Dear reader,
Like many who have made study a central part of their lives, I’ve often come across the theme of learning how to learn. It’s a subject that fascinates and draws curiosity, so much so that an entire industry has grown around it: courses, methods, and techniques on how to learn faster, remember longer.
Yet lately, I’ve started to doubt all this superstructure. I find myself asking: how did we manage before all this existed? The brain, after all, is a machine built for learning. Its job is to extract patterns from the world we live in, helping us survive and thrive. It has evolved through millions of years of challenges, adapting to ever-changing environments; it seems rather presumptuous to think we can achieve better results than such a machine.
One interesting point to reflect on is memory. Consciously, we’re obsessed with remembering what we read and study. And yet, no matter how hard we try to retain information, the brain insists on forgetting. This gap between what we want and how our brain actually works is emblematic of the whole problem.
The brain remembers what it uses and forgets the rest. It’s an adaptation mechanism: what’s not useful gets discarded, leaving room for what is. It’s a bottom-up process, guided by experience and context. Our way of studying, instead, is top-down: we expect to remember something just because we’ve read or studied it, because we believe it’s useful. But the truth is simple: if the brain doesn’t retain an idea, it’s because it isn’t relevant to the environment we operate in.
I believe this is the core issue: our learning systems ask us to acquire knowledge without any real need. From an early age, school trains us to study what we should know, without an immediate reason to know it. This disconnection between knowledge and necessity creates an artificial difficulty, and we try to solve it in equally artificial ways: with techniques and methods, without ever addressing the root cause.
Artificial systems like schools build their curricula on ideological grounds: on what we believe to be useful, not on what truly is. Our biology, however, cannot be persuaded by a syllabus or an educational ideal. It only learns when usefulness is real, tangible, grounded in experience. This is not just a practical distinction, but an epistemological one: institutionalized knowledge operates in the realm of beliefs, while the brain operates in the realm of reality.
The brain functions as a system in constant exchange with the world: it learns through the feedback it receives from its own actions. Without that exchange, it cannot know what’s right or wrong, useful or useless. Contact with reality provides the information that shapes learning. That’s why using doesn’t mean repeating or doing exercises: it means truly applying something and feeling its effects. It’s the experience of results, whether positive or negative, that creates lasting knowledge.
I think we should follow the flow of our biology instead of trying to fight against it. We should trust the brain’s natural capacities: let our contact with the environment show us what’s genuinely worth learning. And if we truly want to learn something, the best strategy isn’t to force ourselves to study it, but to find a context where that knowledge has real consequences: where its absence is felt. This way, we spare ourselves the sterile effort of accumulating information that doesn’t matter.
Learning from the environment not only helps us learn better, it helps us learn what truly matters. Our natural learning mechanism is rooted in reality’s feedback: it’s the world itself that tells us whether we’re heading in the right direction. Human systems, instead, often operate on ideas and beliefs, risking a misalignment between what we think is useful and what actually is. When a learning environment loses touch with reality, a subtle but dangerous distance opens between knowledge and truth.
We don’t need to reinvent learning, but to reestablish a more honest relationship with it. Learning isn’t an act of willpower or discipline: it’s a natural consequence of living in an environment that challenges us. The real task isn’t to optimize the brain, but to create contexts that make knowledge necessary.
When the world asks something of us, the brain responds, and it learns. Everything else is an attempt to replace the urgency of life with the fiction of duty. If we truly want to learn, we must live in such a way that what we want to know becomes part of our experience, not a box to tick. In the end, the mind already knows how to do its job: we just need to place it in the right environment.
Vale,
Davide