I’ll have to weigh in wiith Botrom on this one, though I think it depends a lot on the individual brain-mind, i.e., how your particular personality crunches the data.
Some people are “information consumers”, others are “information producers”. I think Einstein might have used the obvious terms supercritical vs subcritical minds at some point—terms that in any case (einstein or not) naturally occurred to me (and probably lots of people) and I’ve used since teenager years, just in talking to my friends, to describe different people’s mental processes.
The issue of course is (a) to what extent you use incoming ideas as “data” to spark new trains of thought, plus (b) how many interconnections you notice between various ideas and theories—and as a multiplier of (b), how abstract these resonances and interconnections are (hugely increasing the perceived potential interconnection space.)
For me, if the world would stop in place, and I had an arbitrary lifespan, I could easily spend the next 50 years (at least) mining the material I have already acquired, generating new ideas, extensions, cross connections. (I sometimes almost wish it would, in some parallel world, so I could properly metabolize what I have, which I think at times I am only scratching the surface of.)
Of course it depends on the kind of material, as well. If one is reading an undergrad physics textbook in college, it is pretty much finite: if you understand the presentation and the development as you read, you can think for an extra 10 or 15 minutes about all the way it applies to the world, and pretty much have it. Thinking of further “applications” pretty much add no value, additional insight, or interest.
But with other material, esp in fields that are divergent and full of questions that are not settled yet, I find myself reading a few paragraphs, and it sparks so many new trains of thought, I feel flooded and have a hard time continuing the reading—and feel like I have to get up and go walk for an hour. Sometimes I feel like acquiring new ideas is exponentially increasing my processing load, not linearly, and I could spend a lifetime investigating the offshoots that suggest themselves.
I’ll have to weigh in wiith Botrom on this one, though I think it depends a lot on the individual brain-mind, i.e., how your particular personality crunches the data.
Some people are “information consumers”, others are “information producers”. I think Einstein might have used the obvious terms supercritical vs subcritical minds at some point—terms that in any case (einstein or not) naturally occurred to me (and probably lots of people) and I’ve used since teenager years, just in talking to my friends, to describe different people’s mental processes.
The issue of course is (a) to what extent you use incoming ideas as “data” to spark new trains of thought, plus (b) how many interconnections you notice between various ideas and theories—and as a multiplier of (b), how abstract these resonances and interconnections are (hugely increasing the perceived potential interconnection space.)
For me, if the world would stop in place, and I had an arbitrary lifespan, I could easily spend the next 50 years (at least) mining the material I have already acquired, generating new ideas, extensions, cross connections. (I sometimes almost wish it would, in some parallel world, so I could properly metabolize what I have, which I think at times I am only scratching the surface of.)
Of course it depends on the kind of material, as well. If one is reading an undergrad physics textbook in college, it is pretty much finite: if you understand the presentation and the development as you read, you can think for an extra 10 or 15 minutes about all the way it applies to the world, and pretty much have it. Thinking of further “applications” pretty much add no value, additional insight, or interest.
But with other material, esp in fields that are divergent and full of questions that are not settled yet, I find myself reading a few paragraphs, and it sparks so many new trains of thought, I feel flooded and have a hard time continuing the reading—and feel like I have to get up and go walk for an hour. Sometimes I feel like acquiring new ideas is exponentially increasing my processing load, not linearly, and I could spend a lifetime investigating the offshoots that suggest themselves.