Learning How to Learn

Transcript

Welcome to the Art Against Mental Illness podcast. My name is Alex Loveless and this is my podcast about the healing powers of art for artists, art lovers, the art curious and anyone with an interest in mental health and well-being. Hello again. Welcome to my studio in sunny Scotland. It’s freezing cold in here and the room is dusty as hell but I wanted to do this episode from here because this is the place where I do most of my learning and this episode is about learning and so if you hear some noise in the background I’m guessing there’s going to be car sounds and there will be voices and various other things. It’s because I’m in my studio and there’s very very little barrier between me and the outside world. This place has almost no insulation at all so it’s always cold and it’s always noisy if it’s noisy outside and I hope you’ll bear with me if you’re on audio only. If you prefer I’ve recorded this as a video as well so you can tune in and see my lovely face talking at you for the next however long. That can be found on YouTube. I’ll put the the link in the show notes but yes hello and so here I am and I’m going to talk about learning. Why am I going to talk about learning? Well because this is a podcast about art and mental health and there’s always a trajectory between beginning a particular hobby or pastime or creative activity and and then becoming proficient enough of that that you can really use it to benefit yourself either from a mental health perspective or from a financial perspective or whatever and I’m actually in the process of learning a new skill at the moment. This is not particularly unusual for me. I’ve been experimenting for some weeks now with wood carving. Just before Christmas I bought myself a rotary tool which is this thing here with the end there and for those who are just listening it’s it’s like a small orange drill thing with a little power tool with a long extension on it that has a a drill bit on the end and this is used for carving or engraving or etching into wood or metal or stone or whatever and it’s really good for making patterns in wood or carving wood to a particular form and I bought this on a whim and I’ve since been teaching myself how to carve wood and what all the difficulties are with it and which bits to use to do what job and I’m teaching this largely to myself and this is what got me thinking about learning because I’m what you call an autodidact or autodidact which is a really simple word for someone who teaches themselves. Now I always thought this was a bit of a ridiculous word because I’ve always been that way I’ve always been the sort of person that learns on my own steam on my own time my own way and and I just assumed everyone else was the same way but it turns out that really isn’t the case. People have very many different ways of learning different styles of learning some people like me have a strong preference for self-learning some people need very very explicit instructions before they’ll try anything and some people sit in between and I think it’s really important to understand how you learn because especially if you’re going to start something new understanding how it is that you learn how what your particular learning style is will be instrumental in and probably absolutely critical in your ability to learn anything new. For the purposes of this episode I’ll be focusing on creative endeavors but honestly this same set of stuff should apply to anything you feel like you need to learn be it a programming language a foreign language accounting electricianry whatever with some caveats obviously which I’ll come to when we get to them but I think a lot of people think they know how to learn but have learned someone else’s method for learning and so when we are at school certainly in the UK but I think pretty much everywhere there is a certain style of of learning and teaching that caters very much for the the broader array of students the center of the bell curve if you will the the style of teaching that’s going to reach the maximum number of students in terms of how they need to learn pretty much the average way of learning now I’m painfully aware that there are deficiencies in this view particularly in the UK that the standard way of teaching and learning is the optimal way for the maximum number of students or even any of the students but I’m going to put that debate aside really because I don’t know enough about it but strictly speaking I couldn’t agree more but it’s perhaps for another day or another podcast let’s just assume the predominant form and learning is broadly the best way for most students and that’s effectively turning up to a building where someone with some level of expertise on some subject stands in front of you guides you through the principles and the various subject areas of any given discipline and sets you exercises and homework and and then tests you on it but the problem is is that if you take me as an example that’s that’s almost completely anathema to me in terms of learning there’s a reason why I I’m an auto did act partly because I simply can’t be taught I’m ADHD I’m autistic and sitting me down in front of someone talking at me is is going to be very very counterproductive I simply can’t pay attention my mind constantly wonders and I I get bored and irritable and it really really affects my mental health quite badly so that does the first thing and the second thing is the dreaded PDA the pathological demand avoidance and this is something that I only really realized about myself quite recently is that I I can’t be told what to do I don’t want to be like this I didn’t choose to be like this I don’t know why I’m like this but when someone tells me to do something regardless of how much I already want to do it or not as the case may be I immediately don’t want to do it on being told that I need to or have to and and it’s made my life quite difficult for my whole life and I’ve got various coping strategies for example if someone tells me to do something I will I will change that task just enough to make it feel like I decided to do the task it was my task that I was doing and therefore I can do the thing that the person wanted me to do or ask me to do like my boss or someone and and yet still maintain my sanity and not lose my shit and so we’ve got this double whammy is I can’t pay attention and I and I can’t be told what to do and and so school for me was brutally difficult and I I was in the remedial classes for most of my school life I was put in in classes where they took us aside and and gave us much easier things to do they thought that I was learning impaired they took me for all sorts of tests including eyesight but never funny enough autism and ADHD in the UK wasn’t really a thing this is uh in the early 80s onwards and and so I was sort of sitting around not really doing much wondering why all these other kids were in like history classes and so on and we were drawing pictures and reading really really simple books for students much younger than us and and I didn’t really understand it but I also didn’t really care I didn’t seem to me like what everyone else was doing was particularly interesting or fun and what we were doing was fun and it wasn’t until right into secondary school when I was like 13 14 15 the I realized at some point after being heavily bullied and disappearing and trying to blend into the into the background so that no one noticed me and decided to make my life difficult I realized that I wasn’t stupid I realized that actually uh some of the the subjects or the disciplines or the skills that some of the other kids around me who were considered smart had I just found easy and and so what happened was in the space of two years I went from for example the bottom maths group to the top maths group I was never going to compete with the the best mathematicians there because I’d lost so much time and I was playing catch-up but broadly what had happened there is one I was deliberately trying to disappear blend into the background and not be noticed so I just got my head down and did things and and tried to sort of pay attention and learn things and at that point in schooling coursework was a big thing in the UK and so a lot of the the learning and the outputs were self-directed and allowed us to sort of choose the projects that we did and and how we went about doing them and for me that was perfect so I just got on with it and I really excelled in maths and science and and various other things including art and everyone was a bit surprised like how how did this kid go off and you know either sell his soul to the devil or get some sort of magic intelligence injection and bear in mind I’m pretty certain I’m dyslexic as well I’m an August baby which meant I was the youngest in a year ADHD autistic heavily bullied it was little wonder that I didn’t excel I was in a year group where everyone else was effectively older than me and most of them much older than me and and I was I would struggle with everything everything was taxing for me and so eventually I figured out I wasn’t stupid and leaving school was a huge thing for me but it wasn’t until a bit later that I realized also that what else had changed is I’d understood how I needed to learn things and this was a bit of an epiphany for me I could just go and learn things and we had these things called libraries and you know this was before the internet was really much of a thing and I just I just went and started hoovering up information and figuring out what it was that I liked and what I was good at eventually for god knows how found it myself in IT and eventually being a sort of programmer analyst data scientist all these things all of which I taught to myself and and I developed a a method for learning which was along the lines of say I wanted to learn a new programming language well I would go buy the book on it learn python learn javascript or something I would skim through the the introductions of each chapter to familiarize myself with the things that they thought I needed to learn and then I would simply start developing making code and and this is the only way I found I could learn I would start doing things but well how do I do this then and I’d try and do it and it wouldn’t work and I would go I know I can do this because I saw it in the uh the manual so I’d go jump into chapter six and say well how do I do this and then I would just get on with it and and I fundamentally learned by making mistakes I learned by hitting barriers I kind of need to make mistakes I can’t be told to do things if you tell me that the right way of doing something is the way I have to do it I’ll deliberately not do that until I figure out for myself why that way is the right way so I make a lot of mistakes but I tend to make them quite quickly what comes with ADHD is hyper focus which is the ability and the compulsion to focus on one thing that captures my interest for for long periods of time and work on it absolutely frenetically so I I start hoovering up information and work really quickly and make mistakes really quickly to coin a phrase that’s now starting to have real negative connotations I would move fast and break things or fuck around and find out you can do that when you’re learning a programming language or a new artistic skill doing it to the American economy and the American society is probably less advised but well we’re all going to find out whether or not that works in the very near future anyway I I sort of started to apply this approach to anywhere I could and when I started doing art again about seven years ago it was obvious art and creativity is the obvious way to apply this type of of learning because if you want to paint a picture get a canvas and start painting right and I you know I learned things by going well that didn’t work what did I do wrong let’s try and figure out what I did wrong if I could figure it out I would I would fix it if I couldn’t figure it out then I’ve got the internet these days I’ve got books I can ask for advice and and so that’s how I learn and and I didn’t realize until relatively recently that that was called being an auto did act and apparently that was a thing and I was one of them fine I’ll take that it is what it is but why isn’t everyone else that way so I’ve met plenty of people who need to have a certain structure around them to be able to learn that cannot or do not feel like they have to permission to move forward on a subject until they’ve been told by someone how to do it and given permission to start doing it so these are the sort of people that fare a lot better in school and some people are quite extreme on this front in that they simply are almost frozen until someone tells them specifically explicitly what to do give some permission to do it and explains to them all the risks and the benefits and blah blah blah so they wouldn’t decide to write a short story and then just start writing it they would go off and research writing short stories for quite a while before even setting a single word down and that’s crazy to me I don’t know why you would do that but then people who are like that tend to look at me going how do you why did you just dive in that’s mental that’s just completely crazy but I can’t learn their way and they can’t learn my way we’re just not wired like that and so there are spectrums in between there and there are all sorts of learning styles that may or may not align with neurotype that suits certain people and that suits certain lifestyles and for example if you’re very time poor you probably don’t have the luxury to take the very considered very slow and a methodical uptake of a new skill and especially in things like professional situations you’re going to get thrown in a deep end and and and you’ll see that in that environment a lot of the people that that are the ones that are most successful are the ones that can react and learn on the fly when when given new and difficult situations that’s not necessarily the best thing and doesn’t necessarily result in the best people being promoted but this is the world that we live in anyway my point here is um that when you’re starting something new it’s really worth stepping back and taking a little bit of time to think about how how it is that you learn and how it is that you’re going to to learn this new skill based on that you’re going to learn how to uh write short stories and that there’s probably a somewhat linear approach to this i’ve done this myself whereby you sort of understand structure plot uh you refresh your understanding of english grammar or language usage you try and increase your lexicon size and you go out and you try and stimulate yourself to come up with ideas if you haven’t already got them maybe you’ll join a writing group uh maybe you’ll you’ll take a class and get instruction and and then follow a sort of linear path set out by a particular course or a particular instructor and quite honestly the whole learning economy is set up to support that type of learning and if you’re like that then good for you uh you probably just want to take the the normal path but if you’re like me or or has a have a completely different learning style to me even then you probably need to think a bit differently about taking up a new subject now you can’t always like i did with the the wood carving just plow in uh there are certain things like for example you decided you wanted to be an electrician i definitely do not advise going and fiddling around with some of your electrical cables and uh wiring in your house to see what works and see what doesn’t because you’ll probably find pretty quickly none of it works because you’re going to electrocute yourself and you’re going to die right so there are obviously caveats to this where you do need to take some prior learning that the same rule still applies here and and i think you still need to figure out the right approach for you doing that and maybe researching training or educational paths for that particular area is is wise and seeing which ones are most appropriate to you but i’m going to assume that you are smart enough not to um decide that you want to fly a plane without an instructor or go skydiving without an instructor these are not not clever things to do but if you want to start linocut or painting or writing or drawing or performance or any of these things there’s an element to which you can just get stuck in and just have a go and and and then from there what is your strategy what happens when you you hit a barrier what do you do uh how do you problem solve how do you usually go about these things so think back on projects that you’ve done before and think to yourself well i had to learn this thing and i had to learn it quite quickly how did i do that well i did think a b and c now maybe that particular learning experience wasn’t representative of what you’re trying to learn now but this there’s a thread that runs through the way that our behaviors are and the way that we learn and and you will find similarities and maybe the best thing is to hunt through your memory for something that you did that was a little bit more appropriate to the current task but even where you’re going to find methodologies heuristics behaviors and and various things that help you to understand how it is that you learn as i said i’m no stranger to learning i’m always learning something new it’s a bit of an ADHD thing i get such a buzz and a high out of learning new things there’s almost a certain melancholy to it because i tend to realize that i don’t stick with anything for that long and i’m way into wood carving now but it’s just as likely in six months time i’ll suddenly have decided i’m going to sculpt sea life with with dried cow dung or something and some of these skills might transfer or i might just be on a completely different kick and and that’s fine i get it i wish i was a bit better at following through on things and if you’d listened to my last episode on the the beauty and repetition you’ll hear me talking about some of this but i can’t change who i am and i’ve tried to learn things many many times i for example i play the guitar i’m i’m not very good at it i’ve been playing since i was i guess 12 or 13 so like a long time i learned initially with my friend jason in his bedroom we were trying to play the music of our shared guitar heroes and at that point i was quite into my virtuoso guitarist so these are like the hardest people to try and copy joe saptiani steve vi people like that the real shredders of the late 80s and early 90s jason is an incredibly gifted guitarist and i say that very advisedly because i’ve said here before and i’ll say it a lot in the future there’s there’s no such thing as talent you might be born with the aptitude to do something versus someone else who has less aptitude or less ability or less physical ability or less psychological emotional or intellectual ability but one way or the other learning how to do something like playing the guitar takes a lot of effort and some people say oh you’re really talented as if that means that you just sort of picked up a guitar and you can whittle away at a thousand notes a minute and oh well that was very easy because you’re gifted no jason has the right mind for it he’s got the right mentality the right emotional makeup he just found learning the guitar a lot easier than me and i found it really really really brutally hard and to see him progress as we grew up grew up it was quite daunting but he would always try and help me he would try and teach me and i think i was a very difficult student so let’s learn how to play this let’s learn how to play that and i i really couldn’t do it i found it really really hard i don’t read music but we had what was called tablature which is effectively it sits above the the music stave and tells you which strings to press on which fret on the guitar anyone can read it that understands the basics of playing guitar but even then i just couldn’t focus in that the numbers would sort of swim around the page and i i couldn’t remember the thing that was hope supposed to hit between looking at the page and looking at the guitar where i was putting my fingers and and i found it would cause me immense amounts of stress and difficulty and headaches and all sorts of things simply trying to learn something that someone else played not i i don’t have the type of air that means i can hear what they’ve said and um and and then just play it uh other than the most basic things jason went off he’s in bands he does performance he he uh he does singing he was on tv he’s great he does that that’s his thing and he’s still an incredible guitarist but for me what i learned is that i just really can’t and i don’t really want to learn other people’s stuff it’s just too laborious for me so i taught myself how to improvise and um and and that’s what i do i improvise i pick up the guitar plug it into an amp plug in one or other of my effects pedals and and just wang around making a god-awful noise and i’m not great i probably don’t sound great but i have so much fun doing it and i’ve got much better i’ve progressed in my style and my ability and via that i learned a lot of the theory that i i’ve been missing because i find it boring or too abstract or whatever again i’m not great on music theory i’m not a great guitarist but i understand way more now than i did before and it all came about because i learned how to play the guitar via just doing it like just plugging in and seeing what happened when i did this or did that and you know smash the strings like here or plugged in this uh really gnarly distortion pedal and turned it all up to number 11 i just loved it and and one of my favorite things to do funnily enough is just to create feedback so i’ve got a few pedals that are really high gain and i can just create feedback with my little fox speaker and and to everyone else that’s horrible noise but i found for an electric guitar feedback beguiling like beautiful like a a firmural uh keening beauty why is learning how to learn so important for taking up or progressing in any creative endeavor we’ll put simply if you’re trying to learn in a way that doesn’t suit you it’s not going to be pleasurable it’s not going to be fun it’s going to be stressful it’s going to take longer and maybe you just give up maybe you think this is not for me this is not my medium i can’t do this when the reality is almost certainly you can and that the reason you are failing at learning it is because you’re trying to learn the wrong way and and that makes me sad that people are giving up things because they feel more difficult than in reality they are and and some of the biggest leaps i’ve made have simply been stop trying to do things how i’m being told to do them by the mainstream education and and to figure out and sit down and figure out what my way of learning this needs to be and for me i even love the task of figuring out how i’m going to learn something because yes you can’t just dive in it can be wasteful if if what you want to do is learn how to carve really expensive woods well you’re going to have to start on cheap woods don’t just dive straight in and buy a 500 quid slab of absolutely gorgeous hundreds of years old wood because you’re going to destroy it you need to strategize and say well right let’s find some wood that’s um that that’s that’s cheap but of a similar say consistency or color or whatever um let’s go and buy some cheap canvases and just slop around let’s buy a cheap guitar let’s buy a cheap violin just good enough to do what you want and start fucking around lowering those barriers to entry is a really big starting point maybe that’s not the best way for you to do it you need to think about it and and i like to think about how i’m best going to learn something i find it really positive and stimulating and exciting to think through well here’s what i understand about this thing that i’m going to do i rarely try and start something about some knowledge otherwise why would you start it um but i think to myself how am i going to learn this where do i start where is best for me how can i do this without creating havoc mess spending lots of money uh annoying everyone around me and so on and i’ll put in a little bit of thought and planning at the beginning just simply so when i start i’m kind of as best near i can to being frictionless and then the next thing you have to do is accept failure and this is arguably the most important part of any learning endeavor it’s it’s really important that you are not too critical and uh especially in the early stages and the when you hit a barrier that’s natural when you don’t know how to do something it’s natural when you can’t make your fingers form that cord that’s natural you will be able to you just have to keep pushing on don’t let it get you down don’t be too self-critical and and just keep pushing on and if you can’t do that thing leave it for a bit go away try something else try some different exercises and try and find some way to loosen yourself up so you’re able to come back and try that thing again and then you’ll almost certainly figure it out and don’t beat yourself up over failures it’s really really bad to do that and and and when you think about it when you when you first start driving a car you can’t expect to get in there and doing some jukes of hazard a team style jumping over bridges and stuff you you have to jeez i’m showing my age there you need you know you need to understand some basics you need to start slowly you need to understand that you’re going to stall every now and again you need to not get yourself too worked up and try and relax and and once you’ve sort of got those two things how am i going to learn this and this mentality of failing and and just remember how important failing is because that’s how you understand where your boundaries are and also how you know when to go and ask for advice or to go and study some more or to try different things because you’ve got something wrong there’s very very few people if any that have just started up a new endeavor and just sort of intuited their way through without making any mistakes when you learn it comes in fits and starts based on simple physics to your energy levels to your emotional state to your life circumstances to your ability to find time and to make sure you’ve got the right headspace to to practice something this is all natural and normal so the the learning process is is not linear and in fact it might roll backwards you might actually get worse at things before you get better for example if you’ve if you’ve trained yourself to do things in a certain way and you figure out that way is really not optimal it can be quite difficult to train yourself out of that but it’s worth doing but in the meantime you’re going to find that you you get worse and and you just have to accept that and i think that’s another really important acknowledgement that you won’t learn linearly and how many times have you been learning something and there’s this been this one thing you couldn’t do and it was really bugging you and then one day you get in front of you so you pick up your instrument and then you just do it you’re like wow i could do that what happened you know i must have gone to sleep last night and had some amazing epiphany but it’s of course it’s never like that it was linear when you’re when you think about it but that was the first time you you came to your your practice and all the right things coalesce you’re in the right state of mind you had the time you were relaxed you weren’t worrying about it the way you set up your instrument or your easels or the new brush you’ve been using or just not being tired or not being irritable and suddenly you can do this and and it was a it was the whole collection of of circumstances that have led you to be able to to now do that thing that you couldn’t do before so that’s i think all i’m going to say about learning this definitely won’t be the last time this comes up it’s one of the most critical and central things to my core thesis on the value of art and mental health and my belief that one of the biggest barriers to us really using creativity to maintain our mental health is is the barriers we put up for ourselves the the problems that we cause for ourselves that stop us from progressing and and yes there are always external factors yes there might be things that you simply aren’t configured to do but ultimately most things you can do if you think you can do it if there’s no obvious impediment then you almost certainly can and when when it comes down to it if you’re failing at that it’s almost always because of barriers you’ve created so the positive side of that is that these are things that you can fix barriers can be removed and and sometimes you just need to take a step back and think about how you’re approaching something and and make some adjustments maybe take a breather and and reevaluate what you’re doing and then attack it with fresh vigor so that’s all i’m going to do for today i hope that was helpful i’ll be back soon i have an interview that will actually cover off some of this stuff in a completely different domain it’s a really great interview so i really look forward to sharing that probably sometime in the next week otherwise uh enjoy yourself and especially if you’re in america keep safe and keep fighting the good fight you matter bye