Quiet reflection gives us time to digest our experiences and see what they can teach us.
Keeping your mind busy isn’t always good for learning. Today’s environment encourages us to jump from one thing to the next, leaving us little room to stop and think about what any of it means.
While an experience is happening, your brain is already starting to make a record of it. Later, when you have a chance to look back, you can ask yourself, “What was important? What should I keep and throw away?”
In one study published in Nature, MIT researchers David Foster and Matthew Wilson looked inside the brains of rats. They paid particular attention to the hippocampus, a brain structure that plays an important role in learning and memory.
Different cells fired in sequence as the rats passed specific points on a track. When the rats paused, many of those same cells fired again in reverse order, replaying the route they’d just taken. The researchers suggested that this kind of neural replay might help the brain learn from a recent experience.
Making Time to Reflect
A few minutes of silence can feel awkward, unproductive, or boring. But maybe we just aren’t very good at sitting with our thoughts?
In one experiment published in Science, researchers asked college students to spend some time at home alone with their thoughts. About a third said they ended up doing something else, like checking their phones or listening to music.
In another experiment from the same paper, some participants gave themselves a mild electric shock during a 15-minute thinking period, even though they’d previously said they’d pay to avoid another shock. Even an unpleasant distraction can be tempting when you’re alone with your thoughts.
The researchers wondered whether part of the difficulty was having to decide what to think about in the first place. A quiet moment can feel different when something’s been buzzing in your mind all day. You might have thought about it a dozen times in passing. Sitting down to mull it over gives you a chance to see where it leads.
Find a time of day when you can fit in a little reflection. Maybe it’s during lunch, on a walk, or after dinner when things have settled down. Give yourself just five or ten minutes to go back over one thing that happened that day. If something went poorly, ask yourself, “What did I miss at the time? What would I do differently next time?” If something went better than you expected, think about what made the difference.
Writing is a simple way to turn reflection into something tangible. You could try a brain drain exercise, where you write down whatever comes to mind without stopping to edit. Later, you can read it back and see which thoughts are worth diving into further.
Information → Reflection → Integration
All knowledge is processed knowledge.
What we see, hear, and feel is the raw material of experience. We then make sense of it by forming concepts that help us recognize patterns and connect one experience to another. When we reflect, we can ask whether our interpretation still fits. What we learn this way can become part of our map of reality, much as a rat builds a mental map of a track from the paths it takes.
Say you’re learning a song on guitar and the same chord change keeps throwing you off. Thinking back over your practice, you remember another song that gave you trouble in much the same way. You got through it by slowing down and practicing the two chords on their own. Once you see what the two experiences have in common, you can use what you learned from one song to help you play another.
New information can help us see things differently. So can taking a closer look at something we’ve already lived through.
You can keep learning isolated facts without getting a clearer picture of how they fit together. An integrated worldview takes shape as you connect what you’re learning with what you already know and reconsider some of what you took for granted. Sometimes the most worthwhile thing to give your attention to is something you’ve already taken in.