Accelerate Learning: Read and Stimulate Your Reticular Activating System

In this article I cite Thomas Edision, Wikipedia, and Jim Newton (Edison's friend) to answer these questions, "How do we learn? What is learning?"

"That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you'd understood all your life, but in a new way." - Doris Lessing - Author

We Have Been Given a Wonderful Gift

You may or may not know but we each have been given a Reticular Activating System (RAS). It acts as the brains control center, the  center of consciousness, attention and learning.

Your RAS is the key to “turning your brain 'on',” and seems to be the center of motivation and is essentially:

"your unconscious auto-pilot filter that constantly judges what’s important and what’s not about each and every bit of stimulus occurring physically around you and mentally inside of you. Or, to quote an expert:

“[It] alerts the brain to incoming information from the senses, and from the centers of thought, memory and feeling. More than that, it adjudicates the relative importance of that information. . . In a way the RAS is like a vigilant secretary, sorting out the trivia from the incoming messages.” - Ronald H Bailey, et al. The Role of the Brain, 1975

The amazing thing about the reticular filter is that you, through your own intentions and focus, can influence what it lets in and what it keeps out. If you have ever had the experience of buying a car and then noticed that all you see on the road around you are other cars just like yours, you’ve experienced the power of the reticular filter.

The trick is to consciously set up your reticular to look for input and ideas that will lead you toward SUCCESSFUL outcomes, not unsuccessful ones." Via David Allen Co.

We use our RAS each and everyday whether we realize it or not. The information and stimulus we gain in the process of learning is the seed of awareness that our RAS uses to draw our attention, to notice something we might have otherwise missed.

Example of Your RAC Working

Can you remember when you bought your first new car? What was the make, model, and color? Do you remember suddenly noticing many of the same cars with the color as yours?

Truth is those cars were always passing you except now you are able to notice them because your Reticular Activating System drew your attention or conscious mind to ‘notice’ it.

Awareness Is The Second Step In Learning

I have often questioned the value of all the I do. I have read many books, I have a stack that I have not read, I scan a hundred or so blogs almost daily, and read a couple of business magazines  every month.

I do not have to wonder anymore. If I understand the role of my RAS in how I learn, then being well read is a key learning strategy. As we take in information our memory stores it until our RAS becomes activated and then we put that information to use.

"Learning is remembering." - Socrates

Information is the fuel that drives our RAS to raise our awareness. Then we can pay 'attention' to a specific situation like noticing similar cars, new opportunities, or ideas for an invention or innovation.

Edison Had an Active RAS

I remember reading a story of Thomas Edison, who accidentally stepped on his cats tail and got a typical cat scream. The noise the cat made gave him an idea to use 'impulse' to send multiple signals in a series of pulses over a wire. This innovation was used to increase the capacity of the telegraph.

I think Edison's RAS must have been off the charts, with 1094 patents he and his team came up with a new invention every few weeks of his life!

In the book Uncommon Friends, Jim Newton wrote "he could read through an entire newspaper at astonishing speed... he could repeat word for word complete passages of a news paper." -  I think Edison had a very active RAS and a photographic memory.

If reading voraciously was good enough for Edison then it is good enough for me.

Live Large!

Greg Balanko-Dickson
Author, Business Coach, Entrepreneur
Remote Control CEO