On Learning New Things
New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot provides a review of Tom Vanderbilt’s just-released Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning (Knopf, January 2021), replete with her own ruminations on Learning New Things. Along the way she takes time to fills us in about when various forms of cognition reach their height – for example, raw processing speed peaks in the late teens, memory for names in the early twenties, for faces in the early thirties. Other skills peak considerably later (vocabulary acquisition at around 50 or even perhaps at 65 [!]), while still others peak late in life and seem not to fall off barring neurological impairment – e.g., emotional intelligence, beginning from around age 40. This mature form of cognition, referred to as “crystallized” intelligence, favors acquiring competency, even in some cases mastery, in some fields later than in others. The review notes a number of authors who didn’t publish their first novel until they were at least middle-aged (Annie Proulx, Raymond Chandler, Frank McCourt, Edith Wharton, to whom we might add Louise Penny and Anita Brookner).
Vanderbilt was inspired to begin learning new things during the hours he spent hanging around waiting while his daughter was taking lessons and engaged in extracurricular activities. He settled on five – a rather large number: chess, singing, surfing, drawing, and making (the latter is ambiguous, but it entailed welding new wedding rings to replace those he’d lost while surfing). He added juggling, but that was “just for fun” and had the advantage of providing early competency – most people can learn to juggle three balls in a few days, so the dopamine return is comparatively early and high.
Research has shown that older beginners do better when they engage in more than one new activity (“A recent study that looked at the experiences of adults over fifty-five who learned three new skills at once … found that they not only acquired proficiency in these areas but improved their cognitive functioning over all, including working and episodic memory”); probably this is because the brain is activated in multiple ways which create virtuous feedback loops, thus strengthening each other, although Vanderbilt’s choice of five indicates that he’s more than ordinarily motivated (or that his daughter is doing a lot of lessons and extracurricular stuff, leaving plenty of time for her father’s new interests).
There is a distinction between acquiring new knowledge and acquiring new skills; it’s the latter that challenges older adults, who are often fearful of failure (related, but not identical, to the pernicious drive for perfectionism). Vanderbilt is in search of “the naïve optimism, the hypervigilant alertness that comes with novelty and insecurity, the willingness to look foolish, and the permission to ask obvious questions—the unencumbered beginner’s mind.” Note that he takes these new activities up seriously – while he’s not aiming for mastery, he does aspire to competence, to be distinguished from dilettantism (“puttering around”), which results in some superficial acquaintance with a field but often leads practitioners to take up new “skills” (Talbot prefers “accomplishments”) one after another, dropping them once the going gets tough – in other words, once high-level, concentrated, and ongoing effort (known in some circles as “hard work”) is demanded.
The pandemic may seem like the ideal time to learn something new, something one’s always been casually keen on but never had the time or sufficient motivation to really take up seriously. A word of caution here: for beginners, the role of a real-life teacher/coach/trainer is vital: the word of encouragement, the constant support and feedback (because you’re going to get it wrong a lot) are harder to come by online – not impossible, but not easy, either.
The allure of new accomplishments has always exercised a powerful attraction for me, although I can’t recall taking up anything entirely new since reaching adulthood. I’ve had various jobs, but they were vaguely interrelated and each was somehow derivative of, or built on, skills I already possessed. Part of the problem – not mentioned by Talbot – was that such accomplishments (another word sometimes employed is “[serious] hobbies”) were frowned upon in the lower middle-class environment in which I was raised. Everything you did had to have a purpose, and that purpose was one: raising your subsequent earning power, whether directly or indirectly.
Talbot provides a nice example of this (without identifying it explicitly) in her discussion of “accomplishments” and Jane Austen, referencing a famous exchange in Pride and Prejudice, a novel I know well, having read it approximately once yearly since I was sixteen. Talbot: “‘accomplishments’ in the way that marriageable Jane Austen heroines have them, talents that make a long evening pass more agreeably, that can turn a person into more engaging company, for herself as much as for others.” The reference is to Chapter 8 and a discussion among Caroline Bingley, her brother Charles, Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett:
“It is amazing to me,” said Bingley, “how young ladies have patience to be so very accomplished as they all are.”
“All young ladies accomplished! My dear Charles, what do you mean?”
“Yes, all of them, I think. They all paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know any one who cannot do all this, and I am sure I never heard a young lady spoken of for the first time without being informed that she was very accomplished.”
“Your list of the common extent of accomplishments,” said Darcy, “has too much truth. The word is applied to many a woman who deserves it no otherwise than by netting a purse, or covering a screen. But I am very far from agreeing with you in your estimation of ladies in general. I cannot boast of knowing more than half a dozen, in the whole range of my acquaintance, that are really accomplished.”
“Nor I, I am sure,” said Miss Bingley.
“Then,” observed Elizabeth, “you must comprehend a great deal in your idea of an accomplished woman.”
“Yes, I do comprehend a great deal in it.”
“Oh! certainly,” cried his faithful assistant, “no one can be really esteemed accomplished who does not greatly surpass what is usually met with. A woman must have a thorough knowledge of music, singing, drawing, dancing, all the modern languages, to deserve the word; and besides all this, she must possess a certain something in her air and manner of walking, the tone of her voice, her address and expressions, or the word will be but half deserved.”
“All this she must possess,” added Darcy, “and to all this she must yet add something more substantial, in the improvement of her mind by extensive reading.”
“I am no longer surprised at your knowing only six accomplished women. I rather wonder now at your knowing any.”
What Talbot neglected to note, of course, was that all these accomplishments had a single goal, that of making a woman eligible for marriage above her socioeconomic status – for “marrying up,” in other words – which is exactly what happens in the novel when the two oldest Bennett sisters, Jane and Elizabeth, marry men with large fortunes.
About ten years ago, I took up playing the piano again, having left off at the age of 19. It’s hard now to recall my motivation – I was doing a different kind of work then, and sensed that engaging the non-verbal parts of my brain might relieve exhaustion from overworking the verbal parts during the workday. I found a teacher at the local YMCA, and signed up for a lesson once a week, which is what I’d had when I was a girl (age 7-19). My teacher, Maria, was young enough to be my daughter and this was a bit of a hurdle for a lifelong teacher; it’s not easy to go back to full-on student mode – to take correction, admit you haven’t done your homework, acknowledge you’re just not as good at something as your teacher and accept that you never will be.
Maria was a professional pianist – a graduate of the prestigious State Music School – and teaching was definitely a sideline for her, although a full-time one in the dark days of 2009-2010, when Greece was in financial free-fall. I’m pretty sure she’d never had a “mature” student, or a “false beginner” like me. So, lacking any precedent, she just did with me what she did with the 8-year-olds: she started me off at the beginning of the official Greek piano curriculum. This was a bit embarrassing, but it proved a wise decision: I started over after 40 years, and worked my way through the curriculum – exercises (Czerny), “easy pieces,” “popular pieces” (classics re-arranged for beginners), Bach (whom I had never appreciated), Clementi, and so on.
What happened represented a confluence of my younger and mature selves: the need to excel came to the forefront (oddly enough, since I had never remotely felt the urge to excel at piano when I was young; in fact, I was the most indifferent and unwilling pupil imaginable), reinforced by the palpable relief my brain experienced from engaging parts of it unrelated to language. In short, I became obsessed, normally practicing between three and four hours a day, seven days a week, for a total of 25-30 hours weekly. This wasn’t as much as a professional would have practiced (6-7 hours a day), but it was a lot – when I was a girl I had had trouble forcing myself to sit at the piano for more than 30 minutes, and I was watching the clock every second.
As a result, I progressed through around five years of the official curriculum in less than two – and then, suddenly, I stopped. While there were outside factors militating against my continuing (I was by then traveling for long periods back and forth to the U.S. and couldn’t in good conscience continue to pay for lessons I’d never take), I think it was more that my old self – perfectionist, driven, highly competitive – got in the way of my mature self, which, at least consciously, was eager to do “the best I could.” The cost of becoming moderately proficient just became too high, and at some point I gave up.
Recently I’ve come into possession of two sewing machines – one new, one used – and feel they’re sitting there waiting for me to take them on one day. Sewing is something I always wanted to be able to do when I was young; we had a machine at home, but by the time I came on the scene my Mother no longer had the patience or willingness to teach me (she herself was an excellent, if only occasional seamstress). When I was about 10, I entered a phase of fascination with couture clothing; Mother subscribed to Harper’s Bazaar and I couldn’t wait for the latest issue to arrive each month – I would pore over Givenchy and Dior and Balenciaga dresses and gowns by the hour and then try to create my own designs. This wasn’t an actual hobby – I couldn’t draw at all, my designs were uninspired, and I had nowhere to wear anything featured in the pages of Harper’s Bazaar in any case – it was more like an unfulfilled obsession which never found a productive outlet.
Friends here and back home have been regaling me over the last ten months in correspondence, Skype meetups and through their Facebook pages with all their new accomplishments – They’re exercising! They’re knitting! They’re singing on Zoom! They’re taking up new musical instruments! New languages! To this I say “Wow, how cool is that?” But somehow, I can’t find the willpower or desire to follow the sterling examples set by so many.
The thing is, all I really want to do – all I’ve wanted to do for the last four years – is read, think, and write. I can’t wait to get up each morning and start surveying the sites I scan daily, and am loath to log off each night because I might miss a piece that would provide me with the next day’s topic (as I did last night, when Illinois politics changed forever after I logged off, practically in the blink of an eye).
On a related note, it’s worth asking whether it’s possible to change one’s deepest beliefs – to unlearn/relearn – in adulthood, say after the age of 35-40. More specifically, can mature adults abandon long-held political preferences and embrace new ones? Interestingly, our tendency as we grow older is towards “conservationism,” i.e. becoming more conservative, one evidence of which is the fact that Republican voters lean older (and whiter, and richer). Joe Biden, who is 78 years old, more or less promised Americans a return to the past, but “better” (cf. “Build Back Better”), and this promise surely drew older voters longing for a return to 1970 or 1990 or whatever.
But despite our fondest wishes, we’re not going to return to the past; as Heraclitus noted, “You can’t step into the same river twice.” It’s not 1971, it’s 2021, and that bygone river has long since emptied into the sea.
Can Biden govern for the 21st century? Can disappointed, fearful, enraged opponents learn to be governed by a (very) moderate Democrat? We just don’t know at the moment, but an awful lot of unlearning-deprogramming is going to be necessary to bring opponents back into the flow.
That’s a job Joe Biden didn’t bargain for, and may not even realize is coming his way.