Am I Losing My Patience to Learn?

Before the AI era, back in the good old days 🤓, learning was a painful but rewarding process.

To get good at a topic, you put in time, effort, and mental work. You SEARCHED for answers. Huh, what? 😀

For me, the process typically looked something like this. Assume I wanted to learn how motor neurons in the spinal cord control muscles. I would start with a few keywords on Google. I’d click on the first few links and read a bit from each, aiming for breadth before depth. As I read, I’d start noticing other keywords coming up frequently: “recruitment,” “muscle force”, “isometric”, “size principle”, etc.

I’d leave those tabs open and start another search in one of those directions, or with a combination of terms (since it seems they are related). Let’s say, “muscle force and recruitment of motor units.” Then another round would begin.

This could go on for multiple iterations. Each time, another keyword was added, another question came up as I read, and hopefully a new connection was made in my brain.

I learned slowly, steadily, step by step.

And to get each bit of information, I spent both time and mental effort on the scaffolding process. Eventually, I would end up with brain fatigue, tens of tabs open, and pages of handwritten notes filled with bullet points I had managed to collect. I’d sit down, read through my notes, and feel that I had actually learned something new.

This was not a one-day job. I could be doing this over multiple days.

But what was the outcome?

If you stopped me anywhere along the way (and hopefully you wouldn’t, because that would be a bit weird, but hypothetically speaking :D) and asked me to summarize what I knew about motor neurons, I probably could. And somehow, that knowledge stayed with me. It didn’t just evaporate.

Why?

Maybe because I had managed to push through my own brain’s resistance to the effort and uncertainty learning requires. That resistance to reading one more article when I really didn’t want to, but reading it anyway. To having to decide what to read, what not to read, when to let go of an article, and when to search for something else. To controlling how I absorbed information, at what rate, and slowly building associations between concepts in my head.

And, maybe most importantly, to sitting with the discomfort of not understanding. That feeling of being puzzled by something you’ve just read, sitting with it for a while, trying again, looking somewhere else, coming back, and slowly untangling the knots.

This is not easy!

And now?

Now, I find that I can’t sit for very long with that same discomfort.

I get the feeling of, “I don’t understand this, I need to act fast”. I no longer seem to have the discipline, or maybe the patience, to go and search for the answer the old-school way, bit by bit.

I can feel that lack of discipline when I open a long article and realize that understanding the topic means actually reading through it, figuring out which parts matter, following things I don’t understand, opening another article, and slowly building the picture in my head. My attention span feels more limited. I know I still need to educate myself on the topic, but I don’t want to spend the next twenty minutes reading, searching, connecting things, and probably getting confused somewhere along the way.

Soooo… I reach for ChatGPT.

And instead of going through that whole process, I just prompt it to explain the topic to me. I might ask a few follow-up questions, go in one direction, then another, until I feel like I’ve got the picture. And I get this immediate sense of relief, like, okay, I have it now.

Except… I don’t really have the picture in my brain. I have it only in writing, somewhere in this ChatGPT conversation.

The whole process might take 15 minutes.

Done.

But… have I actually learned anything?

What I’ve noticed is that information I get this way often seems to stay only in my short-term memory. If you quiz me in the next 30 minutes, I might have a decent chance of answering. But ask me two days later?

Nope. Gone! I have to open the conversation and check the answer again.

So what is different?

Is it because the answer is available too easily, and I don’t have to struggle to get it?

Is it the speed at which the whole answer is revealed to me, instead of arriving bit by bit, like putting together pieces of a puzzle?

Maybe the old process forced me to constantly make decisions: What do I understand so far? What am I missing? What should I search for next? Does this new information fit with what I already know? Can I summarize the information in my own words?

Maybe all of that searching, selecting, rejecting, connecting, getting confused, and trying again wasn’t something that happened before learning.

Maybe that was the learning.

And perhaps that is the part I am accidentally skipping with AI.

The strange thing is that AI gives me access to more information than I have ever had before. I can ask questions immediately. I can ask follow-up questions. I can have something explained five different ways. In theory, this should make me a better learner.

Yet, I feel like I am learning less.

So:

Have I lost some of my ability to learn?
Am I simply using AI the wrong way?
Is AI removing too much of the struggle from the learning process?
Or have I slowly lost my patience for the resistance that learning requires?