Deep Thinking and Learning

Beyond "Passing the Parcel" of Concepts

"I know it, I understand it well, but I am unable to apply it". How often have you said or heard this stsatement ?

What does this statement really mean ? Why do all of find ourselves in such a scenario so frequently ?

This statement arises from a false notion of learning and understanding, which places unnecessarily large emphasis on the importance of information and knowledge in the process of learning.

"Modern chess players gain information and experience to become very strong players through computers but at the expense of less comprehensive understanding." - Gary Kasparov

When we view "learning" as "having information or knowledge" or "knowing concepts", we perceive "information" and "knowledge" and "concepts" as objects that have found their way in our mind-space. Now that we have these objects with us, we need to put another set of effort to develop the capability to recognize where these objects are useful. Once their utility is figured out, we need to find out a way to extract that information from our mind-space and then figure out a way to apply it. Way too complicated.

The analogy of human thinking process to the way how the current computer works is quite misplaced. The human thinking process DOES NOT function the way the current computers work.The comparisons with the computer might cause us to believe that all the information we have is a part of a separate memory module in our brain, and we can "fetch" the information when required, and process that information.

This is a very trivialized, mechanistic view of how we actually think and learn. The mind-brain system is much much more than an Information Processing system or an Experts System.

Learning, often ends up being a process of gathering of information or knowledge.

When a sportsman asks - "How do I return this shot ?" , he expects his coach to tell him the right way to hit the shot - including all details of body position, footwork, swing of the racket, head position. A "good" coach obliges by providing a lot of painstaking details about each aspect, and then the player feels he has "learnt" how to return this particular shot, demonstrating exactly how this shot should be returned.

The player listens to and watches all of this and gets a sense that he now knows how to return this shot. The small trouble he continues to face is that for a long long time to come, he doesn't do any of that when they are most required - in a match scenario, especially in crisis situations.

This is true in all fields - academic, professional, sports ...

A "good" teacher is one who explains concepts in great detail, gives lots of examples and analogies and makes sure the learner knows and understands what was told to him. At the end of a great explanation, the student feels he has enough knowledge about the topic. He just finds it difficult to apply this knowledge in problem-solving scenarios, especially during tough exams.

A "good" colleague is one who clarifies the details of his peers with great sincerity and details. While the projects move ahead smoothly, we realize that some employees haven't learnt a thing even after having successfully delivered a large number of projects.

A "good" mentor who has all the answers to your problems. Through inherent knowledge and wisdom, a vast experience and having devoured a whole library of books, the ideal mentor is never short of ideas on what you should be doing with your problems.

The world is heavily burdened with experts who have all the "right" answers. What we need is those who have the "right" questions.

Deconstruction and Learning

What happens when we learn a skill or a concept ?

This video from the Smarter Every Day YouTube channel is a great illustration of the complex phenomena that accompanies learning.

The skill of "riding a bike" is not a piece of information stored in some part of the brain, which we retrieve when we start riding a bike. The skill is "burnt" into our neurology. A skill is said to have been "learnt" when it is wired into the mind-brain system. Once this wiring is complete, we dont have to worry about consciously "applying" a concept. The concept becomes a part of the thinking process and influences it.

The difficulty in applying a learning or a concept arises only when the concept is like a foreign body to our mind-brain system.

Any concept that is wired into our system would find expression when required spontaneously.

In the human mind-body computer system, the Memory and the CPU are deeply connected and work as a single complex phenomena. The different faculties of the mind do not function as isolated modules. Although there are segments of the brain dedicated to specific functionality, but they work with an amazing degree of synchronization.

What is in the Memory of the human mind can alter the CPU of the human mind, and vice-versa.

Assimilation and Generation of Concepts

There are two ways of looking at how to learn a concept :

a) gather the information or knowledge from an external source. Through continuous exposure to it and through repetitions, make sure it becomes a part of the system.

b) find a way to learn where the concept is generated from our own neurology. This becomes possible through the art of Deconstruction. When - through the process of Deconstruction - we create sufficiently many "dots" of facts and information, then at some threshold point, the mind connects these dots and an Insight is generated.

In the first case, the information or knowledge - no matter how well it is explained to us, and how prolonged the exposure we have to it, and how many the repetitions we have undergone practising - it will remain as a "foreign" entity to our mind-brain system. We may be able to use it with a certain deftness, but it would never be sufficient to handle difficult and complex situations or to create new ideas. This is the bare minimum survival level of skill that allows us to navigate our way through our life without providing us the handle to create something phenomenal.

In the second case, the concept comes wired into our neurology, as it is a product of our own neurological process. In this case, Learning happens spontaneously and you never have to worry about learning "how to apply" a learning.

The Fallacy of "Teaching"

This popular parable on the internet a stark illustration of what every "good" teacher, trainer, coach, mentor and consultant ends up doing to his protege.

Once a little boy was playing outdoors and found a fascinating caterpillar. He carefully picked it up and took it home to show his mother. He asked his mother if he could keep it, and she said he could if he would take good care of it.

The little boy got a large jar from his mother and put plants to eat, and a stick to climb on, in the jar. Every day he watched the caterpillar and brought it new plants to eat.

One day the caterpillar climbed up the stick and started acting strangely. The boy worriedly called his mother who came and understood that the caterpillar was creating a cocoon. The mother explained to the boy how the caterpillar was going to go through a metamorphosis and become a butterfly.

The little boy was thrilled to hear about the changes his caterpillar would go through. He watched every day, waiting for the butterfly to emerge. One day it happened, a small hole appeared in the cocoon and the butterfly started to struggle to come out.

At first the boy was excited, but soon he became concerned. The butterfly was struggling so hard to get out! It looked like it couldn’t break free! It looked desperate! It looked like it was making no progress!

The boy was so concerned he decided to help. He ran to get scissors, and then walked back (because he had learned not to run with scissors…). He snipped the cocoon to make the hole bigger and the butterfly quickly emerged!

As the butterfly came out the boy was surprised. It had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings. He continued to watch the butterfly expecting that, at any moment, the wings would dry out, enlarge and expand to support the swollen body. He knew that in time the body would shrink and the butterfly’s wings would expand.

But neither happened!

The butterfly spent the rest of its life crawling around with a swollen body and shriveled wings.

It never was able to fly…

As the boy tried to figure out what had gone wrong his mother took him to talk to a scientist from a local college. He learned that the butterfly was SUPPOSED to struggle. In fact, the butterfly’s struggle to push its way through the tiny opening of the cocoon pushes the fluid out of its body and into its wings. Without the struggle, the butterfly would never, ever fly. The boy’s good intentions hurt the butterfly.

Teller vs Teacher

This is not about a "laissez faire" approach to teaching. This is not about letting kids alone to figure it out themselves. It is not about avoiding the responsibility of being a teacher.

It is about abstaining from "telling" and enter the realm of "teaching".

Much of the teaching we see around is "telling". Even the best quality "telling" doesn't come anywhere close to the real art of "teaching".

A committed "teller" is one who tells every aspect of the concepts involved in such great detail, that there is nothing left for the learner to figure out. At the end of the process, the learner is left with a huge baggage of concepts, information, knowledge, ideas.

On the other hand, "teaching" involves providing the appropriate interceptions at the right time. It is about providing the "dots" and setting the momentum of one's thinking process, allowing the learner's mind to connect the dots and figure things out.

Passing the Parcel

Much of our learning and teaching process is similar to the game of "Passing the Parcel". A great concept or an idea originates from one brilliant mind, which he presents to the world as a gift. Thereon, the gift keeps getting passed around as a "parcel". A brilliant teacher wraps the parcel in a beautiful gift-wrapping, while an average teacher might just use an ordinary wrapping. Regardless of how the parcel is presented, most of the learning and teaching happening all over the world is a form of someone passing on to the learners the parcels they had received from their teachers.

These parcels, while they form a valuable gift, do not become part of a learner's persona.

The essence of authentic teaching would be to drop this process of passing the parcel, and empowering every learner's mind to create their own gifts.

Deep Thinking and Learning

In our article series on the 12-weights puzzle, we received a lot of feedback from the readers that shared how reading one part of the article enabled them to come up with solutions of the steps which were discussed in the later parts of the series. The illustration of how the problem was deconstructed left the readers with a momentum of thought process that not only helped them understand the current discussion easily, but enabled them to interpolate it easily and get answers to many of the later steps.

Likewise in the Tic-Tac-Toe examples discussed in our articles The Inception of Strategy and From Impulsive to Strategic, the discussions on keeping the focus on "lines of attack" and "double threats" helped a lot of readers become completely invincible at the game.

These results are in a different realm than a procedural discussion of the two cases. For the 12-weights problem, the usual discussions normally center around which weights to choose for which pan, and in the case of the Tic-Tac-Toe, all discussions end up detailing which are the best squares to capture. These include a number of rules of thumb like "start from the center".

However, when deconstruction was applied to these two scenarios in our article series, it took the learning process to a totally different realm.

We have an amazing number of brilliant transformations in our training and consulting experience using ReInvent's 3-Step Deep Thinking Framework. This includes individuals and professionals from very diverse backgrounds - students, techies, executives and sportspersons. The experience doesn't only include effective learning and its application to problem-solving, but an enhancement in the Deep Thinking ability of the individual that results in a lot of other side-effects, e.g. an increased clarity and confidence in expression, articulation and communication.

As we deconstruct the process of "Learning" in the forthcoming articles, we would start with exploring the intriguing and enigmatic world of thoughts. As we get more used to the process of the formation and evolution of thoughts, understanding the mechanism of learning would be a trivially obvious outcome of that.

Learning is not about gathering information or knowledge of concepts, it is gaining the ability to "figure out".

Reference Articles :

The 12-Weight-Puzzle Part-1

The Inception of Strategy

From Impulsive to Strategic

The Science of Deep Thinking

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