“Do not simply tell people what happens in a story - show them”. This is a major pseudo-rule in story telling. Its what turns a series of random events into a story with a plot and individual interpretation.
However, a similar pattern comes up in scientific research. We see that when we are simply told a fact, we have learnt that fact. We are able to tell somebody that ‘A Jaffa Cake is actually a cake, not a biscuit’. Great. That’s great. But what is the significance of that statement? That is the important part. The fact is just the result.
It’s like being told that an interviewer has just rejected you for a job and when you ask why, you are told: ‘Because he wrote “Declined” on your application’. You’re not really getting to the root of the problem.
Unfortunately this is what happens a lot in science: people think that they become smarter by simply learning more and more pieces of information. But that’s all they are: pieces. In the Coursera course ‘Learning how to learn’, the tutors stress the importance of placing what you have learnt in some context: linking it to something. Otherwise, it is like having a small station in your brain that can never again be reached by your train of thought because there are no railway lines to it from other stations you have already discovered. You might even begin to forget about its existence given enough time.
Therefore in science, what is really important is the background story - the set of logical deductions that lead from a simple statement (an axiom) to an often seemingly complicated scientific result, such the reason as to why resistances add in series and follow a different formula in parallel.
There is more than one way to reach the solution and having lots of different methods helps you to really internalise what you are learning and make it seem more natural.
Different paradigms through which we can view the world can often fall under discrete categories due to common patterns in each of them. For example, artists might use the visual senses to convey abstract concepts such as emotions, whereas a poet would our capacity to form mental imagery. The ultimate result is that they want to convey a particular feeling: the state of mind they were in when they splashed their thoughts down onto the page. Since not everyone’s brain is the same, we can’t simply clone and transplant relevant neurons from one person to another, since two different people’s brains (mathematicians for example) may appear to work in the same way from the outside, but inside that black box the scenario may be wildly different. Therefore when we paint, draw, write, or use mathematical language among myriad other things, we are translating our thoughts so that others can read the medium and try to recreate a similar form of the idea.
This is why different learning approaches work for different people: we try to find one which clicks with the way our brain is structured, in a similar mode to tuning an analogue radio using a dial, until we find a frequency that resonates. Before that there may be utter confusion, but at the slightest turn of that dial, everything suddenly slides into place and out of that chaos there comes clarity. This is analagous to that moment when things 'suddenly make sense'. Is there a way to consistently recreate understanding therefore? Perhaps, but I suspect not - since understanding is a very individual thing. But we can become better at recongnising the things that help us to understand, and even expand the ways in which we understand in order to learn new things. Many people simply rely on the basing new things they learn on models of subjects they were good at or loved when they were young. As they get older they get more lazy and don't want to find new ways to learn, preferring to stick to the pattern of mental streets they have already carved out for themselves.
In fact I seem to be closer to understanding what I was thinking about when I set up this strange blog. Though I may have not previously been able to put it into words. Much of this blog is about finding the little similarities across wildly different and sometimes very abstract and philosophical subjects which is very characteristic of this universe of patterns in which we live. For example, strange loops have sparked many interesting thoughts in the past especially, and I hope to find many more links between the things we observe in the future.
I hope what I said resonated with you.
