You absolutely love to learn, though you might not believe that yet. Let’s first talk about why you enjoy learning and then we’ll get into how you can love it too.
First, we’ll define the word learning as synapsing existing memories to new information. When you learn a new word, you link the visual spelling, auditory sound and conceptual meaning of the word together. When you learn how to play an instrument, you are linking your motor center to the sound and the note on the sheet music. Learning is not limited to academics; you are constantly learning.
Learning happens when any new synapses form, whether it be how a person’s day is going or the observation that it is sunny outside today. Every time you gain new information, your brain releases pleasure to encourage you to do more of that. Your curiosity is nothing more than a addictive dependence on learning. When you are learning nothing new, you feel a terrible withdrawal from that pleasure known as boredom.
You are learning any time you socialize at school or work since you are gaining new information about the characters you’ve made of your peers. You are learning every time you watch or read a story since you are adding to those fictional characters as well as piecing together a plotline. We enjoy learning so much that we begin to hypothesize further into the story with fan theories. Creating fan theories is learning beyond just consuming information since anyone can build their own universes based on an original story, releasing more pleasure.
We enjoy learning so much that we do it without even thinking about it. Have you ever heard a new word and immediately mouthed it out? Maybe you tried the new dance move you saw someone performing on TV. You are taking the information that you have just consumed and you are linking that information to more neurons. In these cases, you are synapsing the motor movement of your lips and tongue or the movement of a dance move to mirror what you saw on TV. Like I said earlier, you are constantly learning!
Love is an adapted form of attraction which usually synapses to something that we recognize as related to us. We can love another person because of their similarities to us, we can love a team because they play for us. When you synapse newly learned information to yourself, you can fall in love with it too. One of my favorite artists asked in a song, “Can you fall in love with the things you only know, the things that you may never touch?” Yes, you can love an idea just as much as anything that exists in the Show.