When it comes to learning new things, we adults are our own worst enemies. Watch a child learn. Little children have a sense of over excited anticipation. Kids are empirical learners. They tend to try things out without any encumbering anxiety of making mistakes. Adults, on the other hand, conceive of ways to make their efforts count and get it right the very first time. That is a fundamental error. First of all you waste so much effort in the conception, you block whatever you may pick through trial and error.
Remember those AC Gilbert Erector sets. I did my best work as a child engineer starting on the fly with my own concept. I dreamed up some project in my head, and never wrote anything down. Yes, I had an idea of girders and screws available to me and the motors and cranks that made everything go. Once I had a basic idea, I would just start to build the thing. Little by little by trial and error I would just go.
The best example is learning language. You can do it in a classroom or by immersion. Kids don’t learn Mandarin in a classroom but entirely by trial and error. They are kids so it’s cute when they make mistakes. Adult’s egos get in the way. They would rather learn language in a classroom or from books. Maybe they make less mistakes. Learning is by rules, that guess what, don’t always hold up.
As you may have guessed we have at least two systems in the brain for learning, conscious and unconscious. Conscious or declarative memory is what was once thought to be verbal memory, is handled by the hippocampus. Concepts get into the brain and are temporarily held in this area of your temporal lobes. Given a list of words generally you have to focus and can’t be distracted else you will lose this list. Initially you have a store of what is called working memory. Deciding about how much paint coverage is needed for the walls in a room, you temporarily carry these figures in your head and work out the square footage. You will be terribly disturbed should someone interrupt with figures for the population of China. Eventually through practice and some processes that consolidate the memory, possibly implicating sleep the night the memory registers, the engram will be consolidated, chiseled into the brain. It becomes extractable when you need it through the process of recall. Thus when we fail to come up with a word, that could be due to failure of registration which implicates the hippocampus, or recall failure, meaning the memory was registered but a bottleneck prevents it being properly brought to the surface and expressed. In fact there are defects in language expression such as expressive language dysfunction, expressive aphasia, that lead to failure producing explicit words. Learning and recall, in this system, is an entirely sequential system. There are blockages all along the way, like anxiety which puts an obstacle in bringing a word out into the open. This kind of learning via the hippocampus, is bolluxed up with the limbic or emotional brain systems as well. Recent learning also recruits the mammillary bodies, and the limbic emotional structures of the brain, which means to learn things this way you are not only conscious, but caught up in emotional turmoil. Performance, typically language performance, implicates conscious willful processes, including registration, consolidation, association, a process choosing right words from a huge pile of words what may be called rummaging, and then expression. Even this account oversimplifies the sequence of processes involved in active declarative learning and use of concepts. It is just this type of conscious learning that’s earliest impaired in Alzheimer’s disease. That does not mean that other forms of learning as described below are just as impaired in degenerative dementia.
There are other more clandestine methods of learning that are repetitive, ridden with mistakes, and unconscious. They apply more to the way children and animals and surprisingly all of nature which lacks a cerebral cortex, improves performance. It shouldn’t surprise you that nature learns and improves upon itself. Science has shown that it does so unconsciously as with evolution, and the spontaneous organization of things such as galaxies and stars. In all things we witness the unwitting improvement from previous states. On a trip to the natural history museum go through the eons and epochs of large biological time. Striking is the trend toward larger and more sophisticated life, and also sleekness, aerodynamics. How do you compare trilobites and bony plated fishes to modern denizens of the deep, old earth animals, clunky dinosaurs with earth’s current inhabitants, Neanderthals with modern humans. Moderns are sleeker.
The model for learning by doing and making mistakes is massed practice. I’m starting to think this form of unconscious improvement is no less efficient than learning by thinking things through. Moreover there are lots of improvements that can only be approached this way, massively, unwittingly, like when learning a new dance or to play a piece on a piano. Even when improvements are applied consciously say by a teacher, they will eventually be used unconsciously by rote. Motor tasks are drilled in by practice. Surprisingly, I have found that even in my own performance as a supposed expert as in the practice of medicine, results from massed practice and experience. In medical education, I have long argued that the current trend of learners such as residents working shorter hours and seeing less cases, is an obstacle to their learning so that by the time these young residents graduate, they are less prepared to take on the challenges of practice than we were in the olden days. Even more, medical cases constantly bombard the experienced clinician’s brain over one’s lifetime, that experience, even comparatively mindless experience of life, is the main cause of the supposed wisdom of the more aged practitioner, not nearly as likely to be seen in the young.
Which method wins the race, conscious or unconscious? I am not at all sure. Bacteria are unconsciously improving their chances for survival while human scientists nefariously design antibiotics to do away with them. We seem to win over the short term slaughtering thousands and billions and trillions of them with our industrial strength antibiotics and our worries over hygiene. Now we are finding out how much we need many of the bacteria we are so busy slaughtering as has been outlined in my previous work on this website. But over the years I have observed bacteria are winning the war. Now we are putting on gowns and masks and gloves as never before just to make rounds and can’t even use our own stethoscopes let alone ophthalmoscopes to examine patients. And our antibiotics are becoming ineffective. Same goes for insecticides. The same holds for capitalism vs the five and ten year plan. The little empiricist defeats the gross theoretician ninety five percent of the time.
Two ways to learn and improve then. One is by design and anxiety driven and conscious effort, using your cerebral cortex with its editors, superegos, mental processors, what may be called industrial methods. The other is subterranean and natural. Maybe this goes to show that humankind with all our mental superhuman efforts, is in nature, made by nature, created by nature and will be defeated by nature. Time will tell who wins.
The Hippocampus: “Sea-Horse”