I frequently find myself contributing to conversations with knowledge that I don't recall specifically learning. Once in a while, I think "Wow, how did I come up with something that insightful? When did I ever learn that?"
It seems there's a background activity in the mind that is actually synthesizing a wide variety of inputs from our environment. As in what I read, movies I watch, meetings I sit in on, Tweets that transpire, hikes I take, visits to distant cities, and so on. In many cases, it seems the connections and support for ideas, notions and realizations that then become knowledge are made without explicitly reasoning through them.
I'd say this happens most frequently in conversations related to my work, which makes sense since that's where most of the inputs are sourced.
It seems there's a background activity in the mind that is actually synthesizing a wide variety of inputs from our environment. As in what I read, movies I watch, meetings I sit in on, Tweets that transpire, hikes I take, visits to distant cities, and so on. In many cases, it seems the connections and support for ideas, notions and realizations that then become knowledge are made without explicitly reasoning through them.
I'd say this happens most frequently in conversations related to my work, which makes sense since that's where most of the inputs are sourced.