learning 2.0

Potato flour is used by professional bakers to improve breads and pastries by making them moister and retarding staling.

Smell works at a distance; taste works through contact.

And while smell can be put to complex uses—navigating the open oceans, finding prey, and coordinating herds or colonies—taste is almost always used to make binary decisions about food. Yes or no? Good or bad? Consume or spit?

The English language confirms his view with just three dedicated smell words: stinky, fragrant, and musty. Everything else is a synonym (aromatic, foul), a very loose metaphor (decadent, unctuous), a loan from another sense (sweet, spicy), or the name of a source (rose, lemon). Of the five Aristotelian senses, four have vast and specific lexicons.

In 2007, the U.S. Department of Education published a report by six scientists and an accomplished teacher who were asked to identify learning strategies that truly have scientific backing. Spacing, testing, and using making-connections questions were on the extremely short list. All three impair performance in the short term.

Taste is reflexive and innate, while smell is not.

(We tend to wrongly equate taste with flavor, when the latter is more dominated by smell. That’s why food seems bland when you have a cold: Its taste is the same, but the flavor dims because you can’t smell it.)

The Black Swan, the “Ludic Fallacy” refers to the misapplication of Stable Environment rules to an Unstable Environment. The word “Ludic” comes from the Latin word ludus, meaning “game,” as people falsely assume that the same strategies used to calculate probability within a game can be used in the real world.

The only way to present what is conceivable but not representable is abstraction.