Uncluttered Mind
When an English as a second language teacher told me the real reason for kids facility with language was that their minds aren’t gummed up with their native tongue, I had an epiphany. Maybe the different learning style of kids had little to do with anatomical brain differences from the the mature brain but more with naive learning strategy.
Who could fail to admire a child’s wonder and enchantment with the world? Child minds soak up knowledge, naturally and effortlessly. Try to interrupt a baby’s adventure in discovery; maybe he is going up and down up an down a small step. Pick him up and cuddle him. He can’t talk, but he will tell you with his tears, “Don’t bother me now! I’m experiencing for the first time what it is climb and fall. I’m having a great time. Leave me be!” I often long for nothing so much as to be that child again, as I suspect you do too. So I’ve been struggling with the rediscovery of my inner child, how to get it back.
I learn best on my own. Force feeding like forced learning is ineffective and alienating. I abhor militarized learning in all its forms. I have a lot of it in my job. For little kiddies starting to learn, (although by the time kids get into school they have been vigorously absorbing all kinds of knowledge all by themselves) some very good accounts of authoritarian models are laid out in recent books for example the famous Tiger Mother by Amy Chua and more recently a nice account by Lenora Chu called “Little Soldiers” about educating her small children in Shanghai. I have recently read another wonderful account apparently true to life midway into the educational cycle describing the Citidel in South Carolina, “The Lords of Discipline” by Pat Conroy. Walter Isaacson described the Albert Einstein to have abhorred all his life the militarism In German school system. Even ignoring the distasteful aspect of pervasive rampant sadism under such educational paradigms, such an approach merely ensured compliance and conformity of control. Authoritarian learning will destroy any joy of learning, stifle independence and curiosity which motivates a person to lifelong learning. When I learn something on my own, there is the great joy of discovery, enlightenment even Eureka transfiguration revelation epiphany effect. Forced learning kills all of this.
We are aware of a hierarchy of knowledge. You have to master certain basics before reaching an advanced level of expertise in any field. You need to have a picture in your mind of sums and multiplications before going onto theorems and axioms and then calculus. You need to have mastered some anatomy chemistry and math to grasp advanced biology and medicine. When my father attended school kids were made to memorize poetry from Robert Louis Stevenson to Poe to Shakespeare. Whenever we had people over, my dad recited poetry joyously, having in his head fitting lines for every occasion ready to be placed in service. In some way, he was let to see the beauty in what he was learning rather than whipped into submission and he carried these lessons and fond memories with him all his life. I doubt this occurs in the madrassa or military academy.
The question is, what’s to blame for the adult loss of enchantment, how to re-enchant the adult brain. It is Satan the snake in the garden of Eden distracting humankind from the Tree of Life to the tree of knowledge of good and evil. It is the acquisition of facts that are subversive for evil purpose replacing the joy of learning for oneself. I have a theory that the worst impediment to learning a new language is competence in one’s native tongue. I now see all my efforts to learn new languages have been hamstrung by translating every word or phrase to English. It takes enormous effort to run through my memory banks and come up with English synonyms. Listening to stories in a new language I miss meanings out of still working on translations of words. My problem is learning by the method of contextualization. But what if I didn’t know English or any language and someone just threw me in the water with a bunch of speakers of a new language or better still, in a Tower of Babel with speakers of many tongues? Then I would have the advantage of automatic practice and could go directly to the meaning without having to capture a word of English. My thesis is that under that condition with the mind of a child I’d be better, not worse off. I’d skip the tedious step of translating all words into my native tongue, allowing words and phrases to go directly to their meaning. Suppose we take a child who has no language skills. A blank slate of a mind will be most absorptive when it comes to learning a new language. It might be best to teach her all new languages at once when a child knows nothing. The baby will have no problems putting Russian, English, and Mandarin in separate silos and learning one or more words for chair as separate synonyms suitable for use at different times.
Which begs the question: What makes it so hard for the adult to learn new things? Does this have to do with brain myelination maturation? Maybe capacity – that our brains can hold a finite amount of information. Or is it that by a certain age you can’t learn anymore? I believe the biggest obstacle to mature learning is our getting in the way of ourselves with heightened conscious effort.
For those of us motivated to learn there’s a little Satan inside whipping us to apply our effort. The only way to digest a new input compare, contrast and classify it in context with information and understandings already present. This snake I call the Editor mostly on account of his peevishness. Suppose I should come across something that doesn’t compute like 2+2=5. Not long ago in a psychological study, found that a person dressed as a clown on a basketball court goes unseen and ignored. If you ask an adult spectator of the basketball game about the clown he may well deny it. We tend to ignore whatever fails to fit into context, what isn’t expected. It’s true when we’re exposed to someone with a different point of view. What happens? That datum is either completely escapes notice or is denied passage into a seasoned conscious mind. If it eludes notice, it still stands to be altered like a misspelling or other erratum so ends up being rejected or changed before being tidily placed in my memory banks. If something fits, the player in basketball shorts is dribbling a ball on a court or someone of the same political persuasion; we will notice it and like it. That is called affirmation bias.
Our editor’s a mean-spirited depressive middleman. I think we might be better off without him. Without the Editor, you will have what we call an open, accepting mind, of a naive child. You will admit more possibilities, and if you are like me, chances are you’ve closed your mind over the years to a lot of viable ideas, thinking Oh I’ve heard that before so many times and I’m tired of it. What’s new under the sun?
The editor is the judge of Conscious learning. Should you learn to turn the editor off and fly by the seat of your pants, as in Star Wars, listen to another inner voice, “Use the force, Luke!” meaning depend on your gut, unconscious learning.
Besides that, as it turns out your will be a mental cripple if you can’t turn off your editor, your previously held fixed delusions, at least some of the time. I will give you some examples. Music and working memory.
The locus of the editor in the brain is the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex which is far less influential in the mind of a child. The naive child mind works mostly with primary process thinking that of the id in the ancient more than 100-year-old terminology of Sigmund Freud. In everyday life, this part of the brain the DLPRC is turned off as if by a switch in ordinary nocturnal dreaming. Recent imaging and chemical studies have found that just this area of the brain, responsible for critical logical thinking is routinely turned off in REM sleep. The REM sleep state is made possible by turning off the DLPFC. It is an altered mental state induced by decreased secretion of monamine neurotransmitters, especially serotonin and norepinephrine in favor of others especially acetylcholine. The hypothalamic hormone orexin regulates REM sleep. Orexin secreting neurons are absent in Doberman dogs and other animals that are a model for the narcolepsy/cataplexy disease process. REM or rapid eye movement sleep is merely an example of an altered state of awareness brought to us by controlling groups of neural cells termed nuclei in the brainstem. Ultimately these nuclei, in the lower part of the brain, control various types of activation states of the cerebral cortex which mediates experience, emotion, thinking.
Explicit memory as conscious memory and procedural memory as unconscious is a useful model, yet not entirely accurate. The best example I can give for unconscious learning that is leaving your editor behind is good music. I observe in myself that it is better to approach difficult music by not consciously listening. Too much analysis gets in the way of understanding until you get to know the shape of the work. Better to let down your guard. Not every piece you will end up liking needs to be true to form of stuff you’ve liked before. For example, Western music builds on chords which determine melody and harmony. I’ve had better luck listening without our presuppositions.
Besides, some of the best music has one or more hooks means grabbing attention. A hook may be something unexpected, a sudden change in volume. The best musical hooks are rhythmic, skipped or syncopated beats that end tend to recruit areas of the cortex. Unexpected harmonies or keys are other hooks. Rhythm hooks relate to motor systems, not just the sensory receptive modules as before you know it; your muscles are swaying to a rhythm as you end up dancing to the music either in your imagination or with actual motor movements. You find yourself holding back so as not to embarrass yourself which brings in more of your brain as now you have to inhibit yourself. Musical rhythms and melodies entrain the listener. Chances are the more captivated or entrained you are, the more you will identify with the piece and learn to love it.
The very best music is complex enough to discover new things as it is played again, even though practically all musical works incorporate repetition of themes. Complex works like operas and symphonies typically make use of repeated themes or leitmotifs that are layered and organized in such a way that by the end of the work you, the listener are transformed. I’ve often found the first movement of work prepares you for the finale. Had I heard the finale first, I might have walked away unprepared for it. Therefore learning takes place from the beginning to the ending of a complex piece. Since I am an amateur when it comes to music, and used to musical recordings, I can hear again and again, many times that I was unable to appreciate a complex work that I had to play over. After that, it seems I reach a peak of appreciation, have perhaps with little effort of our own memorized or incorporated the music and of course eventually tire of the work and move onto something else.
Music, more than just about anything else, uses working memory. When you hear a melody once even if you are not listening to it, it stays in your mind, for later use to contrast and compare with the second theme, or even better, ripens for further complex development. It is like popular works, where you start with one percussion instrument, to establish a basic tempo, then add one or two at a time more percussion instruments and only then layer on melody. If you are to respond to music you just have to carry for at least short periods a working memory of earliest presentations in your mind. Afterward, you may well end up discarding the first iterations of the design as being swept up with more complex structure. But the point is, you are far better off doing all of this mindlessly. I just realized I’d be far better off with an open naive mind with no presuppositions at all, a tabula rasa.
Most everyone knows about explicit or declarative memory the kind most tested in schools. Declarative memory tests in the office setting by giving a series of 3 or 5 simple words, having the subject repeat these words for a trial run to be sure he’s heard them. After two minutes the subject tries to repeat these specific words. Declarative short-term memory is most impaired in Alzheimer’s disease that first and preferentially affects the hippocampus but also in other diseases that affect that part of the brain, such as Herpes simplex encephalitis and in other conditions. Verbal memories of this type enter the hippocampus in the temporal lobe and are stored short term in the location. Most words of this type are not stored long-term and if they are, say these same words turn out to be repeated over and over, they will eventually be stored in widely distributed regions of the brain, closest to related words or concepts. In learning strange words such as a foreign language, your first impulse is to associate them with known vocabulary of your first language. I’m saying it’s best to resist that tendency,
Other forms of learning are predominantly non-verbal, and the port of entry for memory engrams is not the hippocampus. This second form of memory is mostly non-verbal and non-conscious procedural memory. The best example is learning to play a musical instrument or a sport, learning to do surgery requiring much manual dexterity. Procedural memory requires massed practice, extremely abundant repetitions To learn to play music on the piano you will practice thousands of times. Learning takes place not in the verbal areas of the brain like the hippocampus, but in motor regions of the brain, the basal ganglia, which perfects movements and cerebellum.
What I’m pointing out here, is that a great deal of learning takes place in these unconscious motor regions that does not strictly involve motor sequences. Amazingly even learning foreign languages is best done by appealing to these deeper mostly motor structures rather than to the language regions of brain and hippocampus. Language and abundant other tasks have to be learned as well by massed practice without the evil offices of the Editor. Only later will words and phrases and syntax of language be deposited in the language module of the brain which is the Left peri-Sylvian area of the brain for most of us.
Learning can be simplified. It’s surprising that you can learn complicated things, even medicine, and surgery by absorbing the experience, much like learning to ride a bike. You only need surrender your presuppositions. When a patient comes into the emergency room with burns or having fallen off a roof, he will need to be approached thoughtlessly mindlessly and care applied naturally and with great alacrity. Doctors and nurses aren’t going to be able to think about every little thing. They need to preserve the airway, give breaths, maintain fluid volume blood pressure and heart rate otherwise the person will die. They have to be able to proceed rapidly and thoughtlessly. This is best learned through massed practice. Nurses and doctors and indeed all emergency care staff need to have seen enough cases so that motor patterns are well established or at very least established via a protocol. It is just the opposite to thought patterns in a specialty like neurology where indeed it does help to have been through many cases of a particular type, but one needs to apply logical processes. You need logic to come up with a specific diagnosis and treatment plan. Disinhibition does not apply only to waking life but to sleep. Sleep clinicians are trying to work out what if anything might be the function of sleep. Mammals especially are known to have well-regulated sleep stages and REM sleep during which times most organized dreams sequences occur plays a role in learning and working out problems. For many mathematicians and physicists working on problems, these were mostly solved after sleeping on them in the dead of night. August Kekule famously came up with the ring structure of benzene, in dream sleep. The answer came to Kekula in the form of a urobos, the snake eating its own tail, made possible by unfettered nocturnal imagination. Many is the mathematician who has slept on problems only to find them solved through nocturnal mathematical machinations. That is what we mean by sleeping anything we can’t work out.
For some great minds, Balzac doused with enormous doses of coffee was one, Thomas Edison another the waking state often bolstered by caffeine and stimulants provides the best conditions for problem-solving. For others, sleep leads to creative solutions. Samuel Taylor Coleridge claimed to have created his poetry in similar altered states, which enhanced not limited his creativity.
Like everyone I guess I just wish I could go back to my childhood. Then I looked around without any presuppositions or impediments and great delight and enthusiasm of what was new to me. To stretch my arms and vision with wonder again and learn and do without any inhibitory thought. I just wish I hadn’t read so many gosh darn books. I yearn for an uncluttered mind.