What is the meaning of learning?

"Genius without education is like silver in the mine" (Benjamin Franklin)

We learn all our lives, intentionally or instinctively, but do we know the meaning of learning? What means learning? What happens in our brain when we learn??

Babies learn everything without being taught to learn. Although we are not taught to learn we do it instinctively. At the age of seven, we go to school and continue to learn instinctively because we have no “learning” class. We learn many subjects besides how to learn. This one we have to figure out by ourselves.

“We are born capable of learning, but knowing nothing, perceiving nothing.”(Jean-Jacques Rousseau)

In this article, I would like to explain with simple words in a very basic way what learning means and how it takes place.

Meaning of learning by definitions

Let’s see some definitions.

1.The definition of learning given by the dictionary is: “the acquisition of knowledge or skills through study, experience, or being taught.”

2.The definition given by a cognitive neuroscientist, Stanislas Dehaene, is: “to learn is to form an internal model of the external world. You might not be aware of it, but your brain has acquired thousands of internal models of the outside world”.

3.The definition according to neurobiology: “learning involves brain changes and it involves working memory and long-term memory”.

In this article, I will go one by one through the definitions and explain how learning happens in order to be able to improve our learning or to help our kids and/or our employees to learn more efficiently or more self-consciously.

The purpose of learning is the acquisition of skills and knowledge, this makes the first definition pretty obvious. Any further explanations would be redundant. The relevant questions here would be: how do we acquire the knowledge? how is it saved? and where is it saved?

Meaning of learning by cognitive science

A partial response comes from the definition of Stanislas Dehaene to explain that, when it comes to learning, we create an internal model of the external world. This does not refer to how we perceive the outside world, the world is perceived differently by each of us because it is created in our mind, by our mind. ?It refers to how we store knowledge and information about the world. We do that by building models.

"The brain converts your perceptions into chemical and electrical changes that form a mental representation of the patterns you've observed" (Brown, Roediger III, McDaniel - make it stick)

The better you can learn a subject the more precise is the internal model that represents it. Wrong information or wrong understanding of the learned information will contribute to the formation of wrong models.

Just an example of such a case, a geography teacher tested his students’ knowledge about the shape of the earth, in the very first class. He was curious what was their knowledge related to the earth’s shape. All of them knew that the earth was round, but when they were asked to make a graphical representation of it, they draw a circle not a sphere or they said: “the earth is round like a pie”. Some of them had imagined the earth as round and flat and this is such a wrong internal model. In such cases, the internal model has to be corrected.

Let’s now explain the second definition and create an internal model about how learning involves brain changes. The brain is made up of distinct nerve cells. The brain cells are called neurons and we have approximately 86 billion of them. Those neurons are not standalone but are interconnected (Cajal’s discovery in 1906 for which he took the Nobel prize) with other neurons, by up to 40,000 individual connections, forming like this neuron networks. A connection between two neurons is called synapses. Multiplying the two above numbers results in the number of possible neurons’ connections in the brain, and that is higher than there are stars in the universe.

It is important to imagine this number because the neurons' connections are the key to learning. By learning new things or skills, we form new synapses between neurons. There are 2 possible ways of forming new synapses:

- we form synapses between neurons that were not yet connected

- we form additional synapses between already connected neurons.

"Every time we learn something new, the brain processes the information through the senses and make new circuits that encode in the neurons the memory of what it has learned." (Joe Dispenza - Evolve your brain)

“Neurons that fire together wire together” this sentence was used by?Donald Hebb in 1949 to explain how pathways are formed in the brain. Those are the brain changes that appear while learning takes place. At this point I think is crucial to explain how the synapses evolve from young ages till maturity. You would now be tempted to think that we are born with fewer connections and we create them while we grow old and learn things. In reality, things are the other way around.

“During early childhood, the density of synapses reaches twice that of an adult, and only then does it slowly decrease. In each region of the cortex, incessant waves of overproduction are followed by a selective retraction of useless synapses or, on the contrary a multiplication of those synapses and dendritic and axonal branches that have proven their worth” (Stanislas Dehaene – How we learn)

In other words, in the first two years of life, the neuronal trees grow a lot. It is considered that at the age of four the forest of neurons reaches its maximum. And then according to the principle “if you don’t use it you lose it”, the synapses that are not used disappear, in the process called pruning. Those that are used are reinforced and further developed (now it makes sense why children learn more easily languages). The synaptic connections changes according to what it begins to know, remember and recognize. The same happens also with the connections of the neurons in adults. The networks that are not reactivated in the process of recalling the knowledge lose connections and in course of time, the information will be forgotten.?And this is how forgetting takes place in the brain.

Let’s see now how memory is involved in the process. Humans have more types of memory .?When we learn new principles, knowledge, we save the information in the working memory. The information will be transferred into long-term memory during sleep.

Humans’ sleep has 5 sleep cycles (when humans sleep enough, which rarely happens). Each cycle has 3 types of phases: light sleep, deep sleep, and REM sleep. The REM (Rapid Eye Movement) phase is the one responsible for building memories. During the REM the information from the working memory is transferred to long-term memory. More details about the sleep architecture and how to calculate your time to go to bed in order to have as many REM sleep phases as possible, you can find out in?this video .

Learning consists of 2 processes:

1. encoding the information = memorizing
2. retrieving the information =recalling

Efficiency in learning is mainly measured by how much and how accurate we can remember the information that we have learned. And here contribute some factors like time dedicated to a learning session, attention to the learned information, how soon the newly learned information is applied/experienced, how soon and how often is the information retrieved from memory, and how the brain is supported in the formation of the new circuits.

You must have heard of association as a supporting method for learning new things. When we associate a new principle or fact that we want to learn with an already known one, we activate the neural circuits that hold old information at the same time with creating the new circuit for the new information. In this way, we kind of link/connect the new circuit to the old one creating stability.

Remembering is also pretty much dependent on what we are learning. If we learn a skill, the best learning is repetition, practicing that skill as often as possible. But is repetition the only key ingredient to learning??

There are some basic principles that support efficient learning, they are generally described in the 4 learning pillars .?For now, I would like to conclude that learning is the main difference between experts and novices , and in order to develop expertise in any domain/topic, we should first learn how to learn.?

Benjamin Barber, a political theorist said:

"I don't divide the world into the weak and strong, or the success and the failures ... I divide the world into the learners and nonlearners".