liminal 🦠 on Nostr: Coming to recognize two types of learning. Theres the focused, tunnel vision ...

Coming to recognize two types of learning.
Theres the focused, tunnel vision learning. You might need to learn this for a test. Or, because you're just so interested in the topic, you want as strong a covering of it so you learn from cover to cover of a whole book, or go through a whole class. You build the scaffolding, you engineer everything at the top from the building blocks you find at the bottom.

Then theres the glaze-your-eyes-and-just-say-mhhhmmm-yes type of learning. You learn through foraging different ideas, finding how they connect. Whether its because you like to jump around a few - (1) focus on topic A, (2) switch to topic B, relaxing your topic A muscles. Or, because you (a) need to learn to finish something, and (b) ideas are related through thin strings, and you need to strengthen those strings to rest your argument upon. The tunnelvision is in what you're trying to create, rather than the topics themselves. To some degree, this could be seen as short sprints of tunnel vision, all with an averaged focused direction.

I definitely gravitate to the latter. It strengthens an embodied type of learning by association, coming back to ideas as reference. By embodying understanding, you don't need to "memorize", but you will need to reference a lot. My personal experience is that the former might bias toward rote memorization. However, when the associations between the building blocks and how they come together are strong enough, you can do a lot very fast.