How Learning Connects Us To The External World

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Learning serves a purpose that is greater than simply acquiring knowledge. The process by which one learns also allows us to connect with, to bond with that which is being learned about. In other words, there is an emotional connection that is created that provides a certain kind of grounding. With this grounding, a person gets a certain kind of stability, of orientation within the world. Furthermore, this grounding provides a template that allows us to engage in various activities with different phenomena related to the learning. The nature of the activities varies considerably depending on the nature of the knowledge.
Factual knowledge or data deals with defined discrete entities that have well-defined boundaries and that are more disposed to manipulation for some objective purpose. The bonding that occurs is usually strategic, and once the purpose of the acquisition of the knowledge has been achieved, the bond frequently weakens or even dissolves. There is little that is emotionally exciting about data. However, when the data is bonded into information – that is data that is put into larger contexts – then it is transformed by the mixing in of flowing blendable continual relationships into something that lends itself to more enduring connections in the minds of people. In other words, the information is more likely to create preserved imprints in the minds of the people learning it than if it had been mere defined discrete data. These information-based preserved imprints can provide a kind of grounding, a kind of security that people need in order to be able to function properly.
In turn, pieces of information can be put together to form ideas. Ideas are more transcendent mental entities filled with infinite vacuumized stimuli. They tend to give people an overview of situations both in the external world and in a person’s mind. Bonding with these entities is sometimes strategic for concrete purposes in the external world, but sometimes it has to do with creating entities that act as templates to help us bond with ourselves to give us a more cohesive sense of self. This is particularly true in the humanities and the arts. With these ideas, we are not trying to manipulate things for strategic purposes, but rather we are trying to collaborate with ourselves for intangible purposes that allow us to merge more effectively with ourselves. Nevertheless, because these purposes are intangible, one is not looking for a form of concrete achievement, and therefore, it is less likely that these ideas weaken and dissolve in the minds of the people who have them.

Basically, the categories of learning and thought we explore are inanimate things, processes, activities, situations, events, experiences, natural phenomena and other living organisms. And we learn about relationships. The relationships that we focus on the most are those with other people. These are the relationships that are most important for connecting us to the external world. When we learn how to best connect to other people, we learn how to become bonded with them. This is very important at a time in human development when our modern technological living environment creates vacuum fields of experience that tend to unground us which of course leads to our floating away from other people as a result of entropy. So, in order to bond with other people, we have to swim against the tide as it were. And rather than simply learn about people cognitively, as a series of disconnected pieces of information, we have to learn about them intuitively – what do we experience about them when dealing with them as whole cohesive entities. But intuition is a process that we are most stimulated to use when living in traditional natural environments which are filled with organic stimuli, the kind of stimuli which allow us to experience both ourselves and others as whole cohesive entities. In modern technological living environments, we have to exert extra effort to engage in intuition, because where we live is not conducive to it.

Intuition is the best form of learning to help us bond with other people. Cognition basically helps us to deconstruct other people to try to understand them more easily as simple pieces. But then once deconstructed, it is hard to put them together in our minds as unified cohesive entities, which is the form in which it is easiest to commune with them. Intuition is most associated with women, but we all need intuition to survive in social situations, because it is intuition that tells us who we can trust and who we can’t. Intuition tells us who we can allow to emotionally support us, and who we can’t. Perhaps it provides a more important kind of knowledge that cognition, because, apart from the man on the desert island, we all need some sort of social connection to other people in order to survive. We need other people to make, receive and preserve organic imprints, to live more vibrant lives, to develop more meaningful narratives, and to prepare for death with the accumulation of preserved imprints into a surrogate immortality. Intuitive learning is crucial to us as human beings.


Acerca de Laurence Mesirow

Durante mi estadía en la Ciudad de México en los años setenta, me di cuenta que esta enorme ciudad contenía en sus colonias distintos "medio ambientes vivenciales", que iban desde muy antiguas a muy recientes; desde muy primitivas a muy modernas.Observé que había diferencias sutiles en la conducta de la gente y en sus interacciones en las diferentes colonias. Esta observación fue fundamental en la fundación de mis teorías con respecto a los efectos de la tecnología moderna sobre los medio ambientes vivenciales y sobre la conducta humana.En México, publiqué mi libro "Paisaje Sin Terreno" (Editorial Pax-México), y luego di conferencias para la U.N.A.M. y la Universidad Anahuac. También, presenté un ensayo para un Congreso de Psicología.Ahora que mis hijas son adultas, tengo el tiempo de explorar mis ideas de vuelta. Le agradezco mucho a ForoJudio.com y en especial al Sr. Daniel Ajzen por la oportunidad de presentar mis ideas.

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