Grasp summary

Since we’re trying to unlearn a few things, let’s go back to a time before we’d learned much of anything at all: childhood. Imagine you’re a little kid, playing around at the beach. Everything feels new. You touch the water and realize it’s cold. You splash water on the sand and realize it clumps. You stay in the sun too long and realize it stings. 

As you take all this in, you’re building a picture of how the world works. You’re contextualizing information to help structure the way you interact with your environment in the future. In a way, you’re not that different from a scientist. 

I know it’s a drag, but let’s leave the beach and head back to school. It’s the night before your big exam, and you’re just now sitting down with your notes. You’re amped up on caffeine, trying to cram as much information into your skull as you can.

If you attended school, you’ve probably crammed for an exam. That’s because most systems use tests to evaluate students. And even though cramming is terrible for remembering information over the long term, it can be pretty effective for those kinds of trials.

Alright, you’re a kid again, back at the beach. You dig your feet into the sand and scan the shore, searching for something new. There’s a patch of gravel to your left, but why linger on that? Then a flash in a nearby tidepool catches your eye. You go over to look, spotting a beautiful piece of coral. Suddenly, your mind bubbles with questions: What is it? What made it? Why is it here?

We all know what drove you to look at the coral and pass over the gravel: curiosity. It’s what happens when the brain realizes it doesn’t know something that it could know.

It’s sadly time to leave the beach for good. You learned a lot about the world that you’ll now take with you, though. Like the fact that sand clumps together when it’s wet. Still, you have no idea where sand comes from or why it acts like that. Maybe you tell yourself a story – it was crafted by tiny gnomes, for instance. 

Later, you’re back in the classroom. It’s a science lecture, and the topic is – you guessed it – sand. The teacher explains all about erosion, friction, and molecular structures. Suddenly, your experience on the beach starts to make sense. So it wasn’t gnomes after all. 

The beach is now a happy childhood memory, as is the classroom. Now it’s time to get serious. Now you’re in college – in fact, you’re at MIT. 

It’s the end of the semester in Course 2.007, and the quality of the robots on display is stunning. As you watch them topple barriers, leap over obstacles, and soar through the air, you can hardly believe a few lowly first-year students have summoned them into life.