Changed Representations
According to one of the theories of lifelong learning which my intuition finds appealing (I believe it may be Gardner’s), one of the most important first steps in life is gaining a truly deep understanding of something. It doesn’t matter what that something is, what matters is that you gain an understanding of both the abstract overall layout of the field, and an understanding of various components within it. After you have gained this deep understanding, many other abstract concepts are learned by simply analogizing to that thing.
For me this “something” was high-level computing. I learned the ins and outs of how a computer works and deeply understand software and how all the pieces fit together. I have a gigantic memory structure in my head in which I can zoom closely to inspect a particular detail of how one component talks to another, or simply zoom out and see an overall view. I grew to understand the rest of the complicated world through computers.
Even with Psychology, my general approach was understanding the components by analogizing them to components of a computer system. This is a very common understanding basis for people my age to have, particularly at this school.
Recently, however, I’ve noticed that I tend to understand new things in terms of Cognitive Science. I do not believe that my representation of Cognitive Science is permanently tied to computer systems anymore. There are large hunks of Cognitive Science that are not completely mapped out yet, and I don’t have the feeling of being able to fully zoom out like I can with computer systems, but I’m definitely beginning to see large portions of the world in terms of Cognitive Science. It’s an interesting change of representations.