As I've said elsewhere in these posts, I'm various kinds of outdoors-ist. I'm also a bit of an amateur neuroscientist (I studied cognitive psychology and the neurobiological end of psychology in the days before the term 'neuroscience' was really used). Reading Tristan Gooley's "The Natural Navigator" prompted some thoughts about how learning and perception works, and how that relates to the things that humans do in their interaction with the natural world. I'm particularly thinking about moving around in natural environments, foraging for food, hunting & so on - the things that made up our evolutionary history.
To set the scene, we need to look at how brains work. This is true of all animals - mammals, fish, insects, birds. It's also a massive simplification, just enough to understand the underlying concepts.
Brain cells
The nervous system is made up of cells. Neurons, of various sorts. They are basically little signalling pods. When they get a signal, they pass it on to other neurons, varying the strength of the signal.
Each of these pods signals something very simple - just how strongly it's active. It takes billions of them to make up a brain, and they work together to represent anything - a concept, a sound, something in your vision. You can think of them as being a bit like the pixels in a computer screen, it takes a large group of them to represent anything, but one neuron can be a part of lots of groups.
When we learn something, we don't learn it all in one go. Those connections between the neurons adjust their strengths at a coarse level to start with, then as things are repeated the adjustments are progressively finer.
You can see this in child development - a very young child makes large, clumsy movements when walking, handling objects etc. Gradually their motor control becomes finer and more subtle.
That's often thought to be a child development thing, but actually you can see it in adults when you learn any manual skill, like driving a car. To start with, your movements are jerky - the clutch is all the way on, then you declutch in a single large movement and the car lurches forward and stalls. Gradually those movements become finer, until you can balance the clutch and throttle to start on a steep hill easily. Eventually those motor skills are so finely learned that you don't even think about them, and you can drive to a place and suddenly realise that you've not really thought about the process of driving for most of the journey - you may even find it difficult to remember the journey at all.
It's important to note that although we think of developing fine control of physical movements (dance, learning to use tools, playing a musical instrument) as a muscular development, it's almost entirely a neurological thing. We're teaching our brain how to send the precise signals, and the nerves embedded in our muscles how to interpret them.
This is a fundamental of brain organisation - not just humans, not even just mammals, but how nerve cells throughout the animal kingdom work.
Natural skills
This 'gradually finer detail' applies to sensory discrimination too - the more you attend to sounds, sights and sensations in the natural world, the more finely you'll be able to discriminate between different things. That's where it starts to have a really noticeable impact on outdoor skills, which are mostly about understanding the environment you're in. I'll return to the theme of immersion in your environment in a later post.
A friend and I have been mushroom foraging together for some years. A few times a year we'll head out with field guides, baskets and magnifiers to see what we can find. There are certain species that we aim for - ones that are easy to identify with a high degree of confidence: amethyst deceivers, boletes of all sorts and the 'pied de mouton'/hedgehog fungus particularly. What we've repeatedly found is that we can identify likely candidates for our target species from quite a distance, through tiny holes in leaf litter, purely down to the particular shades of colour they display. We're not always right, positive identification is still necessary of course, but being able to spot likely mushrooms easily is an obvious advantage for an animal foraging for food. This has come about through looking at hundreds, thousands of mushrooms and unconsciously learning to recognise very subtle patterns in shape and shade. In our 'natural' state as animals, we would learn to discriminate many different foods from childhood in this automatic way. The colour discrimination is so subtle that I can fairly confidently spot deceivers (the brown variant of the amethyst) by their similarity to their purple cousins. (I don't collect deceivers, they have that name for a reason.)
Natural navigation
Back to Gooley and natural navigation. He makes much mention of Pacific Islanders' navigation ability using patterns of currents, appearance of the water, stars, and other means. It seems likely that someone who has spent hundreds of hours practicing navigation on the open sea by a combination of different sources will just 'know' where they are in relation to their surrounds, and probably have to think carefully to express what contributes to that knowledge.
This is what the brain does. It responds to repeated training of the same information to a point where it becomes automatic. This is what natural skills should be, not a set of handy tips and lists, but an integrated unconscious awareness of ones surroundings.
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