Greg A. Brown

Originally published 04/30/07 in the Kansas State Collegian

You’re almost there. Just two more weeks and you’ll be out of here.

But before you go, I beg you to read this last little column. It’ll be short, I promise; nothing more than a bit of English to try and spin you in a tad better direction.

I’m just here to beg you to keep on asking questions.

That’s it; message over. The rest is one big footnote.

If you’ve gotten this far in life, you probably know the feeling of unease, the sense something isn’t quite right, even if you can’t quite say why.

After pursuing those feelings for a few years now, I can tell you most of them strike paydirt.

Working from the other end, Antonio Damásio speculates in a book called “Descartes’ Error” that emotions are quick rules of thumb that allow us to sift through the never-ending torrent of sensation and possibilities we encounter every day. They work in conjunction with rational and calculated thought, not separate from it.

There’s certainly some caution to be exercised here, as history is strewn with examples of when these rules of thumb were used to support everything from segregation to ethnic cleansing. It’s no replacement for working the problem through, but it’s still awfully useful.

Some of our most revered (and charming) scientists - Richard Feynman and Albert Einstein, for example - have used this feeling of unease to clue in to powerful yet intuitive insights.

As they discovered, you can take steps to maximize this sensitivity.

Avoid using fancy words for their own sake, as falling into that rut will further distance you from any sort of connection to the ideas. This is a particularly dangerous impulse in academic writing, where increasing subdivision of investigation can lead to every field developing different words for common characteristics.

You also have to be absolutely determined to not take anything for granted. If you do, you’ll probably end up re-examining it in the future anyway.

But this all ties into a wider theme: improving the habits of thought. David Foster Wallace broached the subject in his commencement address for Kenyon College in 2005.

“Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliche about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think,” he said.

“It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to, and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

Wallace actually broached the topic through discussing the repetitive boredom of adulthood, which shows that this kind of adjustment is applicable to a wide variety of problems.

As far as we can tell, we’re the only animals capable of introspecting, recognizing our patterns of thinking, and exerting efforts to change them. Though other animals have been discovered to use tools, this trait is still uniquely ours.

It would be an awful shame to waste it, even if only over a summer break.