Forgetting what you know: Sustainable mind and slowing down

Sustainable mind and slowing down: To forget what they know, which is a new way of learning; How do we see the world differently and why should we see it differently?

Learning was apparently the easiest. Anyone who studies and watches a young child imitating the behavior of others knows that learning naturally starts from the immediate environment. Forgetting what you know, the new way of learning, can guide you in answering the questions of how we see the world differently and why we should see it differently.

Forgetting what you know, unlearning, needs a mental effort to reflect what we’ve learned in the past to create a new, yet effective, future doctrine that goes beyond what we’ve passively formulated about the world, ourselves, and the people around us, as we’ll talk about in a moment. Forgetting what you know is the inevitability of a mature mind that justifies and prioritizes the constant importance of seeing things correctly. If forgetting what you know is the new way of learning, how can a person forget what they know and what difference does it make?

Cycling provides a good example of sketching the alarming mechanism of forgetting what you know. The logic behind the phrase ‘like riding a bike’ refers to the resilience and continuity of human learning, like a double-edged sword. Because riding a bike is associated with being an easy activity to learn and remember later. That’s fine, of course, until knowing how to ride a bike doesn’t work in the newfound conditions.

Imagine yourself on a bicycle that turns left when you bend the handlebars to the right, and right when you turn the handlebars to the left. How far do you think you can go?

The brain’s acumen over habitual behaviors and thought processes is at a disadvantage because of its fidelity to the real world. Because the past two years have confronted us with countless events in which we have to urgently recalibrate the world and what is happening around us. Being in quarantine or watching the death of George Floyd or reading statistics about the coronavirus no longer ‘automatically’ created a new way of learning on anyone. Our brains are constantly verbally translating everything we see and hear, and in our highly digitalized age, much of what we read and watch is someone else’s interpretation.

In order to learn anything new—rather than find additional evidence of what we already believe—the first thing we need to learn is how to forget what we know and what it means to forget what we know. And this new type of learning is much more than our GPA or IQ; What is at stake here is the right to life of people with ‘different’ skin colours, the common good to be built in the midst of the global pandemic, and the health of our planet.

How does our brain learn things?

To better understand the complex process that develops—often unconsciously—our primitive beliefs about the world and other people, we need to analyze the neurological science behind how our brains learn things. An adult brain contains about 86 billion brain cells called neurons. Neurons are accompanied by about 86 billion other brain cells called glial cells. Together, neurons and glia run the brain’s daily activities, from regulating body temperature and movement to complex functions such as language learning and problem solving.

About 172 billion cells in our brain are a set, helping us respond to our environment physically and cognitively. Everything we know about the world is rooted in the neural networks in our brains; The team of brain cells establishes connections called synapses that allow brain cells to communicate as well as store information and memories.

Memory is easier to learn when you connect or associate associative new information with old information. In other words, our brain takes advantage of the presence of neural networks – to build on previous experience and teaching – so that when learning something new, it uses relevant information instead of starting over every time. As we navigate through unfamiliar situations, our brains take in all this new information and process it simultaneously, partnering with our previous experiences.

This method of problem solving requires prior experience or prior knowledge, or in some cases bits of knowledge. Because our brain needs to associate new information with old information in order to solve problems; which gives us the wrong feeling about a new situation, sometimes bypassing what might actually happen. The brain’s tendency to adapt to new experiences within this pre-acquired mental framework leads us to the illusion that we already know it in the face of new situations.

Associative memory also means that our brains build bridges between ideas and experiences; however, our brains do not leave unfilled ‘gaps’ – representing information we have not yet acquired or learned. Ultimately, learning scaffolds new synapses within and between the existing synaptic network. So forgetting what you know becomes a conscious effort to define where there should be a ‘space’.

It takes place between forgetting what we know, deliberately reflecting on the experiences we’ve had, and identifying the kinds of experiences we’ve missed. Even as we pinpoint what we think we know by identifying depth and broadening the scope of our lost experiences, existing synapses fail to understand them.

Forgetting what you know does not mean really forgetting, nor does it mean removing old knowledge, experiences or ways of thinking; instead it tries to build new templates for synaptic communication that support different ways of thinking. In order to store new information in our neural networks, our brains need to create new synapses and then use these new synapses again and again so that this operation can become permanent in the architecture of our brain’s neural network.

The phrase “Neutrons that are bound together can fire each other,” used for this in neuroscience, refers to the fact that we can only truly learn about things that we spend time thinking about. Creating and using new synapses encourages new ways of thinking and learning.

Supporting the creation of new synapses by consciously comparing the information we have gained from new experiences with our previous beliefs, instead of passively creating new synapses arising from the knowledge we unconsciously absorb from our environment and experiences, and aiming to identify the gaps between our experiences and our value judgments, paves the way for you to recalibrate your center in the process of forgetting what you know.

That is, habits are automatically defined as what we do without thinking about it. They are often performed unconsciously. Habitual behaviors usually occur as a result of chain events. This explains that some primitive impulses triggered them and the sequence of events that followed.

Habit chains come into play with a trigger that brings habits to mind and compels their implementation. Once the habit chain is triggered, it becomes harder to stop; You either don’t realize it’s happening or it’s playing tricks with your mind that you don’t care. Those who imprison themselves in mental and behavioral habit patterns are not even aware of any new situation without disturbing them. And with it, the following questions are asked; Why can’t I live up to my expectations, why can’t I overcome this problem, why do I constantly avoid this challenge or try every possible way, why can’t I find a way out?..