Insatiable Learner, How Much Can You Learn?

That's really a good question. If you are a creative genius, as I assert, then how much can you really learn? I've never seen anyone run to the hospital emergency room and ask the doctor, "I've got a class tonight and my brain is full. Can you drain out about 10% so I can learn something new?" You can continue to learn during your whole life and never fill your brain. So just how much can your brain hold?

Your brain capacity is infinite. Research up to 1974 indicated that your genius brain contains 10^12 (that's a 1 followed by 12 zeros) brain cells, each of those cells interacts with 100,000 other cells.  That makes 10^800 possible combinations. Compare that to 10^108 atoms in the known universe. (Who was the person with the tweezers that counted all the atoms? :-)

By 1989, additional research showed that each of those interactions can be one of 100,000 chemical reactions. I've actually done this calculation. I set up a computer workstation to do the calculation and let it run overnight. I figured it would be done the next morning. It wasn’t. I checked how far it had gotten and calculated it would take another 10,000 years to complete the calculation. So I used logarithms. Remember those? That way you can do the calculation on a pocket calculator. Now, if you wrote this number out by hand on paper it would take about one trillion pages. Have you seen that picture that represents a trillion dollars? 

It looks like an acre of pallets of money stacked on each other. This number would take that stack of money and pile another 10 trillion stacks on top of it. In other words, you have almost infinite capacity to learn!

If I have so much brain capacity, why can't I remember names? That's a subject for another blog.

Ordinary Children, Extraordinary Creative Genius Results, Insatiable Learners

In an ordinary classroom, children once considered poor students now eagerly tackle the most difficult math problems first. Another school receives criticism for being "elitist" because all of its students are gifted. But most of these students produced only average results and some were poor students before entering the "gifted school." These schools and their teachers, along with many psychologists re-discovered the fact that we can all learn well, when given the proper support and opportunities. 

Examine the qualities of one of these gifted learners. She speaks a foreign language, in a local dialect, with perfect accent. She is a world class gymnast, an accomplished experimental scientist in chemistry and physics, a skilled mathematician, a powerful and influential negotiator, and a talented psychologist. Marvelous, genius qualities, wouldn't you agree? In fact, this description fits most people. Think about all of the things that you learned as a child before you ever went to school. You learned to speak, crawl, walk and run. (If you think learning to walk is easy, ask some one who lost this ability and is re-learning it how easy it is.) You could tell who got he most cookies or the biggest bowl of ice cream. You experimented with the chemistry of foods and the physics of gravity from your high chair during your meals, much to your parents dismay. You learned to influence others and negotiate with them to get what you wanted. You learned to play games with complex rules and strategies. Some psychologists now believe that we learn up to 90% of what we know before the age of six. Then we sent you to school to make sure you never did it again.


As a child, you were extremely creative, using string, sticks, paper, glue and crayons to create anything you could imagine.


You were born a creative genius and an insatiable learner. What happened? Can you regain those capabilities? Good questions that I'll examine in future blog posts.