Union of Learning and Emotions

 Ask someone what is their mobile phone number and they would rattle off a 10 digit number in a flash, now ask the same person what is 13 * 16 and the person starts churning the left brain cells to populate a 3 digit number as the answer. Ask someone the name of their favorite movie or the name of their high school crush and you would get an answer in fraction seconds; now ask the same person what they had for lunch on a given day of that month and most likely you wouldn’t get an answer.

Now, let us ponder as to why we are able to recall certain things that are perhaps decade or two old and we aren’t able to recall things which are just a week of a few days old. Is it the relative importance we lay on certain things and not on others? But if that were true, at some point in time what one is eating for supper that day was important and likewise the table of 13. So, is it that fact that relative importance of things keep changing. An argument against that could be that we are able to recall the name of our high school crush or the name of our favorite movie in a flash of a few seconds (time agnostic).

Hence the question? – What makes us remember and recall things/experiences, learning's that might be decades old and forget things which might be a day or a week old.

My PoV – It is EMOTIONS.

Psychology and neuroscience neglected emotions through most of the last millennium. They were considered too difficult to study scientifically and were left to poets, writers and artists to explore. Emotions were often viewed with suspicion, as distractions that impair the operation of thinking and reasoning. This view is no longer tenable. Emotions are not an accident of evolution. There is nothing uniquely human about them either. And it is clear now that cognition and emotion are inextricably linked

It is sufficient to realise that emotions and feelings (which we experience directly, anyway!) are complex neuro-physiological processes that have at least the following salient features and characteristics:

1. Emotions are responses, triggered by the brain and primarily centered on the body, to significant internal and external events
2. Emotions are highly adaptive and valuable guides for survival. They are not a luxury or inconvenience. On the contrary, emotions and feelings render in glorious 'multi-dimensional color' what would otherwise be a flat and grey personal world. This, for sure, comes at a price.
3.  Processes that generate emotions and feelings in the brain are also, in all probability, involved in the generation of consciousness and a sense of identity.
4. Emotional experiences and emotional memories are powerful conditioning forces that have a large role to play in defining 'personality'.

   It is palpable that emotional processes contribute strongly to the tenor of everyday experience. We as human learn best by reflections of our experiences. With that in mind, a few questions keep my grey cells churning -:

1)  How can we imbue emotions in our learning designs?

2)  How can we make learners remember, recall critical learning's at their behest and apply them in the relevant work context?

3) Shouldn’t emotions be a critical aspect in the learning environment?

   In search and discovery of the answers...