Learn and unlearn; We spend our whole lives doing that. We acquire knowledge, experiences, and also habits and customs. Throughout life we develop ways to deal with our thoughts and our shortcomings. We learned about our parents, about our family and social context.
All that experience influences - and a lot! - what we become at the end of life, or what we think we are. The difference between these two things is very important, since we usually work with the second, and not with the first.
In any case, change and learning form a cycle that would be broken and impossible to continue rolling without unlearning. In fact, in many cases people are also updated, as well as computer programs: eliminating the previous files to open space for the new one.
There are moments in our lives where we have the intuition that something is not right, or look for us and we do not see how we would like. Something is not working, it is not embedded, but we can not exactly identify the reason.
We just walked in circles, which is a big mistake. We repeat the same strategies as always, hoping that it will have different consequences from what they have produced so far - the results that put us in this position dissatisfaction. This will hardly happen.
We ignore that we do not make decisions based on what we see or what we consider good or bad. We make decisions through convictions that are not always true and of already acquired customs that we carry with us and that we never propose to question.
There is a time when we feel dissatisfied and we notice that we need to make some change, but we do not know where to start. That's where you have to strive to forget.
Unlearning: reviewing our reality
Generally we work with rigid models that are structured based on the "should" or the "should". They are self-imposed obligations, derived from our way of seeing reality, which despite being only a speculation, seem an absolute truth.
The problem is that these "truths" make us suffer more from objective or tangible circumstances or situations. A good part of these rigid models is usually built unconsciously, through a process that avoids critical thinking. The construction is done simply by assimilation.
In that sense, we all have a series of irrational beliefs that seem absolutely normal and true, but they are not. We have to look at them again, doubting our most deeply rooted and seemingly unquestionable beliefs.
Now, e-learning is not a simple and easy process. We think that they are filters that we have very internalized and automatic in us and in our way of being, repeated over many years making us practically intrinsic to us.
How the brain learns
It is as easy to learn something positive as to learn something negative. Repetition is a strategy that works with the two valences of behaviors.
In addition, we need to understand that brain plasticity is a mechanism of the nervous system that enables the neurological substrate to be modified.
So, that's a double-edged knife of our brain. This is because the nervous system is modified through habits of practice and repetition of ideas, and in some extreme way adapted for them, and can do so for good and for evil.
The good news is that positive change can also be produced, and she will remain there after removing some "wrong" learning - after we unlearn something that does not fit anymore.
We can, thus, produce new behaviors, but not at the same speed that we learn those currently negative for us.
The psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge talks plastic paradox to refer to this example of negative neuroplasticity. Once the brain has experienced a certain change, and this is already well established, inertia can prevent or make it difficult for other changes to occur.
On the other hand, without having experienced other contexts and ideas it is very difficult to become aware of the arbitrary nature of our beliefs. We can change our opinion. We can change habits, but our brain hates changing their habits.
The learnings leave a trace in a group of neurons that interact between them, thus leaving a mark on our neural substrate. To be in front of a series of new ideas, we can come to question the extent to which our previous ideas are true.
This situation can cause us a strong dissonance, because sometimes, according to these new ideas, he realizes that he has already made mistakes before, and that until then he had not considered it as such. That is, new ideas can come to compromise our self and our self-esteem.
In this case, the brain can inhibit a series of circuits in the active zones of the cerebral neocortex so that new information is discarded.
It is as if our brain said: it is better to continue with ignorance and with our self-concept intact than to assume the task of redefining everything we have already done and what we thought was correct until then due to these new ideas that are presented.
"The same plasticity that allows us to change our brain and produce more flexible behaviors is also the source of our most rigid behaviors."
-Norman Doidge-
The puzzles of our brain
Perception, imagination and memory
An important fact: people tend to remember better the meaning and importance of an experience than its details. Our memories are distorted - adapted to the self. Memory is necessary to remember the past, but it is also important to imagine the future.
In reality, our ability to imagine the future is closely related to the richness of our past. In addition, many of the decisions we make are, in reality, unconscious.
Consciousness allows us to distinguish the past from the present and the future, in order to be able to situate ourselves in time. But the unconscious and intuition are based on heuristic methods, simple principles that ignore much of the information by the demand for speed and processing speed.
These heuristics are acquired through our social interaction, our culture and our life experiences. They stay "programmed" in our unconscious and act automatically based on them.
Becoming aware
The process of unlearning, as we can see, is not simple. We can not rule out what we have learned as much as we do with a rubber by erasing something written in pencil. However, we can be aware of these learning and use them more intelligently.
We can stop identifying with them, and ask ourselves if we really believe in the reality that is marked there, or in the behaviors that they generate. After identifying them, this is the second step.
Unlearning is a process that requires time, patience and analytical skills. We speak of an investment that is always worthwhile: a result that we enjoy, along with people like us.