Blog Zero

Today, I was browsing though the internet, casually scrolling through yet another rabbit hole. This time, it was blogs; mostly about software development, with a dash of productivity / philosophy on the side.

My fingers grew tired of clicking around and I was just about to switch off my machine, when a realisation struck me. There is a LOT of content out there. Interestingly, following the parato’s principle, most of it came from a very small amount of websites — giving insight into the fact that blogging is rather hard. That got me thinking about why people blog in the first place! On first sight, it doesn’t seem like posting content benefits the blogger. Of course, there may be the ‘being selfless’ aspect at play, but that alone wouldn’t reflect the sheer volume of words out there.

There were certain things I could think of fairly quickly. Authors blog because it helps them improve their writing, simultaneously putting their ideas forth and hence building an audience for their books. That in turn helps them support themselves financially. Developers and researchers blog in order to hone their skills with regard to the principle - ‘if you can explain concepts in simple terms, you have understood the concept which you are attempting to teach.’ Others might want to start a blog because of mental health reasons, in order to be one with their thoughts; the same reason why many write personal diaries.

But I found that there is another major reason why someone might want to blog. Now, I don’t claim that it is true, and this is indeed a hypothesis. Do give this a thorough read, and let me know if anything I mention is incorrect. Thanks!

The concept of learning while writing down thoughts.

The working of the human brain is not entirely clear to our peoples yet, but we have indeed figured that the following is true — the brain’s mesh of neural connections is what decides our expertise on a certain topic. A neural connection generally means a network of ideas interconnected with each other in order to form links which connect one topic to another in our brain.

For example when we think of apples, we think that they are red. That’s a connection. When we think of home, it makes us happy; or sad, in some cases. That’s an emotional connection — one which connects certain hormone centers of the brain with the abstract idea of home.

When you think of a problem, and have an insight of a solution to it, that is a new connection being formed in real time; the brain even rewards you for initiating that connection with a hit of oxytosin and other hormones, which makes you euphoric.

The associations we make are not always with concepts new to us, sometimes we know two separate facts but fail to make a connection between those just because we didn’t encounter them at the same time in our lives! Funny thing is even though this particular post was extensively planned out, as I’m writing this, my brain is still making new associations. Remember this point, as it’s important for the rest of the post. (1)

As established, the amount of associations we have branching out from a particular topic determines our expertise in that topic. (There is more to discuss with these neural connections, about how each connection’s strength is also a very important parameter, but it is beyond the scope of this post and the hypothesis that I’m trying to put forth.) Forming these associations takes time and effort. One of the reasons why we, the humans, can’t form rapid connections and all be experts in all topics; and also the concept that separates us form each other intelligence wise, is our attention span and the time we can focus on a particular topic without being distracted by something else. The reasons for this are multifold, and I think I’ll leave this to another post, but the gist of it is that switching between different thoughts requires a large amount of energy, energy which we could have spent instead forming topical connections. ‘Attention’, is hard to do. Because even though it takes a lot of energy and the brain doesn’t like to spend much, it loves novelty even more; which it attains by switching between very unrelated topics frequently. This behavior was evolutionarily sound since if you were so focused on one task that you didn’t see the russle of leaves in the bush nearby, you didn’t survive. However, our top priority in the modern world isn’t protection from predators, it is survival through the abstract concept of ‘money’ and ‘value’, which is why this evolutionary ‘gift’ has become detrimental.

Writing something down (even if it is hard to do) forces us to be engaged in the topic we are writing about, essencially generating focus, and ultimately resulting in a large amount of time spent with a topic, producing a large amount of neural connections.

This is the hypothesis. It is also the main reason why I’m starting a blog; to clear my own mind of the knowledge gaps that may exist, and to pave my way towards expertise. I also encourage everyone reading to start writing, even if they do not publish, for the same reason.

Other reasons

Aside from the above, there are many reasons why I’m starting a blog. Some of them are as follows :-

• Writing about concepts helps put things in a third persons perspective, particularly if they are abstract. That helps in refining that particular concept / completely dismissing it, if it turns out to be false.
• Like mentioned in the first paragraph, if one is able to explain a complex concept properly to a layman, that is a very good sign that they have understood it themselves.
• I do plan to write a book eventually, to give back to the society from which a lot has been taken and learnt. And for that I need to practice my writing and have my own thoughts cleared out, which I plan to accomplish using this medium.

Conclusion

Hopefully you now understand my motivations and why I began writing.

There is another point I want to address about the domain of this blog. I don’t want to limit the topics I’m going to write about in the beginning, because the topics I want to gain clarity on are wide and far apart. Dedicating this blog to a particular domian would not result in a favorable outcome, personally. Even though I will eventually settle on one domain, the posts will be categorised considering the ease of navigation for readers whose interest lies in one domain only — which I suspect will be technical, for no one wants to hear about a 19 year olds opinion on a certain aspect of philosophy.

I will try to make these posts as interesting as possible to read, of that you have my word. I’m releasing this with three posts already in place, so that the blog gets off to a good start. Thanks for reading!