Recently I came across a YouTube video in which neuroscientist David Eagleman is presenting fascinating new technologies which will allow disabled people to get their missing senses like hearing, seeing and allow them to actually ‘feel it’ in their brain.
In the video at one point David Eagleman talks about how a missing sense deprives one of a portion of an ‘Umwelt’; or how adding a new sensory organ expands his/her Umwelt. While the German word Umwelt, when translated on Google simply means environment; it has a bigger meaning. It means what ‘your’ senses allow you to see & experience & only that is your world!
We humans, are capable of sampling only a tiny fraction of the electromagnatic spectrum which allows us to see a certain colors or listen to only a certain audio frequencies. Humans’ visual and auditory world is constrained by what we can sample. On the other hand,some animals can see much bigger or smaller spectrums or have completely different sensory organ that we do not posses at all. For eg. a small bird called European Robin has an apparatus in his head that allows him to ‘feel the earths magnatic field’ which he uses to navigate his routes during migration. All that bird has done is attached a new peripheral device to the same brain, the kind you and me have.
You can watch the above video, it talks about lots of other things. But it got me thinking about how this relates to our everyday lives. We as IT engineers (or anyone else) too can benefit from such expansion of our ‘Umwelts’. I experienced the power of it recently.
For a long time I was siloed in a mindset of a network engineer convinced that the IP networking is all that I need to know. After all, I am a network engineer & my Umwelt consisted only that. But in the last couple of years, I started to make an effort to be friends with Linux. I aspired to be able to manage my own lab servers for soemtime and I realized that the skills gap I had was big. So I started picking up bits and pieces of Linux administration slowly by reading books, watching videos and following blogs.
It was kind of boring and felt like an aimless journey initially but I pushed myself to stay the course and completed the books just for the sake of it, just staying in the game and not retreat. Down the line, I became fairly fluent with Linux OS’s ways of working.
This year, I got interested in writing (after dreaming about it for a long long time). So I started researching ways to setup my blog & got convinced that a LAMP stack is all I need to get a blog running. I bought my own domain, taught myself basics of LAMP using udemy. While I was watching that course and adding pieces to my project, I realized that this time all the linux OS administration concepts which I was struggling with in the past are coming to me like second nature. My neural pathways were becoming thicker!
This feeling of delayed gratification was wonderful. The last time I underwent such a journey was when I studied for CCIE. Back then every topic on a blueprint would give me such a rush & over time my mind adapted to ways of IP networking. Over the next few years, I would learn and unlearn lots of network technologies easily which were needed for my jobs.
Although learning network concepts were easy, to master things which were not related to my domain at all (Linux administration, Programming, Web developement etc.) are much harder. The only way to ride that curve is to put in little efforts over a long time until you have created that new fold in your brain. After that, anything that’s dependant on this ‘newly acquired sense’ becomes easier to grasp.
Imagine if you had only a monochrome vision like some animals do. How boring the world would look? Just add a few more colors to your eyesight and this magnificent colorful world appears in front of you. Some animals who can even see in infrared or like the European Robin who can ‘sense’ the magnetic waves may have much beautiful (or uglier?) worlds than us.
We too can strive to add new colors to our life. How? How about learning something new? Maybe musical instruments, Learning a new language, Reading, Writing, Starting excercising, Cooking, Practicing any form of art, Volunteering for some cause, Having a pet, Nurishing any other hobby, Learning to trade to name a few; or anything that you never did so far in your life? For me, maintaining this blog going forward will be one such thing.
Adding just one such shade to your palette opens your mind to new possibilities, new dimensions of world, new paradigms which were never accessible to you before but now, you have created that new fold in your brain & thickened some more neural pathways.
You have expanded your Umwelt a bit more & that is what enriches your life!
