On Explicit & Implicit Learning

[certified_system]

CW: Toward the end is in 2^nd person

CW: The ways I’ve talked about a Core Self throughout most of this implies that they are inherent traits that one has no choice in the matter. I’m not certain, but I suspect there is some choice, which I talk about at the end.

CW: Homomisia mentioned near the end.
(“~misia” = “hate”, “~phobia” = “fear”. There’s a bit of a push to switch to ~misia instead of ~phobia to describe prejudice / bigotry, out of consideration for people who experience true phobias.)

 

 

The way I see minds:

Conscious:

1. Thoughts
2. Words
3. Explicit learning
4. Knowing
5. Rationalisations
6. Analysis
7. Loud and weak

Subconscious:

1. Feelings
2. Automatic behaviours / actions
3. Implicit Learning
4. Understanding
5. Cognitive Biases
6. Pattern-matching / recognition
7. Quiet and powerful

We learn things explicitly, being told or shown them, and we learn things implicitly, by picking up on the subtle ways people behave.

 

Often, these don’t match up. What the people around us say to us explicitly doesn’t match with how they behave, and we learn to do the same – we don’t practice what we preach. We display hypocrisy.

 

An example of how this mismatch might present itself – In the movie Bend It Like Beckam, one character’s mother is mistaken and thinks her daughter is a lesbian, and once that is cleared up: “Being a lesbian is not that big a deal,” daughter tells her mother. “Oh, no, sweetheart, of course it isn’t. I mean I’ve got nothing against it” her mother replies, as if she hadn’t just thrown hysterics over this belief and then gate-crashed a large wedding so that she could get very angry at her daughter’s friend for having kissed her.

 

We’re often told that it’s not acceptable to be mean to or unaccepting of people for traits they cannot help [which is a whole other post for the future...], so when it gets brought up explicitly, in words, mother claims to be fine with gayness. But she’s implicitly learned that being gay is unacceptable, which she demonstrates by getting very, very upset when she thinks her daughter is gay.

 

 

Sometimes people – often those intending to support mental health, or New-Age-leaning folk – will point out that people are too thinky, too in their heads, and would benefit from paying more attention to their feelings. They’re not wrong per se, but they stop it far, far too short. Often, the implication is that your feelings are intrinsically Correct and Right, that if you are picking up a ‘bad vibe’ from someone, if your ‘gut feeling’ says you shouldn’t trust them, then you should trust that feeling.

 

But your feelings aren’t inherently correct. Your feelings are just commnicating stuff – unmet needs, past patterns and experiences, and how the current thing matches with what you’ve learned implicitly about the thing. If you trust your feelings blindly you’ll be at the same mercy of your biases and the things you’ve picked up as being Normal or Abnormal by wider society, whatever that means.

 

As for your thoughts? They rationalise your feelings. People are really good at logic-ing things away. We can rationalise anything. If you’re too ‘in your head’ and don’t listen to your feelings, all you’re going to be doing is finding ways to justify your feelings. (You might recognise this in the dudebros who are adamant that they are the Epitome of Logic And Rationality, as they continue to completely ignore and dismiss 95% of their emotions, and everyone else’s too, for that matter.)

 

 

[I don’t actually like how this implies ‘in the middle’ is best, but that’s yet another post to come]

 

So in my opinion, the goal is to learn to use each to monitor the other (regardless of whether or not you’re starting very ‘in your head’ or very ‘in your feelings’). Analyse your emotions, figure out where they come from, but don’t think over them. Listen to the feelings behind your thoughts, listen to what they’re telling you, to where they’re directing you. They’re fallible, but they do know a lot, too. That’s how you can start untangling your brain and lining things up.

 

And explicit, conscious stuff, that’s easy to just shove around. It’s relatively easy to change that superficial thinking, if you want to. But the implicit stuff, the feelings toward and about things, those subtle, often biased ways you view things? That can’t be forcibly or willfully changed like explicit thoughts can. It requires time, and care, and delicacy. The details of how I do this aren’t something I can articulate – you know how if you were to, say, pick up a musical instrument you’ve never played before. No matter how much instruction, how much theory of how to play it you know before you start, there are some things that need experience and practice, how the feel of the strings under your fingers and the feel of the shapes your hands make to get the right strings without looking need to be ingrained by practice before you can play a song well and comfortably? It’s like that.

 

I made a metaphor with this image that someone I spoke to about it, and they quite liked it - your core self is a light, and when these things are mismatched, the tangle of lines blocks out the light. The more they're lined up like this, the more the light can shine through.

 

One of the other things that feelings can communicate, usually in the form of ‘interest’ or ‘desire’, is your core stuff. The way it’s common for people who haven’t yet realised they could be queer to be Really Good Allies™, to be really interested in and supportive of queer rights. The way people go “Oh I just think autism / adhd / queerness seems really cool and interesting, and I just seem to connect better with those people!”

 

But imagine if you have that draw toward a thing like, say, being gay, but you’ve learned implicitly and explicitly that gayness is absolutely not acceptable, that it’s wrong and unnatural and disgusting? While straight people absolutely ought to take responsibility for the homomisic culture they’ve created, understanding this sure explains (at least to me) why sometimes gay and bi people end up raging homomisics. Not just regularly homomisic, but people who were Very interested in gayness and putting lots of thought and time and effort into thinking about how to prevent gayness (which is still thinking about and being drawn to it, just from one particlar, hateful angle)

 

Not that a draw to a thing, or lost of interest in a thing, inherently means you are that thing and have no choice in the matter; just that when you are that thing, you will likely have that draw to it, which is why it’s worth seriously considering if you are the thing, or if engaging in the thing would make you happier. And I think it may, may be possible to change and adjust those, if done with even more delicacy and care than even the implicit learnings, but I think to be able to do that, one needs to see and accept that the trait is there, first, and second, actually genuinely want to change it. And if you’re trying to deny the trait is there at all due to outside pressures, then all you’re doing is smothering it, rather than working with it to nudge it into something else.