Is learning an adaptation?

[Eric Schexnayder]

Interesting observation.

I always found in college there was no substitute for attending all the classes. No matter what amount of extracirricular activities occurred in life, my grades were most closely correlated to the percentage of classes attended.

Exam studying consisted of mainly reviews of an hour or so. I think the brain, just like many things wants interesting, useful, and easily digestable tidbits that add up to make you an unstoppable force of logic and applied science.

B.S. CE 4 yrs

Agreed on the class attendance, but generally I learned best reading and working problems on my own, as well as in lab. I think class attendance is critical when the professor decides to teach the material in a particular way that differs from the assigned textbook.

In my opinion, however, "lecture" type classes are begging for some sort of optimization, at least in the hard science and mathematics fields. I think the concept of lecture is pretty outdated, considering that everyone now has access to textbooks. Historically, lecture - from the Latin lectus mean "to read" - was specifically meant for taking notes while being read to from a book, since books were much more scarce than they are now.

At the very least, if I am just going to be lectured to, please don't make me pay $50 - $100 per book (and then "buy it back" from me for like $10).

[Eric Schexnayder]

So as I noted, the primary distinction between the "mental" and "physical" adaptation mechanisms is the stress that is applied. Most notably is the apparent absence of a hormonal response of some kind; we know that as part of Selye's stage 1 there is a release of cortisol, epinephrine, and norepinephrine, and it is the high levels of these hormones that must be allowed to decrease back to some tolerable level (not necessarily zero or pre-stress baseline) and managed in order to facilitate continued adaptation. We want Stage 2 and not Stage 3.

Perhaps the "stress" applied in the mental adaptation model could be one that is artificial, such as is seen in performance anxiety. I wonder if a student could be mentally stressed enough by setting higher and higher expectations of grades, performance, and mastery of material that the stress response we so often see in physical training would provide some physiological benefit to accumulation of knowledge.

A possible example of application is on the job learning. I can say from experience as an engineer that it is an entirely different thing to solve a problem in a book than it is to solve a problem in a chemical plant. Expectations are much higher, and the results you provide can mean anything from a huge profit loss to a possible safety accident. I can also say with confidence that I learned way more on the job than I ever did in school; that being said, without what I learned in school, I would not be nearly as well equipped to do what I do on the job. Or is this merely the difference between audio, visual, and kinesthetic learning? Perhaps there is a connection there?

At the very least, the ability to apply knowledge under pressure may be enhanced, though retention of knowledge may not be affected. At the end of the day though, isn't this what matters from a practical standpoint?

[Jayson Ball]

Is learning a physical adaptation? Hell yeah it is. Many adaptations, in fact.

Here's a wonderful and approachable review of one of the most well explored mechanisms of physical adaptation in the cells that underlie just one kind of learning. A Brief History of Long-Term Potentiation - ScienceDirect

The "stress" that causes learning isn't as brutal as a physical assault from the environment or a heavy set of fahve, but it's an input to they physical system that causes changes all the same. The mechanisms built into the cell to change its physiology are calibrated such that being exposed to certain electrical/chemical signals can yield functional differences in the organ. (So maybe "input" is a better word than "stress" here, given that the physical changes are more like subtle tweaks in a network rather than allocation of resources to thicker bones and larger contractile machinery? Either way, it's analogous. There's an input from the environment.) Depending on the signals received, the cells in the circuit will adapt to change the specifics of their role in the signal processing. They will make physical changes which result in greater detection of input from certain areas, or reduced detection from others.

Disclaimer from the first paper - The mechanisms that underlie which physical adaptations occur in such systems are super duper complex, and vary quite a bit depending on their location, so it gets complicated quickly. (For example, pro-inflammatory signalling molecules at the spinal chord can increase Long Term Potentiation of excitation synapses, but in the hippocampus inhibit they seem to inhibit it. TNF-α differentially regulates synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus and spinal cord by microglia-dependent mechanisms after peripheral nerve injury | Journal of Neuroscience)

[MarinePMI]

Interesting topic. I'd wonder where the WAY that people learn would be factored in to programming. Since all people (in varying degrees) learn by either visual, audio and kinesthetic processes (sight, hearing and touch), and dependent on the person's unique neural pathways, tend to favor one over the other two, it kind of makes sense that this would drive programming (say SS, BLS, 5/3/1, etc.) to achieve the greatest outcome in the shortest amount of time (i.e. efficiency of the applied "stress" of learning on the body/brain).