Learning anything requires at least some restructuring of our thought processes—if these thought structures and patterns stay the same our thinking will be the same and we have not learned anything. This restructuring activity changes throughout our lives. In children and young adults, there is much empirical evidence that it is relatively straightforward. This makes sense: if someone has not already built up complex and practiced thought structures, it should be easy for them to incorporate “new” ideas since everything is “new.” Independent of the already-programmed thought structures, it seems that younger humans’ brains are more plastic and are physiologically designed to learn. Perhaps more correctly—since thought and its associated learning is likely retained in the dynamic flow of signals throughout the enormously interconnected web of the human brain—new thought flows and types of thought flows are more easily generated in the young.
This model of learning is logical in that repetitive tracking of the same thought patterns will certainly result in some reinforcement of these patterns. The reinforcement probably has some electrochemical neurotransmitter basis: revisiting patterns should tend to increase the generation of the triggering neurotransmitters along the synapse paths the pattern uses. The reinforcement process might be more complex, in that the “higher-order” patterns are also called into play which reinforces the patterns' lower-order patterns governed or monitored by them. It is well-documented that people who, at an early age, learn at least two different spoken languages tend to have a much greater facility in learning another language when compared to those who grow up speaking only one tongue. While the newly learned language might be quite different from the initial ones that have already been acquired, the higher-order pattern of learning any new language seems to support this added capability.
Since learning requires restructuring of thought patterns, how can this restructuring occur?
First, let’s address the relatively learning blank-slate of a human child.
Babies, Sequence, and Continuity
Clearly, we cannot learn in a total vacuum. We cannot acquire knowledge in the complete absence of any contextual knowledge—there must be some starting point. Even very young babies come equipped with some cognitive processes that allow them to learn. These processes are limited and the initial learning that can be based on them is equally limited. No matter how much a parent might talk to the baby, the baby will not be able to realistically comprehend and act on what is being said, until they have acquired sufficient “contextual knowledge.” The baby will learn to respond to the tone of voice but cannot usefully recognize what is being said. It is likely that babies have just the instinctual or reflex “knowledge” (transmitted in DNA for the parents and stored in cell structures and functions) most necessary for their early-life survival while under the care of their parents or other caregivers. Other knowledge necessary for the survival of the infant must be learned and applied by the parents.
As mentioned earlier, babies are not born with any innate (brain-stored) spoken language, but they are born with a nascent (DNA-stored) capacity to learn a language. This capacity does not kick in for a while though; there is little need or evolutionary advantage for a newborn infant to converse with its parents. But once the child becomes somewhat mobile, there is such a need: the child must be able to attend to the parents’ directions to, for instance, help keep it out of danger. The “kick-in process” has some physical elements: some enhancement of the brain synapses’ ability to generate neurotransmitter chemicals for instance. It also most likely requires very significant development of some baseline brain functions. Amongst other things, the concepts of sequencing and continuity seem to be critical.
It is clear that newborns physiologically see everything that adults see, but they have not developed and retained the pattern matching necessary to provide the continuity of vision that would help them identify what they are seeing. And they certainly do not have the ability to do anything with that knowledge even if they could get it. Along with this, it appears that babies have limited ability to recognize and follow sequences of events. To very small children the visual world is more akin to looking at a rapidly flipped sequence of quite different still photographs than to a fluidly continuous movie. Given their very limited perception of time-based continuity, very small babies live entirely in the present.
Note that these limitations are somewhat specific to humans. Other animals do come quite well-equipped with capabilities out of the womb or egg. For instance, a wildebeest calf is capable of standing and moving within fifteen minutes of being born on the African savannah; it immediately knows that its mother is nurturing and predator is dangerous. Such capabilities are almost always closely allied with the animal’s survival needs and were undoubtedly conferred upon the offspring through the agency of species evolution and transmitted genetically through the species DNA.
The development of continuity awareness in babies is a model we can use to help understand the necessary restructuring that occurs when we learn things we did not previously know.