Conversations with people, if done appropriately, can be knowledge enhancing endeavours, even if the topic is something you know a lot about.

Knowledge resides in our brains in a tacit form, and only a certain part of it becomes explicit when we are exercising the use of the same.

Many people wonder how we can swim after not practicing it for decades. It is because of this gift of tacit knowledge stored in our memory.

Similarly, even though you have learnt a topic well enough, decades back, you remember it well enough to practice it.

It is just that the nuances of that topic, which you knew then, are lost in the layers of neuronal connections built during those decades.

A conversation about the topic brings back interest in that topic, and you go back to the material to refresh the knowledge.

To your surprise, not only that you find the concepts you understood at that point in time, but you learn newer things because of the other knowledge you added meanwhile.

Let us say, you are talking about the more subjective aspects of Vedanta, you would go back to Yoga Vasishta and marvel again about the implications of subjectivity like parallel universes and implications of choice on the time arrow.

You may have read the book decades back, but some of it would come back as if you read it today.

Or, if you talk about Kelly criterion, you would go back to the entire theory of Shannon, Kelly, and Thorp, and would be lost in books like Element Of Information Theory, Fortune’s Formula, or The Man for All Markets, and marvel at the genius of the trio.

I love conversations, especially about the things that you are passionate about, and they happen to be the cornerstone of my knowledge enhancing strategy.

What do you think about conversations?