The Trained Mind
Those who go through tertiary educational institutions (a few self-study) and actually pace their mind on the learning material (either to be erudite or to get good grades), usually come out on the other side with a trained mind[1]. When one meets an untrained mind, and experiences first hand, it’s ills and dangers, one gets a better appreciation for one’s own training – the mind must be trained.
The game of life at it’s root is a game of survival, the advances of human civilization can easily make us forget that, and the game of survival is a game of chance, and the game of chance is a game of probability, and the game of probability is a game of possibility and outcomes.
In every problem space, there is only one possible outcome, but before that outcome is apparent there are many possibilities with different probabilities.
The purview of the trained mind is to consider the most likely option and focus on that, the untrained mind does not understand this, it sees all possibilities as equal probabilities and this is reflected when it speaks.
So that the trained and untrained mind may start on a problem in a scattered fashion, but as time rolls forward, the trained mind homes in on a few possibilities with high probability and literally ignores the rest, it uses those few possibilities as an angle of attack, which builds on itself until the attack point leads to a solution. The untrained mind is still lurching about with all the possibilities in his mind.
The undeniable feature of the trained mind is the ability to ignore unnecessary information, that is, noise.
Social Media
Ten seconds you are on a post, another 20 seconds on another post, another 30 on another, another 60 on one with comments, another 45 on one your friend liked, another on a post a friend of a friend shared, another …
Social media damages the strains of the trained mind, hence the feeling of disillusionment when you get off it, you did not get smarter, you have just bombarded your mind with unrelated information and it had no way of knowing what the problem space is so as to prioritize one of the posts or comments. The cat video, the twerk video, the dog video, the thirst trap picture, the love song video …, they all have equal weight.
Dangerous is the word. The constant bombardment of the mind with unrelated information that it cannot filter and choose which to ignore and prioritize, leads it to gradually lose the ability to look for angles of attacks and deviates into being no different than that of the untrained mind.
No human is born with a trained mind, it is an acquired skill and all acquired skills can be lost or forgotten.
Thank you for reading.
Notes:
1 - Tertiary education is specified here as it is the closest we have come to giving people general purpose training on how to think and attack problems. Other professions in which it's participants learn a very narrow trade also have a trained mind, howbeit not general purpose. This is usually apparent when economic winds shift away from those narrow trade fields and it's participants are left stranded.