Mathilde’s Musings #2
My weekly digest of discoveries during quarantine.
🤔 One question
Do I know how to learn?
Like I said in last week’s musing, I’ve always been an avid learner. Age 11, I was teaching myself how to code. Age 20, I had shifted my focus to economics, and later entrepreneurship. These days, I spend most of my free time learning Portuguese and dissecting neuroscience papers.
If learning was a muscle though, I’d have lost most of my gains when I entered the workplace. There’s no doubt I’ve learned plenty of life and soft skills these past years. When it comes to reading, writing, note-taking and more broadly “learning how to learn”, however, I feel I’ve only started to sharpen these skills recently.
Here are three questions I’m pondering on the topic:
- How can I break out of my filter bubble? For example, I’d love to be able to swap news/social feeds momentarily with friends, or anyone in the world.
- How can I learn in public more? Aka stop waiting until I feel knowledgeable about a topic to share about it.
- What if I trained my meta-learning skills more rigorously (just like I train my 🍑 off at the gym), or as Andy Matuschak puts it:
“What might it mean for knowledge workers to fanatically pursue virtuosity in these fundamental skills, in the way that athletes [do]?
🧠 One study
We might be able to live much longer. That’s the claim of Harvard researcher David Sinclair in Lifespan: Why We Age — and Why We Don’t Have To. After a controversial start, Sinclair’s work took the world of longevity by storm. His research shows ageing isn’t as inevitable as we think, and has even shown to be reservable in mice. Check out his talk at Google for a roundup of the findings.
🌎 One video
Hey fellow polyglot friends: don’t you feel a different person depending on the language you speak? Turns out, research shows language shapes the way we think. Say you witness someone breaking a vase. If you’re an English speaker, you’ll say : “he/she broke the vase”. If you speak French, you’ll say “the vase broke”. Same event, two different observations: one being more likely to assign blame and responsibility, the other one more focused on the context. On the same topic, Damon, an American polyglot living in Paris made this funny video sharing the French lessons he wishes he’d learned sooner.
A la semaine prochaine,
See you next week 👋
