Learning and Unlearning

A lot of Jargons are being made up today in order to define something very simple. I came across one such Jargon - "Unlearning". Let us dive deep and understand what the term really means...

Original Story by Prashant Sachdev

Learning is a continuous process. It starts on the day we are born. Most people link learning to education. However, our subconscious mind is too inquisitive to stop learning at the age of 25. As a matter of fact, your subconscious mind is currently trying to judge the author of this article amongst a thousand other things.

No matter how much we learn, the subconscious/conscious mind would try to restrict new knowledge that contradicts any knowledge we currently possess. This new knowledge may or may not be valuable. It's like the Schrödinger's Cat! You'll only know the current state of the Cat if you open the box!

Unlearning

Unlearning has been referred to as discarding of false information/toxic information etc. by many people. However, in my opinion the same is impossible. The human brain does not function like a hard drive that can erase/discard information by the use of the Shift+Del. key combination. (Even this would leave fragments of data that can be retrieved back)

Unlearning can be more related to having an open mind. An open mind would allow processing of new ideas/information by checking the validation of older information that may be contradicting.

The pre-existent information you possess may not be false/invalid

Having common sense is also a very important component of Unlearning. One shouldn’t accept any knowledge/fact without considering all the aspects of the same. A fact may be true in one case and be wrong in another – The law of Diminishing Marginal Utility wouldn’t be valid for an Addict!

Learn and Unlearn Carefully…

The moral of the story is to learn and unlearn carefully. Perhaps, the better thing to do would be to learn whatever you can and use the right approach/knowledge (traditional or newly learned) based upon the situation.

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