Ways to Learn

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.











The picture and text above are all capable of telling us something about the quick fox and the lazy dog. They are examples of a visual approach to learning that information. Whether it's through interpreting the picture or reading the various forms of the text, it is our sense of sight that allows us to understand the above images. This is far from an uncommon concept; we take in all kinds of information through our eyes every day. What we think about less frequently are the things that we learn through our other four senses.


If we hadn't seen the picture of the fox and the dog or read the text about them, but instead had had someone come up and tell us about them, we would have learned about the pair through hearing, not sight. Often these two senses work together, a concept I was able to prove to myself just a few days ago. I woke up in the morning, opened my eyes and saw that what little light there was not bright, but grey. It was the kind of color that could be associated with very early morning and without looking at a clock, I at first thought that that was exactly the case. But then I heard a rumble overhead and by listening more closely I noticed that I could hear rain outside. The grey light was not early morning at all, but an indication of a thunderstorm. Without actually hearing the thunder, my sense of sight would have been incomplete and, in fact, completely mistaken.


Touch can also be a conveyor of information. I have two cats, one long hair and one short. If one of them comes up to me in the dark, I can learn which one of them it is simply by feeling the difference in their fur. Smell and taste are more subtle senses, ones that probably aren't considered as learning devices like sight and hearing are. Smell though is able to tell you simply that a flower smells nice, or it could be used as a warning device. If you smell something foul coming out of a room before you open the door, you are going to be cautious when you go inside. And even if it would be impossible to learn about the fox and the dog through taste, just being able to learn that something tastes salty adds to your valuable data bank of information about the world.