What is Learning - 4

Repeated Experiences, Getting Sticky and Learning - The good news and bad news

The Story so Far

Hi everyone. in the last post, we looked at how neurons:

• are hard-wired to make chains

• extend those chains

• link chains together into networks, and

• save energy by pruning, patterning and hardwiring repeated experiences.

Every week I come across real-life stories that support all of this. You might have seen Arvind’s reply to last week’s post in which he commented that high ranking chess players can use 6000 calories in a single game. That’s a lot of brain energy.

And, last weekend, in the Financial Times weekend magazine, I also saw this in an article about dance and the choreographer Leo Walk:

‘To be a really great dancer, you need to have danced eight hours a day for at least ten years. Otherwise it’s not possible.’ Sometimes what the dancers do looks easy ‘but it only seems like that because you don’t see the technique any more.’ That’s a lot of repetitions.

Now back to this week’s business. In this post, I’m reflecting on the implications of the hardwiring of repeated experiences. Some are very good but some are very scary. I’m also going to acknowledge that my lovely mentor, Fred Tiramani, wasn’t completely right.

Here We Go

One of my favourite podcasts is called In Our Time. It’s a weekly exploration of big ideas, with a discussion panel of sharp, bright people, often but not always academics, who really know their stuff.

The good news is that while I am listening to the programme it excites, fascinates and interests me. The not-so-good news is that I’m often reduced to silence when I’m telling a friend about what I have just listened to. When she says to me ‘So what was the main argument or the key points?’ I don’t know. I can’t recall them.

One listen to the podcast doesn’t provide me with the repeated experiences that will let my brain know that this is something worth holding onto. One listen just isn’t enough for my brain to think about hardwiring the programme’s content, especially when faced with so many complex ideas. One listen extends my neuronal chain temporarily, but very little actually sticks.

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Stickiness is a very important part of learning. Stickiness happens when the repeated experiences happen often enough to cause the learning to become automatic, recallable or redoable with very little energy wastage. The repeated experiences have to happen often enough to cause the learning to become automatic. That’s what Leo Walk meant when he said that, after all the practice, ‘you don’t see the technique any more.’ It’s happening automatically.

Without stickiness, we may have had some interesting experiences, but we haven’t learned anything. Stickiness and some aspects of memory are closely related.

Stickiness means I can quickly recall the formula of sulphuric acid, I am able to immediately place my hands in the right position on the violin and I am aware of how I irritate you so that I can try to avoid doing so. Extending our neuronal chain is the first important thing about learning but it’s the appropriate repeated experiences and the stickiness they create that really matters.

Because of this we can amend our for-now still temporary definition of learning with which we finished the last post:

Learning happens successfully when, after the appropriate development has taken place, our brains a) extend an existing neuronal chain, b) make a neuronal constellation more complex and c) hardwire a repeated existing chain so that it fires automatically over time and becomes sticky.

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Now, we need to take stock for a moment because there are problems ahead. Let’s ask ourselves what might seem an odd question about learning:

Is learning always good?

When schools, educators, parents, governments and others talk about learning, they (we) love to do so as though it is a good thing. Our excitement about and descriptions of what is going on in the brain often assume positive outcomes. As an educator and parent, I used to do this all the time. It is a misleading view and one that isn’t very helpful.

When we think of learning as being good, we forget that the brain doesn’t really ‘care’ what it learns. On the whole, brains aren’t ‘interested’ in what is good. They ‘want’ to save energy by hardwiring what they repeatedly experience.

What are the repeated experiences your child is having today, at home, in school and elsewhere? Or the colleagues in your organisation? What are your repeated experiences today? For good or bad, whatever they are, for better or worse,  that’s what your child, they and you will be learning.

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Our brains are learning all the time. They are always ‘on’.

Because our brains are designed to hardwire and make sticky our repeated experiences, whether good or bad, our brains are always learning something. All experiences, and especially all repeated experiences, have an impact on our neuronal chains and neuronal constellations.

From the brain’s point of view, learning is neither a good thing, a bad thing or a school thing. Our brain is hard wired to learn all the time, anywhere and everywhere it is stimulated and everywhere it has repeated experiences.

Apologies for this but: We learn all the time. We learn all the time. We learn all the time. Let’s repeat that until it becomes sticky. This simple fact has a profound influence on so much of what we do with our children and students and our colleagues and what is done to us.

Through repeated experiences, we can learn - and hardwire and make sticky - what makes our parents cross and what makes them happy. We learn how to be a member of our peer group, for better or worse. We learn how to steal (the boys cared for by Fagin in Oliver Twist learned this spectacularly well). We learn that certain people will make fun of us and, sometimes, we learn how to lessen this and, at other times, we learn how to feel shame. We learn how to hurt other people. We learn how to make some people like us. We learn how to cover up our drug taking. We learn to be nervous of owning up. We learn how to own up. We learn that lying works. We learn how to fake it.

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Through repeated experiences made sticky, I learned that my mathematician Dad was happy for me to not always get things right until it came to maths, when, if I didn’t get things right, he got very angry. As a result of my repeated experiences of his repeated anger I learned to get nervous telling him about my maths work at school. I learned to be more nervous in math lessons than in any other, especially when I didn’t quite get it, because I had learned what was coming. I learned to not want to talk with him about any other subject because I knew that maths would come up eventually in conversation. Unwittingly, he successfully helped me learn to associate maths with difficulty and unpleasantness. He did this through repeatedly communicating to me his mathematical frustration and anger at my inability to get the maths right. And the more angry he got, the more I learned to panic, and the more I learned to panic, the angrier he got.

I realise now, of course, that he didn’t know what he was doing and that he had no idea of the impact of his relentless negativity towards me about the subject he most loved. For the record, he also played a big part in me learning good stuff, too. It’s just ironic that he helped me, through my repeated exposure to his anger, not to love the thing that he loved most.

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As a parent, grandparent and educator, this makes me think really, really hard.

The children and people I am with will learn best what I repeatedly enable them to experience. What I don’t repeatedly create for them will be much, much harder to learn. And, if what I repeatedly create for them isn’t ‘good’, then that’s still what they will learn. It shocked me when I first realised this. If the brain is always on, then as a teacher, a parent or a colleague I need to be always on, too.

If we (and ‘we’ might be parents, teachers, the media and more) ‘tell’ our daughters repeatedly - in some way or another - that pretty is more important than bright, that marriage beats career, that being quiet is better than having opinions, that...well, you know… she’s going to have to be lucky later in life to to be able to challenge that hardwiring and undo that very sticky - and very successful - learning. She’s going to need someone or something to give her a very powerful set of alternative repeated experiences. Unless, of course, those are the things you wanted her to learn in the first place. In which case, good job! (But, I hope not.)

This is why my lovely mentor, Fred Tiramani, wasn’t completely right when he said to me ‘They aren’t learning anything in your class.’ Oh, they really were, especially in those first few insecure months of my teaching career.

Many of them were learning that lessons were a drudgery of endless exercises most of them could already do; some were learning that even though I commented on the work in their workbooks I never actually followed up, so the comments could be ignored; others were learning that when I marked their work wrong, I didn’t seem that interested in helping them get better and often blamed them; some were learning that I got frustrated with some kids who were struggling (and those kids learned to begin to panic in front of me, as I did with my Dad); others were learning that as soon as the ‘bright’ kids seemed to ‘get’ something we moved on to the next thing straight away whether all the class was ready or not.

They were learning, alright. As a result of all the repeated experiences I was giving them, they were learning stuff I’d rather they hadn’t.

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I know. Almost all of this learning was triggered by my insecurities and by my lack of skill. But my class weren’t experiencing this version of me neutrally or even sympathetically. The repeated experiences I gave them and which they received from me, caused learning to happen for them.

The downsides of successfully learning bad stuff through repeated experiences are all around us. Fake news is hardwired on social media by relentless repeated experiences. Leaving my own political beliefs in neutral for a moment, I am currently watching the simple, constantly repeated messages of Donald Trump taken up by communities that feel disadvantaged and alienated. Like Fagin and his school of thieves, Trump is a very good enabler of learning.

Frighteningly for me, teenage boys - a far larger proportion of whom than you would believe watch online porn most days - might well be, through these repeated experiences, learning extraordinarily unhelpful things about their relationships with women.

(It’s Thursday 29th February as I re-edit this post. I woke up this morning to a story in my news feed, extracted from Cosmopolitan magazine, that says: ‘New research from Vodaphone found 70% of teachers report witnessing a rise in sexist language in the classroom over the past year’. The research links this rise to boys’ repeated exposure to Andrew Tate and others.)

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Learning ‘successfully’ may not be learning good stuff. Although we all hope it will be, there’s a very good chance that, some of the time, it won’t be. Learning successfully is just what we enable to be hardwired and made sticky.

As we’ll see later when we come to look at the factors that affect learning later on, we have to be extraordinarily thoughtful about the repeated experiences we offer our children and each other, wherever we are, in and out of the home, classrooms or workplace. Imagine, if you can, the different learning that results from the different repeated experiences that might be given by some school leaders to their colleagues and parents and the good; by some teachers to their students ; by some parents to their children and by some students to her students. Imagine the differing impacts of the different repeated experiences delivered by a good curriculum or a bad one, by a ‘good’ government or a ‘bad’ one.

I have come to realise that the quality and quantity of the repeated experiences we create are probably the biggest factors that affect learning. This is true whether we are thinking of learning as academic, social, physical or emotional.

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Practice makes permanent. That's the good and bad news about learning in one three-word sentence. Learning is everything that has been hardwired, whether it is useful or not, high quality or not, good or not.

As long as we have repeated experiences, we learn good stuff and bad stuff alike. When teachers or parents say that a student or their child isn’t learning very well, what they mean is that the student isn’t learning the good stuff the school wants them to learn. What they forget is that the student or child may be learning, making very sticky, a huge amount which may or may not be beneficial to them.

You might (you might not, of course) want to reflect on the repeated experiences you most frequently offer your children, students and colleagues. What learning might they making sticky that you haven’t, until now, really considered? To prompt you, here’s four, 100% true, small, everyday, examples I have seen. All of the examples from schools were confirmed by either teachers and/or students as being typical of what happened repeatedly:

I saw a secondary/High School science lesson in which the teacher spoke little about the actual science, its relevance to our lives or its excitement. She did, though, talk endlessly and only about how to achieve a particular Grade in the exam that was coming up in four months time.

I saw a secondary/High School science lesson (in the same school!) in which a different teacher only spoke about the actual science, its relevance to our lives and its excitement but never about how to achieve a particular Grade in the upcoming exams.

I overheard a small group of parents on the table next to me in a pizza restaurant who were concerned about low levels of mutual respect in their companies whilst letting their own children run around the packed restaurant shouting and irritating other diners.

I saw a primary school teacher taking a morning assembly and talking about caring for each other whilst simultaneously reaching down to children she didn’t think were sitting straight enough and yanking them under the arm whilst shouting loudly at them ‘I told you to sit-up!’

What learning, good or bad, is being hardwired in the brains of the recipients of all this?

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Next week’s Post

The first two posts of this Substack looked at the idea of the Hedgehog Concept and why learning should be that concept in schools and other organisations. In the last four posts I’ve been looking at the way learning happens in the brain and the good news and bad news about that.

In next week’s post I am going to begin thinking about what learning looks like in action. Is it possible to see learning (or not learning) happen in front of us? And, if it is, what does it mean to ‘Look for Learning’? In the posts that follow we’ll be looking through four different lenses. The first two are great. The third can be great but often isn’t. The fourth should definitely be a no-go area. We’ll begin all of that next week.