00:00:03.920 Many people wonder what learning is, is it something that brains do?
00:00:08.560 Is it something that things like food, exercise and brain training can help with?
00:00:13.000 Is it something you need to do to past tests, something that comes from studying really
00:00:27.160 Things are physical things, like hearts or lungs.
00:00:31.800 But what brains do is very special and not like what hearts or lungs do.
00:00:37.600 What human brains do is create minds and minds are not physical things.
00:00:44.040 Minds are very special things that humans have and that create ideas.
00:00:54.320 You need to either produce ideas, via a creative process, or we need to learn ideas, which
00:01:07.120 But although ideas run on neurons, they are not identical to neurons.
00:01:13.120 They are just represented somehow in ways we do not really at all understand, in patterns
00:01:28.400 It's rather like saying, if you were to think that ideas were nothing but neurons, that
00:01:35.080 the Mona Lisa or some other famous painting was made up of nothing but atoms.
00:01:42.200 Now it's true that the Mona Lisa is made up of atoms, but it's far more than this.
00:01:47.560 To analyze the Mona Lisa is a painting in terms of the atoms that make it up, is to explain
00:01:56.160 When we speak about the Mona Lisa, we don't talk about atoms.
00:01:59.760 We talk about shade and tone and that ambiguous smile.
00:02:10.160 Although the physical brain is necessary for learning, we don't need to confuse brain activity
00:02:20.240 We don't need to confuse physical atoms with what's really going on.
00:02:25.120 So to explain learning, we need to get beyond the brain and into the mind.
00:02:32.120 So learning is not really a physical thing, like pumping blood or breathing air.
00:02:38.320 Learning is an abstract process of creating and criticizing guesses about the world around
00:02:48.400 What our minds do is guess what is correct or what might work and then we, as our minds,
00:03:06.840 When we learn something new, we are creating in our own minds that idea for the first
00:03:12.960 If the idea is one that works or that we guess is true, we keep it.
00:03:18.840 How do we know that it works or that it is true?
00:03:23.440 We hold it up to the light so to speak and take more or less a careful look depending
00:03:32.080 And if it survives every criticism, we have it the time, then we accept it, always
00:03:37.800 conditionally of course, but accept it we do and when we accept it, we say we know it.
00:03:46.600 Now sometimes we take extra care to be critical of new ideas and even old ones.
00:03:57.680 It's all about checking to see if there are problems with ideas and so good learning requires
00:04:07.440 It requires us to be critical in the true sense of the word, to bring criticism to bear
00:04:17.800 The better we become at this, the faster we can learn because we discard the ideas that
00:04:22.920 don't work, those that are false and not allowing us to make progress and replace them
00:04:33.760 So learning is about creating knowledge in your own mind.
00:04:38.640 It requires a person to attempt an answer or a project or some other activity like playing
00:04:44.920 the piano or doing gymnastics or solving a chemical equation and testing that idea in
00:04:57.400 If it makes it through, we retain it for now at least.
00:05:02.760 Now in all of this, error is necessarily part of the process.
00:05:08.320 We simply have to make mistakes when we are learning.
00:05:12.000 We have to find out where we have gone wrong and we have to go wrong because we're
00:05:20.080 This means we can't possibly get things consistently correct all of the time.
00:05:28.440 Learning is creating knowledge in your mind by a process of creativity or guessing and
00:05:35.840 Both parts of the learning process are absolutely crucial.
00:05:39.400 And the better we can get at both parts being critical and being creative, the faster
00:05:45.320 we can learn and the deeper our understanding can become.
00:05:49.840 So we should keep in mind a deep epistemological truth.
00:06:01.240 One is creativity and the other is critical thinking.
00:06:07.440 To maximize learning, we need to maximize both.
00:06:11.600 And how to do that, well that's a topic for another time.