The Story of How People Learn

In 1878 Johann von Jolly advised the young Max Planck not to go into physics, because “in this field, almost everything is already discovered, and all that remains is to fill a few unimportant holes”

At all periods in human history, people become attached to the  wisdom of the time, leading many to feel that ‘we are just working out the details’ - and there are no great discoveries to be made.

How People Learn remains a stranger book than anyone knows and – I realise now – a stranger book than I knew.

The intent was to set out a first general theory of learning. The working title was ‘The First Book About Learning’ for that reason. The publishers were primarily interested in practical applications because this – of course – is the everyday concern of their readership. And so it became something like ‘How People Learn & How to Make Use of that Knowledge’

It's a sort of odd coupling in which the idea of a wheel is introduced and then some things that you could do with a wheel are talked about.

Looking back, I realise that something else was going on within the book: once you have a grasp of learning (i.e. that all learning is comprised of stored affective responses) you have a general theory of cognition (i.e. that all cognition comprises affective states - or ‘thinking is just fancy feeling’) – and once you have that, you have an explanatory framework for all manner of things: culture, ethics, AI, child development, language, comparative psychology to name but a few.

So there is this odd kind of exuberance and chaos, where I find myself saying something like ‘oh, by the way this explains ethics, and also memes & cultural transmission – oh, and individual differences - and language…’ I think it probably annoyed my editor a bit.

This is of course, a shocking way to write a book - but I wonder if a kind of hankering after completeness isn’t part of the problem? At any rate, someone else will have to work out the details - the scope is just too wide.

I realise, of course, that what I am saying sounds ridiculous. There is simply nothing I can do about that. My best guess is that someone respectable will come to the same conclusion a few decades from now (meditations have their time, after all) and I run the risk of becoming the chap in the corner of the pub who says ‘you know – I thought of that first’. But who cares? That kind of attachment – those kinds of cravings – are seductive. Shall I plant a flag on my sandcastle?

Image: Jeremy McKnight