From Learning to Understanding
It is important to cultivate a learning culture that has awareness and understanding of the importance of learning in order to develop a creative workforce and build a highly innovative organization.
Learning new things affects understanding through changes in behavior and neural processes. However, knowledge is not static; it needs to be kept updated. It's important to make connections between pieces of knowledge. When these connections are structured in a meaningful way, we are better able to retrieve and apply knowledge effectively and powerfully.
Changes in Neural Processes
-Neural Representation Size: The number of neurons responding to a stimulus in a mind can increase as performance improves. This has been observed in tactile discrimination tasks, auditory discrimination tasks, and motor learning tasks.
-Sharpening of Neuronal Tuning Functions: Neurons at early stages of perceptual processing respond best to a limited range of stimulus attributes, and learning can narrow this focus. This results in neighboring neurons having less overlap in their responses.
-Changes in Relative Timing of Responses: Learning can increase the synchronicity of firing across neurons that respond to stimuli, even those not temporally varying.
Learning Theories: Learning is defined as a relatively permanent change in behavioral potentiality that occurs as a result of reinforced practice. This change doesn't necessarily mean improvement, as addictions and prejudices are also learned.
Learning involves building associations between different ideas and experiences. New ideas are assimilated into existing ones, forming a matrix of associated ideas.
Perceptual learning: Perceptual learning involves discovering how to transform previously overlooked potentials of sensory stimulation into effective information. It can also enrich sensory experience with specific associations and rules for interpretation derived from past experience. Perceptual functioning changes with age due to maturation and learning. Perceptual constancies are enhanced with increasing age.
It is important to cultivate a learning culture that has awareness and understanding of the importance of learning in order to develop a creative workforce and build a highly innovative organization. By having an active learning and thinking cycle, over time, digital professionals develop an effective set of filters that help them find new knowledge that interests them and refine it into valuable insight to accomplish their work creatively.
