Coaches’ Blog

How crazy is our brain?  Really, it blows my mind how it can be so powerful and so flawed all at the same time. Yet somehow we even figure out how to even use our flaws to our advantage.  Lately, I’ve been spending a fair amount of time simply thinking about how we learn anything at all.  It’s not the most productive or even practical use of my time, but it intrigues me.  I’m not talking about how school age or high schoolers learn.  That’s not too much fun to me.  For my money, that’s all motivation.  Keep a grown up interested, or yourself motivated, and you’ll probably learn something.  Without the motivation - why learn?

But infants, that’s a whole other story.  How does an infant go from almost nothing.  And no knowledge about their surrounding environment to a grown up with logic and reasoning.  I could care less about the whole ‘nature vs nurture’ debate.  I spent way too much time on that as a freshman in college.  And to be honest, I don’t really feel like either, or a combination of both, really do a good job explaining things.  There have to be things at play beyond simply our genes and our environment.  And I’m not trying to get all philosophical or spiritual in this post either.  When I think about it, I spend more time with concepts from neuroscience, AI, or quantum mechanics.  (The athletes will attest to my mild obsession with quantum mechanics and and my seemingly, implausible theories.)

Again, as always, I digress.  So really, how do we learn anything?  We perceive our environment - great.  We use our 10 senses to see the world, whatever.  (Yes, 10 senses…as much as I sometimes don’t want to, we have to move beyond what our 2nd grade teacher taught us.)  Even still, how does our brain, that hasn’t been outside the womb, manage to take in all this information (raw and useless data) and turn it into logical reasoning and rational thought.

Are we born with some sort of innate, mathematical logic?  If A then B?  If not A then not B? And then we put that pure concept into context as we take in the environment around us.  Or are we simply conditioned like my dog?  When Marion and I say “Sit.” then Luka will put his butt on the ground.  He wasn’t born with this, he’s conditioned for it because he knows it’s likely that he’ll get a treat.  Is that the same for us?  Big generalizations here.  Sure there’s classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and imitation (Luka is operantly conditioned to sit for the treat).  But still, it blows me away that we can learn anything from sticking out our tongue to higher level calculus.

So where am I going with all this?  Good question.  Well, if it wasn’t enough that I’m working to get my head around the fact that we actually have the ability to process information and then learn from it.  Now I have to add in the fact that we’re actually pretty poor at processing the world around us.

If you have 15 minutes, you should definitely check out this lecture on TED.com by Beau Lotto.  He uses some nice demonstrations to show us that reality and our perception of reality may be different more than they are the same.  That our brains don’t actually evolve to see reality as it really is, but we see the world as it is most useful to us.  It isn’t too hard then to see how so many people develop (evolve) into perceiving the world so differently.

I guess this makes sense.  Why should cleaning up my thoughts be any different than cleaning up my house?  As soon as I start cleaning, I always seem to make a lot more mess before things actually start to get straightened up.  I’m sure that my concepts and thoughts are going to get a whole lot more confused before they actually turn into anything useful or concrete.  Way of the world, guess.  Things sometimes get worse before they get better.

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