Do you get turned on by learning?

Ace of Spades writes today,

I personally used to hate learning. I learned to hate learning as a child, because adults were bossing me around and forcing me to learn things I thought were boring.

But once you're an adult, if you can get over that early aversion to the process of learning, you get to learn the things you're really interested in, and kind of turns you on. (Mentally, I mean.)

And I have to say that learning is actually fun. Now that I'm learning again, I feel pretty lame for letting so many years lapse without learning.

It's actually a deeply satisfying thing. It feels right. It feels like there's some actual forward progress in your life. It feels something like illumination.

Read more here.

What did you learn?

Seth Godin writes,

"Did you win?"

A far better question to ask (the student, the athlete, the salesperson, the programmer...) is, "what did you learn?"

Learning compounds. Usually more reliably than winning does.

A drug to help us learn?

Takao Hensch, a professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard, is studying a drug that may make it dramatically easier for grown-ups to absorb new skills and information — almost as if they were seven years old or younger.

The key ingredient here is valproic acid. Normally, it's used to treat neurological disorders like seizures and epilepsy, and various other mood disorders. But Hensch claims it may help restore plasticity in the adult brain.

In a new experiment, Hensch used valproic acid to bestow the gift of perfect pitch to a group of adult males between the ages of 18 to 27. Here's now NPR describes it:

Hensch gave the drug to a group of healthy, young men who had no musical training as children. They were asked to perform tasks online to train their ears, and at the end of a two-week period, tested on their ability to discriminate tone, to see if the training had more effect than it normally would at their age.

In other words, he gave people a pill and then taught them to have perfect pitch. The findings are significant: "It's quite remarkable since there are no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch," he says. [NPR]

It's a fascinating development, and one that could theoretically help adults acquire new skills and talents at a later stage in their lives. Of course, the side effects — if any — will still need to be studied closely, particularly on a cellular level. "I should caution that critical periods [of development] have evolved for a reason," says Hensch, "and it is a process that one probably would not want to tamper with carelessly."