Idea Architecture

Everyone learns. It has been said that one does not stop learning and that there is no age, place, time or location where learning does not happen. It is easy to accept this; even in the most monotonous and dreary of situations one can learn, even if it is to learn about the lifelessness of the situation itself or about how not get oneself in such a situation again! But articulating what one learns is in a few simple words are in itself a very tedious task, let alone trying to present ones’ learning in a cogent, succinct manner.

It would be worthwhile to note here what the process of ‘presenting’ ones’ knowledge would mean. After the process of acquiring a stimulus through ones senses, the mind interprets this real world external stimuli into an ‘understanding’. This could be termed as being conscious of the stimulus or acquiring a degree of knowledge about the stimulus, its cause or its effect. The next step of ‘codifying’ this piece of information into a response which can be applied to another stimulus could be termed as ‘learning’.

Presenting ones’ learning would mean to be able to revisit the process of acquiring this learning and supplementing ones’ own clarity about it or helping another to gain the same. To do this one needs to articulate, put down in words what it is that one has learnt. This simple task can many a time be very unnerving. Why is it so difficult to put down in words what one has learnt? A person may be a consummate learner in the subject of his choosing, but when it is required to verbalize this into something beyond the realm of thoughts and into a comprehensible ‘article’ most people falter. Many text books are testament to this exact problem. What is in the mind a whole and complete thought becomes a fragmented and unintelligible collection of words when written down.

This can be related to what one calls ‘channel noise’ in the subject of electronic communication. The thought is a whole in the mind, but when it needs to be written down, ones’ inadequacies of language, diction and more importantly lack of clarity of learning come to the forefront since the act as a ‘noise’ to the information being transferred from the mind to the paper. Overcoming this fallacy is a very important and required learning in ones’ life and probably an essential step towards self-mastery.