Skip to content

Unlearning

1 min

Once we learn it, we are competent. Why question the fundamentals? Once it’s good enough it’s golden. It takes humility to question what we have already learned. Did we not trust our teachers? Why would we ever unlearn?

Yes, we are literate. But are we reading for information or for understanding? In life, reading is much different than in school with evaluations. We need to be more skeptical of what we learned in school.

Our brains are programmed to unlearn majority of what we consume and experience each day. There’s too much stimuli.

The cycle to start afresh the next day is when we hit the hay at night. When we sleep, we unlearn things we learn each day. In order to learn, we have to grow connections, or synapses, between the neurons in our brains. These connections enable neurons to send signals to one another quickly and efficiently. We store new memories in these networks.

Human intelligence is largely externalized. Much is stored in our civilization rather than our brain. We technically are our tools. Our brains are part of a cognitive system much larger than ourselves. This system is already self-improving and it has been for a long time. That is what technology means.

Next

Subscribe to receive the latest posts in your inbox.