Is learning painful?
I used to think that you can acquire knowledge in two ways. For the most part, you learn something new – a building block – that can be added to your existing framework. Just like an additional piece of a puzzle. But sometimes you would come across new knowledge that was incompatible with your existing framework, and consequently you had to tear down a small or big part of your explanation model of the world and replace it with an improved explanation model. The first part is effortless, and the second part is somewhat painful. In rare cases, you can learn something new that flips your entire puzzle over and forces you to start anew. No wonder there is a saying that “ignorance is bliss”.
Tonight, I have been driving for eight hours, which is an excellent time to listen to deep philosophical conversations. It captures my interest and I find it a lot easier to stay awake and sharp. One of the conversations dealt with habit formation and the principle of “muscle memory”. I read about an interesting study some years ago that dealt with Tetris players and the corresponding brain activity as their skill improved. When starting out, their brains were working hard all the time. With time and as their skills became better, the difficulty of the game increased correspondingly. At the end of the study, they were extremely skilled Tetris players. Search for Japanese Tetris player on Youtube and you will see what I mean. But here’s the cool thing; as the complexity of the game increased, their brain activity decreased even though the blocks came at lighting speed. Not what you would expect! But this is a good example of the so-called muscle memory, and how we build a little machine in our mind that takes care of the whole process. I have experienced the same thing with my motorcycle. In my early years, I was absorbed by riding due to my lack of skill. Later, I also developed a machine in my mind that took care of the riding process, and my thoughts started to drift as I engaged the “autopilot”. When you have reached this stage, I don’t think you can get rid of the autopilot without pain, even when you are trying to replace it with something better.
This is also how habits work, and I am now thinking about bad habits. We train ourselves to execute certain habits. And it is damn near impossible to get rid of them once they are formed, even if we know they are harmful. In the podcast I listened to tonight, they said that what we had to do was to construct a new machine around the old one to contain it. This made a lot of sense to me, for example when talking about addictions. But when we are stressed and in a bad state of mind, the containing machinery can easily break and before long, the old bad habit can return with full force. That’s why I haven’t touched a drop of alcohol in over four years, for example. I don’t think I am able to handle the drug anymore. So, I just stay away from it altogether instead.
Now, let’s get back to the introduction of this piece and the acquisition of knowledge. A new thought came to me when from this reasoning regarding bad habits and addictions. Maybe my old knowledge acquisition model was too simplistic? Can it be that all forms of knowledge generation requires that a part of you must die, to make place for the new? I picked up the phone and talked with one of my best friends for a long time. We proposed the idea that we might need to consider different forms of knowledge. If we are memorizing the phone book, I do not think that we will run out of storage memory anytime soon and that we have to start forgetting stuff to make place for additional phone numbers. But when we are talking about reasoning or philosophical ideas, it might well be so that intellectual growth implies some amount of pain, either way you look at it. It is impossible to go to the gym without getting muscle pain. Why would the mind be any different?
What do you think?