Parallel Learning

Observations about myself:

1. I love learning.
2. Given a choice, I prefer picking up new skills over memorising information.
3. I love understanding the abstract frameworks underlying any skill.
4. It takes me a while to learn something well.
5. I seek both depth and breadth of knowledge.
6. I seek to unify what I learn from diverse disciplines.
7. After focusing on one area for a while, I feel that I need a break from it.
8. When I come back to a past area of study, I come back to it with deeper understanding and greater fluency.
9. If I spend too little time with one subject before switching to another, I quickly forget what I’ve learnt.
10. If I spend too much time exclusively with one subject, I hit a plateau of understanding.
11. Interleaving subjects helps me build connections.
12. Without planning, I feel overwhelmed by the process.

As of now, the broad areas of study I’ve naturally been pursuing are:

1. Music
2. Language
3. Mathematics
4. Psychology
5. Physics
6. Biology
7. Computer Science
8. History

For now, I think I’ll start with simply planning and tracking my progress across books that I have and am yet to complete. Hopefully, I’ll get some idea of how to see the bigger picture along the way.

I need a balance between sticking to one thing and interleaving different things. I’ll try to make one chapter the minimum that I need to do before I can switch to something else.

One way is to read only one book at a time, but since parallel reading has allowed me to form interesting connections and look at the same thing from different perspectives, I’m very much in favour of trying to follow this method.

I would also like to keep track of the practices I think might be useful and track my experiments with these practices, but I think it’ll be a good idea to start with books first since they’re finite and concrete.

Where I am in each book (excluding fiction books and later parts of a book series):

1. Chapter 8, Applying Karnatic Techniques to Western Music
2. Chapter 5, Nād: Understanding Rāga Music
3. Chapter 4, Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics
4. Section 1, Raag Parichay Part 2
5. Chapter 1, A Higher Sanskrit Grammar
6. Yet to begin, Physical Geography
7. Yet to begin, A Critical Survey of Indian Philosophy
8. Yet to begin, How Things Work 1
9. Yet to begin, A Problem Book in Mathematical Analysis

Well…Good luck with this!

I guess writing chapter summaries/ key points will help so I might as well do that for each chapter I complete. I wish I had been this rigorous when reading Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. I barely remember anything in that book now.

Better late than never!

Changelog:

originally written on 24 October 2023