There is no ‘fast and slow’ in learning and learning development. Kahneman was wrong in suggesting that human enaction was binary, 1 and 2 or ‘fast and slow. All educators know that there is no fast and slow in learning (https://safetyrisk.net/what-theory-of-learning-is-embedded-in-your-investigation-methodology/). One thing Teachers know more than others is that learning is a ‘wicked problem’ and has nothing to do with training.

When we understand the nature of learning and how humans learn, we know that learning develops slowly and takes a long time to become proficient.

When I was 10, my father taught my brother and I how to play the trumpet. At the start, all you can really do is just get a sound out of the instrument. The muscles in the cheeks and the shape of the tongue have to be shaped into a few ‘affordance’. Learning how to shape the mouth to the affordance of the instrument takes time, patience, perseverance and hard work.

In this way, all musical instruments are learned by shaping the body to the affordance of the object. This is the foundation of ergonomics. Here is a pic of me playing a cornet at the age of 12 in a band. At the time I was playing in three bands, and it was heaps of fun. The more I played and practiced the more I improved. Until the embouchure (shape of the mouth) became automatic.

As my two boys grew up, I asked them if they would also like to learn to play and when they said ‘yes’, the same process started, as my father had taught me.

We began with slow making noises, reshaping the mouth and tongue, then learning the fingering, learning correspondence of sound to the notes on as page and then playing different parts against one another. Getting to the stage of playing in a trio like this took 12 months.

Here is a picture of us playing in a forest for a wedding.

We saw in our discussion on enactivism and music (https://safetyrisk.net/guide-enactivism-risk/), that all learning is Embodied, Embedded, Enactive and Extended. We don’t just learn with our brain but rather our whole-body coordinates and works together as one being in doing. Then when one gets to the stage of doing something automatically, one plays without thinking. One plays by intuition and bodily resonance. This is called ‘enactment’, a cognition where the body ‘acts’ without using the brain.

When we leave behind the disembodied idea of brain-centric thinking, we start to understand that most human decisions are NOT driven by the brain. Indeed, most of the time the body tells the brain what it is doing through all of its systems (nervous, endocrine, respiratory, integumentary (skin), muscular, digestive, cardiovascular, reproductive, cellular, urinary, feeling/emotional and skeletal systems).

When we observe people at work, we are mostly observing actions of people driven by heuristics, habit and automatic embodied thinking. How silly then is it to think that when something goes wrong that the best response is more ‘brain work’.

If one understands learning and ditches the nonsense of brain-centrism then new methods of approaches to risk are required. These methods are what we learn in SPoR.