The Secret to Becoming a Lifelong Learner
- Selina Barker
- 4 hours ago
- 3 min read
A commonly held belief about the brain is that it isn’t fully developed until the age of 25. The implication is that once a person reaches this age, their brain stops evolving and the neural structure becomes fixed. Despite the prevalence of this idea over the years, it’s nothing more than a popular myth.
The truth is that the human brain never stops developing. Though it has major developmental phases, it never loses its neuroplasticity – the ability to form new connections, reorganize its structure, and adapt and learn. That means that the knowledge and experience you have now are not the limits of what your brain is able to retain. You have the opportunity to grow, adapt, and evolve every single day.
Learning Over Time
The brain’s ability to continue developing over a lifetime is great news when it comes to becoming a better driver and improving your skills.
Consider young drivers. Young men are consistently ranked as one of the highest risk groups on the road. While youth is a period associated with inexperience, it is also a period of profound learning for new drivers, whose time behind the wheel shapes the drivers they will become as they grow older.
“...adolescence and young adulthood are periods of massive potential, not just risk. The brain’s malleability in these years is a feature, not a bug.”
Car insurance rates are a reliable indicator of risk across demographics. Predictably, teenagers have some of the highest rates due to their inexperience and a higher number of incidents on average. Though rates tend to dip at around age 25, they don’t plateau. Drivers in their 50s and 60s tend to have the best rates, a result of decades of experience that have enabled them to become more skilled at safe and defensive driving.
While young drivers have the most to learn in terms of defensive driving, drivers of all ages can learn new lessons and improve their skills, even after decades of driving. Continual learning is actually vital to keeping safe driving skills alive. It can be easy for bad habits to slip in or become so commonplace that we no longer question them. Active learning at any age leads to increased awareness of how we are making decisions and carrying out maneuvers. In essence, active learning leads to active driving, which is a critical part of staying safe behind the wheel. Learning is not a box to check. It is a process that we can – and should – participate in continually. It is encouraging to know that we can always learn something new, because it means we can always improve and grow.
Opportunities for Growth
We tend to think of learning opportunities as self-contained events, limited to things like school or short-term training courses. However, there is a different way to think about learning, and that is as a continual process that is happening all the time.
Lifelong learners see every experience as an opportunity to learn and grow. In doing so, not only are they constantly learning, but they are constantly presented with situations that reinforce the knowledge they’ve gained. This is important because repeated and reinforced lessons help store knowledge in our long-term memory, which is more effective in producing real change.
Personalized Learning
At alertdriving, we embrace the idea of lifelong learning and provide safe driving lessons that are engaging, recurring, and designed to meet you where you are. Our lessons aren't static: they include text, video, audio, and interactive elements. Managers can keep up to date with the content assigned to their drivers, facilitating more engaged and productive conversations and fostering a strong safety culture.
Finding the best learning system for your organization can seem daunting. Everyone wants to improve the safety of our roads, but it’s hard to know where to start. At alertdriving, we provide a one-stop shop of products that will meet any organization’s needs. Our continuous training model addresses your top risk concerns and prioritizes defensive driving as a means to lowering your incident rate and keeping your drivers safe behind the wheel.
If you’d like more information on how alertdriving can help your drivers become lifelong learners, you can reach out to our team for more information at sales@alertdriving.com
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