This also sounds a lot like Elmer Gates’ approach to learning new things and coming up with inventions.
Gates’s “mind-using” strategies look very different from modern and traditional learning practices. Gates’s theory of “brain-building” fused radically empiricist and inductivist philosophy with a belief in the mind’s adaptability, and his “art” reflects that. Early on in his studies, Gates observed that acquiring the right higher level concepts depended heavily on having the right foundational experiences. Hence, to learn a new scientific field, Gates would start by gathering the “sensory experiences” that constituted the raw data of that science. In the case of mechanics, this might involve replicating key experiments related to things like gravity or fiction. In the case of chemistry, Gates supposedly replicated the experiments described in multiple textbooks himself. In the case of weaving, which Gates was once challenged to apply his method to (which he did successfully, inventing multiple new devices), we have the following quote regarding how Gates’s went about the initial steps:
I secured letters of introduction to practical weavers and loom makers, and with the aid of several assistants made a systematic search of the technical literature. By actual observation of looms and methods of weaving I built over my brain with reference to that subject; acquiring an the images, concepts, ideas, and thoughts that six weeks’ continuous effort made possible.
Once Gates had had the necessary sensory experiences, he’d move on to the next step of “refunctioning” them. Refunctioning (coined by Gates) refers to mentally reviewing the experiences and observations acquired from the science until they “became more vivid, much more clearly minted and complete, while the processes of states acquired much greater celerity and efficiency.” As far as I can tell, Gates would then move on to repeating the process but for images, concepts, and thoughts (higher levels of abstraction) that emerged from repeatedly reviewing the raw experiences and studying their relationships. The following passage contains the best description I could find of this part of the process:
Then he related each concept to the others, which gave many new and true ideas (to be temporarily recorded until experimentally verified). Every new concept always implied a number of new ideas; and for the first time, to relate new concepts was always a rich opportunity for new ideas.
This also sounds a lot like Elmer Gates’ approach to learning new things and coming up with inventions.
Linked review by our own NaiveTortoise.