Autodidactic: A Means for Self-Actualizing

I know this one: President George Bush. His brain is very well rested as it doesn't get overtaxed.

I think that every adult needs to experience the act of intellectual understanding; an act that Carl Sagan describes as "Understanding is a kind of ecstasy."

This quotation of Carl Rogers might illuminate my meaning:

I want to talk about learning. But not the lifeless, sterile, futile, quickly forgotten stuff that is crammed in to the mind of the poor helpless individual tied into his seat by ironclad bonds of conformity! I am talking about LEARNING - the insatiable curiosity that drives the adolescent boy to absorb everything he can see or hear or read about gasoline engines in order to improve the efficiency and speed of his 'cruiser'. I am talking about the student who says, "I am discovering, drawing in from the outside, and making that which is drawn in a real part of me." I am talking about any learning in which the experience of the learner progresses along this line: "No, no, that's not what I want"; "Wait! This is closer to what I am interested in, what I need"; "Ah, here it is! Now I'm grasping and comprehending what I need and what I want to know!"

coberst,

Try a bit of learning about your "self". That might reveal to "it" (what you call "self") the "Reader's Digest" level of it's question.

now now fresco play nice

tx coberst i read your message repeatedly with considerable disinterest

yeah its fun to learn stuff

solipster,

coberst actually believes there is such a thing as "disinterested knowledge". This clearly indicates that has failed to appreciate that "knowledge" like "information" is always related to individual goals, whether they be solving a general problem or simply exercising ones's mental faculties in later years. His general history of failure to debate (on this and a dozen other forums) the didactic summaries of his current reading, indicates "collection" rather than "assimilation". In short his claim to "learning" is highly suspect.

In rhetoric, that's called "confirmation bias." Rogers's field furnishes more examples of it than possibly any other.