Beginner's mind, on purpose

Judy Roitman, a Kwan Um Zen master and retired mathematics professor, argues that knowing is a construction: categories, perception and language only approximate what is there, and deciding we know something is when we stop looking. Don't-know mind is not vagueness but the open, taking-it-all-in attention we were born with, and the place to rest when stuck.

1. 1Conventional knowledge is necessary to function, but we get trapped in it and treat it as the whole of things; its base is inherently unstable.
2. 2Perception is constructed: a frog's eye registers movement, not objects, and humans only see a still object because the eyes make tiny constant movements called saccades.
3. 3Every 'I know what this is' closes a door. Her example: blue jeans that, enlarged on a phone, turn out to be white, black and indigo threads.
4. 4Her practice is huatou: holding a basic question such as 'What is this?' while letting every answer dissolve, going deeper until certainty gives way.
5. 5Don't-know mind is a newborn's looking-around attention, no preconceptions and no doors slamming shut: we were born with it, still have it, and can learn to trust it.

“However we thought it was, that’s not how it is.”

Merim Bilalić and Peter McLeod explain the Einstellung effect: once a familiar solution comes to mind, the brain sticks with it and stops seeing better ones. Eye-tracking of expert chess players shows the first idea steers attention away from the evidence for anything better, even while the player believes they are searching, the mechanism behind confirmation bias and misdiagnosis.

1. 1Luchins's 1942 water-jug study: people who learned a three-step method kept using it on a problem with an obvious one-step answer, and gave up when the old method failed.
2. 2Chess experts shown a familiar five-move smothered mate alongside a faster three-move mate insisted, after about 37 seconds, that the slow mate was the fastest possible.
3. 3The infrared camera showed players who said they were looking for a faster solution never moved their gaze off the squares of the solution they already had.
4. 4A 2013 replication (17 novices, 17 experts) found the familiar move trapped both groups when second best; when it was an obvious blunder, every expert found the alternative.
5. 5Expertise gives some immunity, but nobody is impervious. The countermeasures: remember you are susceptible, and keep Darwin's memorandum of every fact that contradicts you.

“We may believe that we are thinking in an open-minded way, completely unaware that our brain is selectively directing attention away from aspects of our environment that could inspire new thoughts.”

Josh Waitzkin and Andrew Huberman on why failure, not success, drives change. Huberman: the brain only rewires under mismatch and frustration, when adrenaline, noradrenaline and dopamine signal something must change. Waitzkin: losing the Under-18 World Chess Championship final, a game he could not study for two and a half months, whose lesson later won him a martial-arts world title.

1. 1Plasticity needs a mismatch: the brain has no reason to change while everything goes right, so frustration and agitation are the chemical signal that learning can begin.
2. 2Waitzkin's first national championship loss, at seven, to a boy who became his best friend, stopped him ever associating winning with no pain.
3. 3At 17, playing Peter Svidler for the Under-18 world title, he declined a draw in the critical position, played one over-aggressive move and lost.
4. 4He could not face studying the game for two and a half months; the winning idea, pulling his last defender away from his own king, was outside his conceptual scheme.
5. 5A year later he began Tai Chi push hands, whose essence is using empty space against aggression; in 2004 that principle won him the world championship final.

“the most heartbreaking losses lead to the transformational change which leads to the biggest wins of their life”

Eduardo Briceño explains why hard work often stops producing improvement. Effective performers alternate between a learning zone, where the goal is to improve and mistakes are expected, and a performance zone, where the goal is to execute and minimise mistakes. Most of us live almost entirely in the performance zone, which is why professionals plateau within a few years.

1. 1Learning zone: work on what you have not mastered and expect mistakes. Performance zone: execute what you have mastered and minimise them. Know which one you are in.
2. 2Performance usually plateaus after the first couple of years in a profession — teaching, medicine, nursing — because once we feel adequate we stop entering the learning zone.
3. 3Deliberate practice, after Anders Ericsson: break a skill into sub-skills, pick one, work just beyond your current ability with full concentration, frequent feedback and ideally a coach.
4. 4Ten to twenty minutes a day typing 10 to 20 percent faster than your reliable speed makes you faster; years of ordinary typing do not.
5. 5Beyoncé performs, then reviews the show video in the hotel that night and sends notes next morning. Learning needs low stakes: no new tricks without a net.

“The reason many of us don't improve much despite our hard work is that we tend to spend almost all of our time in the performance zone.”

A ten-minute guided meditation from Jeff Warren, built on the Zen idea of Don't Know Mind: noticing how the need for certainty — about what is true, what comes next or how things should be — creates tension and overthinking, then practising letting that need go and resting in curiosity and direct experience.

1. 1The need to know — certainty about what is true, what is coming next, or how things should be — is framed as the engine of tension, anxiety and overthinking.
2. 2The practice is to loosen that grip rather than find better answers: rest in curiosity and openness instead of grasping.
3. 3The aim, in the language of the Diamond Sutra, is a mind that dwells nowhere — attention that stays open with nothing pre-decided.