Tootfinder

noisy construction in front of my apartment for the past week and a half, digging up the street and building a rubber tube that’s a block long that i guess they intend to bury and fill with a natural gas pipeline

This is closely related to / partly overlapping with what linguists call the “conduit metaphor,” in which language is a container into which the speaker/writer places meaning and from which the listener/reader extracts meaning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conduit_metaphor
Study the example sentences in that article. Notice how they are •metaphorical•, but also notice how normal, how •literal• they sound to our ears.
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What I’m talking about is not exactly the Conduit metaphor in which •language• is the idea-container during idea transit, but rather a related metaphor in which the mind is the idea-container for long-term storage (e.g. “Get it into your head,” “Tried to remember but I’d lost it,” “My brain is full,” etc etc).
It’s a handy way to talk, but it does mislead us.
(I’m sure somebody’s worked out the linguistics side of this, not to mention the psych neuroscience sides, but that’s well beyond my knowledge.)
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This is a very reasonable question:
https://pouet.chapril.org/@Zekovski/116844176606612240
The truest and most honest answer is •we have no idea how the hell learning works•, not really, only in hints and glimpses. The mind is full of mysteries, and we only have clues.
A good first step is to imagine some alternatives to the conduit metaphor — all also flawed, also tending toward misunderstanding if we take them too far, but having multiple metaphors helps us get unstuck from one:
- What if learning is like •exercise•: the strain of sustained effort stimulates muscle growth?
- What if learning is like •resonance•: what your mind perceives or experiences makes your mind echo that thing, like a string picking up sympathetic vibrations?
- What if learning is like •filling a toolbox•: problems cause your brain to seek out new tools, which give it the capacity to solve similar problems more easily in the future?
…etc etc. A fun exercise is to try to come up with metaphors of your own, think about what they imply, and notice where they fall apart.