From: http://www.usask.ca/education/coursework/802papers/Adkins/TWOFROGS.GIFmeta·cog·ni·tion noun
"awareness and understanding one's thinking and cognitive processes; thinking about thinking."
From: http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/metacognition
Do you ever think about your own thinking process? Perhaps at the end of the semester, do you reflect upon your previous state, before you'd taken a particular course? What do you know now that you didn't know then?
I think it is somewhat like looking at photographs of myself from when I was younger. Was I really ever that small? How did I get from that state of naiveté to where I am now? What did I think about then? What were the words that ran accross the tv screen of my mind; what was the language of that ticker?
I think it is useful to think about the thinking process you, in particular, go through when processing a particular concept, idea, or topic. Do certain words or concepts contain an inevitable baggage for you and remind you of something else, leading your mind on an endless loop of associations? What do you use to control this impulse, to avoid derailing from the topic at hand? Are the tangents sometimes worth exploring? What new meaning can you derive from the unique baggage some words have for you? How do you move from a state of sensory and information overload, to filter out the most important information and make sense of all you are exposed to in one day?
1 comments:
"Are the tangents sometimes worth exploring?"
I think many tangents are worth exploring. People think in tangents. As a writer, I've learned that writing works best when it follows thought patterns, and tangential thoughts not only follow readers' minds, but also lead the writing to surprising new places for all involved.
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