Learning is Often Discomfort

Earlier today, I was working through an idea presented by theorist Kenneth Burke. The idea isn't the important part of this post, so I won't share it here. What is important, is the discomfort I felt in trying to wrap my head around what he was saying. It was almost a physical feeling, perhaps similar to being on the edge of straining a muscle.

Strain is the key word here, and it seems fitting. Strain is what happens when an existing system is pushed beyond what it is accustomed to smoothly accommodating. In the body, that strain produces soreness, instability, and fatigue before it produces strength. In the mind, it produces confusion, sometimes frustration, and the sense that things no longer quite fit together. Concepts bumble around clumsily bouncing off of each other until slowly or suddenly something locks into place. Others may then follow, or they might simply continue their bumbling.

The discomfort may feel like a sign that something has gone wrong - or at least not yet going right. But I increasingly believe it is a reliable sign of a forthcoming lighting strike of a "eureka!" moment. I just need to keep doing the hard work of learning.

I think it tends to be human nature to want to avoid discomfort. And in many ways, traditional education systems seem to favor and reward particular indicators of intelligence such as specific types of recognition, recall, and speed. It rewards the feeling of fluency. But fluency is often just familiarity. It tells you that new information has been layered onto old structures and has now settled in without any continued challenging of them.

Deep learning does something more invasive to the mind. It destabilizes existing categories. It interrupts the pleasure of coherence. It makes previously useful ideas feel inadequate or clumsy.

This is why gaining new knowledge takes time. We have to synthesize, contextualize, test the ideas against things we previously understood. Learning requires reorganizing past understandings, not just stacking concept upon fact upon things assumed true. When the concepts are mind-blowing, the entire environment is getting re-catalogued.

In that sense, deep learning is less like acquiring tools and collecting answers to trivia questions (to be clear, I am not meaning to make an argument that these things aren't valuable). In depth synthesis is similar to the work of going to a gym - tearing muscles so that they may heal and come back stronger. This isn't a process that just happens. It requires discipline, rest, proper fueling, and patience - the last of which is the part we often find the hardest. Patience with the process and patience with ourselves.

I don't have any tips for shortcuts here. Sure, there are ways to organize ourselves that can lighten some of the load around setting the environment for our best learning. But I just don't think there is a way to avoid the strain. Knowledge that has not strained us has not changed us. It remains external, something repeatable, but not yet synthesized.

When studying feels slow or hard...or both...I try to remember that this friction is mechanism of growing the knowledge. And accepting that is the true path of least resistance.