Blog 2: Learning

I love learning new things and I don't think that my love for learning will ever stop. Learning comes very naturally to me. If there is something that I don't know and want to learn, most of the time I’ll try and just teach myself. The only part of learning that I have struggled with is structured learning. Thought middle school and high school, I did not learn much in school. I always disliked being taught something very generic subjects by a teacher that did not care to much about individual learning, but instead to create a assembly line students that all have a certain set of skills. 

For me learning has always been much more of a fluid and open process. Learning for me starts out with a problem that I want to fix. It then moves to the question “What do I need to know to solve this problem?”. Most of the time this question can not even be fully answered when I start. I then try to learn by doing. I don’t like to go and read a text book or watch a video, I like to just try. No matter the result, success or failure, you learn something new every time you experiment. Then once you have taken a problem down to its fundamental parts, then you can construct a solution out of the rubble.

I remembered reading this article a bit ago about this guy who has taken learning to a whole different level. I do not really understand the process myself but he has some how managed to “hack” the human brain so that he is able to learn and retain information much faster than the rest of us. He used different techniques to do things like learning everybody name at a lecture and memorize long strings of numbers. While these things are not strictly useful in the real world, these skills translate into things like reading whole books in a number of hours and learning new things incredibly fast. While I personally don’t use this technique to learn, I do find the concept very interesting.