Mindful learning

Mindful learning

What does that mean?

To me I think it means learning in the way that the brain learns naturally.

If you think about it, learning is what the human brain is made to do!

Think about babies learning to talk. All you ever have to do is talk to a baby, talk around a baby, in any language, or number of languages, and eventually and in a predictable way that baby will learn to speak. There have been studies that show that babies exposed to a language for as little as 20 minutes are already able to tell the difference between a language spoken correctly and a language spoken incorrectly. This is amazing!

Think about learning to ride a bike. You start out clumsy and not knowing how it works. You try jarringly to steer and pedal at the same time. You spend a lot of time falling until one day something just clicks in your brain, and all of a sudden, you know how to ride.

Think about learning a skill or a trade. What often works best is to spend a lot of time watching and learning from people who are already proficient at your chosen skill. You follow and you put in a lot of time doing and practising and eventually you find that, not only have you gained a skill, but a deep understanding as well.

All of these are ways of learning that I think might be called attunement. I think this is when we expose ourselves to a..something, be it a skill, a situation, an environment, and right away and constantly our brain is working away making sense of things. We are not even consciously aware, but our brain is paying attention to everything. It takes note of every detail, all the different relationships and aspects of everything. As we try and fail and succeed our brain is watching and learning some more. At some point our brain has enough  information and something clicks. We all of a sudden are confident in something we didn't understand at all before.

We all learn this way all the time.

When I think about how we as a society think of learning I don't think of attunement. I think of a bunch of people in a room explaining things. Explaining about the history of something or the process of something or the reasons of something. This involves a lot of conscious thinking.

When I think about this kind of learning it reminds me a lot of storytelling.  Like how in ancient tribes the elders would sit around the fire with the wives and the hunters and the young ones and tell stories of lore, and of old times and important things that happened. Maybe they shared these stories to help the young ones learn from the mistakes and lessons that the older ones had already had. Maybe this gave them a more advanced place to begin their learning from, possibly giving them the opportunity to learn more then the generation before them.

In our world right now things are really complicated. Some things maybe cannot be learned very well through attunement without a base level of understanding of how things work. Our stories are now all about what the people who came before us have learned. Our stories represent thousands of years of trial and error and innovation and mistakes. Our stories are very very important to being able to move forward together as a society in every way.

It's important to remember that our stories are not the only (and perhaps not even the most important) way that we humans learn. When we focus on using our conscious mind to organize and remember facts (and then be able to spit them back out again) we often get very anxious and stressed. Unfortunately this often impairs our subconscious mind from being able to pick up on the enormous amount of information that it is working with.

It might be useful to remember, as we want to learn or to teach, that all we really need to do is place ourselves in the situations for learning and open ourselves up and pay attention with the expectation that we will learn. This is all we need to do to put our brain in the position to do what it does best.

Live and learn