Lifespan psychology tracks you from prenatal development through childhood, adolescence, adulthood, aging and death. Statistics ask how your performance compares to other people.

It is no surprise, then, that learning focuses on you: how you learn, why you learn and why you forget. It helps explain why you get afraid, and why you respond well to smiles and not so well to frowns.

 

Learning occurs naturally, yet mysteriously. Why do we remember things we don’t want to remember and forget things we want to retain? Why is it easy to learn languages as infants but not as adults?

 

It turns out that learning is easier than you think and more complicated.

Learning is about change. Not permanent change, not flickering, but persistent. Once learned, we tend to remember a name, face or word, even if it is less well over time.

Learning is also about experience. The change in knowledge or activity is due to our experience. We encounter a situation and are better able to handle it the next time we meet it. Learning assumes a fairly stable environment. We take advantage of the repeatability of life. Novel environments require us to use all of our mental ability. Familiar environments don’t require such a heavy cognitive load.

Driving a car is difficult at first. It requires sustained attention, concentrated effort and full-fledged thinking. Experienced drivers do it without much thought. You get in the car, get out of the car and the other end, and don’t think much in-between unless something unusual grabs your attention.

The systems of learning and memory and remarkably consistent. Except for diseases and accidental damage, your brain will effectively work. your whole life. It loses some cells and gets more efficient; it’s hard to tell which causes which.

Some people report they don’t learn as fast as they did when they were young. But they don’t recall what it is like to be young, how much time they used to spend on a task, or how well they are currently doing. We are not good trackers of our processes.

 

It is much clearer than our muscles get weaker as we age. Eyes don’t work as well, legs get a bit unsteady and backs aren’t as straight. But the brain is not a muscle. It is more like a computer than anything else. If it stays healthy, it doesn’t deteriorate in the same way or at the same rate as the rest of the body. So learning is a lifetime process.

 

Learning is not one thing. People talk about learning as if it is a single process. They think that learning state capitals is the same as learning how to swim. They assume that there is a single machine or mechanism at work. Learning is simple, right?

Learning is experienced as a single, easy process. But it is a complex combinations of multiple processes working incredibly fast; so fast it seems like a single system. We’ll look at all aspects of this fascinating process. We’ll enjoy its complications, and look for ways of simplifying it enough to be useful.