From our earliest days we analyze and organize information about the world, forming mental models. The world is large, complex, and confusing, so this is no trivial task. And the breadth and volume of things to be learned and understood is without limit. Fortunately, humans have amazing powers to observe and process information. But also serious limitations that can be equally powerful and insidiously invisible (even to us).

Understanding the ways we learn and adapt to our world can help us to become better learners, and also to understand why it can sometimes be so hard to convince someone else to change their mind.

Assimilation

Familiarity is a crucial shortcut for us. We organize things in our minds by matching up with others we’ve seen before, fitting them into categories and placing them in the context of our current understanding. If you know what a baseball is and how it’s used, it’s very easy to understand a softball when you first encounter one. This style of learning works for complex scenarios and concepts, too, and forms the foundation for learning. We understand certain aspects of the world in a certain way based on all our prior learnings and we assimilate new things into our understanding according to those established models.

This makes learning fast and efficient, which is absolutely essential in a world where an overwhelming amount of information is to be processed constantly. The limitation, of course, is that quickly assimilating new information into already existing understanding doesn’t challenge our current understanding. Without challenge, nuances of that understanding go unexplored and the understanding itself never gets questioned in a meaningful way. It’s just accepted, we fit things into it, and we move on.

Accomodation

Far more difficult, but far more powerful is modifying our worldview to see new things more completely, or to see familiar things in a fundamentally new way. When we do this, we make accommodations to our mental models so that we can house these new ideas.

This is hard for a few reasons. Most notably, a certain level of awareness is required – “Hey, this new thing, idea, or concept is totally unlike the others in my worldview and I need to figure out a way to understand this.” This is very different from the fast-paced processing we’re wired so effectively to conduct all day long. Also, we need to allow this new thing to challenge aspects of our current worldview, which is often based on long-held mental models where we’ve assimilated lots of information. And these fundamental aspects of our worldview are based on beliefs held by us, and often also by the communities in which we operate. Challenging and changing some of these can open up a pretty serious can of worms for us. It can be messy and confusing and riddled with conflict.

That’s why it’s so hard to change someone’s mind, sometimes.

But on the flipside, it’s where some of your most profound learning can come from.

Photo credit: Brett Jordan