Learning Starts by Caring About Something

We learn through emotional engagement rather than assimilating data

There are many aspects to learning. Many ways in which we, as humans, adapt to the challenges of the ever-changing environments we encounter so that we may prosper. Learning happens through a continual relationship between the internal and external aspects of our being - the actions we take in the world, and the way the world responds to those actions.

In this article, I am seeking to explore an aspect which is often overlooked in our understanding of how learning occurs, which is the role our emotions play in learning and how important it is to know what we truly care about, what really matters to us and to others, in order to create the best learning opportunities.

Challenging some common assumptions about learning

It’s common to view human learning as a process that is not dissimilar to the way that computers store information - we receive information as data, do some processing, and then write it to the hard drive of our long-term memory. When we’re required to do information retrieval we hope that we’ve applied some good indexing to our stored information so it can be accessed and brought to our minds.

We know that the brain is organic, different to the solid state machinery of a computer, but we also know that the brain creates electro-chemical signals and that through repetition of an action, or repeated storage and recall we activate the process described by Donald Hebb as “Neurons that fire together, wire together”, helping us to respond better to frequently encountered stimuli as a myelin sheath envelops connected neurons to improve their conductivity. We know that the brain has plasticity and so can be ‘rewired’ when we encounter new things, which means we never stop learning, that old dogs can learn new tricks.

But, all of this firing and rewiring isn’t hardcoding memories and learning as a computer writes to a disc, it is instead encoding our emotional reactions to experiences, and we tap into these emotional reactions to fire the neural connections to recreate the experiences when we want to recall information. It’s the feeling of what the experience is like that gives us the impression we are retrieving something from memory - at least according to the concept of Affective Context.

“We don’t remember experiences. We encode our reactions to experiences, and use these feelings to reconstruct them”

Nick Shackleton-Jones

The implication is that to learn things, it helps to imbue our learning experiences with meaning so that they relate to something we truly care about. Dry classroom settings and boring lectures are not conducive to learning because there’s no emotion invested, and no opportunity to connect and care about the content.

Note:

Human consciousness is still not fully understood, and models of thinking and learning are just models. Useful but not necessarily accurate. We still don’t know whether or how consciousness arises from matter, and there remains the possibility that matter actually arises from consciousness. What is a thought? Where do thoughts come from and where do they go?

Learning does not happen in a lecture, or a knowledge share where one engineer is telling a group about what they know, real learning is more likely to occur in a conversation or through practical application in something relevant to you. Learning happens in context, a context relevant to a learner, it is less likely to happen through the simple dissemination of content. A knowledge share is only effective if the recipient can convert the information into something that is meaningful and personally significant to them. Much of what someone knows is an implicit understanding, gained organically through experiential doing and feeling, whereas formal learning in a ritualised classroom setting treats learning as something explicit - like a file download rather than an assimilation of knowledge and skills.

Personally, I find that I can learn from classroom settings, books, or other formal methods only when I’m already heavily invested in the theme being learned. Only when I care deeply about it.

How do I find out what I care about?

Your browser searches, the books you own, your YouTube recommendations, or AI prompts probably tell you what you truly care about.  My dog cares most about food and will learn all kinds of tricks to get some as a reward. We remember things that are personally significant to us. If I were taking part in a pub quiz and failed dismally in the sections about celebrities and sports, I wouldn’t feel particularly ashamed, I don’t care that much about those things. But if I was to get up on stage with a guitar to jam with the pub band, and was sloppy with my playing, then I would feel a sense of shame that I’d not been practising enough - being able to improvise on the guitar is something that matters to me and my sense of shame tells me so.

Often we find ourselves caring about the things we are ‘supposed’ to care about, rather than the things we do care about. Or we subconsciously copy the desires of others -

Luke Burgis

wrote a fascinating book on the idea of Mimetic Desire, and how we want what other people want - we live through adopted desire.

It takes a certain amount of honest self-reflection to discover what truly matters to us. Getting in touch with our muse to find our calling doesn’t come easily in a fast-paced world of continual stimulus, but thinking about these things deeply is a worthwhile practice, to ‘know thyself’ as per the Socratic doctrine. What we care about dictates how we attend to the world and what we learn.

At this point, it might be pausing for a moment to ask yourself a few questions:

• Are my learning goals clear and explicit?

• Do they relate to the things I truly care about?

• How well do I know myself and what truly matters to me?

• Do we create personally meaningful learning opportunities?

• Am I emotionally engaged with the subjects I'm trying to learn?

• Am I aware of the emotional aspects of my learning experiences?

• Do I engage in exploratory conversations about topics I care about?

• Am I learning through practical application and relevant contexts?

• How often do I ask my colleagues about what truly matters to them?

• Am I open to having my worldview challenged as a means of learning?

Collaborative learning in Software Engineering

Software engineering thrives on collaboration, and this extends to the learning process. Peer learning and the dissemination of knowledge, skills and techniques within and across teams can significantly enhance the emotional engagement crucial for effective learning. 

Pair Programming

Pair or mob programming sessions improve code quality and create an emotionally charged learning environment. When multiple engineers work together, they share their thought processes, problem-solving approaches, and coding techniques in real-time, with immediate feedback loops triggering emotional responses – the excitement of solving a complex problem together, to the embarrassment of saying something ‘silly’ to the frustration of debugging a tricky issue – all of which contribute to deeper learning and emotional relevancy to memory formation.

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Code Reviews

Code reviews present another opportunity for collaborative learning, when performed with an attitude to reinforce one another's learning they serve as a platform for compassionate knowledge exchange. As engineers explain their design decisions or receive constructive feedback, they engage emotionally with the learning process. The pride in showcasing innovative solutions or the humility in accepting suggestions for improvement creates memorable learning experiences that stick with engineers long after the review is complete.

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Team Learning Challenges

Learning challenges could be created within the team to address skills gaps. For example, a team could set a weekly goal to explore and implement a new design pattern or technology. Each team member would be responsible for researching and presenting their findings, fostering a sense of ownership and emotional investment in the learning process.

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Celebrating Failure

Another practical strategy is to establish a "failure celebration" culture where team members are encouraged to share their mistakes and lessons learned in a safe, judgement-free environment. By reframing failures as valuable learning opportunities, engineers can transform potentially negative emotions into positive, growth-oriented experiences.

Team Talks

Passion is contagious, so implementing regular "Lightning Talks" or "Lunch and Learn" sessions where team members present on topics they're passionate about can also create emotionally engaging learning experiences. The speaker will experience a deep emotional attachment to the subject as they feel the pressure of presenting in public and there will be a contagion effect that will spread curiosity and interest to other participants. Ensure the talks are not just a ‘telling’ which can easily send participants to sleep - make the sessions deliberately participatory so the speaker thinks of examples to show relevancy to the audience, and the audience actively engages with questions.

Think about why you care, and why the audience should care.

What if I care too much?

Learning comes from the physical pain of putting your hand in the fire or the emotional upheaval of having your worldview challenged when our assumptions of how things are, or how things should be in the world do not hold up to scrutiny. It’s the pain which prompts the learning. We care about our worldview, we are invested in it, our identity is tied to it, and so we feel it visceral when it is challenged - as if our life is threatened.

In order to learn we need to be careful about caring too much about what we already think we know. If we care about being curious instead of caring about being right we open the doors to new learning, without the personal attachments to outdated knowledge.

Writing articles like this one is one of my favourite ways of learning, but it does risk a certain amount of emotional pain. I know plenty of people who are smarter than I am or who have more coherent worldviews. When I share articles online, I brace myself for incoming criticism - people love to assert their competency when the opportunity presents itself, but it’s those painful moments of being challenged that force me to rethink my assumptions and either back my view with more angles or abandon it in favour of assimilating the other person’s perspective. It's the emotions involved that make it stick - I feel the emotions because I’ve been challenged on something I care about - and that’s the secret to learning.

When you care about something, you risk disappointment and frustration as part of learning, but without a well-developed sense of what you care about, without putting in the effort to ‘know thyself’, finding out who you are and what you care about, you risk being tossed around at the mercy of life’s vicissitudes.

Takeaways for engineers and managers

Learning in a workplace setting can often be a contrived experience. If we are disengaged with our work, as many are, then we don’t care and we’re unlikely to be learning much that matters to us - so learning will be faked, and conversations about what we’re learning will be more performance than substance.

Our learning will only be optimal when we are having exploratory conversations about what truly matters to us, and what we care about. When did your manager or colleague last ask you about what matters most to you? When did you last inquire into what your colleagues and managers care about the most?

If we want to unlock our learning potential, the answer doesn’t lie in finding better learning materials, better teachers, or thinking harder - it lies in discovering and sharing what we truly care about.