chris

I have a theory. It’s about lateral learning and brain development. It’s just a theory, and I’m not even sure if it’s true.

The brain develops faster as you think more laterally. That means like when you encounter a problem, and you keep using the same parts of the brain you have been trained to use, it doesn’t improve as fast as if you take your mind off and spend time on other types of problems while trying to come up with a solution for this one.

I’ve been observing my own mental disabilities from since national service. And it has been rather disappointing. My learning capabilities have been slowed to a crawl and it’s not improving at the rate that I need it to be. The past few weeks have been even worse. My schoolwork is plagued with careless mistakes, my thought process becomes incoherent. My usual ’speedy understanding’ isn’t working at all. Yeah sure, I could probably attribute all that to having to keep up with the more advanced topics in my modules. But I don’t think it’s just that.

I think I can attribute that to playing less pool. Yeah, seriously. I think playing pool, which is focusing on another type of problem and using another part of my brain, actually keeps my brain development at a healthy rate. I haven’t been playing pool at a healthy rate. Let alone doing anything other than schoolwork. I’m referring to anything else that takes up other parts of my mind, and requires mental effort. I’ve been spending way too much time in front of my schoolwork and my computer. It’s pretty bad.

I used to do some design as a hobby. And now I can’t really do that because I’ve ‘lost inpiration’ and I can’t really find it back. I guess it’s just my mind not working hard enough to get back that type of creativity. That’s a real bad thing. It’s like I’ve lost a creative thinking ability. That’s highly crucial for problem solving especially at higher levels.

Last night I have a lot of trouble digesting dynamic programming. I made many careless mistakes in my C++ code and I took a lot of time figuring them out. It’s terrible. And after I thought I figured it out, I tried another problem only to find out that I learnt next to nothing from the first problem. That sucks. Extremely.

Well, I should be getting my thinking chair soon. Hopefully it helps. And I really have to get back that creative mind. I’m gonna lose everything if I don’t.

I wonder if this has been proven. The theory of lateral thinking speeding up brain development. I’m not going to spend time to google it. I guess it’s one of the reasons why the government is pushing for holistic education. It’s to continuously push the limits of the mind. But the problem is that after national service, those unlucky ones, who don’t get to do any studying (whether self-study or not), don’t get to exercise their mental strength, and suffer a huge lapse in thinking. I’m one of those, I guess. It sucks.