Confidence is key to self-learning due to brain makeup
Summary
- Information going into our brain is filtered first thgouh the emotional center. If there is a threat going on, it will trigger fight or flight response: there will be no learning going on.
Details
- related to Kruger's pyramid of learning
Quotes
Confidence. At the base of Kruger’s pyramid is the self-conviction that we can learn. There’s no way around this prerequisite, and brain chemistry has something to do with it.
When we receive information of any kind, it travels up the spinal cord toward the neural networks of the brain. The first part of the brain to get this information is the emotional center—before the analytical or interpretive parts. Predictably, this causes some problems in our daily life. The job of the emotional center is to determine if the information we get poses a threat to our security.
If this part of the brain perceives a threat, then it saps chemical resources from the rest of the brain to deal with the threat. Of course, you know this as the fight-or-flight response, in which our bodies are triggered into arousal to avoid bodily harm in one way or another.
The emotional center doesn’t distinguish between physical threats or personal ones, which means it perceives insults, harsh criticism, and condemnation with the same level of alarm that it would with a fist, a bear attack, or an oncoming truck. It’s responding to a danger to our well-being, and to do so, it hoards the chemicals we’d normally use for other brain-driven activity—such as learning.
So motivating someone to learn by threats or reproach isn’t just ineffective—it’s impossible. If one is feeling hurt or mistrusted, or if they’re dealing with depression, stress, difficult personal issues, or fear, they don’t have any resources left to help them learn.
Therefore, it’s important to establish a real sense of confidence that we have the ability to learn. If you’re running low in this area, be kind to yourself and take steps to affirm your learning abilities. You’ve learned everything in your life thus far from scratch. You may feel ignorant or that you’re not good enough—and that might be true, but it’s only a temporary condition.
Reflections
- I need to research this more, but sounds legit. Also interesting to learn about Kruger's pyramid of learning