HOW WE LEARN, AND WHY WE DON’T

The graphic above is adapted from Nancy’s book. It says that, in general, we learn as follows:

1. We take in information through our sensory receptors. Already there is a dreadfully low signal/noise ratio: If we aren’t paying attention, if we’re not good listeners, if our senses are dulled or distracted, a large part of the potential learning from the person or scene we’re ‘taking in’ is already lost.
2. We next filter and ‘process’ this information through our personal mental models or ‘frames’. This is a function of the neuron structures in our brains, which were to some extent set at birth, and to some extent were formed early in childhood as we first began to learn and to acquire language and other information processing tools to help us learn. Here are two quotes from yesterday’s post on ‘laws’ that describe this ‘internal knowledge management’ process:

3. Next, we store the filtered, processed, regurgitated, parsed ‘learnings’ in our ‘working memory’, the brain’s RAM, where they continue to be molded, considered, and amended until we have essentially ‘decided what they mean’. Then it gets filed away in long-term memory, to be accessed and extracted if and when it is ever needed again. If it is not used for a considerable time, it is ‘forgotten’, making room in the memory for other, newer learnings that may be more useful.

You may think this description is unduly negative. I arrived at it, from reading at least a dozen books on the subject since I read Nancy’s work, from interviewing co-workers after they attended presentations and seminars to de-brief with them what they said they had learned (try it — you’ll be astonished at the results), and from thinking about– not how people learn — but why people learn.

The purpose of learning is ultimately Darwinian — we don’t learn just for learning’s sake, or because it is fun. We learn, and learn the way we do, because it helps us to survive. In most situations, the recall and application of past learnings is far too slow and unreliable to keep us alive in critical situations, so to survive we rely much more heavily on instinct. Instinctive ‘knowledge’ is hard-wired into us, as it has been for us and our primordial ancestors since life first made its appearance on Earth. Intellectual and moral learnings are a back-up system, for when we have the luxury of time and the opportunity to apply more complex situational knowledge to a survival problem (such as planning a date, keeping a job, or designing a hydrogen fuel cell).

Bernd Heinrich, in Mind of the Raven, probes the sharp, massive (relative to body size) brains of corvids, the brightest species of birds. He describes the raven’s capacity for ruse (when hiding food so it won’t be found by others) and sophisticated memory of place (for finding the food again). He also describes a simple IQ test for animals that most ravens pass with flying colours: A thick string is hung from a tree-branch, to which is attached a well-wrapped morsel of a favourite food. It cannot be reached from the branch or the ground, and cannot be extracted by grabbing it in flight. Ravens quickly appreciate that the answer is to sit on the branch and pull the string up, claw over claw, until the food can be reached and unwrapped. There is no trial and error involved. The abstract reasoning is well within the raven’s considerable intellectual capabilities. Like us, they simply reorganize the accumulated learnings in their brains to fit the new problem’s context.

Heinrich surmises that the raven’s large and sophisticated brain evolved because it had to, to survive. Ravens do not possess the tools to kill their prey, so, like man, they began as carrion eaters. But then, they ‘learned’ to collaborate with wolves and other killers of large animals. Now they fly overhead and find the meal, and then buzz the wolves, flying circles between the wolves and the prey until the wolves, too, ‘learn’ what the ravens are ‘saying’, make the kill, and share the spoils with their avian scouts.

In Experiential Learning, David Kolb describes a four-phase learning ‘cycle’: Experiencing, Reflection/Observation, Conceptualization, and Experimentation/Application. If this is indeed how we learn, it is not surprising that ‘on-the-job’ learning trumps ‘book’ learning. If we learn by doing, it is hard to imagine a worse learning environment than the classroom or boardroom. And it also explains how stories, which are so engaging, so participatory, are such effective teaching tools: You are sharing your experience in the story, not merely your observations and conceptualizations. It also explains the popularity of Case Studies in the classroom and Best Practices in the workplace, though both of these are extremely poor substitutes for first-hand learning. Kolb describes four basic ‘Learning Styles’:

• Diverging: most learning comes from experiencing and reflection
• Assimilating: most learning comes from reflection and conceptualization
• Converging: most learning comes from conceptualization and application
• Accommodating: most learning comes from application and experiencing

His research suggests that women tend to prefer experiencing while men prefer conceptualization, but he hypothesizes this may be culturally learned behaviour rather than anything innate. There are of course many other models that parse learning styles differently, and different activities (note-taking, summary writing, reading vs. listening, graphics vs. text, oral recapitulation etc.) that enhance learning for each of us differently during each of the four phases of the learning cycle.

One of the things I have observed in watching people in social gatherings and in more formal meetings is that almost all multi-person social activities are essentially sequences of distinct two-party conversations. It is almost as if the signal/loss ratio is so poor in conversations, which are not really shared experiences but rather ‘playbacks’ of one individual’s (the talker’s) experiences and learnings for the supposed benefit of the other individual (the listener), that a simultaneous ‘bandwidth’ of two people is all we can manage. Perhaps the reason why we even tolerate these abstract social activities is that we hardly ever do anything together anymore. The job of the typical specialized ‘knowledge worker’ today (despite the prevalent and somewhat fraudulent hype about collaboration and work ‘teams’) is mostly individual, solitary activities and experiences. And social and family discourse often centres around the passive and individual watching of television or films or listening to music. We often don’t even eat together anymore, the primeval, original social activity of all species.

All of this got me thinking about the constraints to learning, and why, in this ‘information age’, there seems to be less learning occurring going on rather than more. Here is my list of the top 10 constraints to learning in our modern culture:

1. We don’t allow ourselves (and society doesn’t allow us) enough time for wonder.
2. Our workplace activities and our home routines are often repetitious and stimulus-poor.
3. We don’t do anything together anymore.
4. We get too much of our life experience second-hand (from books & movies, and online).
5. We suffer from imaginative poverty — we won’t let ourselves imagine, and now we’ve largely forgotten how to imagine.
6. Our lives are too organized and too scheduled to allow serendipitous experiences and hence serendipitous learning.
7. In this world full of terrible knowledge and awful realities, we are becoming afraid to learn. We cannot bear too much reality, too much bad news, and we don’t want to accept the awful responsibility that knowing and learning brings with it.
8. Everything about the current Western educational system impedes and discourages learning.
9. The media have addicted themselves, and us, to facts rather than meaning.
10. We have ‘desensitized’ ourselves — we process everything mainly with our left brain, so we no longer really see, really hear, really smell, really taste, really feel.