Supersystems: So what about me?

How you use the concept of a supersystem to help you learn is dependent on you, because not everyone's brain works in quite the same way, you might be a Data Acquisitioner or a Conceptual Integrator. Actually, I just made up those two names, what I really mean is: do you, that's you personally, learn best by memorising lists of facts, by experimenting, or by soaking up events and allowing understanding to happen somewhere deep in the recesses of your mind? This is something you need to work out for yourself, and it is important. I am hopeless at learning lists, and even if I do then what I learn is not of particular importance unless I have some exam to take, I experiment with data by playing around with concepts in my mind, and if the data is numerical I might enter it into some kind of spreadsheet and play with it on there to see if I can see any patterns in the data.

If you learn by memorising, or perhaps you believe that this is the only way to learn even if you are not successful at it, then there is one thing you must understand - facts/knowledge/data is essentially random. You can learn as many as you like and it will never be enough, rather like preparing yourself for some quiz where you know that there is a good chance that you will not know the answers to certain questions. I remember back in the 1970s there were a number of different kinds of gameshows on TV in Britain, and then one year they decided to organise a competition between the winners of several of these gameshows. The winner of this super-competition was the winner of a gameshow involving working out solutions, and the one who came last was the winner of a gameshow that was a pure memory quiz.

Facts by themselves are essentially dead things; they lead nowhere. If I asked you what was the capital of China, you would probably say "Peking" or "Beijing". Great! But where does that lead us to? Is this anything that I could not have got out of an encyclopedia or other fact-based book or knowledge source? I have a very small car, a Citroen C1, and yet when the lights go green, most times I am across the junction first, and without spinning the wheels or revving the engine hard. The facts like 'press the gas pedal to go' and 'go when the light changes to green' are all available to everyone, even to that guy in his powerful car who kept creeping forward, impatient for the lights to change and who is now having to accelerate hard to get past me. Facts are easy to teach because they are like bean cans, always there on the supermarket shelf. Teaching how to use facts is much harder, because use seems different every time, and future use is something you do not know now. Teaching, therefore, works best for what is known, and wrks worst for what is not known.

When I leave the lights ahead of the pack and my wife is in the car withn me I make a joke and pretend to say 'bye' to the other drivers, making her smile in this way is just one of the many benefits of learning about what is not known. Knowing what many other people do not know can be very satisfying, and if you create it yourself then it costs nothing more than some time and does not take up room in your car or at home, and the only dusting it requires is simply to remember it from time to time. To make my C1 so fast I gathered all the facts I could think of and which seemed relevant, and then arranged them in some order. I tested that order and then adjusted the original order, added some more facts that I had accumulated, and tested this second concept. The key was to understand that getting across the line quicker was not just about getting my car to go quicker - that would mean investing in another car or in making this car quicker, something I was unwiling to do as it would consume my time and other resources. No, my car did not need to go quicker, I had to waste less time moving from one event to the next. Make sure car was already in the right gear, right foot already pressing slightly on the gas pedal, left foot already with the cluitch pedal partly raised, one hand on the handbrake waiting to release it, other hand on the steering wheel, eyes watching traffic, pedestrians and lights, and brain with the course already plotted. When the lights begin to turn green, assuming it is safe to proceed, I lift the clutch, press the gas, and release the handbrake together. That's all it takes, it works, and you can practice it every day and still have a good car to sell when the time comes to replace it.

Interestingly enough, I have now converted my concept into new knowledge that you and anyone else with a car can use. Concepts created in real time convert to knowledge, and they seem to fill all the available space. What other knowledge do you need to know? At this point you need to stop and realise that cars-at-a-junction are a supersystem, and this is one model we can apply to that supersystem. As such, we know it is only going to work some of the time. What happens when the person in the car beside you has also read this text, but has a much faster accelerating car and quicker reflexes than you? What if you are not at the front of the queue? Well, this junction is just one of many, and today is just one of many, perhaps instead of listening to music you could start watching how other drivers typically respond to different situations. I have a whole stack of knowledge models I have developed to deal best with many different situations, because I have devoted much of my time in cars to observing how other drivers react, and how I react.

Time and devotion are essential to creating new concepts, as is the belief that you cann develop them. Society tries to pressure us into the belief that the answer lies in learning more facts, in copying what others have done, but perhaps the best answer lies within ourselves. Once you have gained knowledge in one area, you can apply it to another. Having developed the 'be faster at the junction' model I began to apply it elsewhere in my life. After leaving university I spent seven weeks working nights in a meat factory to earn some money for a vacation. Most of the time I worked the grills, char-grilling burgers for microwave meals, working alongside two women who had been using the grills for years. In such a short period I had no real chance of honing my reflexes to match theirs, and I know that they chose to use the better pair of grills. Once I learnt the basic techniques I spent every night trying to minimise wasted time, optimising burger layouts on my grill - learning the hot and cool spots, and all the rest. I never was able to match them for speed, but I was 90% there, far better than anyone else. Was it worth it? Of course, the grills are the only warm places at a meat factory, everywhere else is cold so that the meat does not start to go off.

I stated earlier that facts are random, which is not quite true. If you were to go to a zoo and saw a zebra you are likely to think 'black and white stripey animal, like a horse, from Africa', an amalgam of facts based on observation and prior learning. Have you ever looked closely at a zebra's eyelashes? Are they like a horse's? What about zebra feeding patterns? Observation is limited to survival traits, interest and comparison to previous knowledge, which takes some of the randomness out of the knowledge we acquire, but in terms of the universe it is still fairly random. Take cats, for example, many people do, they have been living close to us for thousands of years and yet people still believe that they are independent creatures despite the evidence to the contrary. Cats go off when they want to, but so do children if they can get away withn it. Oh, they don't tell you when they will be back, isn't that a typical problem with children? They don't take orders? Well, who do you know who does if they can get away with it? They go live next door? Hmm, if you were my friend and your neighbours cooked better lunch I might spend more time their too. Cats are like God - you have to notice them first, and being small and easily abused by big humans, it is up to us to prove we respect them first. Cats are very communal, and generally have lots of friends they like to hang out with, including us. When the day comes that all our friends are comfortable sitting on our laps, maybe cats will trust us a little further.

Knowledge being essentially random means that they are only some facts and they are not necessarily the ones that will be most useful to us, and some facts may not be as true as we imagine. Since in any one subject we do not have all the facts (knowledgelets), what if we were to place all our subject knowledges on top of each other in some kind of trememdous sandwich? This is what encyclopedias do, in a way, you may well find 'cat' on one page and 'Catherine the Great' on the opposite page. What would happen if, instead of reading the entry about cats as a complete unit, we read the first line of the 'cat' entry' and then the first line of the 'Catherine' entry, the second line of the 'cat' entry' and so on? This might sound silly, but if knowledge is essentially random, and most people gather information in similar ('normal') ways, then by applying a non-normal acquisition method we might discover something new.

Two of the biggest blocks to non-normal acquistion are 'what would the neighbours say' and the 'three wise men'. Discovering new things automatically is doing what the neighbours would not do, unless your neighbours are already busy doing things differently. There are elements in any society which attempts to block change, so you might have to practice being an innovator in private or in forums where your neighbours do not go. The three-wise-men block is the conviction that someone greater than you has already plotted the best path, has already maximised quality, method or whatever. However, the point of supersystems is that there is no Holy Grail, no ultimate method, not wise person who has a handle on the best method. What the wise person knows is what works best for them, not for you. Grammar Hammers are a good example of people relying on the three wise men, 'someone' in the past has created a system of language that is 'right'. This makes innovation in written language very difficult, because you know they are going to start telling you your grammar is wrong, you have used the wrong words etc.

So, find that quiet place away from the people who you feel are blocking you, and practice there.

Even then, you are unlikely to make a world-shattering discovery in the first forty minutes of trying. I like to use the time in my car or on a bus, when I know I am stuck there for the duration and there is nothing else I can do. I have pretend arguments with people, where I have to take each side in turn and often either demolish my own arguments or learn something new from the second person's viewpoint.

A bus or a train has many opportunities for thinking. Often when it is dark and cold, and I am sitting shivering on a poorly heated bus in the wintertime, I shut my eyes and try to imagine where we are every second of the way. This quickly shows you how little you remember about your surroundings, even though they seem familiar when your eyes are open. Not all memory is accessible, the brain does not deem access to the 'familiarity' memories as being particularly high, and it takes practice to lever that particular door of your mind further open. Hypnosis is another way into this particular memory store, and it is known that this particular type of memory is particularly open to suggestion, perhaps because the brain has to continually edit it as trees grow, buildings get built, we redecorate our rooms or just plain get older. Whatever it's advantages or disadvantages, using the imagination in this way pays off -it gets easier to build and modify whole new concepts in your head.

To conclude, knowledge is essentially dead, random and partial, and what is important is to examine this knowledge from different perspectives. It is this practice of looking that educates our minds into being more innovative, but to do so means fending off the social pressure to conform in all aspects of our lives.