Infotrition

Infotrition: N. The nutritional value of our information feed as assigned by the person interested in the information.

Section 1: Mental Satiety

Life is constantly shifting it’s shape in the process of our aging and the time between distant memories and now can seem very short yet lengthy, simultaneously (See Potential Time). Despite our perception that we remain the same, some of us can lose track of identity and with time, not realize that we’ve become holistically different people than who we were in our youth, or even a couple of years ago. Under The Speakback Cycle we can try to keep track of how we’re changing through time but for the most part, we age and change without too much self-scrutiny.

As kids going through school, or aging, we don’t have much control over what we’re allowed to do. That’s the adults job.

I remember as a kid I could only play video games on weekends, I couldn’t go out with friends or out to public places during the weekdays and I’m sure many people share similar memories. Despite wanting candy all the time as kids, most of us had parents that didn’t allow us to indulge in that impulse. As time moves forward and our responsibilities grow, we are given our freedom. We are trusted with making our own decisions in life, deciding what we want to eat and where we want to go. Basically, as we age, we gain responsibilities and from that, accountability.

It is common that people reach this level of independence by the time they’re in college; some earlier, some later. This sudden surge of freedom tends to bring with it a spike of odd, but natural behaviour. People who were restricted from junk food might have an immense urge to snack on things they couldn’t when younger. If you weren’t allowed to watch graphic or violent movies as a kid, perhaps you’d go and start watching all the movies you missed out on. Sometimes, people don’t exhibit these urges, but for many of us, in at least a few dimensions, we have this “I can do whatever I want now!” surge through us.

The tendency of College Freshman to gain weight due to the gained freedom of going to college is called the Freshman 5 or 10 (depending on which state you end up in, in the United States). They end up eating cafeteria food and fast food. While I’m not sure how much I had gained freshman year, I do recall a prominent example with Reese’s.

I love peanut butter, and I hadn’t had Reese’s since I had been a kid (4-6) and when I got to college (at age 19), I ended up having it very frequently. On spring break, I remember eating a full box of Reese’s cookies which contained some 40 cookies in a single night! My friends were certain I’d have a heart attack or something from the sugar but luckily, I passed by the night fine.

As time passes and people adjust to their given freedom, they tend to normalize (by the time I had reached sophomore-junior year, my intake and desire for Reese’s significantly decreased from that of my freshman year). Many of the people who had lead unhealthy lives also began taking responsibility for their health, or at least, pursuing a healthier life style, however even this adjustment can take a long time to occur, sometimes surpassing college or even adulthood. Health is one of those things we don’t value until we lose, and the likelihood of encountering an event in which health becomes an issue, increases, the less healthy we are. Some people won’t take on the challenge of leading a healthier lifestyle even after a heart attack!… but that’s a topic for a different day.

I want to use this example of how we interact with freedom and our choice in food/junk food to draw a parallel between how we interact with knowledge and information as we progress through academia.

As we’re going through academia, some of us had no control over what we learned. Assuming you didn’t drop out, many people have had to take classes or study subjects that did not interest them. Even subjects within our major can become dull or difficult. People in a British educational system gets to choose their subjects earlier than in an American educational system, so perhaps they’d feel this less, but ultimately, I think anybody who went through college could understand the sentiment. As preteens, we might not see how geometry makes us better historians, and as adults, we might see it less so.

Once we complete our academic career, that is, we’ve reached the point in which we’re not going back to academia anymore, we’ve reached the equivalent position of a college student gaining freedom, however, the freedom we gain is over our own pursuit of knowledge.

In Academia, we are learning things constantly. From elementary to college, each year builds on the previous and you end up learning about literature, history, life sciences and math.

Once we enter the real world (get a job, etc) many are under no obligation to learn things outside of their job, and many people do not, as it is not necessary to them. Save for a few professions like Doctors who need to keep up with medical advances and changes to different treatments, lawyers who need to keep up with changing laws to remain relevant to society or scientists that keep up to date (although some don’t) many people don’t need to learn anything new to be competent and useful at their job, this is partially due to the use of technology in many jobs, but it is also because of the freedom to do what we want once we gain freedom of knowledge. However, neglecting to learn new things for a while not only makes us forget the things we have already learned, but it makes it harder for us to acquire new information and integrate it into our knowledge base.

Knowledge is not about what is sufficient, it is about expanse. To become a more competent human being, one needs to understand different fields collectively, or at least, that’s what makes a person more intelligent. Some people don’t know why earthquakes happen or why lightening strikes or even why humans require oxygen. However, understanding any of these topics can bring forth a more coherent image of the world’s anatomy from a physical, biological, historical or even economic stance. No field of study is truly independent from all other fields of study. Psychology, anthropology, architecture, literature, history, geology, marketing, neuroscience, everything is connected in one way or another, and the more you know about these different fields, the more connected the world will seem. Luckily, self-learning is much more fun than academia because YOU control the wheel.

As you make time for learning new things, you can take your time with it. Since there are no grades or final tests, the only thing that matters is whether you are comprehending what you’re reading or not!

Beware of Academic fixedness. People tend to think that what they’ve learned in college/academia is what they’re capable of learning in general, and this is not true. You’d be surprised of what you’re capable of learning if you take your time to learn, even topics you might’ve failed in school or of which you’ve had no exposure. I’ve a friend who studied history and believed she knew nothing about computers and now, she’s working at Windows, coding and managing projects, working far outside the scope of her degree. Those who studied engineering are capable of learning biology, astronomy or even economics. The matter more so becomes the time you need to put in to understand a given topic and your drive to do so.

Once we are done with academia, it’s important that we take the time to scavenge for new information to include into our mental diet. Otherwise, we end up with the skeleton of only what’s immediately useful to us, and all the branches of knowledge that we learned but never had to use, wilt and fall away.

Section 2: The Mental Dieting

When we are in control of our information feed, it’s important to spend time digesting complex material to maintain the shrewdness and prowess of our mind. When we don’t think about things for a long while, we begin to forget them, and with enough forgotten information, we find ourselves somewhat disconnected from the world around us. This forgetfulness is further hidden by the availability of smartphones as they allow us to look up information without necessarily retaining any of what we find.

The availability of answers on the internet makes it very easy for people to think at a lesser plain while still being convinced they are becoming smarter.

Many articles that get circulated or shared tend to use simple language and don’t delve too deeply into a given topic. While they might be informative in terms of what new product has come out, or which new scientific discovery has been found, they are nowhere near as challenging to read as a textbook would’ve been. On reddit, there exists the subreddit “/r/truereddit” which hoped to focus more so on deeper articles because they found that regular reddit had become too Meme focused. There also exists “/r/truetruereddit” which aims to go even deeper and perhaps in the future even “/r/truetruetruereddit” will pick up! Clearly however, with the rise of meme culture, expedited and shallow communication has become favored over slower, deeper communication.

While I don’t read as often as I’d like from these subreddits, it becomes clear very quickly that reading deeper material in your free time gives your mind a deeper toning. A person who spends their time reading an in-depth analysis on a given topic is better adept than a person reading simpler articles about the same topic. Furthermore, as you get used to reading complex material, you will find it less difficult to do so. However, if reading harder and complicated texts would make everybody smart, why doesn’t everybody do it?

Because the brain’s diet can go askew, and we don’t really think about it.

With food, many people who diet, or think about dieting, have had encounters with snacks or junk food. To ask why people don’t want to strain their brain and become smart is the same as asking why people don’t eat healthy all the time. There’s a joy in having snacks and chocolate that triumphs over our desire to be healthy. We make exceptions and have cheat days to help us cope with dieting (although this will be revisited in the future). Furthermore, as the body gets used to snacking, it becomes difficult to break out of the habit. Having coffee ends up meaning there’ll be a small cookie with it. Birthdays mean cake and gatherings mean brownies and other confectioneries and soon it becomes normal to have pancakes and ice-cream for breakfast because we’re free to live as we choose and “yum”!

Similarly, simpler articles, or, simple information, provides our brain with the same kind of superficial satisfaction as snacking. When we read an article, or watch a 30-second video about a scientific discovery, our brain convinces itself that it’s reading or being exposed to something meaningful even if the language is extremely simple or the video only touches upon the topic briefly. While explaining things simply is better, it’s also important that people learning about a given topic sink their teeth into the breadth of that topic; otherwise we never really get far into anything we’re learning, and none of it really sticks either. Soon, it becomes normal to not read about a given field but just rely on these fun, short videos to help us understand the surrounding world. In short, it’s okay to watch these quick videos that summarize many points and touch on the basics of a given topic (I love the YouTube channel In a Nut Shell), but we should also take the time to delve deeper into a topic of our interest to gain a deeper understanding and solidify our knowledgebase.

One of the main problems is the amount of time required for deeper understanding. People on social media feeds or those looking through their daily news feed might not want to spend 40 minutes concentrating on something to learn but would rather keep their brain at the lower level of operation that entertainment needs. There comes a time, if left unchecked, when the person might not just be uninterested in learning new things, but they become incapable of straining their brain when they need to; thinking becomes a hindrance and 20 minutes of reading becomes too difficult. Implicit of the loss of patience, I think another reason people aren’t as interested in deep learning on the internet is the abundance of entertainment. Many social media accounts post meme’s and people share memes in abundance because they’re easy to digest.

It’s difficult to eat healthy while you include too many cheat days. This happens because you end up cheating more often than you’d like, and soon, you forget that you were dieting in the first place. Similarly, it’s difficult to stay on the path of learning while spending too much time digesting entertainment.  Your brain ends up finding it easier to digest entertainment and you forget that you wanted to actually learn in the first place, unless you also develop your discipline.

To me, this resistance and inconvenience in thinking and learning is synonymous to people who struggle to eat healthy food after a long time of snacking. The brain adapts to complex information and withers without it. Spending time questioning how things work and why they’re a certain way helps us expand our perception of life and provides us with a better picture of the world around us, making it easier to learn other things as we see what part of the large picture this information is filling in. When we don’t have a large picture in mind and we’ve given a tile of information, we don’t know where to put the information or how this fact fits into the grand scheme of things, much like water paint dripping down a canvas; smeary, confusing and illusive.

At the end of the day, you are what you think, and your thoughts are affected by your information intake. Furthermore, our mental habits can sometimes hide from us what’s happening at a cognitive level. Sometimes, I catch people scrolling through their social media feeds and only stopping when they see a simple image (a selfie, food, a pretty sunset), and skipping complex posts where maybe a user is sharing their views on an industry or highlighting a problem like animal abuse or women’s rights. Interestingly, they don’t unfollow these people, but will either skip their posts or launch their stories and skip through them till they see something that’s easy to digest. Again, this can trick the brain into thinking “I’m following intelligent/interesting people” even if they’re not actually intaking what those people are doing or saying. It’s like having a gym membership but not going; you feel better about yourself because you’ve made an investment towards your health but if you don’t utilize the membership then it doesn’t matter.

As we spend countless hours on the internet and in our day to day lives conversating, I think people should strive to acquire more knowledge and wisdom form each other and from the internet. The internet is a well of information but it’s also a well of distraction. Somewhere within it lies the answer to any question you can think of, and in the same liquid, you’ll find a way to take your mind off anything. The question of the mental diet then goes back to what we value within the information itself. That is:

What about information makes itself valuable to us?

Section 3: Food for Thought

Human beings are curious by nature, however, as we age, we tend to settle into a sense of cynicism, skepticism and complacency with one’s own experiences and knowledgebase. The drive to continuously learn as we were in academia (if it existed back then even) dies down largely in part to the way that academia is structured. From an early age, we constantly have homework, assignments and tests which challenge us to retain and apply information, and once we finish with this burden, we feel like we’d never want to learn a thing again.

The truth is, however, it’s fun to learn how to think. Anybody who has worked hard at solving a problem (whether in academia or not) knows that the sense of accomplishment you get when you finish a tricky project at work, complete a challenging boss in a videogame or find something that is very difficult to locate. Humans are not just curious, we also enjoy being challenged, especially if we are able to complete the test.

When we have control of what information we intake, we can then create our own assignments by asking ourselves curious questions. If you’ve ever wondered about something, looking up the information and understanding it is extremely rewarding. The issue though, is that after we leave academia, many of us lose our curiosity as well. With the heaps of entertainment that come out yearly, it’s difficult to find time to wonder about anything. We work long hours and when we get home, we want to relax. This pattern of thinking is somewhat misleading as self-learning is nowhere near as stressful as learning a subject for a test or a class. This is largely due to the curiosity we attain in seeking knowledge we desire and the open time-scale. If we’re reading about something that interests us at our own pace, it keeps us in a constant state of engagement. However, what’s subtly happening with time is that we aren’t seeking what we’re curious about, but rather, relying on automatic curation from companies/services and choosing from that what interests us from that selection.

Social media and news aggregates both provide us with many options. Depending on what we view, like, share and comment on, we’re given other possible pieces of information which might interest us. This sort of approach to acquiring information is different than having us seek knowledge from the internet ourselves. For one, the topics we’d end up reading about would be vastly different between the two methods, and secondly, our interest would be of a different nature.

When I would rely on Google News to see what’s happening in the world, a lot of my articles were related to videogames or technology because those types of articles are usually easier to read, and I’d end up clicking them more. You can always make sure that you curate and control yourself when it comes to what you click on, but the constant resisting of clicking on an article whose title is designed to be clicked on becomes troublesome, I’d rather just stop it all together and see what I end up seeking innately. When I stopped using Google News, I stopped reading news in general except for the major events occurring like wars or policy changes, and I began reading more books. Instead of spending 20-30 minutes scrolling through all the curated material and clicking on the ones I felt like reading, I just took time to read what I wanted to read, and that made it much more fun.

This however, brings us to an interesting point. Information as it is, becomes valuable to us for many reasons and if updates about new phones or reactions to new devices used to attract my attention, why doesn’t it anymore? What is it that changed within me to make me decide “I don’t care for this piece of information anymore?”

Like how we have junk food and snacks, we have information snacks that can fill people’s brains without necessarily providing nourishment to the mind. Reading about these technology updates or videogame release reactions provided me with a sort of “yummy” feeling in my brain; I understood everything in the articles because it was so simple to read. You compare values of sales of videogames to see which one did a better job, you look at GHZ of processing power and focus on mm differences in case sizes, bezel and other parameters. At the end of the day, knowing about this stuff was only important to me because of how it made me feel: smart. Entertainment can also provide a similar feeling.

However, with more focus on my mind, I realized that it’s not that important to me what the new iPhone is going to bring to the technology world or how fast the next Android phone will be. Therefore, this type of information became irrelevant to me, and it was removed from my mental diet; I don’t read about it anymore and it doesn’t enter my feed. Keep in mind, it’s up to a person to decide what’s “important” information and what one person considers important might be pointless to others.

Infotrition aims to give people a way of describing what criteria need to be fulfilled for them to be interested in a piece of information, it describes our information feed. Personally, I find that information that has utility, applicability, relevance or helps me develop coherence, is valuable to me. Although these categories might not pertain to you, these categories aim to describe WHY a certain piece of information might be valued.

I might care about this piece of information because it has utility

Utility, here, is anything a person considers useful. This can also be in terms of work or hobbies, health or knowledge. If I’m an artist and I see an article about how to draw something, it’s likely to be interesting to me because it helps me with a hobby I’m currently practising. If someone tells me of a way to avoid a health risk, I’m likely to be interested as it helps me with an issue I’m facing or might potentially face. Sometimes we want to know about something before going into a meeting because it helps us with that interaction.

I might care about this piece of information because it has applicability

Applicability here is the possibility of implementing the information. Sometimes we read about things that can’t be applied to our current location or aren’t compatible with our culture. However, when the information IS applicable, we are more likely to be interested in it.

I might care about this piece of information because it is a component of a larger understanding

Sometimes we care about a piece of information because it helps us better understand something else. This is much of the part of information that pertains to questions. When we ask a question, we are filling in a node of knowledge that helps fill a web of understanding, representative of any arbitrary idea. One might ask about electricity to better understand magnetism. Sometimes we need a certain date to fill a blank in a timeline. Every idea is composed of components and when we need a piece of information to fill in a blank, we care about that piece of information for its composition, and these components together form our coherent view of the world.

I might care about this piece of information because it is relevant to my surroundings

Sometimes we care about a piece of information because it helps us with our environment. In a way, this pertains to things like news, gossip as well as culture. Information that is relevant to our environment is valuable to us as it helps us integrate better with society and our environment.

I might care about this piece of information because of how it makes me feel

Sometimes we just want to engage in information for the sake of engagement. This is where curiosity and the seeking of information makes us human, but it’s also where entertainment can capture us for an indefinite amount of time. I touch further upon our relationship with entertainment in the following post. Keep in mind however that we can control our feelings by exposing ourselves to certain ideas. If we need to be uplifted, perhaps a cute video will help, or a sitcom will do. If I want to feel informed, I’ll read more news articles or watch documentaries.

Information does not slice up as nicely as we’d like for digestion, and there will always be pieces of information that interest us for several reasons.  In the end, we all think different thoughts and you might have different categories for why you care about a certain piece of information or type of information. Infotrition after all, is subjective and personal.

I view learning information much like being taught to “eat your veggies”. Some pieces of information are crucial but aren’t necessarily fun to learn initially; many people view learning how the internet works as a bit of a dull topic … DNS, information packets, ISP, IP address… it sounds like a bunch of jargon, but at the same time, if we spend so much time using the internet, aren’t we curious about what we’re doing and how it’s working? When you drive a car, don’t you want to know how pressing down a pedal makes the car move faster?

You are what you think and as you learn, you grow stronger. Don’t let your past weigh you down from learning new things, if you did poorly in math, you could still go back and learn it without the worry of flunking a test. Also, know that you can learn anything in the future, but only if you spend the present learning it. As we digest information and go about our day, we work to filling in gaps in understanding as we guide ourselves to that deeper sense of “what it means to know” as we learn in life, what it means to act. We can settle for sufficient knowledge in which we know what we need in life while spending time having fun or practicing hobbies, or we can take some time to improve our mental frame and explore new alleys in understanding as we go about our daily lives.

To learn, or not to learn, that is the question.