“Learning, undigested by thought, is labor lost; thought unassisted by learning is perilous”
Confucius Analects of Confucius, Book 2, 52
Growing Uniqueness
Over a lifetime of learning we each bring together a unique combination of knowledge, thoughts, memory and perspectives. Our uniqueness grows with every learning experience and with it our potential for insight, innovation and creative expression.
Learning new things can enhance the quality of our relationships
One of the benefits of recreational learning is that it can activate healthy social impulses and connections.
Here is one way of looking at it.
When we encounter things that we feel are interesting, exciting and beautiful we often have a strong desire to experience them with others: to capture, collect, "bring" back, show, describe and demonstrate. When we act on this impulse we often create positive social moments, memories and connections. And when we are actively learning new things we increase the likelihood that we will encounter or create something that inspires our inclination to share in this way.
Related Topics: Social Aspects of Learning, Evolutionary Psychology, Cognitive Scouting, Idea Foraging, Brainstorming, Role of intellectual in society, Collaboration
always growing internal context
Every time we make, review, elaborate or deepen a connection between ideas, concepts or units of knowledge we increase the richness of our own internal representation of the knowledge space around those ideas.
human experience and cognitive context
The more we understand of the world in which human experience has taken place the more capacity we have when attempting to see things from another's perspective or cognitive context.
Increasing our knowledge and understanding of the world often leads to better understanding of the people who have grown up in that world.
thinking in a large space
Espresso Shot Eye Opener: Something Cool About Learning, Memory, Minds, Brains and Cognition
The exploration of the cognitive sciences takes place in an explosively large space - a near infinity of networked playgrounds and vistas of thought. The space is as big as the universe of things that minds can think about; the number of ways they can think about them; the number of ways they can internalize, encode and structure this thinking; the number, types and combinations of minds that are doing the thinking; the number of ways that these minds can interact with each-other; the cultures, societies, structures, dynamic systems, languages and shared spaces which house the artifacts and patterns generated by these interactions. That's cool!