Unlearn

I’ve always been fascinated by the instinctive abilities that all sentient beings are born with. Of all the pre-installed software that we come with, the one’s that fire up first are ‘CRY YOUR THROAT OUT.EXE’ and ‘LEARN TO SURVIVE.EXE’.

Let’s break down our first ever learning experience as a new born,

Step 1: Cry out loud like hell broke lose.

Step 2: The annoying sound triggers a conditional behavior in adults caring for us.

Step 3: Get pacified (through food/pampering-good old days)

That’s the very first survival lesson we taught ourselves. Cry, Eat, Sleep, Repeat.

Now that we have learnt a survival skill to live like a king, imagine if we applied the same learning as an adult. Good luck with that.

To save us from getting punched in the face in near future, ‘LEARN TO SURVIVE.EXE’ launches ‘UNLEARN.EXE’ and ‘LEARN TO ADAPT.EXE’. As simple as it may sound, our very foundations are built on top of this. Sadly, most of use restrain this instinctive ability.

Humanity as a race would not have progressed this far without our ability to constantly UNLEARN.

Quoting a real life thought experiment:

“A bunch of kids were shown 2 dolls. One was fair, blue eyed and the other one was dark, brown eyed. When asked which of the 2 dolls they thought was beautiful, almost all the kids chose the fair, blue eyed doll. This is an explicit bias. An outcome of what they learnt from the world around them.

To change this bias, they eventually need to unlearn the belief that color of skin or eyes has got anything to do with beauty”

True wisdom lies between ‘learning to know’ & ‘knowing to unlearn’.

I am on a mission to unlearn absurd beliefs and lousy metaphors :p

So, what did you unlearn recently ?

“Unlearn your limits.”