How Past Experiences Help Us Learn New Things

I’ve noticed something slightly strange about the way I learn.

Whenever someone explains something new to me, my brain immediately starts looking for something old.

A person.

A meeting.

A mistake.

A company I worked for.

Something my mother said 25 years ago.

A completely unrelated Tuesday in 2011.

Anything, apparently, that will give the new information somewhere familiar to sit.

Tell me something entirely new and I may need a minute.

Tell me something new that reminds me of a CFO I worked with 15 years ago and suddenly we’re in business.

For a long time, I assumed this was just how my brain wandered.

It turns out there may actually be some science behind it.

Which is reassuring.

I always enjoy discovering that one of my personality quirks has peer-reviewed support.

My Brain Apparently Needs a Reference Point

Here’s what happens to me constantly.

Someone will explain an idea and halfway through I’ll think:

Oh. This is like that thing that happened at that company.

Now I understand it.

The two situations may not be identical. Sometimes they’re not even particularly close.

But I need the old experience to make sense of the new one.

Researchers have a much more respectable word for part of this: schemas.

In cognitive science, schemas are organized structures of knowledge built from previous experiences. They help us interpret new information, make predictions and incorporate new experiences into what we already know. Research suggests that prior knowledge can make new information easier to process and remember because the brain has an existing structure into which it can integrate it.

I prefer my definition:

My brain hates an empty filing cabinet.

Give it a new piece of information and it starts opening old drawers.

Experience Gives You More Drawers

This made me think differently about experience.

We usually talk about experience as accumulating knowledge.

You work in Finance for 20 years, so presumably you know more Finance than you did in year two.

I hope so.

Twenty years would be an awfully long way to go for no improvement.

But I think there’s another benefit.

You have more things to compare new things to.

I’ve seen budgets that worked.

I’ve seen budgets that became elaborate works of corporate fiction.

I’ve watched forecasts miss because something genuinely changed.

I’ve also watched forecasts miss because everybody in the room knew the assumption was ridiculous but somehow it survived another month.

I’ve seen great leaders, terrible leaders, strange meetings, smart decisions, dumb decisions and spreadsheets that should probably be donated to science.

All of those experiences are still in there somewhere.

So when I encounter something new, I’m rarely starting from zero.

I’m comparing it against everything else I’ve seen.

Memory research supports the broader idea. Most new memories in adults are formed in the context of previous knowledge, and that prior knowledge can affect how new information is encoded, consolidated and eventually retrieved.

Which may explain why sometimes I hear a new idea and understand it almost immediately.

It isn’t entirely new to me.

It has relatives.

This Is Probably Why I Tell Stories

I tell stories when I’m trying to understand something.

This has occasionally been mistaken for getting off topic.

I now reject that accusation on scientific grounds.

I’m processing.

My husband may continue to call it getting off topic.

If someone describes a problem, I start searching my memory for something that resembles it.

“This reminds me of…”

I say that a lot.

Then I tell the story.

The story isn’t necessarily the answer. It’s a reference point.

I’m trying to find the shape of the new problem by comparing it with the shape of an old one.

There’s research suggesting that reactivating prior knowledge while learning something new can help integrate the new material with existing knowledge.

So the next time someone accuses me of telling an unnecessarily long story, I would like the record to reflect that I may be engaging in memory integration.

I will be using this defense aggressively.

Finance Is Basically One Giant Memory Test

The more I thought about this, the more I realized how much of my work in Finance depends on it.

You look at a forecast and something feels wrong.

Why?

Sometimes you can point to the formula immediately.

Other times you can’t.

You just recognize something.

You’ve seen this movie before.

Maybe Sales is forecasting a giant fourth quarter because that’s what Sales did at another company right before everyone spent January explaining what happened.

Maybe margins suddenly improve in a way that reminds you of another time expenses hadn’t hit yet.

Maybe someone says:

“We’re going to make it up in the second half.”

And several memories arrive at once.

None of them have happy endings.

We call some of this judgment.

We call some of it experience.

We call some of it pattern recognition.

But underneath all of those words is a large collection of things that happened to us before.

Experience doesn’t necessarily hand you the answer.

It gives you more places to look for one.

There Is, Unfortunately, a Problem With This

I was enjoying my research right up until I discovered the downside.

Because the same mental structures that help us understand and remember new information can also distort it.

Strong schemas can cause us to fit new experiences too neatly into what we already believe. Researchers have linked this to misconceptions and even memory errors.

In normal English:

Sometimes the thing that helps me recognize a pattern also makes me see a pattern that isn’t there.

This seems important.

Experience can make you faster.

It can also make you confidently wrong.

You’ve seen a company make this mistake before, so you assume this company is making the same mistake.

You’ve worked with this type of executive before, so you decide you already understand this one.

You’ve watched one strategy fail, so you become suspicious of anything that resembles it.

Your brain finds the old folder.

Unfortunately, it grabbed the wrong folder.

This is probably one reason experienced people still need curiosity.

The useful question isn’t only:

What does this remind me of?

It’s also:

How is this different?

I find the second question considerably less fun.

The first lets me tell a story and feel experienced.

The second requires me to consider that my wonderful story may be irrelevant.

Maybe This Is What Experience Actually Does

I’ve always thought one of the interesting things about getting older is that fewer things feel completely new.

Not because nothing new happens.

Plenty does.

AI alone has ensured I spend a reasonable portion of every week wondering what on earth is going on.

But new things increasingly connect to old things.

A new technology reminds me of another technology everyone thought would change everything.

A management idea reminds me of something we used to call by a different name.

A business problem reminds me of a company.

A conversation with one of my kids reminds me of being their age, usually followed by the deeply unpleasant realization that I now understand my parents a little better.

I could have lived without that last one.

The memories don’t give me perfect answers.

They give me context.

And maybe that’s a bigger part of learning than I realized.

Research on schemas describes prior knowledge as something we use not only to remember the past, but also to understand the present and make predictions about what comes next.

That sounds remarkably close to what I’ve been doing without having a name for it.

Something happens.

My brain goes backward.

It finds something familiar.

Then it uses that old experience to try to understand the new one.

Sometimes brilliantly.

Sometimes incorrectly.

Sometimes by remembering an obscure meeting from 2009 while being completely unable to remember why I walked upstairs.

The system has flaws.

I Don’t Think Learning Starts With a Blank Page Anymore

The older I get, the less I think learning is simply collecting new information.

For me, at least, it’s much messier.

New information bumps into old experiences.

They argue a little.

Something connects.

Something changes.

Occasionally I realize I’ve been wrong about something for 15 years, which is always a delightful afternoon.

But I think that’s why experience can become so valuable.

Not because you’ve accumulated all the answers.

You haven’t.

You’ve accumulated reference points.

People.

Mistakes.

Wins.

Bad forecasts.

Good decisions.

Things you believed that turned out to be nonsense.

Things you dismissed that turned out to matter.

A giant, disorganized mental library with an absolutely terrible search function.

Then something new happens.

And somewhere in there, your brain starts looking for a match.

Mine apparently begins with:

“This reminds me of something…”

At which point anyone who knows me should probably get comfortable.

There’s going to be a story.