Learning like a child again

I love to start learning something new and not quitting it as I used to. Just keep going, without hurry. — from my diary, October 2018

The mind as a hard disk

Picture the mind as a hard disk. Not the brain as an organ — the whole of your inner space: attention, awareness, the room you have to take things in. When we are young that disk is nearly empty. Over the years it fills — not with memories so much as with internal dialogue, the endless commentary the mind keeps up with itself. You can see it in people. Watch someone walking, lost, lips almost moving, completely buried in a conversation only they can hear. That inner talk is always running, and it takes up space.

Why we seem to learn slower with age

It is taken as given that learning gets harder as you get older. I do not think the machine is wearing out. My theory is simpler: the disk is full. There is so much internal dialogue running that there is no room left to take anything new in. A child learns astonishingly fast — a language, an instrument, the whole shape of the world — not because its brain is a better machine, but because its disk is nearly empty. Nothing is competing for the space. It can simply absorb.

A child doesn’t learn faster because its brain is better. It learns faster because its mind is emptier.

What the practice cleared

Over years of practising the Formula.life method, the volume of my thinking came down. It is hard to put a number on something invisible, so I will describe it as it felt: it used to feel like ninety thousand thoughts a day, a mind that never stopped narrating. Now it feels like a small fraction of that. The internal dialogue quietened, and space opened up — the same space a child has.

And so I learn again

And I use it. In these years I have picked up the flute, the drums, learned to work with AI, taken on more new things than in all the decades before — and I learn them quickly, the way I did as a boy. I am not claiming a charmed, stress-free life; I carry the same worries as anyone — money, the state of the world. But the inner channel that learning needs is no longer jammed. When I sit down to learn something, I am actually there for it.

Why this can be true

None of this is magic, and here is the honest bridge. The ‘hard disk’ is a metaphor for something real: your attention, and the limited working memory it runs on. The inner voice — the worrying, the rehearsing, the commentary — draws on exactly the same capacity that taking in something new requires. Fill that capacity with dialogue and there is little left for learning; quieten the dialogue and the capacity comes back. That is the whole move of the Formula.life method: for a few minutes a day you give attention a job — the count, the breath, the syllable — and slowly it learns to stay, and to stop narrating. Do that for long enough and the quiet stops being somewhere you visit and becomes the room you live in. That is where the learning happens.

This is my own lived experience and a personal theory, offered as a way of seeing — not neuroscience, and not a measured claim. “Ninety thousand thoughts” is a feeling, not a figure; how quickly anyone learns depends on many things. What can be said plainly is that occupying and quietening the inner voice frees attention — that part is simply how attention works — and that, for me, it changed how I learn.

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