Tom Stafford—co-author of Mind Hacks—has writ­ten a series of posts on what psy­chol­o­gists know about learn­ing. For any­one inter­ested in edu­ca­tion and per­sonal devel­op­ment, these pro­vide an inter­est­ing intro­duc­tion to a few top­ics of note.

Learn­ing Makes Itself Invisible

Once you have learnt some­thing you see the world dif­fer­ently. Not only can you appre­ci­ate or do some­thing that you couldn’t appre­ci­ate or do before, but the way you saw the world before is now lost to you. This works for the small things as well as the big pic­ture. If you learn the mean­ing of a new word, you won’t be able to ignore it like you did pre­vi­ously. If you learn how to make a cup of out of clay you won’t ever be able to see cups like you used to before.

The premise of the arti­cle (and espe­cially the exam­ple given) puts me in mind of the pre­vi­ously men­tioned phe­nom­e­non of sine wave speech.

Learn­ing Should Be Fun

Rather than fun being a relief from learn­ing, or a dis­trac­tion from it, for most of our his­tory, before school, learn­ing had to be its own moti­va­tion. Brains that learnt well had more off­spring, and so learn­ing evolved to be rewarding.

In lots of teach­ing sit­u­a­tions we focus on the right and wrong answers to things, which is a ven­er­a­ble par­a­digm for learn­ing, but not the only one. There is a less struc­tured, curiosity-driven, par­a­digm which focusses not on what is absolutely right or wrong, but instead on what is sur­pris­ing. A prob­lem with rights and wrongs is that, for some peo­ple, the pres­sure of being cor­rect gets in the way of expe­ri­enc­ing what actu­ally is.

The Straight Dope on Learn­ing Styles

This is where we hit prob­lems. Are learn­ers either pri­mar­ily visual, audi­tory, kines­thetic (as claimed in NLP)? Or are they pri­mar­ily ana­lytic, cre­ative or prag­matic (as pro­posed by Robert Stern­berg). Is the world made of Con­verg­ers, Diverg­ers, Assim­i­la­tors and Acco­moda­tors? Maybe instead we should use the Myers-Briggs cat­e­gories of Sensers, Intu­itors, Thinkers and Feelers?

Faced with these pos­si­bil­i­ties an aca­d­e­mic psy­chol­o­gist has a stan­dard set of ques­tions they would like answered: can you really divide peo­ple up into a par­tic­u­lar set of categories?