Learning as adaptation

Learning, again, especially emotional learning, seems to involve everything in life. There are analogies between personal relationships and work, or between personal history and dreams about the future. Sometimes a movie sparks a philosophical notion which is phrased in terms of a technical metaphor. You get the idea.

In with all of this complexity there's one particularly difficult point: focus. Given that attention can spread all over the place and can drift easily from one thing to another, how is one supposed to stay "on task"? And what does this even mean, if we think of learning as something that happens all the time?

Again, I think we get some benefit from thinking about learning as adaptation. Without adaptive results, we can say there is no learning, or the wrong thing was learned. Imagine a coach saying "If you keep practicing like that, you'll learn it wrong. You need to practice it like this."

Some emotional or aesthetic sophistication is required to be that "coach" in your own life, as well as being the player with the willingness to give up an approach that isn't working well and try something else. For this to work it's important to be able to detect problems early on -- for example, not just to detect "distractions" but to look at the conditions that make one prone to distraction. Generally speaking, simplicity, order, and routine help manage complexity. These things aren't always immediately available, and generally have to be built (or paid for as a service).

Indeed it seems reasonable to hypothesize that the more disciplined a person is in terms of work management, emotional processing, clear communication about difficulties and so forth, the more complexity and chaos they will be able to handle in their work life, and the more adaptive they can be as circumstances change.

Then again, one man's "discipline" is another man's "chaos".

"This is a very complicated case, Maude. You know, a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you's. And, uh, lotta strands to keep in my head, man. Lotta strands in old Duder's head. Luckily I'm adhering to a pretty strict, uh, drug regimen to keep my mind limber."

If we're to look at what makes adaptation work well, it would be good to have some standards for evaluation, like a clear assessment of emotions (I don't think things are going well), or some more objective reading (the score in the game). It would also be good to have some sense of how the, potentially many, factors involved influence outcomes. And to recognize that the outcomes themselves are quite varied, ranging from summary statistics (like a score or a grade) to more subtle things (like adequate mastery of a given technique, or a strained tendon).

There is in all of this a potentially infinite complexity which could give us a lot to study, ranging from classical philosophy of mind (e.g. Hume) through to contemporary cognitive science (and organizational science to boot). It may be most useful for us here to adopt a phenomenological approach, in other words, to look at how people think about learning, problem solving, and other adaptive tasks.

Is learning a matter of doing something "by rote" (in which case, perhaps flash cards are the right technology)? Or a matter of doing something "in practice" (in which case, a suitable form of, probably social, engagement should be found)? Do the people involved need to know what they are learning and devise strategies as they go (problem solving), or can they absorb the information more passively (television)? What kind of "reenforcement" is needed (is scientific evidence enough, or are rewards also necessary)? What sorts of examples are they to work from? How is learning to be assessed (or, in other words, what adaptive pressures apply)?

Some of the answers will be fairly obvious. After we get through the more obvious answers, there will be more subtle things. How does the moment looking out the window on the bus bring about an "a ha" relative to a difficult problem that one has been looking at for weeks? Is this connection important, or is the consistent effort over a period of time more important?

Given the difficulties that come up in adaptation tasks -- learning new skills broadly speaking, maybe setting aside some old habits as well, etc. -- can we come up with some "general purpose advice"? Or will specific problems require specific and non-generalizable solution strategies? The field of "heuristics" looks at this question, as applies to technical problems.