The Joy of Never Stopping: Why Learning Feels So Good

Yea I’m still on aliens, aliens might be out there, but even if they’re not, I still want to know why people believe they are. I want to know things. I want to know why the sky sometimes turns purple. I want to know about earthworms, nothing specific but just something. I want to re-learn how to juggle (and why I can’t seem to get past two balls anymore). Point is: I like learning stuff. Always have. And frankly I think I always will.

Whether it’s a new hobby, a weird historical fact, or something completely useless like facts about U.S. president phalluses, there’s something incredibly satisfying about feeding my brain for the hell of it. It doesn’t have to go anywhere. I don’t need to be quizzed on it, it really doesn’t need some grand sense of purpose. I just like knowing things. It’s fun. It feels good.

And, conveniently, as I’ve recently discovered, science backs me up on this.

There’s a growing pile of research that shows how continuous learning actually helps keep your brain younger, sharper, and more adaptable. The Center for BrainHealth (real place, not a bar I’ve lost trivia at) has found that challenging your brain with new learning builds something called “cognitive reserve.” It’s basically a mental buffer that helps protect against aging and even dementia. In short: keep learning, keep sharp. Stagnate, and… don’t.

It tracks. Whenever I’m learning something new, even something incredibly random and infuriating like how to crotchet, I feel this weird mix of excitement and satisfaction. Like not only is the yarn stretching, but my brain is stretching in a way it actually wants to. It’s not stressful. It’s curious and it’s genuinely one of my favorite feelings.

It’s also the reason why I go to bar trivia nearly every week with a few close buds, heck I may call them friends, nah we are friends they’re great. Shoutout Pinna, Nick and Derek. We call ourselves the Cream Boys, and each week, we change our team name to something increasingly stupid and increasingly brilliant. Past hits include “Cream Me Up, Scotty,” “Creambo No. 5,” and “The Creamators” Have we ever won? No. But we learn something every week, even Nick! But whether it’s the name of a 17th-century explorer or what country the Copacabana is in. (Not the NYC club from the song)

The beauty of trivia isn’t just in flexing what you know. It’s not about winning, I only say because we have never won, but It’s in realizing how much there is to know and how much you’ve been missing out on. It’s this mix of competition, comedy, and curiosity. And when someone on our team randomly knows the answer to a question that seemed impossible five seconds earlier, it’s quite a feeling, it’s orgasmic, it’s electric. Not because we’re geniuses, but because we put random pieces of knowledge together in the right way at the right moment.

There’s something almost defiant about learning for fun as an adult. As kids, learning is expected, learning is often seen as boring, It’s school, homework, grades. As adults, it’s like after college we’re supposed to stop. You’re either “done” learning or you’re going back to school for some job-related thing. But what about the rest of us who just want to know more? What if the pursuit of knowledge doesn’t need a goal?

As I’ve become a kindle guy the past few years I’ve also become a find books on Reddit kind of guy too and Tom Vanderbilt explores this learning phenomena in a great way in his book Beginners, where he tries out new skills like surfing, singing, and drawing, not to master them, but just to see what happens. The takeaway is incredibly mundane but kinda what I expected. Trying something new doesn’t just build skills, but it builds a better relationship with yourself and health is wealth and no better health than your mental health.

Curiosity, it turns out, is a superpower. One incredibly interesting yet super fucking hard to understand study in PLOS One showed that curiosity is linked to improved memory, greater motivation, and more creative thinking. It literally lights up reward centers in the brain. So yeah, watching a half-hour video on how deep-sea vents work is technically “doing nothing” but at the same time it’s also doing a lot behind the scenes.

I think the other reason I enjoy learning so much is because it’s one of the few things in life where failure doesn’t really matter. You can’t be bad at learning. You can be wrong, sure, but being wrong just gives you a path to being right about something else later. That’s how you get better. That’s how you find out cool things. That’s how we, the Cream Boys, went into halftime one time in 3rd place… we will not talk about what place we finished in (7th).

The world’s too interesting to sit back and let it roll by. I’m 26 I’m nearly a fossil, I don’t need to become an expert in anything at this point, but I like collecting little pieces of knowledge and skills here and there. None of it is wasted. Even if it never “comes in handy,” it still makes me more curious, more present, more connected. Plus on a date I can spit out some random information in case it’s ever useful.

In fact  researching for this blog kinda got my brain tingling, like the PLOS One article, that was a proper scientific study and me having not met the requirements in Chem 108 to continue on the science track in my undergrad, started to understand the article.  Now I’m not going to lie all the glutides and specific cells and lymphocytes, went over my head but I stayed committed and googled things that didn’t make sense.  And while trying to research something about “learning” I learned about science for the specific goal of learning about “learning.” And that’s just kind of amazing to me and something I love and I for as long as I am of healthy mind will continue to learn every day and that’s cool!