There’s nothing people enjoy more than hearing what they already know and there’s nothing they detest more than being presented with new information.
We keep hearing that humans don’t use a significant part of their brain but in reality people tend to act as if by the age of 20 they have completely run out of space to store any new information.
Those who manage to avoid total brain ossification into their mature years are few and far between.
Is this an oversimplification? I learned how to use a computer mouse when I was around 45 or 50 years old. It is true, however, that I will never happily manage to drive a car with an automatic transmission.
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I don’t mean skills as much as accepting new ideas. This is why I keep asking people, “What have you changed your mind about recently?”
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Nope, I’m totally rigid and I’m gonna tell people to get off my damn lawn already.
Define “recent” and “new ideas”.
-For example, if you told me 10 years ago or even 5 years ago that I’d go from thinking police officers were overwhelmingly trustworthy heroes to “there’s a lot of stupid, frightened racist babies with badges who lie an awful lot and there’s a lot of people who enable them,” I’d have thought you were mad.
-In the last midterms, I voted for a 3rd party candidate, even though I hated the incumbent. Fifteen years ago, I would have started going on about Ralph Nader’s ruining everything.
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I have learned to think that student’s use of cell phones and tablets in class is good. I encourage note-taking via taking photos of the blackboard. This would have really upset me once upon a time, but it leads to more engagement, since people are more engaged since they are not frantically trying to copy down everything I say.
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That’s exactly what I’m talking about! 🙂
I also freaked out the first time I saw people taking photos of the blackboard but now I’m fine with it.
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Hee. Would it be wrong to assume that you’ve had this sentiment – that people are generally rigid and don’t consider new ideas – since you were twenty?
Ideas aren’t exactly piecemeal things, they’re connected, so reconsidering one leads you to reconsider whole tracts of your mental landscape. A lot of stuff that’s rigidly set by 20 may be such because it’s pretty useful and time-tested. By a relative standard if not an absolute one – though (adopting the skill analogy again) you might type faster if you got used to a dvorak keyboard instead of a qwerty one, who’s really going to make the effort to learn to use it? Professional typists, maybe.
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At 20 I only cared about making money and buying stuff advertised in glossy magazines. If anybody suggested I gave any thought to anything not leading to money-making, I would have spit in their faces. 🙂
I’m really glad I didn’t get stuck in that mentality. Gosh, I remember going off at the professor of literature back at the university , telling her it was wrong to teach us all this useless stuff about writers who’d been dead for centuries. :-))) Yeah. . .
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confirmation bias heuristic at its finest. Pretty common psychological phenomenon.
The thing is, for the most part its totally great. I like to assign semi-random probabilities to things, so i will say 95% – 99% of the time what your brain already knows is right / useful (don’t touch a hot stove, drive slower in the rain, when something is too good to be true it usually is etc.). If we didn’t become set in our ways we couldn’t be efficient and handle life.
However, certainly still being open to ideas is vitally important for that 1%-5% of the time. The difficulty is knowing which ideas / issues fall into those to be re-examined.
I fundamentally like to be a contrarian (which i feel this comment is) because while i agree with the sentiment that people don’t like to change, its important to note that its a pretty rational mentality for the vast majority of the time. Only once we reframe WHEN to be more open to change can it become likely that we MIGHT. This life thing is hard 🙂
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“Only once we reframe WHEN to be more open to change can it become likely that we MIGHT.”
“The difficulty is knowing which ideas / issues fall into those to be re-examined.”
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But touching stoves is definitely an idea. And there are literally 1000’s of basic assumptions such as that. Ask someone from 1300 if it makes sense to touch a stove. to defecate in the same water that you later will drink downstream?
In terms of too good to be true, this is a VERY helpful heuristic in business. Most MLM (multi-level marekting schemes) businesses are complete shit. however, even being a business wizard it still usually takes hours and hours to completely explain how and why for each one. Instead, the logical thing i say to firends / family / contacts who asks about a new one they deal with is to come from the point of view that 99% are crap (as history has proven) and then to ask 3-5 other targeted questions that flip the script on MLM promoters (of which shockinly 20 million people take part in each year at some level in the us ALONE.. sigh). So its not fear, but rationality that i summarily dismiss these businesses without massive proof otherwise. This is merely one of 1000’s of examples.
I definitely question a lot, but i definitley use shortcuts and heuristics to make “higher burdens” of proof for many concepts.
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“But touching stoves is definitely an idea.”
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I very recently changed my mind about my major. Granted, this isn’t the best thing in the world because money is an issue. Then again, I’m in my 20’s. :p
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What’s your new major? And hey, I changed mine 3 times. Totally worth it. 🙂
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I changed my major several times, too. I switched from French to English, then from English to mathematics. A year later I switched from mathematics to physics, and finally from physics back to mathematics. Of course during much of that time I was hoping to be a ballet dancer, so my college major seemed secondary.
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Now, that’s what I call a rich and complex personality. 🙂
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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