It seems like a paradox, but the more I learn about the brain, the more I realize that our brains are designed to think and react in the moment. It’s only when we stop and take in the moment that our brain is able to learn.
I remember one of my first lessons as an English major in college. We were asked to read a book about how our brain works. I read, “The brain is a funny thing, it seems to me, the more you look at it, the more you see that it’s not symmetrical at all.” I was amazed that my brain wasn’t symmetrical.
We still don’t have an exact mechanism, for example, to figure out why we feel the way we do (i.e. “I feel happy when I see a certain thing”). But I do know that when we take our minds off our immediate environment and look at the world around us, we tend to forget about the things that are happening around us.
My brain is a pretty big thing, but I can remember that my brain is an incredibly complex machine. I cannot remember it getting simpler, that is just not true. I think it got really complicated as we got older. You see, I remember that my brain does not work in the way that you would understand the term “work.” It is very much connected to who I am and what I do.
The problem with remembering just what your brain does is that you tend to forget about how it works. This is why I often see people who are super-smart and I tend to think they are not. They have a different brain that allows them to forget about what they’re good at. What they do not do well is learn. For example, I have a really hard time remembering how I learn things.
That’s where our research comes in. We have found that as we age, our brains lose some of the ability to actually remember what we do. We tend to forget about things we used to know better. While we may not forget everything we were really good at, our brains tend to lose the ability to remember things that we no longer need to know. This is why people who are older are slower learners.
So to help you better understand how we learn, we have created a short quiz called “How We Learn” which should help you identify what kinds of things you do the most.
Our research has found that it’s the activities we are good at that often leave us the most intact. For instance, when we are playing video games, we tend to go into a trance. This helps us stay in the moment and allows us to concentrate on the task at hand. Similarly, listening to music is a skill that tends to lose its power when we get older because of the repetitive nature of music.
The reason these are different is because they can be learned. A skill can be learned, or a habit, without being taught, yet we tend to teach them to ourselves. The same is true for many other skills. For instance, learning how to use a computer is a skill that can be learned by watching a video tutorial, but we tend to teach ourselves how to use a computer by performing tasks in our own time.
It’s true that we tend to learn new skills through repetition. However, a skill like music is a habit that we tend to learn over a long period of time. The reason is because it has a fixed and constant flow, we can perform it over and over again without making any changes. Music is another example of a skill that can be learned without being taught. Yet, I’ve written here before that learning a new skill often becomes a very difficult endeavour.
