How I Learn

Understanding process

Since I once found it difficult to understand things that others would usually breeze through, I had to write this. It’s time to close the gap between unconventional and traditional ways of learning, and not continue trying to force information through to my mind and make things stick.

When I first see how things or aspects of interest are put together, by watching the relationship between processes, I come to an understanding or a knowing. The feeling it gives is that something internal is unlocked and broadened, or an insight gives strength through a sense of expansion, which gives rise to superiority and greatness. Or rushing into my mind is a wave of overall satisfaction from experiencing an intense meaning of something interesting for the first time.

Ah, yes! Intense stimulation breaks the barriers surrounding my small limited and inferior self. I feel supreme, empowered, and enlarged.

Till one or two minutes later…


Losing Picture Quality From the Big Screen

Although I naturally store records of all played events, and have the ability to rebroadcast them for whatever reasons, I find that nowadays I’m less inclined to return to the mental library once I’ve understood something properly. Also, I have learnt that these picture and audio on-demand files don’t get any clearer or teach me anything new by continually replaying every scene from every angle looking for something I may have missed.

You see, whenever I glued myself to the screen in my mind while learning, which at one stage was ‘the norm’ as I couldn’t detach from dissecting each object and image, and discerning every story involved no matter how hard I’d try, that’s when I became most susceptible to a distortion taking over. My perception of the task, project, or challenge at hand could easily get clouded by enhancements, fillers and filters, throwing the entire line of understanding whatever I’m looking at totally out of whack. In a way, I was over-learning and under-simplifying throughout daily life.

Craving That Mental High of Greatness Reduced My Ability to Learn

Let’s say I felt I had overlooked an important lesson in an earlier experience. Or perhaps I had missed important details of a past event by skimming over information too quickly, or by reviewing what I would perceive as a poor recording of it. Naturally, the next time I try to recall information from this scene, I will grab even harder into my memory, desperately looking for any missing parts to make it all fit into one complete understanding that has a greater high attached to it.

But, did I really miss anything worthwhile? Or was the first or original experience the best lesson in terms of the quality of my perception of the event? Instead, was I simply trying to match the feeling in each replay to align with the greater feeling that the original produced, under the guise of ‘maybe I had missed something along the way’? This was when I knew that there was more to it than just learning for learning’s sake. And this is what led me to a dirty habit of the mind.

I soon realised I had ulterior motives running around upstairs. On the backend, I was attempting to re-experience the same sensations triggered by the initial insight that had ‘set the bar’ for the emotional high that had spiked my system the first time around. This is similar to watching reruns of our favourite sitcoms which are never quite the same as the first time. It’s close, but not quite the same. In this case, I needed to get my hit back while also hoping to gain something extraordinary in terms of the way I would perform from the knowledge. I tricked myself thinking I would outperform.

I’ve spent much of my life re-examining the mental slides that I wanted to either expand or learn even more from in the aim of moving forward. But in reality, my obsession with the learning process had significantly held me back.

You see, nothing ever measured up quite like the original experience or the first rush of sensation that poured into my mind from something deemed ‘super interesting’, and I’d barely learn anything beyond because of it. So was I missing something important here? Naturally, this kept me wondering…

What’s Really Going on in My Psychology?

Am I simply attached to these near-duplicate greater understanding sensations while thinking something of value got left out during the live recording of the lesson, and I simply need to dig further into it?

Should I keep hunting and extracting MORE of this ‘knowing’ feeling (explosive insight or meaning material) in the hope of unlocking the next piece of the puzzle (and MORE meaning), as I’m able to quickly and easily cash in on ‘repeat stimulation’ by cloning the event in my mind?

Or am I keeping myself from actually learning, adding an extra delay to any potential revelation by distorting whatever’s in front with a filter that isn’t serving my best interest?

These were questions of high priority. I had to know if I was doing myself more harm than good with my current thoughts on how to learn. Except, would I ever really get to the bottom of it with the way things stand now, being up against a very powerful lifelong habit?