Following on from the previous post, lets now take a quick look at the distinction between Scanning, Reading, Analyzing and Assimilating. And lets look at its linkage to the main topic of the previous post – “Are humans getting dumber?”. Am not sure how many of you noticed that there was an inherent implication in the earlier part of that post on the possible progress of intelligence in human brains. (Actually am not sure how many people are even reading this blog! But this diatribe is largely for my pleasure!)
I know … I have this annoying habit of jumping away to another train of thought and then jumping back to the same old train. Annoying to you, but not to me, it serves my purpose very well!
Ahem… coming back to the connection of the two posts. As I had mentioned earlier, the way I see the process of learning in a medium, say newspapers, is 1. Scanning (quick/ cursory refresh of articles at a glance); followed by 2. Reading (going through in considerable detail the contents of specific articles); then followed by 3. Analyzing the article to assess its authenticity, accuracy, quality, conclusions etc. Hmmm… how many people have fallen by the wayside at Step 2? Wait… there’s one more step, 4. Assimilation. I really like to call it Reflection, but Assimilation is a more holistic word for it. It’s about reflecting on the analysis and fitting/ integrating all the learnings from it into your own knowledge set, into your intelligence framework. Assimilation is the most important step, because it’s the only step that will actually imbibe the learning from your analysis into your own life, actions, thoughts – it is possibly true learning.
Now coming back to some “Assimilation” for this and the previous post - in today’s fast paced world, how many people do you think are actually getting the time to analyse & assimilate much of what they read? Not many? I would think so. So if there is lesser time for analysing & assimilating – then how likely do you think it is that the human brain’s processing power, on the average, is actually improving? Think about it… actually assimilate it – how much do you actually reflect on your reading.
A rather worrying corollary to the above: A research article apparently talks about the process how humans actually believe what’s true and what’s not in news they hear/ read. (See http://www.eyeofsiva.com/2010/12/28/ready-to-believe-anything/).
To summarize, it’s a two stage process, First stage – Accept as true on face value, Second stage – Analyse now & then re-accept or reject. Now if people don’t have the time to get to the second stage, where does that leave them? On stage 1 – Accept; and that would be better put as “Blindly Accept”. If you think a little more, you would realize what a dangerous situation that puts us all in. As someone would put it… “whatever”!
