Unconscious Learning Quotes

Signal learning (or classical or Pavlovian conditioning) is the simplest example [of leaning without consciousness]. If a light signal immediately followed by a puff of air through a rubber tube is directed at a person's eye about ten times, the eyelid, which previously blinked only to the puff of air, will begin to blink to the light signal alone, and this becomes more and more frequent as trials proceed. Subjects who have undergone this well-known procedure of signal learning report that it has no conscious component whatever. Indeed, consciousness, in this example the intrusion of voluntary eye blinks to try to assist the signal learning, blocks it from occurring. ~ Julian Jaynes

Right now I felt like a person learning that a surgeon had left a pair of scissors inside her during a operation. ~ Alexandra Kleeman

Nobody was born a master; amateurs become experts because they did not give up on learning. You are going as far as you can if you'll learn and apply! ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego's rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche. ~ Carl Jung

I could do anything - be anything.
I could be a blackberry farmer.
I could worry about phone bills and nipping out to the corner shop for milk and bread of a morning.
Little Declan Jr. could learn to walk and talk with his real father, alive and well, and I could teach him how to wear a waistcoat with just the right amount of tragic charm, take him to school in a few years, maybe makehim a little sister to look out for, someone to keep him on his toes. He could play a sport - tennis, maybe, or football. I'd attend parent-teacher meetings and have after-work drinks with the neighbors, talking about how well so-and-so is doing, and why yes, Declan Jr. is learning to play the piano. Top of his class, you know - he has his mother's grace…
I could see all of that, as clear in my mind as sunlight on fresh snow, and so much more.
Just living day to day. One morning we could have picnics, my family and I, next to blue glacial lakes. One afternoon my son would be old enough to meet a girl, get in a fight, need to shave. One evening his sister will need help with her homework, and he'll complain, but he'll help.
And then one day the Elder Gods would descend from a blood-red sky in chariots lashed together from bone and flame and take away all my blackberries. ~ Joe Ducie

The fool multitude, that choose by show, not learning more than the fond eye doth teach. ~ William Shakespeare

Our intellectual powers are rather geared to master static relations and that our powers to visualize processes evolving in time are relatively poorly developed. For that reason we should do (as wise programmers aware of our limitations) our utmost to shorten the conceptual gap between the static program and the dynamic process, to make the correspondence between the program (spread out in text space) and the process (spread out in time) as trivial as possible. ~ Edsger Dijkstra

You have to learn and keep learning. ~ Gil Scott-Heron

Casabianca"

The boy stood on the burning deck
Whence all but he had fled;
The flame that lit the battle's wreck
Shone round him o'er the dead.

Yet beautiful and bright he stood,
As born to rule the storm;
A creature of heroic blood,
A proud, though child-like form.

The flames rolled on–he would not go
Without his Father's word;
That father, faint in death below,
His voice no longer heard.

He called aloud–'say, Father, say
If yet my task is done?'
He knew not that the chieftain lay
Unconscious of his son.

'Speak, father!' once again he cried,
'If I may yet be gone!'
And but the booming shots replied,
And fast the flames rolled on.

Upon his brow he felt their breath,
And in his waving hair,
And looked from that lone post of death
In still yet brave despair.

And shouted but once more aloud,
'My father! must I stay?'
While o'er him fast, through sail and shroud,
The wreathing fires made way.

They wrapt the ship in splendour wild,
They caught the flag on high,
And streamed above the gallant child,
Like banners in the sky.

There came a burst of thunder sound–
The boy–oh! where was he?
Ask of the winds that far around
With fragments strewed the sea!–

With mast, and helm, and pennon fair,
That well had borne their part– ~ Felicia Hemans

Maybe you've noticed what I've noticed, and thought it strange, or dismissed it as youthful foolishness or that you were missing some critical piece of information that would reveal itself with age and wisdom – that is: every single teacher believes feverishly in the importance of the content of their class, and furthermore, believes that their assessment of you in their class is a direct measure of your capacity for future success, while simultaneously not having a clue as to the content of virtually any other discipline in the school. They will boldly state things like, That's math, I'm an English teacher or That's literature, I'm a biology teacher, practically admitting out loud that nothing learned in school is important (except, of course, the course they are teaching). ~ Brian Huskie

Hasty learning can lead to mistakes, and magical mistakes tend to be more spectacular than healing mistakes. My father used to use that reasoning to explain why apprentices of magi drink far less than the students of healing."
Veran grinned. "'Healers wake up with a sore head," he used to say; 'magicians wake up with a sore head, our toes burned black and the roof on the floor. ~ Trudi Canavan

Her learning to sew (from a book Yankel brought back from Lvov) coincided with her refusal to wear any clothes that she did not make for herself, and when he bought her a book about animal physiology, she held the pictures to his face and said, "Don't you think it's strange, Yankel, how we eat them?"
"I've never eaten a picture."
"The animals. Don't you find that strange? I can't believe I never found it strange before. It's like your name, how you don't notice it for so long, but when you finally do, you can't help but say it over and over, and wonder why you never thought it was strange that you should have that name, and that everyone has been calling you that name for your whole life."
"Yankel. Yankel. Yankel. Nothing so strange for me."
"I won't eat them, at least not until it doesn't seem strange to me. ~ Jonathan Safran Foer

Then the young men, streaming blood on their painted chests and backs, would stand and begin their dancing and chanting, leaning back from or toward the sacred tree so that their bodies were often suspended totally by the rawhide and horn under their muscles. And always they stared at the sun as they danced and chanted. Sometimes they danced the full two days. More often, they would dance and leap until the pain caused them to fall unconscious or - if they were lucky and Wakan Tanka smiled on them - until the rawhide and horn ripped through their powerful chest or back muscles and freed them. ~ Dan Simmons

But the psychologist as familiar to us today is generally dealing with what we call the fake personality of man: the superficial (though necessary) intellectual-emotional system with which he works. We are attempting to contact and inform the deeper individuality of the human being. ~ Idries Shah, Learning Ho

Education is as much about learning what you don't know as it is about adding to what you do. ~ David McRaney

This attitude [the abstract method in mathematics] can be encapsulated in the following slogan: a mathematical object is what it does. ~ Timothy Gowers

Science is experimental, moving forward step-by-step, making trial and learning through success and failure. Is not this also the way of religion, and especially of the Christian religion? The writings of those who preach the religion have from the very beginning insisted that it is to be proved by experience. If a man is drawn towards honour and courage and endurance, justice, mercy, and charity, let him follow the way of Christ and find out for himself. No findings in science hinder him in that way. ~ William Henry Bragg

One of the greatest and simplest tools for learning more and growing is doing more. ~ Washington Irving

Great athletes practice, train, study, and develop. So do great learners. As students empowering ourselves with knowledge, what can we learn from Olympic-caliber athletes about success, and how to achieve it?
1.Preparation = Success!
"If you fail to prepare, you're prepared to fail." - Mark Spitz, Gold Medalist, Swimming
2.Learning is lifelong
"Never put an age limit on your dreams." - Dara Torres, Gold Medalist, Swimming
3.Failure is opportunity
"One shouldn't be afraid to lose" - Oksana Baiul, Gold Medalist, Figure Skating
4.The only person who can stop you is yourself
"This ability to conquer oneself is no doubt the most precious of all things sports bestows." - Olga Korbut, Gold Medalist, Gymnastics
5.Learning is fun!
"If you're not having fun, then what the hell are you doing?" - Allison Jones, six-time Paralympian
6.You have to be in it to win it
"Failure I can live with. Not trying is what I can't handle." - Sanya Richards-Ross, Gold Medalist, Track & Field
There are always new skills to learn, new challenges to overcome, new ways to succeed. The only guarantee of failure is if you don't get started in the first place. ~ Udacity

What changes your life is not learning more. What changes your life is making decisions & using your personal power & taking action. ~ Tony Robbins

The superior man, extensively studying all learning, and keeping himself under the restraint of the rules of propriety, may thus likewise not overstep what is right. ~ Confucius

As infinite as the world's ingredients and flavors may seem, a great starting point for learning about them is a simple principle: What grows together, goes together. ~ Sally Schneider

People seek methods of learning to know God. Is it not much shorter and more direct to simply do everything for the love of Him? There is no finesse about it. One only has to do it generously and simply. ~ Brother Lawrence

Learning to have sex from porn is like learning how to drive from the Fast and Furious. A bloody horrendous idea. ~ Jameela Jamil

Learning to pass, it turns out, is less a matter of acting than not acting. You can become part of a given scene, situation, or people ('our people,' as it were), simply by letting yourself serve as a mirror for those around you. When I was still in college, when I still thought I might make a good priest, I spent some time in a Trappist monastery. I found that by exerting as little of my own personality as possible, I was able to fit right in. The monks in no time came to call me brother, believing I was destined to make vows as one of their own. Passing begins with the assumptions of those around you. The best thing you can do to maintain the illusion is to come as close as possible to doing nothing at all. ~ Peter Manseau

To learn that his treasures had been lost months ago, and so far away, was no different from learning of the death, similarly distant in time and geography, of a beloved person. Such a death bears a peculiar imprint of doubt. To be told one day that someone has gone off to the other side of the world, and with whom you expect momentarily to be reunited, has actually been dead for many months, during which you have been going on with your life, unaware of this subtraction that has taken place, makes a mockery of the finality of death. Death is reduced to news. And news is always a little unreal - which is why we bear to take in so much of it. ~ Susan Sontag

Yours is the face that matters most. So yours is the one I wear. My unconscious reflection of you. ~ Jodi Meadows

The people who are horrified by the idea of children learning what they want to learn when they want to learn it have not accepted the very elementary psychological fact that people (all people, of every age) remember the things that are important to them - the things they need to know - and forget the rest. ~ Daniel Quinn

A retrospective's huge potential for learning should not be off-limits to any team member. ~ Luis Goncalves

To be rendered unconscious; to lie exposed, without shame, at the mercy of others; to be touched, incised, plundered, remade - this is what they are thinking of when they look at him, with their widening eyes and slightly parted lips. ~ Margaret Atwood

Any writer is inevitably going to work with his own anxieties and desires. If the book is any good it has got to have in it the fire of a personal unconscious mind. ~ Iris Murdoch

At home we have always regarded the dining table as the prime seat of learning. We planned it so it was impossible to see or hear a TV from the table, and it has paid dividends in the volume of ideas that have been shared over the evening meal. ~ Noel Whittaker

[M]y determined and strenuous endeavours to take in absolutely nothing of what I had regarded as entirely the most irrelevant part of my schooling had patently not met with total success ~ Iain M. Banks

The greatest sin is to be unconscious. ~ Carl Jung

Learning to play the guitar is a combination of mental and motor skill acquisition. And to develop motor skill, repetition is essential ... Whenever musicians have trouble executing a passage, they generally tend to blame themselves for not having enough talent. Actually, all that's wrong is they don't know where their fingers are supposed to go ... you should learn the piece in your head before you play it. And when you do play it, play it so slow that there's no possibility of making a mistake. ~ Howard Roberts

To probe for unconscious determinants of behavior and then define a man in their terms exclusively, ignoring his overt behavior altogether, is a greater distortion than ignoring the unconscious completely. ~ Willard Gaylin

Loneliness is a desert. Solitude an oasis. ~ Ted Agon

Cousin Mary hoped her journey through periods of dark and light was like that of a Swiss train toiling up the mountainside, in and out of tunnels but always a little farther up the hill at each emergence. But she could only hope that this was so, she did not feel it. It seemed to her that she did not advance at all and that what she was learning now was only to hold on. The Red Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass, she remembered, had had to run fast merely to stay where she was, but doubtless she had run in hope, disdaining despair; and hope, Cousin Mary discovered, when deliberately opposed to despair, was one of the tough virtues. ~ Elizabeth Goudge

There! it had come ― the moment ― the geste! And although I was so ready, it caught me; it tumbled me over; I was simply overwhelmed. And the physical feeling was so curious, so particular. It was as if all of me, except my head and arms, all of me that was under the table, had simply dissolved, melted, turned into water. Just my head remained and two stick of arms pressing on to the table. But, ah! the agony of that moment! How can I describe it? I didn't think of anything. I didn't even cry out to myself. Just for one moment I was not. I was Agony, Agony, Agony.
Then it passed, and the very second after I was thinking: "Good God! Am I capable of feeling as strongly as that? But I was absolutely unconscious! I hadn't a phrase to meet it with! I was overcome! I was swept off my feet! I didn't even try, in the dimmest way, to put it down!"
And up I puffed and puffed, blowing off finally with: "After all I must be first-rate. No second-rate mind could have experienced such an intensity of feeling so.. purely. ~ Katherine Mansfield

In asking philosophical questions, we use a reason shaped by the body, a cognitive unconscious to which we have no direct access, and metaphorical thought of which we are largely unaware. The fact that abstract thought is mostly metaphorical means that answers to philosophical questions have always been, and always will be, mostly metaphorical. In itself, that is neither good nor bad. It is simply a fact about the capacities of the human mind. But it has major consequences for every aspect of philosophy. Metaphorical thought is the principal tool that makes philosophical insight possible and that constrains the forms that philosophy can take. ~ George Lakoff

My new favorite quote is, Feed kids Cokes and french fries and you get an obesity crisis. Feed them mental junk food and you get non-readers and poor thinkers. ~ Joy Hakim

There is no inactive learning, just as there is no inactive reading. ~ Mortimer J. Adler

We triumph without glory when we conquer without danger. ~ Pierre Corneille

The amazing thing about a long journey is that you can miss exits, run Stop signs, head the wrong way down a one-way street, get lost, misplace your keys, find them, make a U-turn,
and still, somehow, miraculously reach your proper destination. ~ Eleanor Brownn

With languages, you can move from one social situation to another. With languages, you are at home anywhere. ~ Edmund De Waal

With faith, I know that everything will be taken care of. Even the difficult times become learning experiences to help make my faith stronger. ~ Torii Hunter

Devoting yourself to a particular art is invaluable. The art becomes our vehicle with which we drive down the road of life. We use this vehicle to learn about ourselves and this place, to conquer fears, to become more of what we already are. In my own life, I have found most valuable the transferable skills of learning from jiu jitsu to all other facets of day to day study. In devoting myself with such commitment to this art, in undertaking the task of understanding jiu jitsu to whatever degree by circumstance allows, I have unknowingly learned how to learn. ~ Chris Matakas

Of course, learning is strengthened and solidified when it occurs in a safe, secure and normal environment. ~ Jean-Bertrand Aristide

I have often thought of it as one of the most barbarous customs in the world, considering us as a civilized and a Christian country, that we deny the advantages of learning to women. ~ Daniel Defoe