in reply to There is more cargo where that cult came from!

I want to say that this simply isn't true. I can't, though; there is a grain of truth to it.

However, I feel it's an oversimplification. "Repetition is learning!" No, no it isn't. I may be an anomaly, but I can tell you that memorizing times tables is not the same as learning how to multiply.

"Well, no. But after you look at how it works a few hundred times, you start to *learn how* to multiply."

That is, traditionally, how it's happened. I don't believe that's the essence of the mental transaction, however. The key is pattern recognition.

You've seen this before. The teacher shows everyone their times tables and one child can predict answers well ahead of the others. "Fast learner!" the educational system exclaims.

They've merely recognized the pattern before other people have.

The real key in it is learning how to recognize patterns. Once you learn to recognize them, you begin to learn to streamline the learning of patterns; you figure out how to pick out the important parts, how to test patterns out, etc.

My own experience with martial arts (which included said Shotokan kata, coincidentally) is part of how I came to this conclusion. The trick is not so much the repetition; that was merely how it was done, and how it has always been done, and likely will always be done. The key, as in every other enterprise, has been figuring out the essentials of the pattern and then embellishing upon it once you've got the essentials down.

Repetition serves two purposes; it exposes you to the patterns within the actions, and it (rather surreptitiously) forces away those unwilling to be disciplined in their actions. It's not necessary, by any stretch.

Most of the time, if you've got several examples of something and you compare and contrast them all against each other, you can get effective notions of their patterns.

Note that I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with repetition. It just shouldn't be confused with actual learning. You can learn while repeating, but you don't have to repeat while learning.

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You are what you think.

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Re: Re: There is more cargo where that cult came from!
by poqui (Deacon) on Jan 18, 2002 at 01:22 UTC
    I agree, chaoticset, that is true with an external art, as I am assuming Shotokan Kata is.

    My experience is with Tai Chi Chuan, especially the Modified BeiJing variant of the Long Yang form.
    My Sifu starts out all students in learning the postures of the form (about 30 depending on how you count them). Learning the entire form, just the external positioning of it, takes about 3 months.
    However, the external postures are only a framework upon which to hang the real substance, which is the internal work that goes on while doing the postures: the movement and rotation of chi. Once the movement and rotation of chi is learned, one could almost do any external form, and as long as it is in balance, it would suffice.
    Advanced students learn a 4 posture form that can substitute for daily practice of the long form, if the mindfulness and inner work are true.

    More to the point: the specific repetition may not be necessary, but I believe that repetition of some kind *is* necessary to move the mind out of the (usually) stuck place it is in, in order for new learning to come in. Especially so, if the thing to be learned is to *replace* older learned habits (in this example, such as: carriage, balance, awareness).

    In other words, I see the repetition as a kind of "rocking the truck to get it out of a rut" kind of thing.
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