Knowledge and Understanding

There has been a lot of talk over the past few years about the creation of a knowledge society, with little consideration about what you do once you have access to all that information. It is part of the reasoning behind the government's support for the internet in schools, just as the acquisition of books was before that. However, once you have amassed all that knowledge, what are you supposed to do with it? I suspect that the reason that libraries have failed to live up to their expectations, despite generations of huffy people telling us that it would be good for us to visit them, the libraries I mean.

I used to have a lot more books than I do now, but to be honest the effort required for their upkeep in terms of dusting, loss of space that could be used for other purposes and the basic fact that they stood there unread, other than the paperback novels. The novels remain, the other books have been decimated, yes, only one in ten or less remain. I gather most of the knowledge I need either from the internet or from basic research on my part; books are very low on my priority - except the three I use to support my screen at the right height at work.

Wherever you find your knowledge, how do you use it, or, more importantly, how do you know what information is useful, and then how to get any effective work out of it? The secret is understanding, a concept very much misunderstood and left almost abandoned on the byways of the human intellect. Knowledge is much like a car, very useful but will not do anything for you. What you need is a driver, for the driver is our understanding, and the driver has the choice of which car to drive, or whether to simply walk instead. Car and driver, knowledge and understanding, they are complimentary but essentially alien.

Understanding creates new knowledge from old, and this is the mechanism that we need to create use out of knowledge. Imagine that we were burgling a house, if we had never been in the house before we would use our knowledge of all the other houses we have known to understand what we were seeing in this new house and therefore make decisions on what we should take and where we should look for it. We are not afraid of learning this new knowledge, although we might be afraid of being caught, because we both understand the kind of information and value it.

Understanding is a thinking process that can leading to success (I understand) or failure (I don't understand), the success being more likely to occur if we can match it to previous knowledge, such as a specific experience. The closer to what we are comparing is to our prior knowledge then the quicker the match can be made. If you see a cup, for example, the match will be made so quickly and successfully that you will not be aware that your brain has done anything. However, the further something is from our prior knowledge then the more you become aware of the lack of understanding concerning it, and maybe your brain will disregard the information.

Large volumes of information have to be broken down into smaller chunks so that we can process it, but this does not all happen at once. Some things that we do not understand get put into the subconscious and the results from this can appear in dreams or when we relax our hold on our consciousness for a moment, such as just before we go to sleep. Because the brain takes such varying amounts of time to process information at different levels of familiarity, we should not expect instant solutions to problems that we are working on. Instant results should be viewed with suspicion in cases where new solutions are required, they will be too close to the current solution.

Since new knowledge is based on old knowledge, everything that we know is also very similar and creating the understanding of a completely new experience is incredibly difficult. Putting ourselves in situations where we gain different types of new experience helps us to understand things that are very much different to knowledge from our normal and working lives. If our lives are regular, we are limiting our potential to understand changes because the changes feel more alien than it would be to someone with a wider experience, not because they have a different kind of intelligence or way of thinking.

Since understanding is a process of the brain, we can do things to improve our ability to understand. Taking our understanding out for a jog around the mental park frequently will help stop it from becoming a knowledge potato. The brain has many different ways of processing information: eyesight, sound, touch, body movement - anything that the body controls or uses to gather information is able to store and process information. Learning how to repair a shoe is an intellectual exercise as much as doing a crossword, practicing both gives you greater chances of understanding new situations. We use these different areas of the brain in conjunction, mostly with the visual side. Shutting one's eyes when attempting a common task can help us learn more about the total experience of doing that task, as the brain can focus more resources on sound, touch, smell.

Our vision consumes huge amounts of our brain's resources, and to think about something our brain often moves our eyes off what we are looking at and defocuses them to reduce input from that source. Going somewhere quite and shutting our eyes can help us enormously when we need to think, but if the thinking involves a stressful subject it might be better to modify our surroundings so that the problem can sink into our subconscious.

Intelligence is not about how much knowledge our brains can contain, it is about how effectively we can use that knowledge. Perhaps it would be better if we spent our time optimizing how we use information rather than acquiring new information.