How Your Brain Works: What is Learning?

A framework for thinking about learning and how the way we learn determines our paths forward in both music and life…

Table of Contents

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Lesson Goals

To understand that learning happens without or without our permission and that future success in both music and life belongs to those who have the love and discipline to study.

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Prerequisites

LOVE of music and the discipline to study and practice the right things the right way.

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What is Learning?

Learning is a change in what or how we feel, think, or act as a result of experience, observation, study, experimention, instruction, training, coaching, or mentoring.

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The ABC Model of Learning

The ABC Model of Learning views intelligence in three domains: affective, behavioral, and cognitive:

1. The Affective Domain is the realm of feeling: emotions, attitudes, values, and motivations.
2. The Behavioral Domain is the realm doing: bodily actions and skills, writing, speaking.
3. The Cognitive Domain is the realm of thinking: language, definitions, concepts, associations, calculations, remembering, problem solving.

Notice that these three domains validate our intuitive notions of self as consisting of body, mind, and spirit.

Sidebar: Learning to play the piano deeply engages and excites all three of these domains. As you keep browsing the site, you’ll notice that Piano-ology routinely taps into all three of these fundamental, complementary, overlapping aspects of our being as we acquire new attitudes, skills, and knowledge. When we play, we don’t want to stop with merely thinking the music. We also want to feel the music. And if we do, our body will naturally express our musical intentions, guaranteed.

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Intentional versus Unconscious Learning

Surprisingly little is known about how our brains learn and remember a phone number, friend’s face, familiar melody, or complex motor skill. It seems that we naturally wired to do so. In fact, the processes our brains use to seek, interpret, organize, remember, recall, and relate sensations and information are almost entirely unconscious. And they are so powerful that they need not ask permission from our conscious minds to do work their magic.

And so it’s critically important to highlight and understand the distinctions between two categories of learning:

• Conscious, active, intentional learning is the process by which we deliberately try to learn something.
• Unconscious, passive, unintentional learning happens to us without our awareness, typically in response to something in our environment (*), for better or worse.

(*) This includes the powerful conditioning processes of classical conditioning and operant conditioning, two vast subjects beyond scope of this discussion. For the moment, it suffices to realize that they exist and can have enormous influence on the courses of our lives if we let them.

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The Power of Studying

While we cannot control the unconscious, behind-the-scenes workings of our brains directly, we can control what and how we feed this powerful and mysterious organ. To that end, we introduce the critically important notion of studying… and highlight how it relates to learning the right things the right way:

• Learning is an unconscious, passive process beyond our control.
• Studying is a conscious, active process within our control.

And so, learning how to study–by feeding our hungry brains meaningful and useful things in an appropriate way–is essential to the mastery of any complex skill–and has the power to make learning efficient, enjoyable, enduring, and self-sustaining.

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Learn more… How Your Brain Works