Learning

Learning is a part of the parcel of our lives. Wherever we are, at any time, and every moment of our lives, we encounter the art of learning. Since the day we were brought to this world, we learn and develop till this level of our lives, but it does not just end here, it is continuous and it is an ever growing process with no boundaries. In the aspect of psychology, learning is defined as the process of acquiring experiences with the aid of external stimuli and environmental factors and will be stored in our body in the form of memory, like computer stores information of keyed in data. Likewise, learning not necessarily needs to be acquired from books or other reading resources, but rather can be gained from environment, experience, vision, hearing, taste, pain, touch and many other external resources. As human development progress further, learning can also be further acquired from several ways, as long as something good and beneficial is gained from it.
Experience consists of knowledge or skill in observation of something or some event which is gained through involvement or directly exposed to that thing or event. Experience is one of the most important parts of learning. For instance, fresh graduates without experience possess lower working performance than those existing senior workers in a workplace. This is because senior workers have more experience on their job compared to those fresh graduates. That is why experienced workers are the preferred choice of hiring than fresh graduates in job prospects. Medical professionals such as doctors, pharmacist, and medical scientists require lots and lots of experiences despite their heavy workload and handling patient’s life. Doctors are the individuals whose health of the patient relies on them in major context. In medical schools, theory and books are the major parts of their education. Medical students are required to pass their exams in order to obtain a medical degree which allows them to practice as a qualified doctor. It may seem like a studying honeymoon in medical universities, but that will change as medical graduates encounter working life in hospitals. In hospitals, they will be exposed to real-life patients and experiences with various kinds of diseases, besides challenges in social environment. Pharmacists are the individuals with high responsibility to educate the community in drug intake and the proper usage of drugs at appropriate doses. In pharmaceutical schools, students were educated using books, lectures and laboratory experiments. They were only taught on how to study and memorize names of drugs and its uses. In hospital and pharmaceutical industries, these students will further learn on new drugs, latest diagnosis and exposed to research in producing new drugs. In food industries, individuals such as hawkers and professional chefs, with more experiences, these individuals will explore further on ways to improvise food quality and preparation to meet customers’ needs by improving on taste and service. Business professionals learn through experiences of failure and bankruptcy. Some even acquire experience from senior business professionals. They will also learn via environment; those who venture to the overseas will encounter challenges of language, status, citizenship and etc whereas local business people encounter local challenges like financial mishaps. Furthermore, in the fields of education, teachers also encounter the process of learning, besides educating learners. Junior teachers have lesser experiences than senior teachers. This is because their education is only limited to what they have learnt in teaching colleges. The senior teachers often encounter different kinds of students; some lazy, smart, weak, slow, etc. Consequently, their teaching methods will be improvised year by year through new experiences.

Nevertheless, most of us believe, ‘what you see is what you learn’. Vision has an impact on learning. Infants and children learn through what they observe everyday of their lives. In the process of human development, the infant stage is the stage where the learning through vision is more effective rather than the later years. In the nursery schools, when a child sees the other individuals of their age doing something, like playing at a swing, they will indirectly be influenced by what they see. When the others laugh, they laugh. School-going children learn through teacher’s guidance. For instance, a beautiful portrait of a flower vase is displayed in front of the class, children will be awed by what they see and then try their levels best to draw the similar portrait. Television also has an influence in a child’s process of learning. Cartoon characters and action movies will indirectly educate a child by their actions. Whether it is a good or a bad influence, it strongly depends on how a child perceives it. Adult also learn through vision. A photographer or an environmentalist observes the environment; the changes, color, and climate is the aspects they might look for. A photographer gains experience by learning different kinds of ways of taking photographs with proper angles, resolution and styles. On the other hand, the environmentalist observe changes in the environment, such as pollution caused by human activities and other factors causing side effects on the environment, and thus implement new ways to protect the environment. A chemist observes colors of chemical reactions learn to recognize chemicals by their colors in some cases. If the experiment does not turn out the way it is supposed to be, they would not repeat the faulty steps in the experiment again until what they see in the result satisfy their needs. Another group of individuals which uses vision to learn is the sports people. The coach guides a sportsperson on strategies and methods to tackle a game. The learner or player then learns by observing the coach to improve their gaming performance for the better.

Another way of learning is via audio or listening. It cannot be denied that hearing is one of the best methods of learning. In the early stage of human development, like the infant uses this method to learn. For example, our parents taught us how to speak, and slowly we were able to say ‘Mom’ or ‘Dad’ and then further improved by mastering our mother tongue languages. As the infant grows, they will start to learn to sing especially nursery schools when the music is played and the children sing along with the song. Adolescents and young adults, especially school going children and college students acquire learning effectively through listening. Students listen attentively when attending classes, lectures and practical classes where the educator delivers information to their fellow students. Students need to be able to listen attentively to enhance the effectiveness of their learning; hence the information given out will be absorbed better and stored longer in their memory. It is believed that 70% of the knowledge of a student is gained from classroom and the remaining 30% is further gain when they re-study the classroom materials at home. Students who do not attend lecture will miss the golden opportunity of learning, and therefore bid farewell to the 70% of knowledge! Therefore, to be a good student, listening skills in classroom has to be enhanced. Not to be neglected, the public too, can learn by attending talks or seminars given by professionals. They learn by listening attentively to talks and seminars and then utilize the knowledge gain to be practiced in their daily lives. Public talks like awareness campaign, health talks, educational seminars and motivational talks will do a good deed to the public.

It was said that animals have better taste buds and sense of smell than humans. Generally, taste and smell have an impact on our learning process. For example when you have eaten something like a spoiled food, you would not continue eating that food even though that food might cost you a day’s meal. Eating an orange which is sour will cause us to not eat it, but when it is sweet, we would end up eating up all the oranges, or purchase even more of it! When you cook a new dish, for the first time, it might not turn out too well; with some defects. So, the next time when you attempt to cook the dish again you would try to improvise on it, making it taste better, perhaps, adding a little spice into it to enhance the taste. Professionals such as nutritionist, food technologist and dietitians require more experience in food preparation, in other words, they must possess good sense of smell and taste. They will attempt several steps to reduce ingredients that will cause health hazards such as oil, sugar, salt, animal fats, etc. Laboratory technicians will easily recognize abnormal smells in a laboratory, but a new technician might not be exposed to this and will perceive that the smell is normal. Moreover, a famous Russian physiologist, Ivan Pavlov conducted a test on dogs to determine the process of learning using classical conditioning method. He placed two stimuli which are a bell and a plate of dog food. The dogs were trained so that the bell resembles that the food is served. As he rang the bell, the dog started salivating, compared to another dog which is not trained to recognize the meaning of the bell. In the police force, sniff dogs were useful to detect drugs held by drug traffickers. They were trained over and over again to recognize the smell of drug as bad and response to the smell by barking extensively towards the smell. Undertrained dogs might not respond to this smell because they were not exposed to the smell and consequences.

Many of us hold to the principle which says that ‘No pain, no gain’. This principle is related to the learning through pain. Without any pain, they would not be any learning. What is pain actually? In a more scientific term, pain reaction occurs when the receptor which is the skin touches unfavorable conditions like the hot object ( hot boiling kettle), which then sends impulse via afferent nerve to the central nervous system to be process and perceived by our brain. From the central nervous system, impulse is sent back via the efferent nerve back to the receptor. Consequently, our hand is pulled back from the hot kettle. This is because the message stored in our brain tells us to touch the hot kettle again. At early development of humans, infant tend to have lesser experience than adults. At later stages we will learn to walk. That is where we encounter pain from falling down and then try many other methods to walk by holding to furniture or get a helping hand from our caregivers. Children often being punished for doing something that they are not supposed to do. As a consequence, they might be caned by their caregivers. From this they will learn to improve and not to repeat the same mistakes again. There were also other forms of pain besides physical pain. Psychological pain which affects us mentally may educate us indirectly. For instance, a person suffering from financial problems would not want to suffer from this for too long. At a certain period of time, they will begin working out ways tom improve on their living qualities. Some worked out smoothly, some not, depends on the individuals’ willpower. People suffering from family and relationship problems, which may cause them a struggle to get together and to reunite. They will have to learn to understand each other better and to think positively, where they might have to give and take when necessary. The pain of losing your loved one is another form of pain. Orphans, who lost their parents when they were young, will have to face difficulties learning to stand on their own feet, besides gaining external social, financial and moral support. Death of a spouse can leave a sense of emptiness; therefore, we must learn to curb that emptiness and accept the death, perhaps, finding a new partner in life. Apart of that, an artistic person learns through touching and appreciates arts through touches. In the art gallery, an artistic person can easily recognize fine arts by touching several carvings, drawing and etc. However, individuals with visual impairment have no sense of vision, and so indirectly their sense of touch and feel increases. They are able to recognize surrounding objects by just touching them.

Learning can be acquired from books, but it is not as effective as learning through experiences and senses. It is just words and illustrations in books which delivers the message to the reader. There were individuals who practice self studying. These individuals’ reads directly on books without knowing the exact information on how true is the statement written by the book author. They have no proper experience on what is stated in the book, but rather gobbling everything which is stated by the book without proper understanding and without proper author-reader interaction. Meanwhile, a storybook which is one of the very popular reading material read by most of us, tells stories, imaginations and experiences of the author. It may be purely fictional or non-fictional. This may even lead to misunderstanding of the reader towards the content of the storybook. As a result we might not gain that much by just burying ourselves under hills of storybooks. At the same time, medical professionals are a group of individuals which their workplace does not only emphasize fully on books but rather hands on experiences. In medical schools, students will emphasize more on theory and laboratory practices. Some even utilize dummies for training! Dummies are useful at the beginning but it will be no longer useful as medical grads step into the working environment. These non-living materials does not possess properties of living things such as heartbeat, blood flow, feeling and etc. In real life exposure, medical grads will deal with many types of patients with various needs. In medical colleges, reading materials such as atlas, encyclopedias and other medical books are primary sources of information for medical studies. These books focus mainly on illustrations and might not be the same as the real visual experiences. This will lead to misunderstanding of knowledge. For example, anatomical atlases illustrates drawings of human body parts, vessels, nerves and etc. It would not be the same as studying on a real human body, where the parts might be slightly altered in shape. Besides that, books may provide source of sharing information from the author to the reader. For example, a journal of a famous leader sharing their life experiences. Not all information is shared. Some might be forgotten at the time of writing the journal. In mathematics revision books, the author might have different understanding on some mathematical equation. It was believed that different people have different mindsets. Different people have different ways of solving mathematical equation. Some might clash with your own understanding of a specific mathematical formula. The side effects of learning through books are people cannot think out of the box. With no environmental exposure, we cannot possible imagine the content of a book written by the author which will lead to defect in understanding of the content. We cannot see what the author have seen or imagined, we cannot feel the feelings of what the author is trying to describe, and we cannot taste the described content like in recipe books describing how tasty a food is. Therefore, without experience and without stimulus, where will be no learning. In other words, ‘action speaks louder than words’, reading a book without action, only whispers to the reader; whether it is heard or unheard, it strongly depends on the reader.

On the whole, learning should not be limited just to books only, but rather hands on and ‘hearts on’ experiences. This is important to promote effective learning. Likewise, it is crucial to learn through experiences based on our own senses rather than obligating ourselves on books. Even the greatest book in the world written by a renowned author cannot really educate and enhance a person’s reading process and cannot deliver a proper message to its reader. So, learn hard, learn smart!