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Nodal L:earning in this New Age
Having been conditioned to Google searches and Wikipedia learning over the years, not only is how I access information from the knowledge of the world changing, but my neural and cognitive processes are changing as well.
I’ve evolved from being the young man who read all the books, often repeatedly, and learning by rote to that man who now scans pages and opts for creating a quick neural map instead. I no longer read all the books to remember information, sound intelligent, do schoolwork, or satisfy my curiosity; instead, I keep a catalog of tabs in my mental library and search for those keywords whenever I need to recall or validate what I already ‘think’ I know. With each new bloc of information I come across, I find myself subconsciously filtering through my old tabs and tacking new links onto the mnemonic latticework I’ve been constructing in my head since Google launched in 98.
For example, instead of memorizing the key events of Nigeria’s independence, I only need to remember Lord Lugard or 1960. When the conversation on Nigeria’s independence comes up, I recall any of these words, and the nodes start to connect. Where they don’t, or where key linkages are missing, I do a quick Google search prompted by my missing mental cues, and these memory synapses are bridged.
