Learning and filtering

Charles Dunbar Broad
National Portrait Gallery

            

From childhood I used to look up any French word I didn't know, obsessively, no matter how obscure, on the basis that I would probably come across it again.  This was true and memory can cope at that age.  My French though is good more from a lot of real life practice in my early and mid twenties with native speakers. 

In The Doors of Perception Aldous Huxley quote the philosopher C.D. Broad.

"...we should do well to consider, much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do, the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful."

 Broad was referring to the philosopher Henri Bergson.  Neuroscientists today do not generally accept that "Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe."  This sounds more true of the mystical experiences Huxley sought. 

It would be controversial today to say that "the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive". Nowadays we think the brain is integrated and generative of experience. The part of the theory that has withstood time is that the brain does ignore a lot of what is not relevant; selective attention and sensory gating are among its methods of filtering. Sleep, exercise and emotion affect learning.  So does cognitive load and contextual diversity.  Why then learn with dull routines or in classroom environments when learning could be so much closer to real life, so much more interesting, so much more exciting? And why learn stuff you don't need?