How do we learn…odd thoughts on acquiring knowledge
I was talking with friends the other night about something that’s been bothering me since my dentist visit and the hygienist’s evil eye roll with sigh. Okay so I hadn’t had my teeth cleaned by the hygienist in years but I brush 3 times a day usually. But you’d have thought that I’d committed a crime against nature. Then there was the lecture on the importance of brushing my teeth — as if I never did. (This is going somewhere, honest.)
Anyhow, once I got home and calmed down, I began to wonder why she thought I didn’t brush my teeth enough when most people (when they’re honest) barely brush twice a day — morning and night. So, what do you do when you want to know something — you google, and I found out some interesting stuff.
First, I learned that if you have an electric toothbrush you’re not supposed to move the toothbrush except to move from tooth to tooth. It’s vitally important that you don’t use it as a normal toothbrush because that could damage your gums. Hmmm, I don’t recall ever hearing or seeing anything about that when we got our first electric toothbrush. But we’re back to regular brushes now anyway — it was just an interesting aside in my search.
Next, and this is really interesting because it showed up on several dental sites; you’re supposed to brush each tooth for 10 seconds. Now the average adult has 32 teeth (I have 24 because 2 molars never came in and 4 I had to have pulled because they came in sideways). However, let’s use the average adult with 32 teeth. That means you should brush your teeth for 320 seconds total or 5.3 minutes every time you brush. That’s just over 5 minutes just for your teeth. I don’t know about you, but I barely spend 5 minutes on my whole ‘get ready to face the day’ routine.
At first I thought well, maybe I’m just clueless (I often am) so I’ve been asking around my usual sample group about it. No one knew about the 10 seconds/tooth thing. So, I’m wondering how people are supposed to know about it. I know that over the years and several dentists, not one has ever mentioned this time/tooth thing or even that you should brush for 5 minutes for a totally clean set of chompers. So, before the internet how were we supposed to find this out if the professional people we go to don’t tell us?
Then I starting thinking about the things that as an adult I realized I didn’t know, and realized there was a lot of stuff that I just ‘learned’ without being specifically told, or somehow figured out for myself. Kids observe and they learn lots of things. And because it appears that they know something, no one jumps in to explain so sometimes they learn the wrong things. One of my favorite scenes in Starman is when he runs the red light and causes chaos behind him in traffic. He’s asked (paraphrased), “You said you’d watched me. You said you knew the rules.” The alien replies, “I watched you very carefully. Red light stop, green light go, yellow light go very fast.”
See, he learned by observing and while he learned the actual rules of the road, he didn’t learn the correct legal rules of the road. Now, we observe drivers for years and I’m sure many of us found out what we knew and what were the real rules were very different when we actually studied for our learner’s permit.
I know I’ve learned a lot from books. The research and background material that goes behind a good mystery or science fiction book does sort of get packed into the unconscious as you’re reading. I learn from movies, too. It’s from books and movies that I learned about bringing gifts to the host/hostess in some situations; about multiple forks and spoons and finger bowls at fancy dinners (not that I go to any); about valet parking; about tipping maids in hotels; the workings of the bail bond system; forensic house cleaning after a death; and much much more.
I also remember those childhood songs we used to sing and the games. I don’t recall any adult every teaching us the “I’m going to go eat worms” song. But it seems, in my memory, that one day all of us just knew it somehow. Sort of as if the wind just blew the knowledge into our ears one night.
So, I guess I’m still curious about how we’re supposed to learn things when the professionals don’t tell us. Is it ESP, the wind whispering in our ear, should we have picked in up by observation somehow (can’t think of a single movie/book with a five minute tooth brushing scene though I can think of several with a toothbrush scene.
Guess, I’ll continue to ponder this question of how we learn.