If you ever ate mothballs as a youngster thinking they were Mentos left by someone in the closet and you're here now, alive and well, reading this article, it's a safe bet you're not going for them again. That's because your brain has learned something that day and will not allow you to do that again unwittingly.

In the United Kingdom's University of Exeter's School of Psychology, researchers are now discovering how exactly the human brain learns from past mistakes. All the while, it was believed by many in the field that the frontal lobes which commandeer complex mental processes was responsible for the feat, but a new way of testing has proven otherwise.

What actually happens is that the lower temporal regions near the temples send a message within a tenth of a second that warns a person about a mistake he made in the past. Although not fully conscious, it's often enough to make people do a double-take on things.

The study also shows that the temporal area which is mostly associated with recognition is actually more akin to learning than originally thought.

Professor Andy Wills says that this fast process helps us in a lot of ways. "For example," he says "when driving abroad the rules of the road sometimes differ. We may make a mistake the first time we misinterpret a situation, for example not realizing that in the States cars can turn right on a red light. The next time we’re driving out there and see a red light, this early warning signal will immediately alert us to our previous mistake to prevent us from repeating it."