For a McFly look at Unlearning go Back to the Future

A couple of things got me thinking today. The first was due to a comment about unlearning after I overheard a conversation about a change of system and process. "Am I supposed to just unlearn everything I have been taught over the last few years?" The answer given to them was a simple "yes" and then the killer question was driven home, "so how do I unlearn?" You could hear a pin drop, then a few cogs, then an overheating neural processor before finally the manager uttered the words "just forget about it" 

You could see this was not the answer the person was looking for and I felt it was time for That Learning Dude to ride to the rescue but I stopped myself. You see, it is something I have heard a few times now in the last couple of months and I should have responded along the lines of "we are made up of our experiences, our culture, our interactions. A product of ourselves, however sometimes if you want to continue to personally evolve etc etc you sometimes have to unlearn, challenging ideals that you may have held for sometime etc etc etc blah blah blah. Imagine a cup full of water, imagine yourself pouring the contents of that cup out and watch as it soaks into the earth. The earth quickly dries up and your water  is gone, that water is the water you once"......STOP ! I have a better idea. That Learning Dude was also sourcing a Back to the Future clip and that got me thinking.

I then have to admit, I got lost in thought....

If you got sent back in time, what are the things you know now that would help you learn then to be better now? Unlearning Back to the Future Style.

Take Marty. A lot of what Marty experiences is the process of unlearning in order to create a better life for himself in the future although it is not necessarily his intention. The pursuit of happiness for Marty is also beset by rejection as his band fails to make the grade in the audition for the high school dance. It is interesting to note that a lot of his success as rock n roll legend is not provided by unlearning the style or instrument of his future success but by unlearning the experience of rejection. His rendition of that future hit from his past Johnny B. Goode excites Marvin Berry enough to call his cousin Chuck with that great new sound he'd been searching for........oh how Marvin could have unlearned from helping his cousin and made it HIS new sound instead.

Now Marty isn't the only one that has to go through the process of unlearning, although Doc Brown has a slightly different journey. What he knows in 1985 about the 1.21 Gigawatts of power required to power the flux capacitor in order to travel back and forth in time is perceived by his 1955 self as unthinkable and therefore he has to unlearn or unconvince his current conviction that this is a truly unthinkable thing to think. However, Marty through the medium of a portable TV studio and the Docs ability to remind himself in a letter to pass to his future self to tell himself from the past of what to do in the future is enough to keep a good story line going...................although I think I may unlearn that one for the benefit of my own cranium.

All in all though the Doc demonstrates many of the thoughts I have on unlearning. There is something in it but I am not fully bought in to the empty the vessel type examples and certainly wouldn't advocate it because for me things we learn are all connected to either lessons learnt or lessons still to be taught and also I think there are somethings that will never be unlearned......just ask Biff.........he never stopped hating manure !



Now if you'll excuse me I am heading out to see if my little car can hit 88 miles an hour, I think I spotted a spelling mistake in a post from July, if successful you will never have noticed it.

That Learning Dude @learningXDude