Some particularly brilliant people seem to have the ability to access their entire map of ideas: these are the kinds of people who can rattle off a long, well-organized presentation on a topic without notes or other forms of planning. Looking at a particular idea, I can see where it is ‘located’ relative to a few nearby ideas, but what I really want access to is the whole map. At least for me, thinking flows a little like topics in a conversation: in my mind I can travel from idea to idea along the connections in the map, just as a long conversation can lead from topic to topic (sometimes so much so that we pause and ask “how did we get onto this topic?”). When I sit down and think about something, I can travel the byways of this map. In other words, we seem to house a huge ‘map’ of ideas in our mind, and learning is the process of adding ideas to this map or finding new connections between ideas already on the map. Although admittedly the physical structure of the brain may not serve as an apt metaphor for how it actually works, it is reasonable to guess that what we call ‘knowledge’ and ‘understanding’ boils down to how different ideas are connected in our heads. So as we try to figure out how to make the best use of the brains we have, we will have to make some guesses as to how they work. Why? Well, because the brain is an incredibly complex network of interconnections, and we are not very good at understanding complex networks. Although the basic function of the neurons that make up our brain are well understood and neuroscientists have an impressive array of technologies that can scan our brains at work, no one has cracked the code of the human brain. No one knows where knowledge and understanding are stored in our heads. It is as if all these ideas interact in a diverse community, housed in my head, and the arrival of new ideas has the potential to reconfigure that community. But some ideas are truly new, so novel that they compel the existing ideas that I carry around in my head to move over, reconfigure themselves, or even disappear. Sometimes the ‘new ideas’ are not new at all, as they complement existing ideas that seem to have taken up permanent residency in my head: when I watch an object fall in a movie, my brain takes scant notice of this idea as it simply confirms the very well-established idea that gravity compels objects to fall. As I consume media - especially media designed to inform - these thoughts intensify. As I read or listen or watch, my brain makes rapid connections between the new ideas I can recognize in the media I am consuming and the old ideas that I have held in my mind. If your brain is anything like mine, thoughts pretty much constantly race across it.
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