Nurturing our minds for deeper learning

We hear and read a lot about machine learning and deep learning nowadays, but how can humans develop themselves?

How can humans become better? Sometimes I feel like we talk more about technological innovations than about what we already possess.

Let’s pause for a moment and analyse this.

Each of us knows who Albert Einstein is; sometimes I come across his quotes, and below I present a few of them. The last one is simply the essence of what we should strive for, a powerful summary of our direction.

If we look at him and others alike, they all encourage us to value imagination, learn from experiences, seek opportunities in difficulties, question the status quo, and strive for personal growth and value.

Somebody who only reads newspapers and at best books of contemporary authors looks to me like an extremely near-sighted person who scorns eyeglasses. He is completely dependent on the prejudices and fashions of his times, since he never gets to see or hear anything else. Albert Einstein

Einstein was once asked how many feet are in a mile. Einstein’s reply was “I don’t know, why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book? Albert Einstein

Never memorize what you can look up in a book. Albert Einstein

I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book Albert Einstein

And the most important one:

It is not so very important for a person to learn facts. For that he does not really need a college. He can learn them from books. The value of an education in a liberal arts college is not learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think something that cannot be learned from textbooks. Albert Einstein

Recently, I also came across this article posted on Harvard Business School website: Learning-by-thinking-how-reflection-improves-performance

In summary, it’s worth taking a moment to look at these seven points:

  1. Practice mindfulness
  2. Read widely and diversely
  3. Solve problems systematically
  4. Practice creativity
  5. Engage in critical reflection
  6. Seek diverse perspectives
  7. Keep learning

Improving our thinking skills can be beneficial in many areas of life, including problem-solving, decision-making, creativity, and critical thinking.

In an era where access to information is becoming increasingly shorter (and it’s possible that in the future, databases could be connected to our brains through a suitable protocol), it is all the more important to focus on the points mentioned above.

These are just my reflections,

have fun,

Łukasz.

// Photo by DeepMind on Unsplash