Learning produces changes within an organism, and interestingly, those changes are almost always permanent. The stakes of learning are quite high as it creates a state of being that ultimately determines nearly everything about life as you know it.
We have a tendency to reduce “learning” to the acquisition of facts. We learn about things that happened in the past and present so that we might incorporate the outcomes, desirable or not, into our future decision-making, and to make predictions that lead to our well-being. But obviously, though easily forgotten, that concept of learning is a very small, almost minuscule aspect of the real phenomenon.
Try thinking about learning in the context of values, behaviors, skills, preferences, so on. It turns out that how we define ourselves and our entire species is learned. We could be totally different than how we are. We’ve learned to be the way we are, and it’s possible to learn different things, and those things determine how and to an extent what we are. We know this is true by having observed different kinds of humans in different places who view things and do things differently. Cultures whose entire concept of life itself is different from our own. And individuals, even that guy down the street, whose concept of life and living is vastly different than that of my own, both of our concepts have been learned, and that is a process.
There are types of learning processes at work, working on you and in you, at all times, and those things affect and determine how and what you are. For example, one type of learning is habituation. In habituation, a progressive diminution of behavior response to a certain stimulus eventually determines a state of being. If an organism is exposed to a certain regular stimulus, its reaction to it will be diminished, possibly to the point where it’s no longer even sensed. In habituation, we can become blind to things around us, even other people and their states.
Another kind of learning is enculteration, our inescapable adoption of the beliefs, behaviors, thinking and working patterns of the environment in which we develop, notably our native environment. Note this is different from acculturation, which is the same but when the environment new to us, i.e. non-native. One we have no choice about until the right experience comes along and enables us to see ourselves as an enculturated being, and at that moment an empowered being, able to exert will and self-determine our state, our experiences, our values and beliefs. What is the “right experience” and how does that fit into the phenomenon? It’s called “episodic learning”.
Episodic learning is a change in behavior or understanding that results from the occurrence of an event. It’s so named because the way an event is recorded in our minds is different than how other forms of information are recorded. It’s actually a different kind of memory altogether, aptly named “episodic memory”, contrasted to semantic and perceptual memory. Episodic memories are autobiographical, the permanent changes in our brains that come from time, place, emotion and other contextual elements of a specific event. The right kind of experience can change us permanently, granting us a way of seeing the world that is forever altered. Throughout history these experiences have been documented. The Buddha was forever changed, calling it an “awakening”. Newton was forever changed, calling it “deterministic laws of nature”. George Orwell was forever changed, suddenly aware of political tools.
Our experiences determine what and who we are, and we have control over what kinds of experiences we have. How do we judge the value of how we spend or time and how do we progress towards our greatest potentials where we experience the most happiness? We must choose what and why we do the things we do, and understand them fully, if we are truly to determine our lives for ourselves.
