The brain prioritizes information that strengthens the structure of knowledge

Humans learn surprisingly well from remarkably little. One way by which such feat may be accomplished is strategic information processing. In particular, the brain may prioritize new inputs that are likely to support efficient mental models. Here we show that people prefer semantic information that strengthens the small-world configuration of a knowledge system, a topology previously associated with creativity and comprehension. Such information is prioritized by the brains language network and elicits enhanced activation in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, which is central to the brains valuation system. These findings (replicated across studies) reveal a principle of information prioritization: the brain assigns value and resources to knowledge according to its capacity to improve the structure of what we know.