Theories of Learning (Part 2)

Consider the mania for efficiency and speed in all areas of contemporary life. Is it surprising that the same influences are felt in the fields of learning and self-development? Consider the ever-increasing swarm of push-buttons which almost seem to run our lives.

There are so many areas in which physical effort has been reduced to a minimum that perhaps we are ready to eliminate mental effort as well. The easy way is always the tempting way and, if the results are even better, why not take advantage of a time and labor-saving device?

In the area of psychotherapy we find there is a widespread need for professional help and, once again, we observe the temptation to do it the modern, easy way, to save time and money and effort. There is certainly a special appeal to those people who feel that they don't need extensive professional guidance, since they have only a few minor difficulties to work out. Whether or not this self-evaluation is correct, sleep-learning offers man an opportunity to take the easy way out.

Finally, in this age when education is nearly universal, the amassing of facts is considered an important achievement and, in the cases of the now-defunct quiz shows, a lucrative one. We are supposed to know something about everything—and there is so much to know. There just isn't enough time during waking hours. Often we are too tired to even care about improving ourselves.
Yes, sleep-learning has much modern appeal.

Still, only by knowing how we learn can we examine the effectiveness of sleep-learning. There is not, of course, complete agreement among authorities but if we can unearth points on which they do agree then we can evaluate sleep-learning against accepted theories.

Looking back a few centuries (1690), we find John Locke challenging the old doctrine that men come into the world with a set of ideas and a particular character stamped on their minds. He argued that knowledge was derived from experience, the result of ideas acquired through the five senses, and from inner experiences of the mind which operate in considering the ideas derived from sensations.

Only what can be perceived exists, according to George Berkeley (1710), and various combinations of perceptions come to signify objects or ideas. The perceiving is done by a distinct entity, the self, and nothing can exist except in the mind which perceives it. Berkeley asserted that all reality was mental and all nature a manifestation of God.

David Hume later (1748) affirmed that there was no knowledge beyond the evidence of the senses, that there was no such thing as cause and effect and that experience was primary in all thinking. He divided the mind's perceptions into impressions (sensations, passions, emotions ) and ideas by which he meant the faint images of impressions in thinking and reasoning.

A pioneer in psychological research, Johann Friedrich Herbart (1816) held that the mind is a blank on which experience writes, man learns by means of perception of the sense organs and by the process of association. Herbart attempted to explain psychic phenomena in terms of simple ideas and looked forward to a future system of psychodynamics determined by mathematical laws.