A Song of the Conscious & Unconscious
How we learn, personal observations of the mind
Sometime in my childhood I heard about ‘sleep learning’ or ‘passive learning’. Hypothesis being, you can play an audio in the background while sleeping or doing something else, and your brain can’t help but passively listen & learn from it. Lo & behold, you can learn without putting any effort into it. I did not have access to audio lessons, so it was only upon entering college that I could test out the concept in earnest. By sleeping while the professors give their sermons. Science is hard work & I very diligently took on the mission of proving this hypothesis. No class went by without me getting a new data point. But having done multiple runs of the experiment, I can declare with confidence that this hypothesis doesn’t work.
Paying attention seems critical for learning to happen. This fact is curiouser than it looks. It is apparent that most human behaviour(s) is largely autonomous — listening to speech, walking on a sidewalk, riding a bike — all are things we can do without really paying attention. So while the act of learning requires attention, the end result of learning seems to be to make the behaviour autonomous, something you can do without paying attention. To add to that, as one meditates one realises that our attention is very fickle, prone to the distraction and other vagaries of the unconscious mind. Not at all in control the conscious self. So are thoughts & desires. These aren’t an outcome of attention but rather come into being all on their own. Like a (biased) random number generator (or LLM) within our brain. Our attention just puts a spotlight on them.
So when we decide to engage in a new activity or a hobby, firstly the desire for this comes from somewhere within the unconscious. We choose whether to act on this or not. There is a question of free-will here which shall remain a topic for another time. Assuming we do decide to act, let’s explore what happens next.
Depending on the nature of this desire, I posit that learning-activities can be divided into three categories — whether it is a) subject-to-learn or b) skill-to-acquire or c) game-to-play. What is being learnt & how it is being learnt seems to be a bit different in these three categories.
- Learning a subject
“Learning a subject” is what it sounds like. Maybe you want to learn a new branch of maths, or the history of Galapagos Islands, or the human respiratory system, etc etc.
Learning about any such erudite topic is mostly a cerebral activity. Your brain constantly updates its abstract representation of the world based on the new information it receives. If the information fails to be interpreted or integrated, you hit a roadblock in your learning. This is the point where you seek clarifications — which may be from your teacher, or Google. If no such clarifications were needed, you may just learn the new stuff in a ‘one-shot’ learning i.e. no repetition of the material needed. You did not have to practise this again & again for your brain to understand & learn this new information.
Paying attention is of critical importance here, almost a superpower. If one is paying attention, one learns. If one is not paying attention, good luck. What does paying attention mean? It means that the conscious self is focused on that task, on this specific piece of information. It should not be focused on its phone, or daydreaming, or sleep dreaming, or focused on a pretty face across the room.
What’s more interesting is that there seems to be a difference between learning the subject-matter & retrieval of the subject-matter. Once the learning has happened, you should be able to retrieve this information at will. But retrieval is an unconscious process and it seems to work a bit differently from learning. It is possible for having learnt something but you are still not able to recollect it. And when the retrieval process in your mind gives it’s results (eg: name of a person associated with a face), amazingly you somehow ‘know’ whether the information is correct or not, even when you may still not remember the correct information.
Since ‘retrieval’ is an unconscious process, you benefit from revision. Notice that revision helps not so much for understanding, which is a ‘one-shot’ conscious activity. It only helps with retrieval, the unconscious process.
2. Acquiring skills
Skills refer to activities like sports, playing a musical instrument, swimming, riding a cycle, etc. “Acquiring skills” is distinctly different from “Learning a subject”. It does not need updating your world view, but rather it needs your body & senses to become more adept towards the task.
Suppose you are learning to play tennis. Going is slow in the beginning. You can hardly land the ball in the other’s court. For anything requiring body coordination, you have to try & fail, try something new & fail, on and on until you get it right. Repeat this process many many times. This is a very laborious process which again involves a lot of conscious effort on behalf of the user.
Interesting to note here is that while this activity also needs the conscious attention, but ultimately the unconscious is learning it. Your conscious self is evaluating what went wrong and what to try next (like back-prop in a neural-network, if you will). But once it works, it becomes automatic and you stop thinking about it. This process is remarkably similar to a teacher training a student. The presence of the teacher is critical for the student to learn for the first time. But once the student has learned, the student is able to repeat the task even with no teacher around.
3. Playing a game
Games (think Chess, Candy Crush, Fortnite, soccer) present a slightly different learning paradigm, where we are learning to ‘plan’.
There are different ways to plan. In a ‘tops down’ planning, it is the ability to envisage multiple futures, the desirability of each and then determine which of the presently available actions is likely to lead to the more desirable outcomes. In a game of chess, this would be akin to planning a set of moves to trap your opponent in a check-mate. In bottom’s up planning on the other hand, we start with the actions. We start with what actions are available to us, and choose one which will take us to the most desired future. In our chess example, this would be akin to being opportunistic, when we don’t have a strategy of multiple moves but we can make get some easy advantage by killing the opponent’s queen.
While planning, the visions of the future & corresponding action plans seem to originate automatically within the mind i.e. the generative process is unconscious. But the whetting of quality, whether something is a good or a bad idea seems to involve conscious thought.
Planning seems to be a ‘meta’-skill. It can be combined with other subjects & skills to gain critical advantage. Professional sportspeople and teams always have a strategy entering a game. Composing a song needs extensive planning. Even creating a long mathematical proof needs its own strategy.
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Whether it be a skill or a subject or a game, learning means that neurons in your brain are physically changing to store new information (neuroplasticity). This means that in the future, just like science-fiction’s predictions, we may be able to add modules to the brain. Download skills & knowledge instead of having to acquire them manually.
Masters of any craft combine their great skill, their subject matter expertise & expert planning to create masterpieces. Whether it be a symphony, sport, art, a Michelin dish or even a business strategy.
