pain and learning — Tarik Yildirim

FAAH is a protein that breaks down anandamide, also known as the “bliss molecule,” which is a neurotransmitter that binds to cannabinoid receptors. These are some of the same receptors that are activated by marijuana. With less FAAH activity, this patient was found to have more circulating levels of anandamide, which may explain her resistance to feeling pain.

... Dr. James Cox, another author and senior lecturer at the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research at University College London, said, “Pain is an essential warning system to protect you from damaging and life-threatening events.” Another disadvantage to endocannabinoids and their receptor targets is that poor memory and learning may be unwanted byproducts. Researchers said the Scottish woman reported memory lapses, which mirrors what is seen in mice missing the FAAH gene.
Jacquelyn Corley - The Case of a Woman Who Feels Almost No Pain Leads Scientists to a New Gene Mutation

Pain is needed to register what is learned. As they say, no pain no gain.

You can easily tell that you are not learning much if everything is flowing too smoothly. You take notice only upon encountering the unexpected and the unexpected is painful.

I advise mature students to stay away from well-written textbooks. They are like driving on a wide and empty highway. Typos keep you alert, logical gaps sharpen your mind and bad arguments force you to generate new ideas. You should generally make the reading process as hard for yourself as possible.

Educational progress can be achieved by making either the content or the environment more challenging. If you can perform well under constraints, you will perform even better when the environment normalizes.

Engagement enhances learning not because it increases focus but because it increases grit. Struggle is necessary. If the teaching is not engaging, student will more easily give up on the struggle. The goal is not to eliminate the struggle.
The more confident a learner is of their wrong answer, the better the information sticks when they subsequently learn the right answer. Tolerating big mistakes can create the best learning opportunities.
David Epstein - Range (Page 86)

So the harder you fall the better. The more wrong you turn out to be, the more unforgettable will the experience be. As they say, never waste a good crisis.

People usually go into defensive mode when their internal reality clashes with the external reality. That is basically why persuasion is such a hard art form to master. The radicalized easily become even more radicalized when you try to lay a convincing path to moderation.

Of course, there are times when you need to close up, refuse to learn and stick with your beliefs. World is complex, situations are multi-faceted, refutations are never really that clear. In some sense, every principle looks stupid in certain contexts. The principled man knows this and nevertheless takes the risk, because he thinks that looking stupid sometimes is better than looking like an amorphous mass of jelly all the time. Someone who is constantly learning and therefore constantly in revision mode runs the danger of becoming jelly-like. Sometimes one may need to prefer the pain of resisting to the pain of learning.

The essence of the neuromatrix theory of pain is that chronic pain is more a perception than a raw sensation, because the brain takes many factors into account to determine the extent of danger to the tissues. Scores of studies have shown that along with assessing damage, the brain, when developing our subjective experience of pain perception, also assesses whether action can be taken to diminish the pain, and it develops expectations as to whether this damage will improve or get worse. The sum total of these assessments determines our expectation as to our future, and these expectations play a major role in the level of pain we will feel. Because the brain can so influence our perception of chronic pain, Melzack conceptualized it as more of "an output of the central nervous system.”
Norman Doidge - The Brain’s Way of Healing (Page 10)

Pain is not an objective factor. As with everything else, it is gauged in an anticipatory manner by the mind. If you implicitly or explicitly believe that the associated costs will be greater, your pain will be greater.

Since pain is necessary for learning, this means that learning too is done in an anticipative manner. That is why proper coaching is so essential. The student needs to have some idea about what he desires for the future so that his cost function becomes more well-defined.

When one has no expectation from the future, one is essentially dead and floating, and has reverted back to basic-level survival mode. You need to make yourself susceptible to higher forms of pain. Some of the greatest minds I have met had mastered the art of getting mad and pissed-off. They were extremely passionate about some subject and had cultivated an exceptional level of emotional sensitivity in that area.