Heuristic
Heuristic comes from the Greek, “to find out.” It is a way of learning or problem solving that is hands-on and experimental. It takes one’s prior knowledge and personal experience into account and is sometimes called an educated guess. Some synonyms are: interrogative, investigative, quizzical.
I have always been better at hands-on kind of learning. You could tell me 100 times how to do something and I won’t really know how until I have done it myself. Obviously, there is not enough time to learn everything by first hand experience, but I still find it the best way to learn new tasks.
A lot of really smart people, like Ptolemy and Aristotle, used to think the planets and sun revolved around the earth (the geocentric model), because that is what they observed. It took some other people, like Copernicus and Galileo, who risked being labeled heretics, to question what was so widely accepted in order to learn the truth.
I don’t question everything and I am not a member of the tinfoil hat society, but a little bit of healthy skepticism can be a good thing. Think of all the things we used to believe were true but have now been proven false. Here’s an interesting article in Reader’s Digest about 17 Science “Facts” That Are Actually Not True. I think that no matter what you have learned or what you believe, you should always be open to new information and new experiences. New discoveries are constantly being made about the world we live in.
I always loved the X-Files. Did you know their fans were called the X-Philes? Mulder was my favorite, of course. He was very open-minded and only wanted the truth. Scully was a medical doctor who believed in hard-science and hard evidence. Who’s your favorite X-Files character?
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