How much is 3 + 3?
You know the answer already, don’t you?
That answer is embedded in your brain through a factor of repetition.
Time and time again, you were called on to remember random numbers.
Then you had to add them up, multiply them and eventually they formed a memory.
Your brain has a storage point for all these bits and pieces.
And talent works on memory. But depends far more on layering.
So if you were to listen to Clay Shirky on collaboration (see video below), you’d learn about collaboration in groups.
If you were to listen to Clay Shirky a second time, you’ll learn something quite different about collaboration in groups.
If you were to listen to Clay Shirky four or five times, you’ll learn something quite different every single time.
How do I know this?
Because I went for a walk to the beautiful Milford beach, near my home.
And during that one hour walk, I listened to the same audio five times over.
Each time my brain remembered something from the previous hearing, and layered a new learning over it.
The more I listened, the more I learned.
It wasn’t just repetition.
It was literally a bunch of new ideas that were popping in my brain with every repetition.
In effect, I was layering.
Then I took that layering, and added some more information.
I listened to Deborah Gordon and how ants use collaboration (see video below)
Then I spoke to my wife, Renuka about how collaboration could be used on our websites.
Then I brought up the concept of collaboration in a client call.
With every layer, my understanding of collaboration increased in leaps and bounds.
I now understood collaboration like never before.
What my brain is doing, is creating a whole bunch of amazing links.
Links that help me learn.
And get more talented in the understanding of collaboration.
Compare this with 3 + 3.
No matter how many ways you look at it, it’s still 6.
Which brings us back to the question of superiority. Which is more important? Layering or repetition?
Without a doubt, layering is what helps us become talented.
Memory merely helps us remember those layers.
Memory isn’t superior than layering. And neither is layering superior to memory.
Both are needed to learn and sustain a skill.
But if you really want to become a genius at something you can’t depend solely on memory.
Memory by itself is just a bunch of 3 + 3 situations.
Layering is what causes genius.
More on this later…now that I’m back thanks to a nudge from Stew Walton
For now, watch these fascinating videos on collaboration.
They all relate to one simple factor.
Your brain freezes.
It doesn’t have a memory of a fire-drill
So let’s start with the fire-drill, shall we?
The reason why you had a fire-drill in school or at an office, isn’t because the organisation likes making you run out of the building, and onto the street.
The biggest reason for fire-drills, is to know what to do in an emergency.
Because contrary to what you may believe, people don’t actually run helter-skelter in an emergency. They sit there, transfixed, as if in a bad dream.
And in your business, emergencies pop up like 800-pound gorillas
Suddenly you have to write a report. Or create a presentation. Or even worse, write an engaging article.
And your brain panics. It freezes. And it has no memory of any fire-drill.
The brain goes into panic mode. It scans memory bank after memory bank for a memory of success.
On the contrary, it finds failure after failure
Why does it run into failure? And how do we overcome this failure? Listen to this short 7 minute audio, and you’ll understand exactly what goes in the mind of a so-called ‘talented’ person. Why that person is able to walk right past that 800-pound assignment, while you can only watch in terror.
We automatically assume that we’re born with some talent.
But what if the reverse were true?
What if we were all blank slates?
What if everything depended on where we lived?
What if everything depended on if we were taught, based on how we learned fastest?
What if we had ‘teachers’ that didn’t believe in talent?
It’s all very fine to believe in talent.
But that’s like believing that 2 + 2=4.
Or to believe that time exists.
Because time doesn’t exist.
Neither does 2+2.
We humans made it all up.
And what if we made up the concept of talent as well?
Makes you wonder how many more skills you could have, if only you didn’t believe in talent, huh?
But again, it’s fine to fire rhetorical questions. But science is about proof.
And not only is it about proof.
But the proof must work across the board.
This means that anyone who’s interested in learning should be able to master the talent.
Anyone.
This means that you could walk into a cafe, where there were fifty people seated.
Fifty people of different ages.
Fifty people from different countries.
And education.
And capabilities.
And imagine we assumed that all of those fifty people are blank slates.
And we could teach them a skill.
But not only a skill, but help them become faster and more efficient than others who’d been using that skill for a long time.
We need a worthy challenge don’t we?
So let’s take a really difficult challenge.
Let’s learn Photoshop.
Let’s learn Photoshop without the toolbars.
And then let’s get everyone around you, no matter what their abilities, to learn Photoshop.
And then, learn it in such a way, that people have been using Photoshop for many years look at you in wonder.
And then, just to make it even more interesting, let’s learn Photoshop without a computer.
Is that a good enough challenge?
Are you game?
Because you’re one of those fifty people.
And this blog is the cafe. 🙂
So? Are you game, then?
Are you willing to believe in the blank slate, not because I say so.
But because you can prove it to yourself.
Are you?
Say yes in the comments section if you are ready 🙂
Learning and talent is all supposed to hinge on ease of instruction.
But what if you made learning difficult?
And what if there was no apparent benefit or payoff?
One Indian researcher ended up doing just that, quite by mistake…
In the year 1999, Sugata Mitra occupied an office at NIIT (a computer-training institute that has trained over five million students). And his office overlooked an urban slum in New Delhi.
A wall separated the slum from the office
So Sugata and his colleagues made a hole in the wall, and placed a computer in that hole. The monitor and the touch pad faced the slum. And the computer had a decently fast connection and was connected to the Internet.
Then Sugata and his colleagues sat back and watched.
What would happen next?
About eight hours later, an eight year-old child and six year-old girl were browsing the Internet.
Now the browser was in English, and technically at least, the kids didn’t speak the language.
But what if they were somehow helped?
There they were browsing the Internet, but hey, this was an urban slum. It’s possible that they were helped by someone with an understanding of computers, and/or an understanding of the foreign language.
This experiment was bringing up more questions than answers
So Sugata headed off to Shivpuri. Now Shivpuri is reasonably remote in the state of Madhya Pradesh.
They put another computer in the wall, and it was found by a 13-year old school dropout.
Yet in eight minutes, having never seen a browser before, he was busy browsing. By the evening, over seventy (yes, seventy) kids had begun to browse (again with no prior knowledge of browsers).
By the year 2000, the experiment had gone one step further.
Sugata took the experiment to a village called Madantusi, near Lucknow, in India.
Now if you know India, even just a little bit, you’ll know that English is all pervasive. Yes, the accents and the pronunciation is a bit different, but you can make yourself understood in English.
Well, the village of Madantusi didn’t seem to have an English teacher at all.
And once again, the computer was placed in the wall, this time with CDs available. And no Internet connection.
And the computer was left there for three whole months.
When Sugata came back three months later he was amazed
The little kids turned to him and said they needed a faster processor. And a better mouse.
How did the kids learn what they needed?
Amazingly, though all the terms and the information was in English, the kids taught themselves to understand the ‘code’ of English.
The kids were now using over 200 English words in conversations with each other.
In fact, in many instances, when the computers were hooked up to the Internet, the kids would search for a website that would teach them the English alphabet.
Are you stunned?
You should be.
Not only was the concept of the computer alien to most of the kids.
But the language was the equivalent of you reading an unknown language, like Swahili.
And yet, the kids quickly worked it out.
So how did they work it out?
Were they more talented?
As it turns out, they were not.
The kids were just kids from the village, who’d found something interesting.
So how did they pick up this talent of browsing, finding websites, and speaking a foreign language?
You see, talent is a matter of understanding code.
If code is simple to follow, then you understand and apply it.
But as it turns out, even when things are difficult, the human brain is able to work things out.
So why do we not become as talented as we should be?
Parents. And teachers.
The people who believe that we’re born to do certain things.
And not other things.
The people who tell us that nature, and family and heritage determines talent.
Time and time again, these parents and teachers tell us who we are.
And what we should be doing.
And what we can’t do.
But as it turned out, in this experiment there was no parent. Or teacher.
The hole in the wall computer was manned only by curious kids, eager to learn.
And to teach each other the ‘code’.
And time and again, they succeeded, across the length and breadth of India.
No matter what the level of education, or language, or diversity. The experiment played out almost the same way time and time again. And a whole bunch of kids became magically talented.
Which makes you wonder, eh?
Are parents, and teachers, and our school system…who believe in talent, the factor that kill our talents?
Hmmm…
Note: Watch the video below that details the experiment. If you’re reading this on email, you’ll have to go to https://brainaudit.com to watch the video. If you’re online, you can already see the video right under this line.
