Aristotle – “Learning is an ornament in prosperity, a refuge in adversity, and a provision in old age”.
Learning is a process to grow and survive. It is the only thing that moves along with time. Imagine a situation if our ancestors haven’t learned the art to survive, the world would have been different from what we see today. The art of survival is the first lesson all the living organisms learn, learning starts when you are born and never ends it is passed to the next generation and it continues. Learning is an iterative process that promotes another learning.
In reality, we understand ourselves when we learn about things around us. Let’s deep dive into the science of learning.
The Science
Life and Learning start with experience, God has gifted every organism with the two most important things The Brain and The Senses. These 2 things help us experience everything in life.
Experience acts as a catalyst in the process of learning. Imagine a time when there’s nothing, no language, no questions, no answer nothing but you and nature. For now, let’s call this world a “Nothing World”. What would you do in the nothing world? Take a pause and I request you to imagine this world and think about your answer before reading ahead.
Alright now that you have thought about a world where there’s nothing — Let’s explore more, the above question can have multiple answers. I’ll give you my answer.
One answer that I can think about is that I’ll start by experiencing things around me in simple words nature. We can always debate how did we learn to experience, let’s not get into that but assume we can experience things in this “Nothing World”. Experiencing something indirectly teaches you many things, experience leads to questions, questions lead to answers and answers lead to more questions thus making you learn more. To believe, even the “Nothing World” helped us learn many things. Fast forward from Nothing World and coming back to Today’s World. In today’s world, there are many things to experience. I strongly believe that experiencing things that you want to learn can lead to a path where you can learn and start questioning your experiences and then learn more. I believe this is how the human race started learning by experiencing things around. So the first step toward learning is experiencing things that you want to learn. For example, if I want to learn engineering I need to experience engineering at each thing I see around me. Once I start with experience it leads to curiosity and as we know curiosity is the mother of invention. Everything that I learn is an invention for my inner self thus every experience adds to the knowledge base and knowledge base adds to intelligence. Intelligence is the reason why we evolved from being Nothing to Something important in this universe. All this could happen only because of experience leading to curiosity and from curiosity to inventions.
Someone’s experience is another’s learning. Let imagine again ourselves in the Nothing World. We have learned something from experience, next what would you do? The obvious answer is to learn more but there’s something that everyone does apart from learning and that we humans do is sharing or communicating about things learned and experienced. It’s interesting to know-how did we communicate. It’s been argued about what did we learn first speaking or writing. Many researchers believe speaking is what we started with while many believe writing is what we started with. I don’t know what did we start with speaking/writing but for sure we learned how to communicate. Communicating things we learned is one way of harnessing learning. Harnessed learning is the source that we call our knowledge base. Thus, Communication adds a new dimension in the process of learning. Just think how easy it becomes for you to read someone’s experience and learn from it and that's the whole point of communication and reading. Our ancestors experienced many different things in life and learned many different skills.
Undoubtedly we can say that the next step in the process of learning is to communicate things learned.
One Learning to another and the process continues. From nothing we learned the art of survival, next we learned how to communicate giving rise to language and speech. Furthermore let’s compare today’s world and the Nothing world, in today’s world we learn and built many things. Learning helps in the construction of our thought into reality. The reality that we see today is someone’s dream. Learning has always added meaning to the life of every organism making them more intelligent and stronger than their ancestors.
Learning is an eternal concept like time. It can never stop, it’s directly proportional to time with growth being constant. Growth nurtures learning giving birth to another learning process. We know that learning can be tough but not an impossible thing. The tougher learning more is the enlightenment.
Learning doesn’t always mean you are educated. Today, many humans believe in one form of learning and that is to get educated. Education is not the only form of learning it’s just part of an entire universe of learning. Being educated always helps you learn quickly.
Leaning can be negative or positive. Yes, Learning can again be positive or negative. Your mind comes into play here, if you are peaceful you would ensure to learn something positive adding positive learning to your life or the society but if your mind is surrounded by negative thoughts, the learning can be negative. So it becomes very crucial to be part of learning only when you are at peace with yourself.
Life without learning is difficult, cumbersome, and sometimes painful. To understand this you need to understand a few things about the human brain. The human brain is one of the most complex things ever studied and still being explored. The human brain also ages as we age, to keep it active we need to learn. How does the human brain register your learning? Each time you learn something new and practice it, your brain will either change the structure of its neurons (cells) or increase the number of synapses between your neurons, allowing them to send and receive information faster. You can harness your brain’s inherent plasticity to learn new skills, build a better memory or quicken your speed of processing abilities, which will help to keep you sharp as you age. So to keep going in life one must keep learning in life.
Learning cannot stop or can be suppressed, history has many instances where people tried to suppress a class of society or sect but that didn't change anything. The process of learning slowed but always existed. The power of learning lies in the belief to learn and grow.
In the end, I would like to summarize something that I follow to learn things in my life.
Experience -> Questions -> Answers -> Learning -> More Learning -> Share my Learning -> Another Experience and this goes on and on.
The secret of happiness is to do something — John Burroughs.
Learn things to do something. Follow a path where you learn things that add value to life. I hope that every point in your life brings a lot of learning that adds value. Remember to stay motivated, learn from experience, and question things around you.