What the enquiry
produces
Learn and Think Better is a sustained enquiry into human cognition, perception, and how that relates to what we can see and what we can do.
The enquiry is ongoing. As understanding develops, certain things become clearer. Patterns emerge. New possibilities become visible.
And sometimes something reaches the point where it can be captured and given a useful form.
When something becomes clear enough to give form
Possibility is not a vague, misty or ambiguous thing. It is the bringing into awareness of something concrete and specific that was previously not seen.
One way I think about this is mud settling in a pool. At first, you cannot see what is beneath the surface. Then the water settles and something that was there all along becomes visible.
The same thing can happen through enquiry. Something that was initially unclear begins to take shape. You can see it well enough to work with it. And once that happens, another question becomes possible: what form should this take?
The form emerges from what has actually been discovered.
Why instruments?
Human knowledge becomes much more interesting when it becomes usable.
Take a sextant. Someone had to look at reality closely enough to infer a set of principles that were stable enough to make navigation possible. Those principles could then be captured in an instrument that somebody else could pick up and use.
Night-vision goggles make the same idea even more obvious. They are human knowledge and human capability captured in a form that another person can use. Put them on in the dark and you can see something you could not see before, even if you know almost nothing about how the instrument works.
Maps do it. Compasses do it. Telescopes do it. Microscopes do it. A good instrument gives you access to something that was not previously available to you.
PRISM
One enquiry. One thing that emerged from it.
PRISM is the clearest current example of that process.
It emerged from an enquiry into perception, perceptual transformation, possibility space, and the relationship between what people can see and what they can do. The underlying idea was that changing how you look at something can alter what becomes available to perception — and therefore what becomes available as a possibility for action.
PRISM did not arrive fully formed. At one point, the idea took the form of a set of standalone micro-tools that could be treated as lenses. The analogy I used was that you might buy a hammer from a hardware store, a magnifying glass from a science shop and a ruler from a stationery shop, then assemble a set of instruments that each let you measure, decompose or assess an object in a different way.
Through further experimentation and thinking, those separate instruments evolved into a singular whiteboard-style workspace. That is where PRISM currently stands.
Put the thing you care about on the workbench.
In PRISM, you begin with an object of attention. It might be an idea, a question, a problem, a decision or something else you want to understand more clearly.
Place it on the workbench. Then bring different instruments to it. One might ask what sits upstream of the thing as you currently see it. Another might look downstream and ask what could follow. Another might decompose or recompose the object so that different aspects of it become visible.
The object has not necessarily changed. What you are able to see in it may have. And when what you can see changes, what appears possible to do can change with it.
Useful now does not mean finished forever.
An instrument can be genuinely useful at one moment in time and still be part of a much larger, continuing investigation.
Sailors once navigated using sextants and relatively simple telescopes. Modern ships have GPS, radar and vastly more sophisticated systems. The existence of GPS does not mean the sextant never worked.
I think about Learn and Think Better in much the same way. The enquiry advances. Understanding changes. The things made from that understanding can change with it.
“Instrument one can be useful. Instrument ten may be more useful. There is no contradiction between the two.”
What comes next?
I genuinely do not know exactly what Learn and Think Better will create next. That is part of the point.
PRISM itself has already changed substantially as the enquiry behind it has developed. It began in one form, became a collection of separate perceptual tools, and then became the workspace that exists now. Who knows what it will become next. The same is true of Learn and Think Better more broadly.
As that enquiry continues, different instruments, products, tools, ideas and other forms will emerge from what is discovered. The projects collected here are the current ones.
