Chris Dalton's Personal Development Blog

I’m re-reading, now for the third time, Gregory Bateson’s “Mind and Nature”, which was one of his last books before his death in 1989. In the periods between reading and re-reading I have been able to go out and follow, albeit somewhat haphazardly, various other threads of thought and research in subjects that slowly revolve like planets around the central question of “what is learning?”

Bateson’s book was intended for the general reader, though I suspect that what constitutes ‘general’ for Bateson might not be quite the same thing as most books aimed at a wider audience. Anyway, on page 29 in my edition, where he is stating a necessary presupposition that science never proves anything, and where he is discussing what we can know, he says “Knowledge at any given moment will be a function of the threshold of our available means of perception.”

This thought is built on the notion that we naturally co-create knowledge by a never-ending process of mutually established and familiar patterns, which retreat to the background in their use.  The limit of this knowledge is set by the limit of our capacity to perceive it.

Thresholds are digital: you will know when they are reached and crossed only when they have been crossed. So it follows that learning, also a process of perceiving, should also be digital. What is not perceived cannot be learnt, or perhaps more accurately cannot lead to learning. In theory, if we widen, or broaden, or sharpen, or whichever analogy is most appropriate to convey the improvement of our capacity to perceive our threshold for perceiving difference, it becomes possible to see new ways of perceiving pattern and eventually ways that pattern that connect.

When we become very used to doing something, we often stop seeing how that behaviour was created, or is created, and may find that it unconsciously becomes a self-fulfilling loop which then actually limits our perception of it.  This is a strong argument for placing a short, sharp exercise in critical self-awareness right at the start of an adult learning process to contract the digital to the analogue.