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When my wife and I were thinking about buying kayaks, we went to the park one Sunday where a vendor was letting people test-drive the various models. A good kayak can cost from $2,000 to $5,000 brand new, so we felt we needed to shop carefully before making a purchase. I watched as the instructor helped Kathleen into the seat of a long, sleek-looking kayak. “What do I do?” she asked. “You’ve never done this before?” She shook her head no, but quickly added that she had learned how to paddle a canoe. “Great. Paddling a canoe is really a lot like paddling a kayak. Just hold it like this and do what comes naturally. It’s like riding a bike. You never forget. It’ll all come back to you.” Ever heard that one before? “It’ll all come back to you.” Well, it did all come back to her. She did just fine. This incident reminded me of what I discovered about learning more than a decade ago when I was reading obsessively about brain anatomy and brain function. Learning is about memory—long-term memory. We learn about (remember) different kinds of things: images, feelings, facts, associations and concepts. We also learn how to do things. The outer layer of the brain, called the cortex, is where “thought” takes place. It’s five cell-layers thick, and the neurons are heavily interconnected across the layers and between the layers. The resulting web of neurons is an information processor that is unimaginably more complex than any high-speed computer built today. Although the human brain is analogous to a computer, human memory doesn’t work like computer memory. There’s no hard drive, and there’s no delete key. When something is remembered, it’s permanent. Neurons (brain cells) have branches called dendrites, which actually grow longer and connect to other brain cells. The connection establishes a physical pathway from one cell to the next. The cell is now a part of a vast network of interconnected brain cells. The fatty glial cells surrounding the connected neurons work to establish a myelin sheath around the neurons, creating an electrical insulator that speeds the conduction of nerve impulses. The brain is now able to activate a new pattern, which we experience as an image, feeling, fact, association, concept, attitude or skill. Only the death of brain cells from aging or disease will break the connection. From a physiological point of view, this is how we learn. We learn for one simple reason: if we had to wake up every morning and figure out everything all over again, we wouldn’t survive. So if memory is permanent, why do you sometimes have a hard time remembering things? The answer is, the connections are there, but they have to be located. Once you’ve done the work to establish a long-term memory, you still have to access it. The bad news...you probably already have a ton of unwanted thoughts stored in your head, and you can’t get them out. If you repeatedly expose yourself to something—anything, chances are it will become a long-term memory. Later your brain will access the material for you, whether you welcome it or not. But there’s good news...you can replace unwanted images, associations and habits with better ones. Not because the old pattern is deleted, but because you establish new ones. You don’t delete or unlearn; you learn new concepts, new attitudes, new skills, new habits. Essentially, you create a new pathway that’s more fulfilling than the old one, so you use it instead. It’s like building a super-highway next to a country road. It takes time to build a better highway, but eventually the old road falls into disuse; it becomes weathered and covered with tall grass. With all the garbage floating around in our culture, maybe we should be careful what we pay attention to.
Article Source: http://www.articledestination.com
Dennis E. Coates is CEO of Performance Support Systems, author of MindFrames, a brain-based personality assessment system (www.initforlife.com) and co-founder of the Train-to-Ingrain alliance (www.train-to-ingrain.com, info@train-to-ingrain.com, 800-488-6463), which delivers a reinforcement-centered approach to learning and development that achieves permanent, measurable improvements in workplace behavior and positive impacts on business results.
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