When we learn something new, there's often a heavy thinking cost in the beginning as we move from incompetence to competency. For example, those of you reading this have a high degree of reading competence, otherwise, you wouldn't read it. No one's paying you to read it, unless you're one of my colleagues preparing it for posting. No one's assigned it to you. You activated personal interest. Reading is likely enjoyable to you, at least for short forms like this. It's recreational rather than work, even though it, nonetheless, requires time, attention, and energy. At the same time, it's a level of effort, cognitive psychologists Elizabeth and Robert Bjork called "desirable difficulty."
In November two years ago, I watched my newborn grandchild struggling to communicate. There were many moments of expressed pleasure and many moments of what looked like painful frustration.
To communicate, Max needs to learn the sounds his parents make to communicate. Linguists call those sounds, phonemes. Infants babble about 200 different phonemes. Over time, they stop repeating sounds their parents don't reinforce. Eventually, they narrow their vocalizations to the sounds their parents use to say words. Max's parents speak English so he starts to use about 52 of the most commonly expressed sounds in English. Then he combines clusters of sounds to express words his parents both use and respond to. He now can create meaning. By age five, children learn about half the words they will use in their entire life. This half, to many parents' surprise and dismay, includes most of the taboo words in their language.
It has taken five years of effortful trial and error for children to learn first to recognize meaningful sounds, then to recognize meaning-packed clusters of sounds, we call words, then to build a vocabulary of meaningful clusters to reach fluency, After all that work over years, their brains seemingly effortlessly converse with others who have learned the same language.
Hah!
Now we introduce the customary symbols used to represent those sounds. They need to recognize those symbols expressed as pencil or pen marks, or made with paint, chalk, etched on the ground with a stick, sprayed on a wall from a can. All of which represent sounds and then clusters of sounds representing words. Fluency in all the language modalities: listening, speaking, reading and writing, takes an average of 10 years. Trust me, I taught third grade. Most of my nine-year olds were still honing in on these skills.
Ten years of hard labor, a lot of it in institutions.
Ten years of desirable difficulty.
What's amazing to watch is the snap into fluency that occurs at the end of all this labor. All of a sudden, we speak. All of a sudden, we read. In comparison to the learning, it feels effortless.
That snap into what feels effortless happens after many practices that require difficulty: riding a bicycle, tying one's shoes, catching a ball, driving a car.
Wisdom passed down from Sophocles to Ben Franklin to Jane Fonda: No pain; no gain.
All of this hard labor is to communicate with other humans. They create the tools that leverage the pleasure, and often painful frustration, of engaging other humans.
Accessing other tools of engaging other humans: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, and self control, require a lifetime of desirable difficulty.
We don't have machines to do those yet.