teaching and learning and creating and relating (meditation and anything) › embodied learning

a speculative comment on language learning:

[Originally published: https://meditationstuff.wordpress.com/2019/04/11/technical-debt-meditation-and-minds/#comment-1962 (Last accessed: 2020-09-05)]

I predict that someone very far along on the meditative path, who puts in the time to learn a second language or to polish a second language that they learned after early childhood, will end up with that second language "mixed in" with their first language. In other words, the fluently multilingual advanced meditator will have a more similar brain, in the relevant ways, to a "natively multilingual" person, someone who grew up speaking multiple languages, than other later-in-life bilingual or multilingual individuals.

It’s not automatic; you don’t get it for free by taking classes or something. You do have to do a special thing that looks more like meditation than study and practice, in addition to whatever else one normally does to learn a language (drill, immersion, etc.)

Generally speaking, correct meditation "puts things in the right places" in the brain. And generally you learn how to learn better (across hundreds and hundreds if not thousands of hours).

As I’ve gotten a taste for this, I have indeed thought about gaining "fluency all the way down" in a second or third language. It’s a very large time investment, though, some fraction of the total number of real-time hours of language use in one’s entire life thus far, because of how stuff gets laid down in the brain. And so I think the opportunity cost may be prohibitive. But it would be a finite amount of time, a non-insane thing that someone could reasonably do, and it’s on my maybe list.

There are lots of cool things in this space, for social interaction, sports, intellectual abilities, stroke victims, PTSD... Anything that you use a brain for... This stuff is very, very, very cool.

I currently believe that this works almost just as well for an eighty-year-old as a twenty-five-year-old meditator. The eighty-year-old may need a few thousand more hours to get to the bottom, depending on how learning and compression actually work, because they’ve been alive longer, but I imagine it’s pretty practically finite, all things being equal.

I believe that the ways in which some subset of eighty-year-olds (or forty-year-olds or fifty-year-olds or thirty-five-year-olds) are mentally X is often or even usually because of "technical debt" and not some sort of cellular senescence or something. I think the operating characteristics are the same from one acquiring one’s first couple of wired-together neurons until (a little after) medical death. I think that the "technical debt" explanation is more elegant because there are sharp-as-a-tack 80-year-olds walking around, and even a confused 80-year-old is doing astonishingly complex real-time learning with their mind, in every waking moment, that is not really different in kind from a baby’s mind. I claim.