Learning

First-hand learning

This is a slow process in which an organism finds a suitable response to a situation by trial and error.

A secretary finds out how her boss prefers his letters typed. A circus horse learns how to stand on its hind-legs. A cat learns to find its way home. A tennis player learns how to serve.

Learning involves doing something about a situation and then seeing what happens. The outcome may be good, bad or indifferent.

If you eat red berries the taste may be very nasty. If the circus horse stands on its hind-legs it gets rewarded with an apple.

Gradually one learns to shape the response so it produces only pleasure and no pain. Once it has been shaped in this way the response is elicited by special situations just as an instinct response might be.

Advantages

1. The advantage of leaming over instinct is that one can develop responses to new situations.
2. Responses can be exactly adjusted to a situation. Bad
   responses can be improved or abolished.
   

Disadvantages

1. Leaming is very slow as one has to mess around with tria! and error. This is especially so with long-range learning where the reward does not come at once but only after a long sequence ofresponses (so you cannot tell at once whether you are on the right track or not).
2. Direct leaening can be dangerous. It would be very dangerous if everyone had to find out about an electric socket for themselves by putting their fingers into it.

Second-band learning

This is a sort of artificial instinct. It involves acquiring immediate responses to situations without having had to go through the slow trial and error process for oneself. It is passed-on or second-hand learning. It comes from books, TV, school, parents, other people, etc. A child learns that a car is dangerous without having to find out for himself. A student learns that vitamin B12 can cure a certain type of anaemia because his medical textbook tells him so. A man learns that an investment is risky because bis broker tell him so.

Advantages

1. Second-hand learning is very much quicker and safer than first-hand learning.
2. Second-hand learning can apply in advance to situations which have not yet been met.
3. Second-hand learning can apply to situations which would never be encountered (for instance geography lessons about far-away lands).
4. Second-hand learning can be stored and passed on (books, etc.) so that the total body of learning grows and grows.
5. Lots of different minds (some much better than one's own) can get to work on a situation and produce a much better response than one could by direct first-hand learning.

Disadvantages

1. You depend entirely on the trustworthiness ofthe source that is passing on the learning. Since you do not encounter the situation directly you can only meet it through the possibly prejudiced eyes of the person who is handing on the leaming.
2. The second-hand response is a sort of average response suitable for everybody and not as finely tuned to individual requirements as a response leamed at first hand.
3. There may easily be conflicting responses passed on by different sources of second-hand learning (e.g. parents, teachers, pals). This can be confusing.
4. Since reward and punishment are less direct there is not so much keenness to leam as with first-hand learning.

EDWARD DE BONO. Practical Thinking. Penguin Books. New York, 1971

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lnstinct

This is a fixed reaction built into the organism so that a special situation will automatically elicit a special response. The response is pre-wired. It is as direct, automatic and unchanging as the illumination of a room if you switch on the light. The response is built into the organism just as the electric wires are built into a house. No learning is required.

Animals show instinct responses to situations which they could not possibly have encountered before. A particular black silhouette moved above naive nestlings will make them cower in fright because it suggests the shape of a hawk moving through the sky. Exactly the same shape moved backwards has no effect because it looks like a harmless swan.

Instincts are precise responses set off by precise situations. Young gulls open their mouths for food as soon as a beak-like shape with a red spot on it appears above them, because this is how the mother gull looks. A piece of wood bearing a red spot will produce the same response. This type of direct response has been beautifully worked out by Tinbergen.

Advantages

1. An instinct response is immediate and perfect and requires no learning at all.
2. An instinct response is predictable and its meaning does not change. This makes it useful for communicating with other animais.

Disadvantages

1. The instinct response is fixed and cannot be adjusted to suit the situation. Nor can it be abolished if the response is inappropriate.
2. The number of fixed inbuilt responses is limited so there is no way of coping with new situations for which there is no ready-made response.

EDWARD DE BONO. Practical Thinking. Penguin Books. New York, 1971.

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Understanding

An instinct is a, response fitted to a special situation. The smell of a female moth entices the male moth from miles away. In first- or second-hand learning responses are also fitted to special situations. These become 'familiar' situations because one knows what to do about them. But what about new situations? What about unfamiliar situations which do not have any ready-made responses?

A strange woman appears on the doorstep. Immediately you try and put the situation into a familiar category to which you know the response. Is she carrying out some sort of poll? Is she trying to sell you a flag for charity? Has her car broken down? Has she just lost her way? Is she an old acquaintance whose face you have forgotten?

Understanding is the process of changing an unfamiliar process into a familiar one so that you know what to do about it. This changing around takes place in the mind as you go from one idea to another until the unfamiliar situation is seen to resemble or be derived from familiar situations. This going from one idea to another is thinking. Understanding is thinking.

If you see a white sheet flapping in the night it is frightening because it is an unfamiliar situation, but as soon as you can see it as a sheet on a washing-line then you know what to do nothing. In a foreign restaurant you try and relate the strange words on the menu to words you already know in order to understand what dishes are available. In the end you find that some of the most exotic names refer to very familiar dishes.

Understanding is a very powerful process because it is the means by which man multiplies his knowledge. He can only learn responses to a few special situations but through understanding he converts any number of new situations into already familiar situations and thus knows what to do about them at once (without having to develop a response through first-hand learning or ask for one from second-hand learning).

Advantages

1. Understanding allows one to multiply learning by using old responses in new situations.
2. With understanding you can explain new situations to other people so that they can choose their own responses instead of having to accept second-hand responses blindly.

Disadvantages

1. Understanding is limited by the available old responses (or ideas) with which to explain the new situations.
2. In trying to understand a new unfamiliar situation in terms of old ideas one may leave out a lot or distort the actual situation to make it fit the available ideas.
3. It is usually possible to understand an unfamiliar situation in several altemative ways but one is apt to settle on the first way and believe this to be the only possible way.
4. Different people may understand the same situation in quite different ways and act accordingly.

EDWARD DE BONO. Practical Thinking. Penguin Books. New York, 1971.

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FLATLAND

Em 1884, um clérigo britânico, Edwin Abbott (1838, 1896) inventou uma forma de as pessoas perceberem melhor o que seria uma quarta dimensão: inventou um mundo de duas dimensões apenas para que nós, seres de três dimensões, percebêssemos o quanto faz falta uma coordenada a mais. “Flatland” (Terra Plana) acabou se tornando um clássico da Ficção Científica.

Na fantasia vitoriana Flatland (Terra Plana), os personagens são diferentes figuras geométricas vivendo em um mundo exclusivamente bidimensional.

Quando a história começa, o narrador, um Quadrado de meia-idade, tem um sonho perturbador em que visita um reino de uma única dimensão, Terra Linear, cujos habitantes só podem se mover de ponto a ponto. Com crescente frustração, Quadrado tenta explicar a si mesmo - que é uma Linha de Linhas, de um reino onde é possível mover-se não apenas de ponto a ponto, mas também de lado a lado. Os habitantes da Terra Linear, irritados, estão a ponto de atacá-lo quando ele acorda.

Mais tarde, naquele mesmo dia, ele tenta ajudar um de seus netos, um Pequeno Hexágono, em seus estudos. O neto sugere a possibilidade de uma Terceira Dimensão - um reino com alto e baixo do mesmo modo que lado a lado. O Quadrado classifica essa noção como tola e inimaginável. Naquela mesma noite, o Quadrado tem um encontro que mudaria sua vida: uma visita de um habitante do Espaço, o Reino das Três Dimensões.

A princípio, o Quadrado se sente apenas intrigado com o visitante, um círculo peculiar que parece se modificar em tamanho e até mesmo desaparecer. O visitante explica que é uma Esfera. Apenas parecia mudar de tamanho e desaparecer porque estava se deslocando na direção do Quadrado no Espaço e, ao mesmo tempo, descendo.

Percebendo que somente com argumentação não seria capaz de convencer o Quadrado quanto à Terceira Dimensão, a exasperada Esfera cria para ele uma sensação de profundidade. O Quadrado fica muito abalado.

Houve uma estonteante e enjoativa sensação visual que não era como ver; vi uma Linha que não era Linha; um Espaço que não era Espaço. Eu era eu mesmo e não era eu mesmo. Quando consegui recuperar a voz, gritei alto em agonia: "Ou é uma loucura ou é o Inferno." "Não é nada disso", respondeu a Esfera calmamente. "É o Conhecimento: são as Três Dimensões. Torne a abrir seus olhos e procure olhar firme."

Depois de ter uma percepção de outra dimensão, o Quadrado se torna um evangelista, tentando convencer seus amigos da Terra Plana de que o Espaço é algo mais do que uma desvairada noção de matemáticos. Por sua insistência, acaba sendo preso, a bem do público.

A partir de então, a cada ano, o mais alto sacerdote da Terra Plana, o Círculo Chefe, vai examiná-lo, a fim de ver se recobrou a razão, mas o teimoso Quadrado continua a insistir que existe uma Terceira Dimensão. Ele não consegue esquecê-la nem explicá-la.

Edwin A. Abbott ©1884

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