What is learning?

He asked me, “What is learning?”

I said, “Learning is gaining new knowledge.”

What is knowledge?

Knowledge is an awareness of concepts. If you say that you have knowledge of ‘force’ that just means you are aware of the concept of ‘force’. Similarly, knowledge of ‘freedom’ means you are aware of the concept of ‘freedom’.

What exactly is a concept?

First, let me give you a few more examples of concepts - force is a concept, freedom is a concept, motion is a concept, rational numbers is a concept, a nation is a concept, nazism is a concept, religion is a concept, life is a concept, a forest is a concept, a tree is a concept.

Now, the definition of ‘concept’ - A concept is a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.

But, what does it mean?

Being aware of the concept of ‘force’ can mean any or all of the following:

awareness of people associated with the concept of force like Newton and Faraday
awareness of objects associated with the concept of force like falling apples and magnets.
awareness of events associated with the concept of force like ‘Newton observing an apple falling from a tree’ or ‘Faraday building his first magnetic machines’.
awareness of ideas associated with the concept of force like Laws of Motion, Laws of Gravitation, or Laws of Electromagnetism.

You can be aware of a concept at different levels. Continuing the example of force, you can be aware of Newton and his ideas on force and motion, without having any clue about his use of calculus and mathematics in those ideas.

Now you can think of learning like this - if you have become aware of a concept at a level higher than before, only then you have learned something. Learning happens when you become aware of new concepts - you go from level 0 to level 1 - or when you increase the level of awareness of an old concept - you go from level 1 to level 2 or to level 3.

If learning is just gaining new knowledge of concepts, then why don’t we just learn from a dictionary or an encyclopedia instead of books? Aren’t those just collections of concepts?

Yes, they are collections of concepts. But learning concepts from them is very hard, as you might already know from experience. It's hard because your brain is very inefficient in learning long lists of unconnected concepts. Dictionaries and Encyclopedias are exactly that - long lists of unconnected concepts.

I thought our brain was smart. Why is our brain inefficient?

It is due to the way our memory works. Memory is the ability of the brain to store information. We can learn from a dictionary or an encyclopedia but such learning only stays in our memory for a short term, in the long term we forget everything we learned.

Why does that happen?

Think of it like this - in the short term, our memory is limited and it overflows if you give it many concepts to learn. Our brain solves this problem of ‘overflowing short term memory’ by forgetting old concepts to make space for new concepts. So, by the time you are learning the tenth word from a dictionary, your brain forgets the first or second to make space for more words.

The sad part about all this is that your brain never tells you it has forgotten most of what you tried to learn. You might get an illusion that you have learned all the words but what if you try to retrieve them from memory the next day, you can’t do it. You might recognise the word, know where it was located on the page of the dictionary but you won’t be able to remember it.

In summary, when dealing with a lot of concepts that are not connected, your brain remembers them in the short term and forgets them in the long term.

I understand. This has happened to me a lot, especially when I learn during exams. Now please tell me, how do I remember in the long term?

Learning in the long term is just like eating to be healthy. There are a few simple rules that you can follow that greatly improve your health. While eating - eat slowly, give some time for digestion, use the energy and only then eat again. Similarly while learning - learn a few concepts at a time, give them some time to settle down and strengthen, use them to think about the world and only then learn new concepts. If you do this, then you can think of the concepts travelling from the place in our memory which stores concepts in the short term, to a place that stores concepts in the long term. If you learn the right amount of concepts at a time, they transfer from short term memory to long term memory. If you learn more than the right amount, the concepts are forgotten.

But what is the right amount? How do I know when to stop?

Some scientists say the number of unconnected concepts that we can learn at one time is under ten.

Ten? Only ten? What about the days when I have to learn a whole subject before the exam?

When I said ten concepts, I specifically said ten ‘unconnected’ concepts. There is a neat trick that we humans have developed to learn a lot more concepts at once. That is ….

...what is it, tell me, tell me …

… … That trick is called chunking. We can learn a lot of concepts at once if we pack them together and form chunks.

What are chunks?

Chunks are inter-connected packets of concepts. Your brain is lazy at learning lists but it is brilliant at learning chunks. If you form connections between multiple concepts and pack them into chunks, they take much less space in your short term memory in your brain. In other words, your brain stores the chunks much more efficiently than unconnected concepts. This means that you can pack a lot of concepts in very few chunks and then learn all of them at once.

I understand. Can you give me some examples of chunks and chunking?

Sure. Here is an example of chunking

Nazism is a concept. Germany is a concept.

‘Nazism in Germany’ is a chunk.

‘Hitler’s Nazism in Germany’ is a bigger chunk.

‘Hitler’s Nazism in Germany during World War 2’ is an even bigger chunk.

‘The Holocaust and Hitler’s Nazism in Germany during World War 2’ is an even bigger chunk.

Suppose you have learned the chunk ‘The Holocaust and Hitler’s Nazism in Germany during World War 2’ that means you have learned about the following concepts: Holocaust, Hitler, Nazism, Germany, World War 2.

After learning about these concepts, they might exist in your brain at different levels - some might be completely new, others already existing. For example, you may have learned:

World War 2 as a series of conflicts between different countries.

Germany as a country and its role in World War 2.

Hitler as a German politician and a person.

Nazism as an ideology and its effects on Jews in Germany.

The Holocaust and antisemitism.

Overall, you have learned many varied concepts, all at once.

How is this better than just opening an encyclopedia and learning about these concepts?

Okay, imagine learning about all these concepts from an encyclopedia. In order to gain the same amount of knowledge you have to do the following things:

Open different chapters in the encyclopedia.
Read all the chapters one by one.
Keep the concepts from each chapter in your short-term memory.
Find a connection between chapters. Again taking space in the short-term memory.

There are two problems with this method of learning. First, overflow - there are way too many concepts to keep in your short term memory. Second, connection finding - finding connections between two concepts requires an in-depth knowledge of both concepts. When you are learning a concept for the first time, finding connections between them is almost impossible.

Chunks solve both these problems. It is because of this reason that most pieces of knowledge meant for human consumption are presented in the form of chunks. An article is a chunk, a chapter is a chunk, a research paper is a chunk, a video is a chunk etc.

I always liked reading stories and comic books. Is a story a chunk? Can we learn from stories?

Yes, a story is a chunk. Most of the chunks that I mentioned above are stories. Stories are chunks of very high quality. This high quality is due to two reasons - first, you can pack a lot of concepts together into one chunk and second, humans have evolved to process stories much better than any other form of a chunk.

I was right. From now on, I will find a story chunk of every concept and learn from that.

I think that is not a wise thing to do. In your journey of learning, you may come across a lot of good chunks that are not stories - some chapters that not stories, some research papers that are not stories, some articles that are not stories. But learning from these chunks is still better than learning unconnected concepts.

A story is a connected series of events - someone always does something, somewhere. When you give a context (circumstances) to a concept, a story is formed. The context acts as a strong connection between the concepts. However, a chunk can be formed without a context, it just requires a different form of connection.

‘The Miracle Year - How Einstein refuted 200 years of physics in a year’ is a chunk where concepts are connected with a context - a story chunk.

‘Special Theory of Relativity’ is a chunk where concepts are connected without context - a chunk but not a story.

The concepts to be learned from both the chunks are the same - law of invariance (laws of physics are same everywhere) and constant speed of light (speed of light is always constant).

On the learning scale

Hardest to Learn - individual concepts one by one - law of invariance, constant speed of light

Easier to Learn- simple chunk - ‘Special Theory of Relativity’

Easiest to Learn - a high-quality chunk, that is a story - ‘The Miracle Year - How Einstein refuted 200 years of physics in a year’

I understand. So our mind remembers story chunks better than simple chunks better than unconnected concepts.

Yes.

And then it directly stores these chunks and concepts in memory so that we can use them later.

No.

Okay… Wait... What?

The brain does not store these chunks directly. The brain breaks down chunks into concepts, organises the concepts into categories and then uses these concepts by retrieving them when a new situation arrives.

That is complicated. Please explain.

Take an example of a chunk - Nazism and the Holocaust in Germany. If you learn it, your brain will first break it down into concepts. Let us suppose it breaks it down into three concepts - Nazism, Holocaust and Germany. Suppose you learn that

‘Nazism’ is a group of ideas that is bad,
‘Holocaust’ is a series of events that led to the killing of Jews, and
‘Germany’ is a group of people living in Europe that call themselves a country.

Now that your brain has broken the chunk down to concepts, it will categorise them. For example - your brain may store

‘Nazism’ as a concept in the category of ‘ideas’,
‘Holocaust’ as a concept in the category of ‘events’, and
‘Germany’ is a concept in the category of ‘countries’.

Sometime in the future, if you read another chunk - Hitler and Nazism. Your brain does the following things:

For Nazism

It retrieves the knowledge of Nazism that you already have.
It reorganizes and restructures the knowledge of Nazism according to the concepts in this new chunk.

For Hitler

It adds the concept to the category of bad people.
It tries to find connections between Hitler, Holocaust, and other concepts that exist in your memory.

Now suppose, one day you come across a person or a leader having a set of ideas that resemble Nazism, you may say that ‘he is a modern nazi’ because his ideas are similar to that of Nazism.

Similarly, one day you come across a big factory. You notice that the people in it are kept in tight spaces and are forced to work till they die of weakness. You will retrieve the concept of the holocaust from memory and rebrand the situation as - ‘The Modern Holocaust’.

In more formal terms

When storing - concepts are chunked so that we can keep them in the short-term memory to understand them and un-chunked so that we can organize them in the long-term memory to store them.
When retrieving - depending on the situation we are in, concepts are fetched from long-term memory to short-term memory, where we re-connect them with new knowledge from a situation.

So wait. We chunk concepts so that the brain understands them. Then the brain undoes all our work by breaking them all down into concepts to store them. Then we re-chunk everything all over again if we want to explain the concepts to others. Isn’t that a lot of work?

Yes, it is. But currently, that is just how the human brain does it. It is inefficient but it works and makes us the smartest living thing on earth.

I wish there was a way in which we could directly store concepts in our brains. That would be much easier, I think. No chunking and un-chunking.

Theoretically, there is a way to do that.

How?

Think of something like a USB cable that can directly add or update concepts in our brain. If you want to learn, you connect a wire to your brain, upload the concepts and the learning is done. If you want to explain a concept to someone, you send the concept to them through wifi and the explanation is done.

It sounds amazing. But is it possible?

It is possible, but it is very hard to do.

Our brain is like the genie from Aladdin. We understand what the genie can do, but we have very little idea about how the genie does it. Similarly, we know what our brain can do but we understand very little about how our brain works.

We know that the brain has neurons. We also know what these neurons do individually. But we have very little knowledge about how they work together to perform complex tasks. That is a big problem. Storing concepts in the brain requires changing the brain in some way and changing something we don’t understand is not a good idea.

Oh. I see. So, is there no hope of a cable to the brain?

Yes, there is. Human groups can do amazing things. A brilliant man named Elon Musk and his group is trying to build a cable that connects to the brain. It is called neuralink. I will not go into the details, but you can read about it here.

But, How….

… Enough learning about learning. You gained a lot of new knowledge about the concepts related to learning. Now we must stop, or else the concepts will overflow and you might get the illusion of knowledge instead of knowledge. You must give some time to your brain for moving the concepts from short-term memory to long-term memory. A day or two might be enough for that. In the next discussion, when we take up the same topic, you will retrieve most of this knowledge, and only then, we will add new knowledge to it. We will learn more another day.

I could have handed you a list of all these terms. But, as we know now, the brain does not work like that. This whole conversation was an example of a chunk of knowledge.

Here is how this chunk is possibly stored in your brain as categorized concepts.

Learning: gaining new knowledge.
1. Knowledge: awareness of or familiarity with concepts.
  - Concept: a mental grouping of similar objects, events, ideas, or people.
Memory: Memory is the ability of the brain to store information.
1. Short term memory
  - Limits of short-term memory
    - Less than 10 concepts
2. Long term memory
Process of Storing Memories
1. Encoding memories in short-term memory
  - Chunking: Chunks are groups of related concepts in which your brain can find some meaning.
    - Stories as chunks
2. Storage of concepts
  - Consolidation: Moving memories from short-term to long-term memory
    - Breaking down chunks into concepts
    - Organizing concepts in categories
3. Retrieval of Concepts
  - When a situation arrives, we can retrieve memories.
4. Forgetting
  - After a certain point, short-term memory is wiped clean.
People
- Elon Musk
  - Neuralink
    - USB Cable to store concepts in the brain

This model of how learning and memory work is not perfect, but it is the best model of learning we have currently.

References & Inspirations

Psychology — Daniel L. Schacter, Daniel T. Gilbert, Daniel M. Wegner, Matthew K. Nock
Psychology - Peter O. Gray, David F. Bjorklund
Made to Stick - Peter C. Brown
Make it stick - Dan and Chip Heath
Brain Rules - John Medina
Psychology — David G. Myers, C. Nathan DeWall
Psychology — Henry Gleitman, James Gross, Daniel Reisberg

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