What Remains

Learning doesn’t start with a syllabus. It starts with “What is this?” and the courage to be wrong long enough to find out. We take a surprising tour through how humans actually learn, from newborn brains binding voice, face, scent, and warmth into a single person, to the way prediction and repetition carve “trails” in the brain. Along the way, we dig into statistical learning in language development and why babies are less like sponges and more like tiny scientists running nonstop experiments. 

We also make a case that mistakes are not detours, they’re the road. A deliberate error in our opening song becomes the whole lesson: learning begins with correction. From Alexander Fleming noticing something strange in a contaminated petri dish to the Wright brothers questioning accepted data about lift, progress comes from paying attention when things don’t behave the way we expect. That’s why we’re wary of certainty and obsessed with curiosity: the goal is not a final answer, it’s getting closer. 

Then we widen the lens to adult learning and emotional learning: masking, micro-corrections, and the slow timing of becoming yourself. We talk about triangulation, how other people help us see what we can’t see alone, and how humor and art make room for change without denying what hurts. The closing question is the one we keep returning to: after the answer changes, what remains? 

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Transcript

Stories As The Real Teachers

SPEAKER_00 1:33

How did you learn to ride a bicycle? You probably wouldn't tell me the name of your teacher. Maybe tell me about falling down. If I asked how you learn to cook or drive, or fall in love, or grieve. Those answers probably wouldn't begin with a year. You know, while I read chapter three. They'd begin with a story. Because that's how human beings actually learn. Hello. And welcome to the Anne Levine Show with Michael over there. Hello. And today, we're gonna maybe learn a little something about how we learn. I mean, you may remember lots of stories from when you were little, right? Many of them could have begun with uh Once Upon a Time. That's that's a big one, right? Evoking a past time, a past land, you know, that now only exists in legends. It's a great story. But it's not the first kind of story we uncover. Our very first stories. The ones we tell ourselves as infants begin with. What is this? Let's take a look at what newborns are actually learning.

What Newborn Brains Learn

SPEAKER_00 3:02

And here's some of the here's some of the biggest things. They're learning what belongs together. A newborn hears a voice, or they see a face, or they smell a particular scent, and they feel warm arms. Those are not separate events to the baby. The brain starts binding those things together. This voice, this face, this smell, this feeling, they're one thing. That's the beginning of recognizing a person. They're also predicting. One of the brain's main jobs is predicting what's going to happen next. Very quickly, babies learn things like if I cry, someone usually comes. If I'm hungry, milk eventually appears. Dad's footsteps sound different from mom's. This blanket here feels different from that blanket. Right? The brain is constantly asking, what usually follows this? Every successful prediction strengthens, you know, certain neural connections in our brains. And then they're also learning the structure of language. And this is the thing that amazes the neuroscientists because long before babies understand words, they are learning the rhythm of speech, which sounds belong in their language, where one word ends and another one starts. They don't need grammar lessons because their brains perform this sort of incredible kind of statistical analysis automatically. If they hear good morning a thousand times, their brain notices which sounds tend to occur together. That's called statistical learning. And it happens really very early. Another thing that they're learning is about their own body. A newborn doesn't really have a perfect sense of how their bodies work at all. So every wiggle is data. Eventually, I move this muscle or my hand touched my face. That felt different. The brain gradually builds what what we call a body map. And finally, one of the things they're learning is cause and effect. But over time, if you kick, oh, you learn the crib moves. Or if you turn your head, you notice you can see the light. And you open your mouth, oh, there's dinner. These tiny discoveries accumulate into an understanding that tells you that things happen because of other things. Like, is the world predictable? How do people respond? Do I feel comforted? Right? These experiences repeated over time shape stress systems and attention levels, emotional regulation, long before a child could explain anything. So how's your brain do this when you're so little? It's not storing little videos, it's actually changing itself. Neurons that fire together, they strengthen their connections. Connections that aren't useful to each other gradually weaken. Imagine, you know, you're walking through a field, and you walk the this path one time, the next time you walk another one. Nothing much happens. But you walk the same trail a thousand times, and a trail is going to appear. And your brain is constantly building those trails in there. Now, here's the surprising part about this when we're talking about babies. Babies are not passive sponges, they're tiny little scientists. Instead of consciously forming a hypothesis, their brains are continually testing expectations. Hey, I did this. Did that happen again? Was it different? Can I predict what's going to come next? So every little surprise teaches them something, and every repetition teaches something. Both of those things are necessary.

Wrong On Purpose And Correction

SPEAKER_00 7:53

Did you notice uh there was a little mistake at the beginning of the opening song? It says one plus one is two, two plus two is four. C A T spells cat. D-O-R spells door. And another child says, I don't think so. Which is correct. D-O-R does not spell door. D-O-O-R spells door. That's much better. And I want you to know that though I wrote the song, I do know how to spell door. I want to establish that right away. I didn't get all the way to almost years old thinking that you walk through life, you know, spelling door D-O-R. No. And now that I say the thing that you walk through, I mean, hmm. I mean, you don't just walk through door. You could walk through a wall, I suppose, if you're moving fast enough. So I don't recommend that. But the mistake in the song was deliberate. But the correction in it is the important part because the song doesn't begin with someone knowing everything, it begins with someone being wrong and someone else noticing. Someone making a correction. That's learning. So, um, I guess we can be done here. That's kind of the whole episode in a nutshell. We could probably all go home now. I mean, I am, although I am home. I do have a microphone. I did already make the music. No, no, I think we're gonna keep going on. I've been, you know, I've been thinking about learning for a while now, which is different from learning about thinking, because we already did that. Although we will sort of discover it's not entirely different. And nothing seems to be entirely different from anything else, actually, if you had enough time to look at it. You begin with memory and or learning, and and learning leads to memory. Memory leads to communication, communication leads to language, language leads to mathematics, math leads to clocks, and clocks lead to navigation, and obviously navigation leads to John Harrison. I mean, you you may remember him. He made world-changing clocks. I promise you, we're gonna hear about John Harrison again. I mean, you don't introduce a clockmaker that interesting and then leave him sitting in the 18th century unattended, right? That would be really irresponsible. I mean, that's what I think. Okay, but today learning.

Learning Is Bigger Than School

SPEAKER_00 10:40

And I want to make uh a distinction right here near the beginning of the show. Learning is not the same as school. School is one place where learning can happen. It's also a place where lunch can happen, and climbing the freaking rope in gym, and detention, and depending on your school, asbestos. Uh but learning's much larger than school. School has classrooms, learning has everywhere. I mean, you learn in the kitchen, the car, you learn in bed, you learn when somebody leaves, you learn when someone arrives, you learn when the dog makes a particular noise at three o'clock in the morning, and you discover that particular noise means you should get up right now. You learn from books and you learn from music, and you even learn from your kids. You learn from strangers, you learn from doing things right, and if you're lucky, you learn from doing it completely wrong. In 1928, Alexander Fleming came back from vacation and he found that one of his petri dishes had been contaminated by mold. And normally that's a failed experiment. But instead of throwing it away, he noticed something strange. The bacteria near the mold had died. This mistake was not a discovery, but paying attention to the mistake was. And that observation eventually led to penicillin saving millions and millions of lives. Let's talk babies again. No baby learns to walk by studying walking. They learn by falling, wobbling, overcorrecting, trying it again. Imagine if babies interpreted falling the way adults often interpret mistakes. Well, I guess I'm just not a walker. No, instead, your brain treats every fall as data. You were too far forward, or you had too much weight on this foot. Try again. Walking is literally built from thousands of failures. And finally, here's an example we've heard the story of, but not really the details. The Wright brothers. They built gliders that didn't behave like they expected. And instead of assuming that they were bad inventors, they concluded something that was much more interesting. They said, maybe the existing data about lift is incorrect. And they ended up building their own wind tunnel because the accepted aerodynamic tables were inaccurate. The airplane wasn't born because everything worked. It was born because things didn't work, and these guys were curious, curious enough to ask why. Now, school sometimes gives us a peculiar idea of what learning is supposed to look like. I mean, there's a person in the front of the room who has the answer. There are people sitting at desks who do not have the answer. The person at the front transfers the answer to the people at the desks. Everybody takes a test to see whether the answer arrived there intact. It's like shipping a vase, right? I mean, that's one kind of learning, and sometimes it works. But sometimes the vase arrives broken, and sometimes you open the box and discover you got a toaster instead. But an enormous amount of learning does not happen that way. I mean, nobody handed you a complete set of instructions for being alive, and they certainly didn't hand one to your parents. No, that would have been useful. Welcome to Earth. Here's your body, here's gravity. Other people are complicated. Good luck. No, we start learning by encountering things. We learn by trying, by watching, by copying. We learn because something hurts. We learn because something delights us. We learn because we need to know. And sometimes we learn simply because a question gets under our skin and refuses to leave.

Curiosity Changes The Quality

SPEAKER_01 15:06

You take drugs, Danny? Every day. Good. So what's the problem? I don't know. I don't know.

SPEAKER_00 15:15

Another word for curiosity. That's the line in the song. And it's not exactly a definition. I mean, you can learn without being curious. You can learn how to not touch a hot stove because you touched a hot stove. The stove has a very effective curriculum. There are no student loans there either. But uh curiosity changes the quality of learning. Curiosity is not merely receiving an answer. It's reaching towards something. It's the mind leaning forward. A baby does that before a baby has words. What's that? What's this? Can I put it in my mouth? Apparently, yes. Should I put it in my mouth? Haha! We are awaiting further information about that one. A baby. A baby's a scientist with no safety protocols. Everything is an experiment. Drop the spoon. Somebody picks it up. Drop the spoon again. Somebody picks it up again.

unknown 16:16

Ooh.

SPEAKER_00 16:16

Now we have replication. Drop the spoon 17 more times. Now we have tenure. Child's learning about gravity. They're learning about sound. They're learning about cause and effect. And they're also learning how long the adult can continue participating in this little experiment before something changes in the adult's facial expression. And if you're one of my sons, you learn very quickly that not only do you have two hands to grab stuff, but you have a mouth which can essentially be used as a third hand. Learning, folks, is happening everywhere. Long before anybody writes the word learning across the top of a worksheet, and curiosity doesn't begin with answers. It begins with noticing that there's something you don't know. That's important. It would be pretty difficult to ask a question about something you haven't noticed. I mean, you can, but it's going to be a very general kind of question, like uh, what's going on? That's a useful one. I mean, people use that one frequently. I do. Although, to tell you the truth, just being there, your brain has kind of answered you many times about what's going on because it's taking in information from all around you, seeing what's going on. That's entirely beside the point. A good question, though, can shape create shapes around the unknown. Like, uh, why does this boat float? Or where does the sun go? And how does that bird know how to fly? And why is that man yelling, and where are his pants? Why do grown-ups say maybe when they mean no? Children are constantly discovering that the world has patterns, and they discover that patterns have exceptions. And then they discover that the exceptions have patterns, and there goes the afternoon. In the opening song, there's a there's a baby chick, there's an egg, there are acorns and trees, there are boats on giant waves, and and we have the line, thanks to buoyancies. Now that's not how anybody normally says that. Uh the word is buoyancy, right? The property is buoyancy, but the rhyme was required. Look, there are things we learn early because the explanation is simple enough to give it to a child. An acorn becomes a tree. A chick comes out of an egg, a boat floats because of buoyancy. And then later we learn that none of those things are simple. An acorn doesn't merely decide to become a tree. I mean, there's there's soil, there's water, there's light, there's genetics, there's uh fungi under the ground, there are insects, there are seasons. I mean, there are animals carrying acorns away and forgetting where they put them, which is apparently one of nature's top five forestry programs. I mean, the simple answer isn't necessarily wrong, it's incomplete. And that happens over and over again. We learn an answer, and then we learn what the answer left out. And that doesn't mean that the first answer was bad necessarily. Sometimes the simple answer is the right size. It's the right size for the question we're asking at the time. I mean, you don't you don't explain molecular biology to a five-year-old who asks how a cut heals. You tell them, well, your body knows how to fix it. And that is true. Later, if the five-year-old becomes a doctor, the answer gets a little longer. This is one of the things I love about learning. The answer can grow. It can become more precise, it can become stronger, it can become more beautiful, and sometimes it can become wrong. Also, if you have a five-year-old doctor, um you probably need a second opinion.

Simple Answers That Keep Growing

SPEAKER_00 20:38

Look, there are things people knew for centuries. It turned out not to be true. The earth is the center of the universe. Illness is caused by bad air. You can also, oh man, you can improve almost any medical condition by removing some blood. People were very enthusiastic about removing blood, not just for health reasons, but because some of them also thought it made you look like a badass. Guys, uh, if you want to have some really creepy shivers, look up how the Maya used used bloodletting in their rituals. Yeah. Yeah, you'll learn something there. Look, uh people weren't stupid. That's important too. People in the past weren't stupid because they didn't know what we know. They were working with the available information, just as we are. And that should make us at least a little bit humble. I mean, because there are things we know right now that people in the future may look back on and say, huh, they thought what? And you know, I I hope they're kind about it, really. I hope they say, well, they were doing the best they could. Although people in the future may also be assholes. I mean, we don't know. Okay, we do know. We just don't know how many and what their global distribution numbers are going to be, right? And there are no final answers except on that game show. And even on that game show, there's another episode tomorrow where there's still more final answers. That's one of the reasons I'm suspicious of certainty. Certainty feels wonderful. It feels like standing on solid ground. But a great deal of human history consists of somebody standing on solid ground and then discovering, oh wait, this is a raft. Doesn't mean we can't know anything. I'm not saying that there is no difference between knowledge and guessing. There is a difference. I know there's a microphone in front of me. I know I have dogs. I know the Chelsea clock I have is now keeping extremely good time because I've been watching it like a man monitoring a launch at Cape Canaveral. It's two seconds early. The clock is almost a hundred years old, and it's two seconds early. I'm not two seconds early. I've been known to arrive 45 minutes before something begins. The clock has restraint. We can know things. We can gather evidence. We can test, we can compare, we can triangulate. It's a great word. We do it every moment when we're when we're just walking around. We have one eye with one data point, one eye with another. And we're looking in front of us at the third data point. And we can see, we get a spatial idea, we get an idea where we are in the world because we can triangulate things. And we can get closer. But getting closer isn't the same as arriving at a place where nothing can ever change. I mean, the only certainty may be that there is nothing certain. Which sounds like a contradiction. I mean, because it is. And I enjoy a contradiction. Let's all go to the lobbies.

SPEAKER_05 24:29

Let's all go to the lobby. Let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat. The popcorn can't be beat. The sparkling treats are just candy. The chocolate bars and the candy. So let's all go to the lobby to get ourselves a treat.

Emotional Timing And Masking

SPEAKER_00 27:39

And timing is not simply knowing when something should happen, timing is being there when it does. And I think that applies to emotional learning too. You can be told something years before you're able to know it. I mean, how often when you were younger were you given this advice? Just be yourself. Fine. Which self? The self who's speaking? The self who's listening? The self who's afraid? The self who just walked into a room or the self who sits in the car afterward and reconstructs every sentence. Be yourself is three syllables. Learning how to do it can take a lifetime. I spent a great deal of my life making microcorrections. Adjusting, monitoring, trying to determine which version of me would work in a particular room. Is it too much? Not enough? Too loud? Too excited? Too many details? Too many connections? Too strange? Too Michael? You can become very skilled at that. Masking is learning. It's adaptive learning. You observe what receives approval and what receives discomfort, and you adjust, you survive. But then you may eventually have to learn something else. You may have to learn that survival and living are not precisely exactly the same thing, right? You may have to learn that the qualities you spent years suppressing are also the qualities that make the work alive. That doesn't mean that every impulse is sacred. I mean, I still need editing. Everybody needs editing. This show certainly needs editing. But editing is not erasure. There's a difference between shaping a voice and removing it. We speak of learning as though it had a finish line. Oh, I learned French. I learned piano. I learned patience. Did you? All of it? How much patience? Did you learn enough patience for customer service? Or enough for a delayed flight? Enough for someone in front of you writing a check at the grocery store? I mean, there are degrees. There are levels. There are moments when you think you've learned something, and then life gives you an advanced placement exam.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

Disgust.

SPEAKER_00 30:30

I mean, memory is gonna have to wait for its own episode because I have this suspicion that memory's not just playback, it's a performance. Every time we remember something, we're doing something in the present with material from the past. And that means learning and memory are tied together. What remains? That question keeps returning. After the answer changes, what remains? After the person is gone. What remains? After the object breaks, what remains? After you discover what you believed was incomplete or wrong, what remains? Learning has changed, but it's also a way of deciding what to keep. You don't replace your entire mind every time you learn something. You revise and you connect and you rearrange. I mean, maybe the mind is a filing cabinet. I've used that image before, but mine certainly isn't. A filing cabinet has layer uh labels and drawers. And a filing cabinet doesn't open a drawer looking for a tax document and emerge, you know, 45 minutes later holding a harmonica and thinking about the Norman conquest. My mind seems more like a city, or at least a detailed map of one. There are roads, there are alleys, there are old buildings, there are construction projects that appear to have been abandoned in 1987. There are signs pointing in contradictory directions, and there's often a parade. Nobody remembers applying for the permit. And every new thing I learn builds another road or extends a cul-de-sac. Sometimes the road goes exactly where I expected. Sometimes it turns behind a building and connects into two neighborhoods I didn't even know were adjacent to each other. That's my favorite kind of learning. The moment when two things touch, like a clock and navigation. Or navigation and triangulation. Triangulation and perspective. Perspective and the listener. I mean, because the listener becomes the third point. I see something from here. You see something from there. And when we compare what we see, we have more information than either of us had before. That's why the purpose of this show is not listen to me because I have the answers. I am most definitely not the guy with all the answers. There are no final answers except on that game show. Now, here's how I see the show.

Triangulation Through Other People

SPEAKER_00 33:27

Come sit beside me and see what I see. That's it. Not agree with me, not become me, not surrender your view. Come over here. Come over for a moment, you know, check it out. And the interesting part, I think, is if you're sitting next to me, I have a point of view, you have a point of view, and when we look at the same thing, we're triangulating, and now we understand where we are in the world. That's learning too. Changing position. Sometimes the object itself doesn't change, sometimes you do. Walk around a sculpture. The sculpture stays where it is, but you see another side of it. Walk around an idea. The idea may look different from the other side. And that's why disagreement can be useful. And of course, not all disagreement is useful. Some disagreement is just a man on the internet who's enthusiastically discovered an all-caps argument. Now, but genuine disagreement can reveal the shape of an idea. If you push against something, you learn where it's solid. You learn where it bends, you learn where it breaks. And this requires discernment or perception. And we're going to be talking about that in another episode. Communication is going to be another episode. Art. We'll talk about that in another one, too. Unless we did that one already. Oh no, that was memory. Did we do that one? I don't know, in case we might have to do it again. But that's also learning. Sometimes you know an idea isn't complete and you still want to try it one more time. That's how sequels happen. That's how the Marvel Universe was created. Learning, it's not purely rational, folks. We have preferences, we have habits, we have emotional investments. Sometimes we defend an idea not because the evidence is good, but because the idea has become part of the furniture. We know where it sits. We've arranged the room around it. Moving it will reveal the old mystery stain on the floor and get everyone talking about the murder again. That's why changing your mind can feel threatening. We often talk about people changing their minds as though it should be easy. Here are the facts. Update immediately. People aren't software, although software also resists updating. Usually at the exact moment you need it. Nobody puts the butterfly on a motivational poster while it's turning itself into soup inside the chrysalis. That part's less decorative. Change can be messy. Learning can be humiliating. It can make you feel like a beginner. And adults do not always enjoy being beginners. I mean, children are expected not to know. Adults are supposed to know where the forms are, how the machine works, what the abbreviation means, and why the Wi-Fi has stopped. Really, I mean, there's freedom in being a beginner. You're allowed to ask. You're allowed to be clumsy. You're allowed to make that awful sound. You're allowed to miss the drum. You're allowed to use the wrong chord. The problem isn't being wrong. The problem is becoming unwilling to notice. The problem is protecting the answer more than curiosity. And hey, folks, the truth may be too large a word. If there are no final answers. So let's let's say accuracy instead, huh? Or closeness. I like closeness. Can we get a little closer? That's usually the best we can do. You cannot eliminate uncertainty. You can triangulate, you can look from another angle, you can ask another person, you can get closer. And then new information arrives. Learning requires the possibility that new information matters. And that sounds obvious, but it isn't. There are some people who collect information only to defend what they already believe. We all do this sometimes. We notice the evidence that agrees with us, and we glide right past the evidence that doesn't. The mind is not a neutral courtroom. The mind is the lawyer, the witness, the jury, the stenographer, and the man in the back trying to hide the fact that he's eaten crackers. No, we need other people. Not because other people are always right. Good Lord know have you met him? No, we need other people because they're standing somewhere else. They see the side we can't see. And could see things in me I couldn't see clearly inside myself. Listeners have said things about the show that I understood only after hearing them said back to me. My friend said the show is asking people to sit beside you and see what you see. That's eight words. I said it in somewhere like 400. But that's another kind of learning. She saw the shape. Recognition. Someone gives language to something you already knew without knowing you knew it, and suddenly you have it. A phrase can become a handle. Now, now you're carrying that idea. Good teaching does that. Good art does that. A song can do that. A story can do that. You know, you hear a line and think, oh yeah, that. I've been there. But I didn't have a name for it. Naming is powerful. Naming can also be dangerous. Once we have a name for something, we may mistake the thing for the name. A diagnosis can explain, but it can also become a box. A category can help us see a pattern, but it can also make us stop looking. Oh, that's what it is. Maybe. What else is it? What doesn't the label include? I mean, every definition has edges, and the edges matter. We're gonna get to definitions in another episode, too. I you know I appear to be promising a lot of future episodes. I guess that's how franchises begin. But look, the central takeaway today is this learning is not the accumulation of correct answers. That's part of it. Facts matter, dates matter. The Battle of Hastings was in 1066. Our declaration of independence in the United States was in 1776. My house was built in 1739. The moon landing was in 1969. Those dates give us anchors and they and they let us build a timeline. But knowing the date isn't the same as understanding the event. And understanding the event is not the same thing as understanding what it meant to be the people living through it. And understanding what it means to them is not the same thing as understanding what it means now. The date is a point. Learning draws lines, then it sees a shape. That's why I love history. Not because I want to memorize a warehouse full of dates. Although dates, you know, are useful. I love the moment when history stops being a list of things that happens, though, and becomes a network of consequences. This happened, so that became possible. That person made a decision, someone else reacted. A tool was invented, a belief changed, uh, a ship made it to its destination. A nation drew a line. A family crossed it. History is not behind us, it's underneath us. We're standing on accumulated consequences, and we're adding consequences of our own. So let's think uh I mean, that's kind of a frightening thought, right? Let's think about something else.

Humor And Art As Learning

SPEAKER_00 42:52

Let's think about cake. And I was listening to Dr. Demento, a show that I that I love for years, used to listen to all the time. And I heard a song on there by a guy named Art Paul Schlosser. And the first time I ever heard him is called, the song is called Have a Peanut Butter Sandwich. And I almost died laughing. Because there's really not a whole lot to the song, it's just have a peanut butter sandwich. And then later in the song, he says, Have some cake, have some ice cream. Those are great lyrics. But why do I remember that? Because I laughed. I mean, emotion marks information. We remember what startles us, what frightens us, what delights us, what embarrasses us, what breaks our hearts. That's one of the reasons that humor is such a useful teaching tool. A joke opens a door, you know, even if you spell it D O R. You laugh, and while your mouth is open, someone slips an idea inside. That's how I like to work. We can talk about uncertainty, but I'm gonna mention the game show. We can talk about the human mind, but someone's gonna put the milk in the cupboard. We can talk about grief, and there can still be a joke. The joke doesn't disrespect the subject. Sometimes the joke makes it possible to stay in the room with the subject. Learning needs room, learning needs play. It needs permission to make connections that might not work. Some of my ideas don't work. I know this because I have had more than one. You can't create only successful ideas. That would require knowing in advance what ideas will succeed. And if you knew that, there really wouldn't be experiments, right? Why would you need it? Art. Art is learning in public. You try a line or you change a word, you hear the rhythm, you notice the rhyme. You write, I think, and then I thought. And then suddenly those two phrases are talking to each other. You make a song, you listen, you make another version. One version carries the bridge a little better, one has more personality, one smells like library books and cinnamon. Not literally, but I mean that would be like a fire hazard, but a prompt can feel like a feeling. I mean, it can create one. Then you learn from the result. Creation is a conversation with what comes back. You put something into the world and the world answers, sometimes nope, nope, nope, nope. Sometimes almost. Sometimes uh what in God's name is that? And then every every once in a while, it's oh my god, that's it. An artist uh, you know, tar uh sort of learns to listen for the difference. That's what discernment is, but like I said, that's a future episode. I should start selling season tickets. Well, okay, one of the strange things about learning is that the more you learn, the more visible your ignorance becomes. At the beginning, you don't know what you don't know. Then you learn something, and that thing has edges. Beyond the edges are ten more things, and you learn those. Now there are a hundred. Knowledge doesn't always make the world feel smaller. Often it makes the unknown larger. I mean, a child sees a star. An astronomer sees fusion and distance and gravity, elements, time, death. An astronomer knows more, but the mystery hasn't disappeared. It expanded. That's beautiful to me. The song says at the beginning, every answer finds a question we didn't used to know. That's learning. You didn't close the book. You discovered that the book has another volume and footnotes and a revised edition. And someone in the margin has written, I don't think so. Good. Look again. Count the letters, check the clock. Listen to the note. Ask the person standing somewhere else. Learning's not a straight, narrow line. You can color outside and call it design. We like to draw learning as progress upwards, like a staircase or a ladder or graph, reassuringly going from the lower right or lower left to the upper right. But learning wonders. You kind of forget and you return.

The Unknown Expands With Knowledge

SPEAKER_00 48:10

You understand something differently. Because you're different. You discover that the thing you dismissed ten years ago now makes sense. You rediscover a song you wrote and forgot all about. You hear your own words as though someone else left them for you. Isn't that something? I mean, that happened to me. I was going through old material, old uh Suno songs that I'd never finished. And um and I found one, and I'm like, oh my goodness. I'd written something that I didn't needed later. That's learning across time. The earlier self leaves something and your later self recognizes it. What remains? Well, apparently songs remain. Ideas remain. Some jokes remain a lot longer than they should. People remain in the way they changed us. The past is not stable. We keep learning from it because we keep arriving as different people. We can read the same book at twenty and sixty and still not read the same book. The words didn't change. The reader did. That's why there may be no final answer to work of art or life or even a memory. These are interpretations, they're perspectives. There is evidence. There are better and worse explanations, but the meaning continues because we keep moving. And I think this is where learning becomes more than education. Learning is a way a living thing remains responsive to the world. A rock does not have to revise its position. Although erosion may revise it anyway. A living thing notices, responds, adjusts, tries again. It does not mean endless self-correction in order to satisfy everybody. I've done enough of that. But there's another kind of learning. Learning when not to adjust, learning when the room is wrong. Learning when the expectation is too small. Learning that being unusual is not being is not the same as being defective. Learning that saying, I'm pretty damn special is not the same thing as saying, I'm above you. I'm not above anybody. I'm also not the usual thing. Those statements can both be true. Every person is singular, but not every trait is equally common. Sometimes we can't see our own faces, much less our behavior, without reflection. We need mirrors. Other people can become mirrors. I mean, they're not perfect mirrors. Some are fun house mirrors, and I advise you avoid those when possible. But somebody who loves you may reflect a part of you that you've never been able to look at directly. Anne did that for me. In another way, now the show does it. I say something and you hear it. You tell me what you heard, and sometimes it does what I intended, sometimes it's more. That's the third point. That's triangulation. That's learning. It's not transmission, it's not just sending facts from one place to another. It's a relationship. And maybe it's an answer, but probably not.

The Change That Remains

SPEAKER_00 52:17

Because I suspect there are no final answers. But for today, the answer is maybe that learning happens in relationships between the learner and the world, or between the question and the answer, between the uh mistake and the correction. Or maybe beho between who you were and who you're becoming. Between what I see and what you see. Between the person's and the song that they're listening to. Between Anne and myself. Between me and you. And what passes between us does not leave either of us exactly unchanged. And it seems that that is what learning is. The change that remains. Not every change remains. You can memorize something long enough to pass a test and lose it before dinner. You can read a page and realize your eyes moved over every word while your mind was somewhere in Ohio. But some things take hold. They become part of how you see. After you learn perspective, the picture changes. After you learn harmony, the song changes. After you learn the history of an object, the object changes. After you learn somebody's story, the person changes. And not literally. It changes in you. But from then on, you can't entirely see the old way. And learning also leaves something behind. A road, a dent, a question, a caution, a skill, or a melody, a new place to stand. What remains? That is the question. And maybe it's also the measure. Not what did I hear? Not what did I repeat, but what remains? What can I use? What changed the shape of the room? What do I s what do I see now that I couldn't see before? And what question appeared because I learned the answer. D-O-R spells door. I don't think so. Good. Yeah. That little voice is not the enemy. That little voice is the beginning. Oh, look again. D-O-O-R. Yeah. That's better. You got it. And then we go through the door, and there's another room. And there's another question. And if we're fortunate, somebody sitting beside us says, Look at that. I also think it's good to keep in mind that some things just can't be rushed. You know, being told something may take ten seconds. Learning it may take years. Someone can tell you that grief changes. Someone can tell you that people surprise you. Someone can tell you that uncertainty is part of life. Those are sentences. Yeah. Learning them can take a lifetime. Let's go back to the beginning. D-O-R spells door. No, it doesn't. It never did. But now, look what you can spell. Maybe learning isn't something somebody puts into us. Maybe it's what happens when curiosity, an experience, mistakes, help, time. All the things we already know suddenly connect. Maybe learning is what we call that change that remains.

Final Door And Last Question

SPEAKER_00 56:29

Thanks for sitting with me today. And for Annaby.