Spheres of Reading

"Knowledge expresses itself as a fusion of pre-existing ideas," Aiden Arnold, a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of California, Davis' Center for Neuroscience observes. "Our own thinking involves permutations of basic elements into fascinating combinations," he continues in a recent essay in which he applies this data to the practice of reading to craft a tiered structure that channels the synthetic nature of our thoughts to facilitate our creative insights. Whatever your present system modus operandi ― if any, "Combinatorial Knowledge and Reading in the Spheres" is worth reading.

Pursuing Knowledge Is Never Useless

As an inveterate researcher, I have often advised those engaged in the lifelong quest for knowledge that the relevance of a specific finding may rest in doubt for years, perhaps a lifetime. In a puzzle in the order of magnitude and complexity that is life, a missing piece oft remains undetected until its adjacent counterparts have been discovered. On her aptly named site Brain Pickings, Maria Popova cogently encapsulates a seminal 1939 essay by U.S. educator Abraham Flexner on “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge.” As Flexner rightly observes, “The world has always been a sorry and confused sort of place.” Thanks to Popova and Flexner, however, a tad less.