Generations of school children, bored by class and scolded for daydreaming out of the window, have been told to concentrate more. Yet it is clear that attempting to concentrate on something that is uninteresting is an exercise in futility; we go through the motions, we stare at the page, we re-read the paragraph, but we continue to think about something else altogether. We can become better at fooling people that we are working hard, but our glazed eyes usually betray us long before our failed examinations do so.
When we truly learn how to do something, we cease to have to work so hard on it at all. There is no chore involved, and it seem to take only a fraction of the time. In fact, when we are excited about a subject we only need to glance at a page for its meaning to leap to our eyes and affect us deeply. It seems as though our body is doing it all by itself.
Of course, this is not the case; it is that our brain has become so enthusiastic, so practiced at the action, and so comfortable with the new environment it has created, that it can dedicate a part of itself to take care of details automatically, whenever needed. In computer terms, it has `hard wired’ a special program or sequence just for that purpose. This leaves us free again to do other tasks.
This can apply to anything, for example learning a musical instrument or riding a bicycle. In either case, once a certain moment is reached, we feel an `aha’ taking place; we feel a breakthrough has happened. For the first time, the violinist feels as if the fingers are moving faster than the mind. Once that point is reached, not only do we need never learn that sequence again, we would actually find it hard to unlearn it. It takes hundreds of hours to learn how to walk, and perhaps dozens of hours how to ride a bicycle or drive a car. But once learned, they are imprinted forever.
This explains why it is so hard for many people to unlearn a habit, for example learning to drive on the other side of the road when visiting another country; in this case, the conscious mind’s attempts to conform are in conflict with strong, hard-wired messages from the unconscious. After some struggle, we adapt to driving on the `wrong’ side of the road, often only to revert to the old program in a moment of tiredness or stress. It is very hard to forget that which has become automatic; an adult does not forget how to ride a bicycle even if no practice or even thought has been given to the subject since early childhood.
This does serve to give us a clue about the implications involved. What else might we have take for granted; what else has become so automatic that we assume it is the only way of doing things? The challenge we might face in rethinking something long adopted as automatic can indeed be formidable, but it could be an invaluable mental exercise to try. Because our established ways of thinking have long since become standard, we have to work hard even to become aware of them, let alone reverse them. Once attempted, the mere recognition that there is more than one way to do something we previously took for granted can be enlightening, even transformational.
Habits are powerful tools, but we surely should not be ruled by them. Even some of our most trivial actions are governed by them. For example, if someone is asked to fold their arms over their chest, they invariable adopt the same method every time, for example right over left. The other way feels wrong and uncomfortable, even unthinkable.
Our very perceptions are also governed by habit. In an early study, a volunteer was given a pair of special glasses to wear during all waking hours. The glasses reversed Up and Down, so that everything seemed to be upside down. Naturally this was highly disorienting at first, but gradually the volunteer started to make progress. Eventually, he could function quite normally. Then, when the glasses were removed, he was disoriented again; he thought that everything looked upside down again.
In another experiment, researchers showed a movie on a big screen to an audience of people who had never seen a movie before. Whenever an actor moved off-screen, the audience stood up and moved to the next room, expecting to see the actor there.
Both the above examples are interesting and perhaps amusing, but they raise a disturbing thought: how would we know if our own perceptions were based on an element of illusion? The very structure of our eyes helps us to form an impression of reality. No two people have an identical perception of the same shade of, say, green, and some people cannot differentiate it at all from, say, a particular shade of blue.The structure of a bat’s sensory organs cause it to see reality in a different way altogether. Is there a `true’ reality after all? Who are we to assume that we are always right? Yet how many of us question anything about our accepted ways of seeing the world.
Given this enormous reliance on our cherished thought patterns and habits, imagine therefore how unthinkable it might be to change one’s attitudes and beliefs on such issues as politics, parents, religion or nationhood. Or, for that matter, one’s career.
Our environment naturally influences us, and some of what we experience interests us. This is what we find the easiest to learn. In turn, we put back into the environment more of our specialized subject, thus perpetuating the cycle for ourselves. But we need to ask ourselves: Exactly how arbitrary was the original environmental impact in the first place? Who would we be today if we had not had that experience?
In an age where job retraining has such fundamental implications in national economic as well as in individual levels, there is simply no point in attempting a major effort to retrain anyone unless the idea is embraced by the trainee, the subject as agreeable and seen as worthwhile, and the expectations of success are high. How else could we expect someone to throw away the self-perceptions and habits that have taken half a lifetime to perfect? We fear that after such a dearth of retraining commitments at corporate and government levels for so long, a rush of desperately-needed and well-intentioned training projects could fail because of a lack of awareness that their success is dependent on factors other than subject matter and delivery methods.
As any action or posture, long continued, will distort and disfigure the limbs, so the mind likewise is crippled and contracted by perpetual application to the same set of ideas. —Samuel Johnson
Source: Igniting your Natural Genius by Prasad Kaipa and Steve Johnson
Posted at 12:58pm and tagged with: Learning, Education, Perception, Habit, Awareness,.
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