What If We Asked What Was Learned? Adaptation, military transition and the challenge of recalibration

Anthropology, neuroscience and a different way of thinking about adaptation, mental health and military transition

Much of our language around mental health begins once something has gone wrong.

We identify symptoms. We assess distress. We diagnose disorders. We develop treatments designed to reduce suffering.

All of this matters.

Over the last two years, through conversations with veterans and reflecting on military families, I find myself wanting to ask a slightly different question:

What did the person learn to become?

And, more specifically, what happens when a human being becomes exceptionally well adapted to one environment and then moves into another?

This question has led me into an unexpected meeting place between anthropology, neuroscience and psychology.

It has also made me wonder whether some of what we describe as difficulty following military service might sometimes be understood not only through the language of damage or disorder, but through the language of adaptation, persistence and recalibration.

Learning to perceive a world

Anthropology gives us an interesting place to begin.

We tend to imagine perception as relatively straightforward: the world is there and we see it.

But human beings learn what to notice.

Anthropologist Tim Ingold describes the development of skilled perception as an “education of attention”. Through repeated participation in particular environments, people become attuned to features of the world that matter within them (Ingold, 2000).

Consider an experienced sailor looking at the sea.

I might see waves.

They may see wind direction, currents, changing weather and navigational information.

The difference is not simply knowledge stored somewhere in the sailor’s head. Years of participation have changed what becomes perceptually significant.

Charles Goodwin also described something related as “professional vision”: socially organised ways of seeing and understanding events that develop within professional communities (Goodwin, 1994). His original analysis examined archaeology and legal practice, demonstrating how professions teach practitioners to identify and organise features of the world in particular ways. 

This raises an interesting question about specialist military occupations. Different, I know, but bear with me.

What does someone learn to notice when their work repeatedly requires them to detect risk, anomaly, environmental change or potential threat?

For someone working in bomb disposal, intelligence, reconnaissance or another specialist occupation, the environment may contain information most of us would never register.

I am not suggesting these occupations are identical, but they share something important: attention to details that can have significant consequences.

Over time, perhaps they do not simply know more about danger.

They may learn to perceive differently.

When culture gets under the skin

But perhaps this learning goes beyond what we consciously notice.

Some things become so practised that we no longer have to think about them. They become embodied. We respond, move and orient ourselves almost automatically. In other words, experience may shape not only what we know, but how we inhabit and respond to the world.

This is where anthropologist Thomas Csordas' work on embodiment becomes interesting. Csordas argued that the body is not simply something culture acts upon, but is fundamental to how we experience and engage with the world (Csordas, 1994).

Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus offers another part of the picture. Repeated participation within particular social worlds can produce relatively durable dispositions: characteristic ways of perceiving, responding and acting that eventually feel less like something we have learned and more like simply who we are (Bourdieu, 1977).

Military training provides an unusually powerful example of this possibility.

It deliberately develops particular capacities.

Attention.

Discipline.

Rapid decision-making.

Emotional containment.

Procedural thinking.

Responsibility.

The ability to operate effectively under pressure.

The ability to act despite fear.

These are capacities developed for a reason. In the environments for which they are developed, they may represent considerable expertise.

Seen this way, military training becomes interesting not simply because of what it teaches people to do, but because of what it teaches them to become.

Neuroscience tells another part of the story

Neuroscience offers another way of looking at the same process.

Brains and nervous systems change through experience. Neuroplasticity is not an abnormal process; it is fundamental to human learning.

Repeated experience influences perceptual learning, attentional priorities, memory and patterns of behavioural response.

Expertise research across many domains demonstrates this principle. A musician, athlete or medical specialist does not simply accumulate facts. Practice changes the efficiency with which relevant information is detected and acted upon.

Contemporary theories of predictive processing push this idea further.

Rather than understanding the brain as a passive receiver of information, predictive approaches propose that perception involves continual interaction between incoming sensory information and expectations generated from previous experience.

In simple terms:

experience helps teach the brain what is likely to matter next.

Imagine, then, an occupational environment in which a small anomaly can have enormous consequences.

Something out of place matters.

A change in behaviour matters.

A disturbed environment matters.

Uncertainty matters.

Repeated often enough, these are not irrational lessons.

They are accurate lessons about that particular world.

The important question is what happens when the world changes.

The environment can change faster than the person

A person can leave an operational environment in a day.

Their learning does not necessarily leave with them.

Home may demand a very different repertoire.

The capacity to tolerate unfinished things.

To allow somebody else to take responsibility.

To sit with uncertainty.

To move attention away from potential problems.

To communicate vulnerability rather than contain it.

To wait rather than act.

To relinquish control when control is unnecessary.

This does not mean military personnel inevitably struggle with these things. Nor should every behaviour following military service be interpreted as an occupational adaptation. Trauma, PTSD, depression, moral injury, brain injury, personality, relationships, socioeconomic circumstances and ordinary life events may all contribute to someone’s experience.

But the possibility of persistent adaptation gives us another lens.

Instead of asking only:

What has gone wrong?

we might also ask:

What remains extremely well learned?

Regulation is not the same as calm

This distinction also changes how we think about nervous-system regulation.

Popular discussions of wellbeing sometimes imply that calmness represents regulation while physiological activation represents dysregulation.

Human physiology is more complicated than that.

Someone responding effectively to an emergency may have an elevated heart rate, increased physiological arousal and intensely focused attention while remaining extremely well regulated for the task in front of them.

The relevant capacity may therefore not be permanent calmness.

It may be flexibility:

the ability to mobilise when mobilisation is required and to recover when it is not.

That connects interestingly with psychological flexibility within Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT).

Put simply, psychological flexibility is the ability to respond to the situation in front of us rather than automatically doing what our adaptations, habits, emotions or old learning tell us to do. Evidence increasingly supports the relationship between psychological flexibility, psychological distress and wellbeing, although measurement and causal questions remain important areas of research. 

The problem may not be vigilance itself, but whether vigilance becomes the default response regardless of context.

Emotional containment is not inherently unhealthy.

The question is whether a person can also access emotional openness when connection requires it.

Self-reliance can be an extraordinary strength.

The question is whether somebody can also receive help.

The same adaptation can therefore be functional in one environment and costly in another.

And then there is belonging

Neuroscience cannot explain the whole experience of transition.

Human beings do not simply leave occupational tasks.

They leave social worlds.

Military service can provide identity, structure, ritual, shared language, status, purpose and unusually strong forms of belonging.

Anthropology reminds us that mental health cannot be separated completely from these social and cultural environments.

A person might therefore experience difficulty after leaving service not simply because their nervous system remains highly activated, but because the world in which their skills, identity and relationships made sense has disappeared.

The transition is biological, psychological and social.

That distinction matters.

Families adapt too

There is another layer that I would argue deserves considerably more attention that it currently receives.

People do not adapt to environments in isolation.

Families adapt to one another.

If an occupational environment shapes how someone attends, responds, communicates or manages uncertainty, family members live alongside those patterns.

Over thousands of ordinary interactions, partners and children learn too.

They may learn when to approach.

When to give space.

What gets discussed.

What does not.

Who takes responsibility.

What counts as danger.

How emotions are expressed.

How uncertainty is managed.

Perhaps children undergo their own education of attention. They learn what matters in a family, what is talked about, what is left unsaid, and what kinds of responses are valued.

Many adaptations may become strengths: independence, perceptiveness, responsibility, humour, loyalty, competence and an ability to function when circumstances are difficult.

But it does raise an important research question:

Can occupational adaptations become part of family culture, and under what circumstances do those adaptations remain useful or become restrictive?

That is a subtly different question from asking whether trauma is transmitted between generations. The question is not simply what harms persist, but what forms of learning persist.

From repair to recalibration

This brings me to a word I keep returning to:

recalibration.

Recalibration does not assume that something is broken.

A system can be functioning precisely as it learned to function and still need to adjust when circumstances change.

Perhaps this gives us another way to think about some aspects of military transition and wellbeing.

Not:

How do we return this person to normal?

But:

What did this person become exceptionally good at?

What environment required that adaptation?

Which parts remain valuable?

Which responses no longer fit the present context?

And how can someone develop enough flexibility to move between different ways of being?

This is not an argument against diagnosis or clinical treatment.

Where PTSD, depression, anxiety, brain injury or another clinical condition is present, appropriate assessment and treatment matter enormously.

It is an argument for widening the lens.

Anthropology reminds us that human beings are shaped through participation in cultural worlds.

Neuroscience shows us that repeated experience can shape perception, attention and responding.

Psychology shows us the importance of behavioural and psychological flexibility.

Family research reminds us that adaptation happens relationally.

Perhaps wellbeing sits somewhere in the conversation between them.

Because sometimes the most useful question may not be:

What is wrong with you?

It may be:

What did your world teach you to become and what does your world require of you now?

I suspect those questions may tell us something important about military transition. They may also tell us something about adaptation more generally.

References

Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge University Press.

Csordas, T. J. (Ed.). (1994). Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self. Cambridge University Press.

Goodwin, C. (1994). Professional vision. American Anthropologist, 96(3), 606–633. 

Ingold, T. (2000). The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill. Routledge.

Macri, J. A., & Rogge, R. D. (2024). Examining domains of psychological flexibility and inflexibility as treatment mechanisms in acceptance and commitment therapy: A comprehensive systematic and meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 110, 102432.