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.

Experience gives new information somewhere to land

I think this is one reason experienced people can sometimes understand a complicated situation quickly without being able to explain the speed of it.

They are not necessarily processing faster.

They have more shelves.

A strange forecast miss reminds them of another forecast miss. A leadership disagreement resembles one they watched years earlier. A new technology creates a familiar incentive problem even though the technology itself is new.

The new thing is still new. The pattern around it may not be.

That distinction matters to me because it keeps experience from becoming nostalgia. The useful question is not, “Have I seen this exact thing before?”

Usually I have not.

It is, “What does this resemble, and where does the resemblance stop?”

The dangerous part is when the old story fits too well

Pattern recognition feels good.

That is exactly why I do not completely trust it.

Sometimes I hear three facts and my brain has already found the ending.

This reminds me of that company. That person. That mistake.

Maybe.

Or maybe I am forcing a new situation into an old folder because the folder is convenient.

Experience can accelerate learning, but it can also accelerate the wrong conclusion.

I have had to learn to ask myself what is genuinely similar and what I am merely recognizing because I want the world to be tidy.

The world has shown very little interest in cooperating.

Experts can become beginners again surprisingly fast

I actually like this.

Put someone with twenty years of experience into a genuinely unfamiliar domain and you can watch expertise rearrange itself.

Some instincts transfer. Some vocabulary does not. Some assumptions become useless immediately.

That can be uncomfortable, especially when you are accustomed to knowing what you are doing.

But it is also where learning gets interesting.

You begin borrowing structures from things you already understand while slowly replacing them with better ones.

I have noticed that I learn faster when I am willing to say, “I do not know what this is yet, but it reminds me of this.”

That leaves room for both recognition and correction.

Stories are memory compression

I used to think my tendency to remember stories instead of isolated facts was inefficient.

Then I realized a story can hold an absurd amount of information.

Who was involved. What they believed. What happened. What surprised us. What the incentives were. What the outcome felt like.

A spreadsheet can tell me the forecast missed.

The story reminds me that everyone knew the assumption was aggressive, nobody wanted to be the person who lowered it, and the meeting ended with the number unchanged.

Those are very different memories.

The second one is more useful the next time a room gets suspiciously quiet around an aggressive assumption.

Teaching exposes whether the connection is real

One of the fastest ways I know to test whether I understand something is to explain it to someone else.

Not with the vocabulary I just learned.

In ordinary language.

If I can connect the new idea to something the other person already understands, I probably have a decent grip on it.

If I need twelve definitions before I can begin, I may still be borrowing somebody else’s understanding.

This is probably why analogies show up so often when I explain Finance.

I am not trying to make everything cute.

I am trying to find the bridge.

Experience is useful when it remains editable

This may be the part I care about most as I get older.

Experience should make me faster at noticing patterns.

It should not make me harder to update.

There is a version of experience that becomes a museum: everything labeled, nothing allowed to move.

I do not want that.

I want a working library where the old stories can be reclassified when new evidence shows up.

Sometimes the lesson I carried for ten years turns out to have been too simple.

Annoying.

Also useful.

Learning is not only adding new shelves. Sometimes it is discovering that the book has been in the wrong section since 2009.

Maybe this is what judgment actually is

We use the word judgment constantly in business, especially when talking about experienced people.

I think part of judgment is this ability to compare the present with a large collection of imperfect pasts without confusing them.

Notice the resemblance. Retrieve the lesson. Check the differences. Update the conclusion.

That is less glamorous than instinct.

It is also more believable to me.

The people whose judgment I trust most are usually not the ones who announce that they have seen everything.

They are the ones who say, “This reminds me of something, but there is one important difference.”

That sentence contains both experience and humility.

I am trying to keep both.