(un)learning

I believe that good teachers introduce new thoughts, but great teachers introduce new ways of thinking.

Thinking like a scientist involves more than just reacting with an open mind. It means being actively open-minded.27 It requires searching for reasons why we might be wrong—not for reasons why we must be right—and revising our views based on what we learn.

“Maybe the journey isn't so much about becoming anything. Maybe it's about un-becoming everything that isn't really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.”

—Paulo Coelho

When psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi studied eminent scientists like Linus Pauling and Jonas Salk, he concluded that what differentiated them from their peers was their cognitive flexibility, their willingness “to move from one extreme to the other as the occasion requires.”29 The same pattern held for great artists, and in an independent stud

When you change who you’re being, you’re basically killing off your old identity, which completely freaks your subconscious self out.

While specialization is necessary to develop the complexity of any pattern of thought, the goals-ends relationship must always be kept clear: specialization is for the sake of thinking better, and not an end in itself. Unfortunately many serious thinkers devote all their mental effort to becoming well-known scholars, but in the meantime they forget

School tests weaknesses. Life rewards strengths.

Spending more time on our weakest areas is tempting, but life mostly rewards us for investing in our strengths. Imagine a student who struggles with math but excels at writing. In school, they might spend hours raising their math grades from a C to a B. However, spending the same time on writing might

Neuroscience, neuroanatomy, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology are some of the most directly relevant fields to choose from; however, trying to summarize their findings would result in an account similar to the descriptions the blind men gave of the elephant: each different, and each unrelated to the other