What Eating can Teach Us About Learning

Photograph: Irene Jurgens

1. Our meals do not immediately come one after the other, we leave time in between meals to digest.

I have found it to be most ideal after 40-60 mins of learning to allow myself 20-30 minutes of reflection and meditation on what I have just learnt, in order to help my mind to digest the ideas (20-30 minutes has been ideal). I have found this brings clarity, fosters the connection of ideas in my mind and prepares me to pick up the subject again later with enthusiasm to gain more.

2.  We are advised to have as little variety as possible at mealtimes, having a great

variety of foods in one meal burdens the stomach.

I have found this to be the case with the mind. Trying to learn too many ideas in one sitting makes the time fruitless. I have found it best to learn at most two ideas. And to have studied the first thoroughly before moving to the second. Textbooks often pile up too many ideas into one page. You do not have to learn them all in one sitting. Pick one idea, thorough study it, test yourself and move on.

3. It is advised that we eat slowly, and chew well.

Haste makes waste in learning, more fruitful are the sessions where I prioritise thoroughness than speed. Great speed leads to cognitive overload, and overloaded, the brain fails to make connections, to form new memories and brain fatigue quickly settles.

4.  We are advised to eat in a cheerful frame of mind.

We should study in the same frame of mind. Being anxious that we may not be able to learn ideas, robs the mind of the power to learn. And rarely are new ideas learned in one sitting. The mind needs time to digest. Often multiple sittings are necessary in order to have a good command of ideas. Study hopeful and cheerful, say, “what others have learnt in the sciences, I will learn through consistent and well directed hard effort.”

What Learning Difficult Ideas Requires

Every so often we’ll come across an idea that’s difficult to understand. And what is important to know, is that difficult ideas are like really solid food. What I mean to communicate is that we need to chew on difficult ideas for some time before we can digest them. What we can’t understand immediately, we can after some sometime breaking it down by reflection.

And interestingly, just as walking aids the digest of physical food, walking also helps us digest thought-food, and in this case, one serving of difficult idea. Thinking while walking often helps bring clarity to those difficult ideas.  So, think about that difficult idea during walks and during chores. This kind of reflection and meditation helps the digestion process of the difficult idea.

Today, this kind of reflection is largely missing from our lives. Time alone with our own thoughts is being eroded by devices which promise a never-ending supply of entertainment. Yet it’s this kind of reflection that helps progress in our mental pursuits.

Reading for Mental Strength

“A little food well digested will give more nourishment to the body than the large quantity that overloads the stomach, clogs the system, and brings on disease.”

There is wisdom in those words for us as we sit at the table to eat and as we sit at the table to study. A few ideas thoroughly digested will provide more benefit to us than the rehearsal of many ideas superficially. Eating slowly and in a happy frame of mind, will benefit us in the absorption of ideas as it does in the absorption of nutrients. How this way of studying and reading provides mental strength will be the subject of future posts.

Our devices and the internet have made us hasty eaters. Skimming, cursory reading, and multi-tasking characterise our habits of reading online. We can’t seem to take in all the information fast enough. Our attention is eroding, and so are the capacities that help us construct meaning from text. Eating physical food quickly, can lead to overeating, which weakens our minds. Similarly, the method of reading that has become our dominant of way of reading— hasty, superficial reading— is weakening our minds. Reflecting on a decade that he had been a computer user; writer Nicholas Carr wrote:

“I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”

Has the internet made you a hasty eater? Has it robbed you of your mental strength? When someone sends you a ten-sentence WhatsApp message, does it feel like they’re asking you to read an encyclopaedia? When you read the summary of a book, do you wish someone would send you a summary of the summary? Does a 300-page book seem intimidating?

The wonderful thing about our brains is that they can regain the strength we’ve lost if we’ll practice reading slowly, deeply, and attentively. We can once more read for mental strength.