Continuing Education

They say your mind is like a muscle. If you exercise it, it will get stronger. I believe this is true. We have all heard claims that doing crossword puzzles is good for older people, and may even forestall Alzheimer's.

I heard about a study recently where they determined that lead miners that read every day were less affected by the mentally debilitating effects of lead exposure. The theory was that people that kept mentally active had more neural connections and were able to "work around" the lost functions from damaged areas in the brain.

So there is growing evidence that you can physically improve your mind through mental exercise. It's not hard to believe, and it's not so easy to act on.

I listen to between 1 to 4 hours of podcasting each day. A lot of it is current events, and much of it is science, but I'm also improving my Spanish. I also listen to some college classes and books on tape. It's easier to listen to material than read it. You can exercise or work around the house when you listen to something. It also helps fill driving time rather than listening to the mindless drivel that the airwaves have become.

My grandfather used to talk about the most important thing you can acquire being knowledge. Authorities could always take away your possessions, but no one can take away what is inside your head. The same is true with a job. You can't guarantee that the job will be there next year or even next week, so you owe it to yourself to learn everything you can while on the job, knowing that you'll arrive at your next job more experienced and better prepared.

Why do we go to school, read books, learn subjects, struggle mightily and then just stop when summer comes or when we graduate? That's it? That's all you'll ever learn in life? What do you do from that point, just coast down until you die? I hate to think of 18 or 22 as a mental high water mark.

Two of my favorite movies are Good Will Hunting and Phenomenon. John Travolta's character in Phenomenon suddenly has the capacity to understand everything quickly and easily. What does he do? He reads most of the books in the public library. As a result, he starts figuring out deep secrets of many dissimilar subjects like plant fertilizer and earthquakes. Matt Damon's character is poor and lacked a good home. There wasn't much in the way of opportunity for him, given his upbringing. He was born with intelligence and a thirst for knowledge, and he educated himself simply by reading books on his own. The best line in the movie is when he scoffs at the pretentious Harvard student, saying "You got for $100,000 what I got for $1.50 in late fees at the public library."

No one was blocking these people from greater knowledge and understanding of the world. Oftentimes, what blocks a person is their own preconceptions. If you believe a subject is too hard for you, it's a self fulfilling prophecy. You don't try and therefore there is 0% chance that you will ever learn the subject. You were right about not being able to understand, but only by choice. The difference between a genius and anyone else is simply the amount of time and effort you are willing to put into something. School simply concentrates the effort and forces you to progress at a rapid pace.

In one of my favorite books, Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card, the boy genius Ender shows a natural and immediate aptitude for a competitive game that the children in his school are made to play. When he makes a particularly good move, one of his teammates says, "Packed head, Ender". The characters in the school had their own slang, and some of it was ok, but this phrase in particular resonated with me. Packed head. As in "your head is just packed full of knowledge".

It's what I try to do. I listen to scientists that are trying to understand the human mind, which is fascinating. How does it store knowledge? What happens when part of the brain gets damaged? How do you retrieve information from the brain? What kinds of electrical activity signify what kinds of thoughts or emotions? How much of the brain do we actually use? How much information can we store in the brain? Is there a limit? We try to emulate the human brain with computers. We create storage devices, each year holding more information. Each year our processors are faster. We try to program computers to use artificial intelligence to come up with thoughts independently, or at least recognize patterns and respond to them. But we have no idea what the human brain is capable of.

When I was about 10 or 12, I read an article in the paper about dreams. The article said that we only use 10% of our brains. (Recently, scientists have said this is probably not true.) The subconscious mind supposedly comprises the other 90%. This is supposed to be a part of your own brain that you do not control and do not have easy access to. The article was about dreams. It speculated that the subconscious mind could only communicate with the conscious mind during sleep through dreams. They also said that the subconscious mind did not think in words like the conscious mind, it was almost like an alien within. It communicated using symbolism, and what it communicated was all the things that you were not putting together from the daily activities. The subconscious watched everything you did, and figured out much of the "rest of the story" connections and missed interpretations, as well as clues about things going on around you that you may or may not have noticed. The article's main theme was that your subconscious mind had it all figured out and was trying to tell you all about it through your dreams. So for a few years, I kept a dream journal and interpreted my dreams. I learned many interested things and felt very in charge of my life and connected to my surroundings. That faded over the years, because it takes a lot of time to pay attention to your dreams, but the sense that you can figure it all out never did.

So I consume information as much as I can stand. Television doesn't count. Well, there is some that does, but watching television is a trap because the sexy flashing titillating content will always lure you away from the substance. Movies don't usually count, but some are very good. I'm not saying you should stay away from all the fluff and simplistic stuff, sometimes it's fun to relax and laugh at the simple things in life. I'm suggesting a balanced diet, rich in mental nutrients, protein, and vitamins.

I find that much of what you learn spills over the field you're looking at and crosses over to apply to other fields. Strange principles resonate. Like the fact that we use the word turbulence in fluid mechanics to mean highly disturbed flow, and in psychology to mean a highly disturbed mental state. In fluids, turbulence actually cuts resistance and helps move objects along, and the same is true with your mind. Often times, the things that bother you the most, that get you agitated, are the things you are struggling to figure out and learn. If you learn to ride out the mental turbulence, and not shrink from experiencing it, you will find that you have benefited from it. Often the things in life worth learning, worth doing, are hard. We need to teach that in school. We need to tell students that the horrible feeling they are experiencing is the limiting walls of their mind crumbling. Maybe then they will not fear continuing education.