evolution of learning

Learning another language is a great way to gain insight into your own mind. I've been using the Rosetta Stone language learning software to wire my brain to process Japanese. I can feel the necessary connections building when my body feels a deep sense of fatigue and I can no longer continue listening and clicking. The system mimics what it must be like to be a child. You hear snippets of language and different images. You are rewarded when you click on the right one. There is never any translation. There is no need. No one translates 'car' into baby-speak to teach a baby what a 'car' is. They see it - or experience it - and create and association with a sequence of audio and muscular emanations that is stored in the brain as 'language'. I've often been intrigued by this process, why it takes so much more energy than other tasks, what affects the rate of learning.

One of the things I seek to explain to myself is what man has been doing for so many millions of years. How does it put us where we are now? And where do we go from here? In some sense - I speculate we will reach some threshold where it takes so much schooling to reach the forefront of science that we will be limited by our lifetime. And therefore could not hope to advance new thought because it would take so much time to learn what is 'known' previously. I now think this is false. And this video helps explain why. And it also helps explain why it took so long for man to evolve the systems we build on today - language - society - technology. And how they are evolving. In addition to aquiring new data that advances our tiny needs for the moment, we are stumbling on the tools for constructing new thought. Some times, like paper and the printing press, the connection is clear and the tools shape the advance of tochnology and therefore - more importantly - our ability to build mental relationships that did not previously exist. That's what learning is; creating structure in our brains - electro chemical connections - that lead to new abilities to make more novel structures. The ubiquity of information washes us in more forms of novel input. And the resursive cycle, our internal explorations of this input and exfoliation of thought, feeds on itself and drives us all.

Going back to my fatigue observation, I think diet and energy level affects how much effort is available to make these connections. Perhaps that's why it gets harder to learn as we get older. We just dont have the metabolic capacity to process sugars effeciently any more. Our protien folding gets more and more messy. And we lose the ability to make connections. Another factor is the willigness to try something new. The mind travels down the same paths daily - the same snippets of sentences we reuse in conversations - the builtin response to surprise - the reflex to categorize more and more of what we see as something we have all ready seen. Perhaps the evolution of learning will be recognizing and controlling these environmental, social, diet, and stimulation of new experiences. Maybe we will rediscover the importance of sleep.