Ignorance - Did we misunderstand

“Why are you so ignorant?”

Have you ever said that to someone? Were you frustrated by the lack of understanding? About something that was so obvious?

Let me tell you a secret. It is not ignorance or stupidity.

It takes people time to learn.

Sometimes the time may run out, but learning remains undone.

It came as a surprise to me when I realized it. Having spent a decade on understanding health, every day, I discover new things that I simply did not know.

I learn new things about things I already thought I knew. Some of these may be nuances or an enhancement of my understanding.

But these are new insights, regardless.

Which made me wonder why I didn’t understand it before. It wasn’t like I did not apply myself to the process. Learning is something I approach with intentionality. Then I realized.

Learning takes time.

We operate from our awareness. Which means we operate from things we understand. Awareness creates the perception of knowledge.

Imagine a brain operating from the awareness of its knowledge being asked to acknowledge that it does not know. You can see the difficulty.

So at each step of learning, you have to use what you know to add more knowledge while simaltaneously believing that you do not know.

Dont forget, we also have what Ebbinghaus told us in his book Über das Gedächtnis called the forgetting curve. Our neurons are wired to forget new information within the first twenty minutes of acquiring it. So if you dont repeat it, you will forget. Within a day, left unattended, it will be gone.

Combining the unwillingness to accept that we do not know with the terrific speed of information decay makes us slow learners.

It is not for nothing that children spend so much time in school.

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