In the process of making STEM learning intuitive, I stumbled upon one of the core insights. STEM is basically about understanding and mastering abstract concepts. My insight is about how our brain handles those abstract concepts. Knowing this insight alone empowers me, both as a learner and as a builder.
In short, the insight is: your brain treats a concept as if it’s a solid object and thinks with it.
Examples:
- Problems as knots you can untie.
- Attention as spotlight you can aim.
- Ideas as objects you can grab, move or connect.
This is the brain’s default behaviour. There is nothing outside it.
Now you might naturally ask:
Why? : One word: “Evolution”. Evolution shaped those characteristics into us. Why? Because for most of our species’ existence, we dealt only with physical object and navigated our way through the world for food, shelter and mates. That was our life. There were nothing we did other than this. So our brain became good at those things.
A few thousand years ago, we started speaking, writing and stacking knowledge across generations. Basically, we started “thinking”. Thinking by forming abstract concepts about the world(I will explain why abstractness in an another post). But the brain has no special hardware to represent those abstract concepts. It reused the circuits built for handling objects and navigation.
Now what? By treating an abstract idea like a physical object, the brain gets “handles” for reasoning. You solve problems, innovate, learn and think using the same machinery, just without noticing it. Realising this is the insight.
The term for this process is reification: from the Latin res (thing) and ficare (to make) - “to make something into a thing” - “to turn an abstract concept into a concrete one.”