The extent to which you can benefit from asking what someone is tracking in their head, and the degree to which they can usefully explain it to you, will depend critically on how much information, basic to the topic at hand, you two of you already share.
You can learn more from a master, using this technique, the more you already knew.
If “cognitive capacity” is the amount of information useful to some specific domain of problem solving one has in one’s head, then everyone on Earth has more or less the same cognitive capacity (excepting only people with some diagnosable mental disability). Everyone has, more or less, the same amount of information in their long term memory as everyone else, applicable to the problems they have had the most experience with during their lives to that point (controlling for age).
If you ask why some people demonstrate greater ability to master certain problem-solving domains than other people do, then the answer lies in the way that human long term memory is organized. Our ability to learn new categories of things depends on our prior possession of categories of similar things: people assimilate new knowledge to old knowledge that shares similar characteristics. For example, the more types of animals one already knows, the easier it is to add another type of animal to memory, which will allow that person to make finer distinctions between specific animals (that’s not just a cat, it’s an American Longhair).
“Tracking” information while considering someone’s explanation of a problem probably includes observing how closely new information corresponds to previously encoded categories. That certainly seems to be what Feynman was doing: he was able to apply a schema based on the characteristics of balls, along with information he knew about set theory, to a proposed set of new information from another expert in his field. When the new information deviated significantly from what he knew about sets of actual balls, he concluded that the new idea was “false” (ie, he could not assimilate the new information into the categories he already had).
Therefore, my prediction is that the more advanced the student in a specific domain, the more they will be able to benefit from asking the teacher what they are tracking in their head, and the more elaborate the set of knowledge categories the teacher has already developed the easier it will be for the teacher to report tracking something that would be of benefit to the student (plus the degree to which the teacher is able to self-reflect on what is going on in their own head, an entirely different set of skills).
In other words, it’s a technique that is most appropriate for advanced students, and skilled teachers.
The extent to which you can benefit from asking what someone is tracking in their head, and the degree to which they can usefully explain it to you, will depend critically on how much information, basic to the topic at hand, you two of you already share.
You can learn more from a master, using this technique, the more you already knew.
If “cognitive capacity” is the amount of information useful to some specific domain of problem solving one has in one’s head, then everyone on Earth has more or less the same cognitive capacity (excepting only people with some diagnosable mental disability). Everyone has, more or less, the same amount of information in their long term memory as everyone else, applicable to the problems they have had the most experience with during their lives to that point (controlling for age).
If you ask why some people demonstrate greater ability to master certain problem-solving domains than other people do, then the answer lies in the way that human long term memory is organized. Our ability to learn new categories of things depends on our prior possession of categories of similar things: people assimilate new knowledge to old knowledge that shares similar characteristics. For example, the more types of animals one already knows, the easier it is to add another type of animal to memory, which will allow that person to make finer distinctions between specific animals (that’s not just a cat, it’s an American Longhair).
“Tracking” information while considering someone’s explanation of a problem probably includes observing how closely new information corresponds to previously encoded categories. That certainly seems to be what Feynman was doing: he was able to apply a schema based on the characteristics of balls, along with information he knew about set theory, to a proposed set of new information from another expert in his field. When the new information deviated significantly from what he knew about sets of actual balls, he concluded that the new idea was “false” (ie, he could not assimilate the new information into the categories he already had).
Therefore, my prediction is that the more advanced the student in a specific domain, the more they will be able to benefit from asking the teacher what they are tracking in their head, and the more elaborate the set of knowledge categories the teacher has already developed the easier it will be for the teacher to report tracking something that would be of benefit to the student (plus the degree to which the teacher is able to self-reflect on what is going on in their own head, an entirely different set of skills).
In other words, it’s a technique that is most appropriate for advanced students, and skilled teachers.