Opinion: Importance of revision

I made this essay when I saw Shivam feeling lazy to take down some notes as he read through a book. I, no doubt, feel lazy quite often to take down notes. And therefore, this essays was not only intended for Shivam but also for me. This happens. I know I should take down notes because that'll aid my revision; but often, I have observed, the mess in our minds eclipses the motivating wisdom (viz the ideas that'll motivate me to make the move). While writing this essay I realised that the very wisdom is hidden in a corner of my mind. A mere initiative to write on a topic helps me keep the mess aside and hover over that wisdom. Writing helps me think, to be exact. Why I address Shivam? Because that serves as a purpose. So, with all due respect to Shivam (and no offence intended), I bring you the essay.

Dear Shivam, The Situation: There are times when we realize that we are wasting our time. There are times when a real world engagement appears in our dreams. As surfing get ever more common these days, the conscience of man begins regretting every now and them. We do random things all days long and at the end of the day plan to have an order in life. Doing things in chunk and order is pleasing as well as efficient. But the world is turning into a sharp poking stick. The instant pleasure of the pokes tricks this ape-ish brain and we go with the flow. I have an urge to cite Sapolsky here, but I won’t. The Problem: I can’t figure out why you didn’t note things down regardless of me and your deep-inner-self constantly emphasizing on it. The task was not short-lived. You spent something like 10 continuous days or more, reading the book in June and something like 100 hours on Krauss’s book. Why the practical-you kept ignoring the voice? – I do not know. But I can see one of the possibilities. The defining feature of our being is what we do. Let our actions not be decided by poking sticks. The Metaphor: Book reading is like Sex. There are two possible consequences. Short term: Instant pleasure. Long term: A cute baby. Saturation, Incubation, Illumination Intellectual victory is no easy. People think the inventor of the electric bulb, Thomas Alva Addison, just repeated and repeated and repeated for 999 times and Blimey! on the 1000th try he made the bulb light. Sisyphus might have put-in a bit more effort and then a bit more effort and so on to push the rock uphill but the idea behind an artificial lighting device didn’t come just by joining together a thousand pieces of wire, repeating the same joint-fixing again and again. Putting-in muscular effort is all we have been doing all through our evolutionary history. The ability to memorize the ‘dictation words’ is clearly a side effect. Chasing mangos and bananas for their delicious taste is what kept our ancestors alive all through our evolutionary history. The craze for social networking and video games is clearly a side effect. Not doing anything to save physical energy is what kept our ancestors alive all through our evolutionary history. Laziness and procrastination are clearly a side effect. This is one of the significant ideas I have learned in my drive to drill through biology after school years. That is, to live on the commands of my prefrontal cortex, I need to see the world (including my own thought-processes and activities) through this scientific filter. The contrast helps me take the right decision and I’m still working rigorously on it. My Nemo Analogy: Assume that you are a fish in an aquarium. Nemo! One day, an aquarium grandma narrates a tale of oceans. You got motivated. One day, you got a chance to make a move; dive down into the ocean. You will sound fishy to the aquarium guys who have never seen the awe-inspiring bedrock, but over time they’ll value your effort. Immersion is not possible with fishermen drawing a net beneath you. If you love the fish-edible sprinkled on the net, you are unfortunate. So make sure the net-delusion won’t be a hurdle. If there are no fishing rods poking you, you’ll survive and will gradually turn blue; meaning, the underwater colony will slowly identify you. You’ll shortly find the most-beautiful-at-heart fish. You spend significant time with her and fall in love with her. You start living together. One day that Queen of ocean allows you to love her. You do it together and you feel her deeply within yourself. That unspeakable feeling! You are saturated with a deep passionate love for her. Moments later the good news comes in. Your queen lays the cute little baby eggs on the blue bed-rock. That was the result of your physical effort. Now is the time for your creative effort. You have to bring in food and comfort her and incubate the eggs with her. This is a time-consuming and tiring process. Sometime later, you see an egg hatch. Finally, that’s the Aha! moment. The motivation is Madame Curie’s suggestion to choose to be curious about the ideas over people. Sounding fishy is the moment when lay-people find your cracking of scientific jokes strange. Fishermen are the people, and poking sticks the constant disturbance by information bombardment. Net is the distractive part of Internet, the ocean the science itself, and blue the familiarity with science. The fish is your field and the love-making your exploration. Bedrock is the heart of your field, and the eggs your notes. Incubation is your playing with notes, and the egg hatching the Eureka! moment. Beginning with the motivation, you worked for so long, fought against distractions to concentrate and immerse yourself in your favorite field. You dived to reach the bedrock of your field and be saturated with the idea. You understood so much and collected so lot that it took all your life to reflect and rethink and remodel and break the monotonies for a new idea to hatch. That is a contribution and once verified, a revolution! The Advaita Ashram of Vivekananda has this inspiring logo: a figure of a hooded serpent encircling a swan, a lotus, a lake, and sunrise. Swan resembles the destination, lotus passion, sunrise knowledge, and the hooded serpent focus and concentration. In India, a hooded snake is an icon of concentration. Think about it. Some students, when in a crowd, enclose their eyes under cupped palms to steal their attention and concentrate on the book. My idea: I am convinced that a fair disregard of concentration is a big problem in itself. In today’s world, people are the victim of the attention economy. Poking sticks demanding attention are shaping the brain to take an impulsive shape. Quoting Carl Sagan, ‘... we might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces’. Being an ignorant of the workings of this piece of life, we are driving it (under the orders of multinational companies and anticipation of sweet meals) towards disaster. Clarification: Anyway, coming to our issue, I don’t react like this every now and then. I am your friend. I don’t want you to do things in a way that turns out to be incomplete or futile. After all, you landed spending time reading the books because I happened to initiate it and bring it to you. In future, if at all it happens that you (for some reason) start blaming me for being the reason of your loss of years, I’ll lose my face. The apparent futility of your time and effort (almost no long-time benefit I see) is horrible. Answer me: after reading those long difficult chapters of Sapolsky and these short ones of Krauss, what have you collected to incubate on? What were the most striking ones you met? How do these help you grow? If you didn’t squeeze the extract out, what have you done? I asked for your notes simply to adopt (if any) new technique you made use of to lay selected ideas. I wanted to improve my conciseness, and never intended to test you or insult you. Your failure to produce any was disappointing because your passion for the subject of the book made me think that you to take it (like really) seriously. When you said ‘the book is not an easy read and it is filled with a hell lot of information’, you sounded like ‘regardless of all this I am continuing and trying to enjoy’. Take these words of yours and present it to somebody else and ask what he draws from it. It’s very likely that you’ll sound to him the way you sounded to me. A bit close to certainty: I think you read the book because of your interest. That is normal. I think you also read to find striking ideas. That is normal. I think you procrastinated making notes. That is normal. I think, like me, you expect to understand everything in the book. The probability of that ‘happening’ without complete involvement is, indeed, abnormal. So? Saturation when you read a book! Incubation on your notes! (like a hen incubates on her egg) Illumination will happen suddenly. And finally, this must be added: Verification! Love, Shivam