Chicago Trip

Today I write about a week-long trip I took to Chicago and neighboring places (July 22-29) in connection with the annual meeting of the Autism Society (formerly the Autism Society of America). What particularly interests me is the way I used this trip as a roadmap to help me learn more about the working of my brain/memory and the nature of learning. The realization that is gradually dawning on me is that at age 57 my capacity for learning, retention, and recall of material is unparalled in my life. Details, precision of expression, theories, people, languages--all are coming together in ways of tremendous power for me, allowing me to do accurate, useful, high-level multi-disciplinary work with a "twist" (that is, my own "take" on things) and with humor.

Well, let me explain what I mean. Whenever I make a trip I try to add a day or two (or more) on either end of the task for which I made the trip so that I can enhance my learning by taking advantage of things only available where I am going. Making this happen takes a considerable amount of planning, but it almost always yields gratifying results. In the trip just completed, I managed to probe, gather lots of specific knowledge in, write about, store away in memory, and begin to recall insights from eight different fields of learning. Specifically, these eight fields are: (1) contemporary autism research and politics; (2) additional trees and plants through the Morton Arboretum (Lisle IL), the Boerner Gardens (Milwaukee, WI), and several nursuries; (3) the history of American evangelism/evangelicalism through a trip to the Billy Graham museum at Wheaton College; (4) biblical exegesis through expositions of the story of David and Bathsheba, the lectionary text for 7/26/09; (5) learning about particle physics through visiting, thinking about and, eventually, writing on, the Fermi lab and the history of discovery of minute particles; (6) home architecture, focusing especially on the work of Frank Lloyd Wright throgh a visit to the Robie House; (7) learning about tropical plants through a visit to the Garfield Park Conservatory (Chicago); and (8) writing and thinking on humor through a long layover at the Minneapolis Airport.

My Method

Six things I do in almost every context in which I want to learn are: (1) "divide" the task in front of me; (2) take extensive notes; (3) ask the experts or staff around for clarification on things; (4) take written material that is offered there; (5) review my notes by revisiting all the things I saw before I leave the premises; and (6) writing on what I saw. These tasks, taken together, help fix the learning in my mind, sending it, so to speak, away from the "clutter" of the "reception area" of the brain, moving it rapidly down the long hallways of knowledge, storing it away in well-marked places and then, recalling it and bringing it right back to the entry places of my mind.

Let's illustrate this method through my visit to the Morton Arboretum (I could do this with most of the others, too). First, I "divide" the task. This is important to do at Morton because of the vastness of its scope. Without a clever "dividing," one can easily get overwhelmed, not learn much of anything, and leave the garden/arboretum frazzled and disorganized. Or, as most poeple did, just use the arboretum as a pleasant place to take a walk. I decided early that I needed two visits to the Morton (many more, in fact, will be required, but these two visits "divided" a good chunk of things). The first visit was taken up with making extensive lists of identified plants and flowers outside the visitor center. Normally, when I learn new plants/flowers, I try to make a list of about 10-20 new ones. Then I rush home, look them up on the "net," and try to incorporate their names, Latin and English, into my thinking. You have to take on "bite-sized" pieces of learning, however, or else the "manna" can strangle you. So, in the first visit to the Arboretum, I began making lists, in my Moleskine notebook (my daughter gave me the first one of these about a year ago; I am finishing the second now; they are wonderful books for recording insights). I date the page (7/22/09), and then begin the listing. I have, for example, "Pretoria canna; Blue Horizon Ageratum; Derby Melampodium etc." Actually, I have about 60 things listed here for my 7/22 visit. I was so delighted with so much learning that I just "kept going."

But then, after studying the Arboretum map more fully, I saw that I would have to divide my next trip into about three segments in order to maximize learning and have fun along the way. The first segment would be the "mastery of the planters," so to speak. I tell the story of these 25 planters here. The second was the mastery of the plants/flowers around the man-made lake near the Visitor Center. This took about two hours, but I was aided in the task by people, young and old, who were pulling weeds and very willing to stop and point out a Pickerel weed bobbing on the water or explain something about Culver's Root to me. The third division was the children's garden and conifers. I walked through the first rapidly, realizing that it wasn't the best place in the world for a calm investigation of plants/flowers, but then I spent more than an hour wandering through some of the pines and oaks on display. When I felt (and you have to listen to your body on this one) that I had learned enough, I then retraced my steps, seeing if I could identify without consulting my lists, in reverse oreder, the things I wrote down. I also took a leaf or two, storing them away in my notebook, so that I could learn to tell the difference between and identify the Hardy Rubber Tree and the Korean Evodia, for example.

Conclusion

I will perhaps have learned 100 "facts" or so after each day of intensive learning/touring/asking questions. Sometimes I pick up additional documents or information. Then, if it is getting on to dinner time, I go to my motel, shower, get something to eat, and spend the evening either writing or looking up images of what I saw. By doing this third "learning" time, I begin to sink the Latin names deeply into my consciousness and I even discover things that I hadn't really noted during the investigational walk. For example, when I went back to review notes from the Billy Graham Center Museum, I studied some texts which were alluded to in the exhibit, and I attempted to find things as diverse as Parliamentary laws from 1649 or the text of Cotton Mather's Magnalia Christi Americana. I learn facts about these documents, read extensive sections from them and find, without fail, that each time I probe the "primary" texts, I end up learning things that I find in no secondary source.

By reading and rereading this material, by committing many of the details to memory, by recalling it and writing on it, I begin to fill up the storehouses of my brain with very valuable information. In addition, I am able to "clear the decks" of my mental "reception room" of piles and piles of new learning. I store it all away, identifying it clearly in my mind for easy recall. Unless I have spent as much time studying as I do investigating and as much time writing as either of the other tasks, I am not able fully to make the material my own. Once I have done it, however, I am able to speak at different and deeper levels than ever before, with insight and humor thrown in. My questions can be very precise and are reflective of a person who has spent a great deal of time in the field. And I have the sense that I am unpeeling another layer of mystery in our world.... That, in short, is the way I proceeded in my trip. The next essay gives a more exact chronology of it.

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