Think of a time when you first visited a new, distant place, one with which you were barely familiar. Upon arrival, you were alive to every novelty. The smell of the food in the street! The curious traffic signs! The sound of the call to prayer! Flushed from the comfort of your usual surrounds, forced to learn new rituals and ways to communicate, you gained sensory superpowers. You paid attention to everything because you didn’t even know what you needed to know to get by. After a few days, as you became more expert in the place, what seemed strange began to become familiar. You began noticing less. You became safer in your knowledge. Your behaviour became more automatic...

It scarcely matters what it is – tying nautical knots or throwing pottery. Learning something new and challenging, particularly with a group, has proven benefits for the “novelty-seeking machine” that is the brain. Because novelty itself seems to trigger learning, learning various new things at once might be even better. A study that had adults aged 58 to 86 simultaneously take multiple classes – ranging from Spanish to music composition to painting – found that after just a few months, the learners had improved not only at Spanish or painting, but on a battery of cognitive tests. They’d rolled back the odometers in their brains by some 30 years, doing better on the tests than a control group who took no classes...

And yet what better remedy for the widespread affliction of “smartphone addiction” than two hours of burning your eyes and brain into 64 squares on a board, trying to analyse an almost infinite variety of moves and countermoves?

Learning new skills also changes the way you think, or the way you see the world. Learning to sing changes the way you listen to music, while learning to draw is a striking tutorial on the human visual system. Learning to weld is a crash course in physics and metallurgy. You learn to surf and suddenly you find yourself interested in tide tables and storm systems and the hydrodynamics of waves. Your world got bigger because you did...

Finished: 05/06/2021

Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt

Being a beginner is precisely about putting your status aside, about being willing to listen to and learn from others, about revealing your insecurities.

Rating:  ★★★★☆

Summary:

Following the nagging question of, “Why do adults stop learning new skills?” Tom Vanderbilt sets out to find the answer by partaking in various new activities like, chess, singing, surfing, and jewellery making to name just a few.

Currently Reading: Beginners by Tom Vanderbilt

Book #209 of 2019:

Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us) by Tom Vanderbilt

This is an interesting topic, and I appreciate the array of studies that author Tom Vanderbilt has assembled for the task, but I find many of his arguments hard to parse, reliant on unjustified assumptions, and frankly somewhat repetitive. I also think he stretches in tying local traffic norms to purported cultural values such as individualism or civic corruption, and I feel that his critiques of innovative technologies like GPS navigation and self-driving cars have proven overly pessimistic since the book’s publication in 2008. So overall, this has been something of a disappointing read.

★★☆☆☆

In Jakarta, desperate Indonesians work as ‘car jockeys’, hitchhikers of a sort who are paid to help drivers meet the passenger quota for the faster car-pool lanes.