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On Learning It has been said that half the solution to understanding a problem is to define it. If we are plunged into trying to understand a completely new situation it is sometimes difficult to know what questions to ask. We may be given a number of facts but unless we understand the context it can be difficult to see how these facts relate to each other or to how we do our job. What we need is an overview. Eventually experience and assimilation gives us a context and then we can start asking the right questions. However, most learning is not done intellectually. There is a growing tendency in the West to teach all skills at university. The assumption is that all learning is intellectual, even though a common sense examination of this shows this to be wrong. For instance, when we fist learnt a language we didn’t do it at college learning grammar and pronunciation. We did it by imitation and trial and error. It takes most people far longer to learn a second language than it did the first and, what’s more, people who learn a second language usually have the accent of their first language. We often learn without knowing that we learnt. We learn by assimilation, associating with people who understand and by experience. Only a few years ago many trades were taught by apprenticeships. The student would work alongside someone who knew the trade and who would show them how to perform tasks. I was taught computer programming at university but really learnt it when I worked alongside a master who taught me the skills as an apprentice. This is the distinction between information and knowledge. University education can give us information but experience, and practical application, gives us knowledge. By seeing education purely in terms of information people are not taught how to think laterally. That is, how to see the information they have in different ways. Generally, school and university education is left-brain orientated. It teaches sequential, rather than holistic, thinking. Consequently, people feel they have to defer to others who purport to have more information. People who have read a lot of books and are able to regurgitate ideas of others are listened to, whereas people who have original ideas are, as often as not, ridiculed. And so understanding stagnates. Once a consensus has been established it is difficult, if not impossible to break out of the established way of looking at things. It is sometimes said that science has given us the ability to land on the moon, perform heart transplants, and develop technologies such as computers and television. While it is undoubtedly true that science has given us some of the theoretical understanding of such things as propagation of radio waves, which is essential for television reception, the real work is done by engineers. And engineering is fundamentally pragmatic. It is learnt on the job and all the theory in the world counts for nothing if it doesn’t work. A friend of mine is an admissions nurse in an emergency department at a large hospital. He told me that one of the main reasons for voluntary admission is migraine headaches. The first course of action is to re-hydrate the body by giving a drip. I have found that when I talk to people who get migraines, invariably they don’t drink enough water. This is not acknowledged by the medical profession but is well known by people working ‘in the field’. I suspect if you suggested this as reason for migraines to many medical academics, they would laugh at you.