Learning can happen communicatively and collaboratively. It can also well up unexpectedly during periods of aimlessness and solitude. Significant, life changing learning can happen in a fleeting moment, take the best part of a lifetime or never happen at all. Learning is not linear or formulaic. It is an all-too-human, messy process, requiring us to grapple with and work through novel or dissonant situations.

Learning, like following a story, involves some initial mental grappling followed by a kind of breaking through or “getting it.” We can dance around explaining this pivotal moment by exploring philosophical concepts like fore-structures of understanding, cognitive shifting, paradigms, liminality, flow and reconfiguration. These metaphors provide powerful insights and are more than convenient labels, but they sidestep neuroscience. What is actually happening? Advances in brain imaging and computer modeling may eventually reveal what is really going on at the synaptic level.

In recent decades eminent neuroscientists like Gerald Edelman have presented a growing body of evidence for a Darwinian model for learning and the brain.

As far as learning is concerned, it appears that some kind of synaptic evolution, entirely inaccessible to consciousness, is at play at the neuronal pathway level. Pattern recognition and prediction is key. The essential idea is the physical generation of multiple, alternative neural pathways or networks in the brain corresponding to competing virtual scenarios. We can imagine these competing scenarios being projected, re-projected and assessed for their overall coherence and usefulness. The myriad microscopic synapses associated with the “fittest,” prevailing scenarios would be physically reinforced.

Of course, such a scenario invites the meta-question—how exactly would these tentative networks be assessed?

It is seductive to imagine that our propensity for making cognitive connections—to see one thing, loosely, in terms of another—grounded in competing neural networks. It is also tempting to view hidden aspects of “Aha!” learning epiphanies and, indeed, much of the creative experience in this way…

For now, of course, the physical basis for thought is frontier science...