The color red has many associations to the subconscious. These associations lie dormant and unused until the first time she actually experiences the color red. No amount of study could enable her to understand every nuance of these associations to the color red. I think that she really would learn something upon first seeing the color red.
Those things would probably not be particularly important because if they were someone would have taken the time to write them down at some point and Martha would have read about them. Things like “The color red is associated with aggression” are easy enough to learn but they are only qualitative, not quantitative. Until she actually experiences the color she will have no idea exactly how strong those associations are.
Perceiving a color has many very subtle effects on the mind that are not easy to identify even while you are experiencing them. When Martha first perceives the color red she experiences these connections for the first time. I think this would suffice to explain that Martha feels like she has learned something, because she actually has learned something, it’s just too subtle to point out exactly what it is.
That said, I think you are right in principle in that different parts of the mind/ mental agents/ memes can work against each other by mistake or be harmful to the mind as a whole because they don’t realize that they don’t apply to a given situation. I just think that this particular scenario has a different explanation.
A technique that I have been using for several years to great effect is the following:
Whenever I think my decision making is affected negatively by an emotion I go through these steps:
Identify the exact nature of the emotion.
From an evolutionary point of view, what was the emotion’s original purpose?
What has changed since then that makes the emotion no longer useful today?
Internalize this and “convince” the emotion to stop.
I basically try to “talk” to my subconscious and convince it to stop. I don’t try to fight my subconscious or get it to accept reality but just mentally repeat those findings to myself until the irrational impulses of my subconscious are drowned out by the more rational response I designed.
I basically tell my subconscious that if it wants to help, it should just stop interfering with things that it is incapable of understanding.
Using this technique I have virtually eliminated all grief, resentment and desperation. I won’t try to eliminate pain as this can actually be quite useful. I have also used it to turn hatred into spite, as the later has less of a destructive effect (it is more passive and far less likely to result in an outburst).
I don’t know the reason why it works so well for me, but I could imagine that it is because I treat my subconsciousness’s irrational impulses not as obstacles to overcome but as a machine that is outdated and broken.
Essentially, instead of telling my subconsciousness to “shut up!”, I tell it to “stop helping me!”