How do you use your brain?

Posted by Parke Ladd on Nov 21, 2008 in Do Something You Love, Featured {Article}, Greatness | 1 comment

I don’t know.  Why should I fill my brain with facts I can find in two minutes in any standard reference book?  -Einstein, in response to the question: how many feet are in a mile?  As taken from the book The Magic of Thinking Big

Maybe you are like me.  Maybe you spent 4 or 5 or even 6 years of your young adult life in a lecture hall, voraciously attempting to scribble down words onto a lined sheet of paper in hopes that later on that week you would be able to interpret what you actually wrote down.  Maybe you are like me, and you asked yourself, “Why am I doing this?”  

What we are taught in school is to push as much information, as many facts as we possibly can, into our overloaded, overworked brains.  We are then taught that those of us who are best able to keep those facts in our brain just long enough to spew them back onto a more formal piece of paper, called an exam, are the most successful of the group (class).  

What is wrong with this picture (or should I say reality)? 

For the majority of students, this way of learning and using our brains continues into the rest of our lives, leaving us with brains that function as mini-warehouse storage units rather than as well polished, active thinking machines.  Remember, (or learn for the first time) it is more important to use your mind to THINK rather than to STORE.  Most anyone with a higher education experience can store, but very few can actually think and process and create and imagine and…well, you are starting to get the picture.  

A fact storing person is only worth as much as the encyclopedia or Internet data base that he memorizes his facts from.  A thinking man or woman is a priceless asset.