Thinking and Learning II

Several weeks ago, I wrote about how the more you know, the more you can learn (accessed here).

Adding to it with a bit of Ken Robinson into the mix (an animated TED Talk he's done can be found here).  Initially, I predominately indicated that it's useful to have a depth of knowledge from which you may be able to draw referenences and points of comparison, effectively interconnecting the web of information that exists all around us.  And I most certainly still see that as an incredibly valuable asset to have.  The ability to observe a situation, understand the circumstances, recognize likely outcomes, and acknowledge the otherwise unforeseen effects is an incredible ability indeed.

However, I beleve that there may in fact be two sides to the coin.  On the one side, we have depth of knowledge - expereince and insight perhaps only gleaned through conscious effort to learn.  On the other side, I think we can find breadth of knowledge - experience and background into a wide range of topics.  This one's a bit more difficult for me to convey, mostly because I'm not a psychologist.  But I'll give it a shot:

The human mind is perhaps one of the most intricate and interconnected system of avenues and information in the history of the world.  no computer has even come close to providing anything on par with it, and as such, there's still much we don't fully understand.  What we, as humans, have come to learn about the human mind is that it's very dynamic and very diverse.  Two hemisphere's compose the brain, one, on the left, controlling logical/deductive reasoning and the other, on the right, controlling our artistic ability, spatial awareness, and creativity.  It's fun - to draw the left hemisphere, we need the right.  To study and learn about the right hemisphere, we need the left.  The two sides don't operate in a vacuum: they intermingle data from one side to the next, back to the first, shoots it over...and so on and so on and so on and so on, and it happened faster than you read this sentence.

Pretty cool, eh?

But what that means, however, is that as we learn, the dynamic and plastic nature of our mind organizes, accumulates, and reorganizes data in such a way that we haven't even begun to fully understand the pathways and synapses and connections made in the categorization of information.  What we know and what we've experienced shapes our perceptions and influences how we view the world around us.  The language we speak and use influences how we see the world more than how we see the world influences our language.  The experiences each of us have and the encounters we face all play a role in some way, shape, or form how we see the world, and in turn, perceive future events.  As such, if all we study and all we know is, for instance, 19th century English literature, we limit ourselves to (predominately) only be able to perceive the world through that singular lens.  Adding breadth to your knowledge, though, may just be the key to an ability to see more...