The one thing about knowledge is that no matter how much you think you know, there is always something out there that you don't. About three years ago I was in a job where I felt like I was finally had it all figured out. There were few surprises and I had become something of an expert in my area. Sure there were things I didn't know, but I was at a point where I knew most everything I needed to in order to do my job effectively. It was very comforting to be in that position. At the same time though it felt like maybe I had peaked and there was nothing else for me learn, or at least nothing else I wanted to learn. It reminded me of what Phil said about God; "Maybe he's not omnipotent. He's just been around so long he knows everything." For some people when they get to that spot in their life or career they feel like they've arrived. It's what a lot of people are working towards. There is some sense that eventually you'll get to a point where your knowledge about a particular thing is complete. There is something known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, which recognizes the fact that the more you learn about a subject, the less likely you are to consider yourself an expert because you have actual knowledge of how much you don't know.
In the technical world one of the last things you want is to have your knowledge plateau. The moment you stop learning new things is when you start becoming irrelevant. It may take a long time before anyone, including yourself, notices this fact, but by the time you do it may be too late to do anything about it because you'll spend so much effort trying to catch up. I guess if you think about it, the same is probably true for other areas outside the technical world. So once I reached the level of what felt like expert I started to look around for something else so that I could keep that eventuality of being out of touch away a little bit longer. In the past three years I returned to college and learned about a whole different area that I had only briefly touched on before. I wasn't exactly out of my element, but it had been nearly ten years since I was last in any kind of formal schooling. After that I had three different jobs, each one forcing me to admit that despite any knowledge or education that I have, I still knew next to nothing regarding the actual work involved. I am now the opposite of an expert.
It can be very frustrating not knowing something. It's even more frustrating to have forgotten something you once knew. Where does all our knowledge go? You know how they say you never really forget how to ride a bike? Your body just remembers because it was such a complex array of movements that your muscles retained the memory of it. So even if you haven't ridden a bicycle in a couple decades you'll still have the ability to hop on and peddle away, maybe a bit wobbly at first, but it would come back to you pretty quickly. It would take something drastic for you to lose that knowledge completely. If that's true for something like riding a bike then would that mean while we may forget something we learned a long time ago our body physically retains the knowledge somehow? If everything I've learned is somehow stored in my cells then is it possible for that knowledge to be passed along to the next generation? If eye color or height can be influenced by our parents then what's preventing our cellular knowledge from being given to our children? Or more importantly, what can we do to access that information? You may have heard the story about the experiment where a flatworm is sent through a maze until it knows its way. That worm is ground up and fed to another flatworm. This new flatworm is able to navigate the maze much easier, indicating that information may have some kind of physical component to it. Granted flatworms are a very simple organism compared to a person, but I have a feeling scientists are looking at the general idea that knowledge and experience is stored inside in ways we don't fully understand.
There is a somewhat scary aspect to what we learn though. Our bodies are fairly fragile when you think about it. While we can take a lot of punishment at times, often it takes only a single event or trauma that could change everything. People with head injuries have had to relearn everything over again, including how to walk. It seems to run contrary to the idea of muscle memory. The way I look at it though is imagine if all the information in your brain where a library and your brain had the index to where everything was stored. That index get damaged and the information doesn't necessarily go away, but you've lost the ability to efficiently access it. Your first kiss is out there somewhere, but you may never find it again. In a sense that type of injury could disconnect our ability to access muscle memory. The idea that something like that could happen makes our knowledge even more precious.
It's entirely possible that everything we've experienced has been recorded by our brain and stored somewhere. It's been said that we only use a fraction of our brain. This isn't entirely true though. We use all of our brain, but we don't all use it as efficiently as we could. Plus we don't fully comprehend how information is stored and retrieved or if there is a limit to our storage capacity for new information. The physical aspect of our bodies break down before we can really test the limits of what our brains could do given enough time. Some day though we may be able to access anything that we've experienced with total recall. If we are able to have that kind of clarity regarding the past, imagine what it would do for our future.
