Unconscious Learning

Human beings have an innate unconscious tendency to learn from others. For instance, In our daily interactions we talk with many people but it happens that we tend to grasp words, phrases, tonality only from the people we interact with the most. 

This happens so gradually at the unconscious level that most of the people don't realize.If would like to explore this magic that happens inside our brain to grasp a word from the cobweb of communications, remember it and reuse it repeatedly, keep reading. 

unconscious learning is not limited to communications but it has a larger impact on how an individual behaves. conscious learning is noticed and known whereas unconscious learning is rarely noticed even after the individual starts practicing that learning as his/her routine. Unconscious learning  shapes up the overall personality of an individual and changes he is exposed to in periodic unconscious learning. 

In simple terms conscious learning is something that you know you have learned while unconscious learning is something you learned but you are not aware that you have learned it. 


I was recently approached by a young married couple. In the first online meeting they informed me that their 4 year old child is out of control. Child behaves very aggressively in school, beats his fellow students. Most shameful part for his mom was that the child often becomes highly abusive and throws bad words in every alternative statement. His mother cried and said, "This child is a shame for us, we have stopped attending family and social gatherings due to this very reason".

We decided to explore his abusive behaviour. Later we interacted with this child to figure out where he learned this abusive behaviour. His mother detailed this child's daily routine, In that description she said, their driver drops and picks the child from school. We fixed a camera in the car to find out whether something is happening during the drive, while viewing the recording we found that the driver talks on the phone in very abusive language. Further when bad words of driver and child were compared we found 84% match, we noticed that tone of the driver and child matches 100% too. Thus the Young couple understood that their child learned this behaviour unconsciously from the driver. Child was not aware of his learning, neither he wanted to learn such behaviour. He was even not aware of what these bad words really meant. 

During everyday drive to school, Child watched the driver and grasped it unconsciously. 
after understanding the problem, his father said "I will drop him to school everyday from tomorrow". We asked the child and his family to revisit us after two weeks to find whether there is any change in the child's behaviour. They informed that within two weeks the child showed 50% improvement. 

Such Unconscious learning if not intervened can turn into a big problem. The story mentioned above is that of a child however people of all the ages can learn unconsciously. Unconscious learning does not necessarily bring negative impact, it can have positive as well as negative impact. Some teachers/trainers use unconscious learning methods that makes learning easy. I used several unconscious learning methods to teach english online. 

Please check my IGTV channel @satvikmind, all the language learning videos are designed in such a way that the viewer learns unconsciously without making serious conscious efforts like classroom learning. Unconscious learning methods are also used by sales people. advertisements we are exposed to daily teach us unconsciously to make an opinion about a product or services based on Images, information and audio-visual. an advertisement on the very first viewing is not consciously remembered by the viewer however after repeated viewing the advertisement gets hard printed in the viewers brain. This is how the magic takes place. 

An employee starts imitating his boss, a student starts acting like his teachers, best friends behave like each other, children start behaving like their parents.. these are some very common examples of unconscious learning.  

Following exercise is designed to help one explore such unconscious learning. Make a list of words/phrases/gestures/behaviors. let me know how many of them you have learned unconsciously from others.  

Words/phrases/gestures/ behaviour	When I learnt this?	Have I learnt this from someone else?  If ‘yes’, who was that person?