Two Things

I learnt an interesting thing recently about learning itself. It’s common experience that when we go over something new, there are perhaps a lot of lessons that we’d think that we could take from it. For example think of an interesting marketing lecture you attended in college (you’d note that I have this habit of referring to marketing lectures every now and then, I think that’s probably because those were the lectures I most enjoyed during my MBA). Okay so once you go back from the lecture, you’d probably mull over it and find that there were a lot of new things that you learned during that lecture, and if you’re me you’d probably even feel quite happy about it. The question is, would you retain and recall all of those things the next day?

Well, maybe you’re that awesome and exceptional and would perhaps recall all of those new things to the last detail. But then most of us would find it somewhat difficult to remember all of those new ideas, and which would progressively fade out of our memory (which makes me think, it would be an interesting research topic to understand the variables that affect the rate of fading or decay of ideas, and maybe even derive a certain formula to calculate the average half-life of a certain kind of idea). Sorry for drifting away there for a bit. So, you see the point that ideas, by virtue of their dynamic nature, have this tendency to evolve and metamorphose into something big and entirely different from the original stimulus that triggered them in the first place, to the extent that sometimes you may even forget what the starting point of it all was! The point is that it is but natural that you tend to lose out on a lot of apparently valuable ideas over a period of time (unless you relentlessly jot all of them down, and refer to those notes every once in a while).

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Now coming to what I learnt recently, when you go over a large amount of content in a relatively short period of time, it’s helpful to follow a simple process, which as my trainers from whom I learned it would call it the ‘Two Things’. Just think about the session and imagine that if you were to retain just two things from this session what they would be. Remember the key is to do this as soon as the session gets over, and framing your two things in a way that broadly capture all of your learning from that session. And the good thing is while you’re framing those two things, your brain sets-up all the necessary connections in the background, which would at a later point in time help you to recall most of what you learnt that day. That sounds really simple but is actually very effective (as most simple things are!).

Try that out and share your experience here in comments, also if you have a similar simple method that you think works great for you do share it with us.

© Jayant Rana 2012-Present

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A Theory on the Explosion of Ideas

A word of caution: the views expressed below may not conform to established schools of thought, hence the following ideas are meant for a very select category of audience, and may not be appealing to most of the casual readers.

There are times when idea after idea explodes in your mind…and all you want is to capture them, but then again another one explodes, and after that another one… Deep within you know it’s pertinent to hold on to a few, if not all of those ideas, so that your existence may get some respite from the mundane series of aberrant, unimaginative and intermittent ideas that your brain usually comes up with, when called for duty. You also know beforehand that after these explosions are over, and apparent calm engulfs your neurons for another uncertainly long phase of those dry ideas, that this entire thing is going to leave you somewhat frustrated afterwards.

And that’s because howsoever much your heart may pine, it’s impossible to catch hold of all of those ideas once they’ve exploded, because ideas travel faster than the speed of light, and so, their escape velocity when they explode is totally unimaginable. Because imagination itself is an idea, and to imagine (or to take a rough measure of)  those exploded ideas would mean backtracking them with imagination, which according to the laws of basic physics (if at all they're still applicable at those imaginary levels) would present another impossibility, as the relative speed of that imagination as compared to an exploded idea would further be unimaginable, since by virtue of their motion in perfectly opposite directions their absolute velocities would add up! To cut a long story short, an explosion of ideas is bound to leave you somewhat frustrated!

It happens with all of us, maybe with a higher frequency for a few; but all of us definitely do experience  explosions of ideas often in our lives. But then the question is, why do concepts of ‘dry’, ‘unimaginative’,and ‘run-of-the-mill’ ideas exist in human society? Maybe, it’s all because of a vicious cycle of frustrations and creative explosions that has conditioned in us a reflex, which has created in us an aversion to imagination. My question is, could this be a possible explanation for the drying up of ideas in humans, or is there a more insidious dimension to it?

As a child, every human very nearly survives on those explosions in the mind, as the child senses the outside world and tries to absorb and assimilate the outwardly physical manifestations in the form of inwardly psychological impressions. S/he is forced to create a first impression of everything that s/he happens to come in contact with, initially physically, and at a later stage, even mentally through parental guidance and other media. At times though, s/he has to wipe clean his old impressions and rewrite them as per others' instructions, but that process of rewriting is not very easy, as impressions on a tender mind can be more difficult to erase than etchings on steel.  So, the crux is that a multitude of explosions through childhood create an almost equal amount of first-impressions, and those impressions are hard to displace by others' ideas and impressions.

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Hence, out of that difficulty in displacement and a subsequent replacement of impressions, a need for  the same was felt and eventually was born the concept of training or teaching. And only those minds respond best to teaching that are most tender and which have not already turned into steel-plated entities. So thereby results a variety of learning capabilities and a whole big normal distribution of students, which only but represents a normal distribution of their mental capabilities. So the part about being born with equal amount of mental capability might just be correct, who knows? And the modern funny quote that goes something like this – ‘I was born intelligent but education ruined me’, may to a certain, extent be correct, because even though education was a perfectly natural concept, but it had to be delivered through artificial agents…that is humans.

So, there comes into play the quintessential ‘man vs. wild’ concept, or the inherent incompatibility between the artificial and the natural, which incidentally are antonyms too. So the concept of teaching of man by man was fundamentally flawed, or at least, very, very far-fetched, even if we consider the premise that teaching can somehow be perfected to be totally natural. But that premise  itself is again flawed, as it completely ignores the earlier notion that two minds are totally unique in their impressions (because of totally unique and possibly mutually exclusive environment variables) and hence, one mind trying to replace another’s impressions with its own, presents a near impossibility (unless of course things like ‘Inception’ become possible!). Also there additionally might be a purely physical concept like that of a resonance frequency for every brain, at which it might be possible to write or rewrite something on to it with complete ease, or in other words, totally naturally! It’s a world full of possibilities…

So where does this theory leave us? Well, for one, it forces us to question that whether the artificial (man-made) and institutionalised system of formal education is in the best interest of human race? Does scope exist for any possible perfection of present education delivery system to replicate the natural process of learning? Was the idea of education itself man-made, and not natural…?

Well, maybe it’s that continual process of formal teaching that almost invariably tried to wipe out your own impression and replace them with more collectively accepted impressions, and which somewhere calms down those explosions of ideas in one's mind. And this slow but sure process of slowing down those explosions can then lead to unconventional reactions from individuals who have a high resistance for being weaned away from those natural outbursts of ideas. And many a times, those people are the ones who create wonders and great inventions which we all amaze at; and when they’re asked how they did it…they always have the simple, but obviously natural, answer that all they did was listen to their hearts! Isn’t that a perfectly logical explanation to what people like Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Walt Disney and countless other similarly great humans have demonstrated to us in reality. The fact that we called them all irrational and stupid at first, when they dropped out of school and with it the formal education system to follow their hearts, only to be glorified by us ultimately, gives even more credence to this theory. All of them had one thing in common, that they refused to be common.

Meanwhile, others, who weren’t so confident of their convictions, were restrained by the artificial education system and they were forced to ignore their internal explosions and concentrate only on what the so-called ‘conventional wisdom’ had to offer. That had a devastating effect on the human race. A majority of capable, fertile, and enthusiastic minds that could have been the fountainheads of novel ideas and inventions. But everything imploded into that ‘could have been’…

But the ideas still exploded, although with a lesser regularity than before, but now the shackles of conventional wisdom slowed down that once vigorous and virile mind from pursuing those ideas or at least, creating lasting impressions of all of them. Only a few made impressions…others faded away…and with further passage of time and many subsequent attempts at rewriting of first-impressions, the dust from that explosion finally settled down and our minds receded into a sinister calm. A calm that would come back to haunt us every time creativity would be demanded of us...hence resulting in frustration. And that completes that vicious cycle of explosion of ideas and subsequent frustration, which further lead to the latent build-up of newer ideas culminating again in an explosion of those pent-up ideas. It is only natural that as we get used to that frustration at not being able to pursue our hearts, that pressure of pent-up ideas takes longer and longer to build up and thus leads to lesser and lesser frequent explosions of ideas.

This radical new theory raises some very fundamental questions, which if answered, have the potential to transform the understanding we humans have of our modern world. I would love much to philosophise further and explore deeper into it and shape-up my new theory, but then it is not without reason why mankind drifted so much from the fountainhead it was born as. Formal education requires me to submit an assignment, and prepare two presentations for tomorrow, which means I am forced to quit on my imagination and drift unwittingly in the dry river of our good ol' conventional wisdom. The final question is – when would my next explosion of ideas hit me with a jolt that would force me to think again and get frustrated enough so that enough pressure builds up once more for the subsequent explosion…!

P.S.: I hope soon.

© Jayant Rana, 2012-Present

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