"That's old news to me"

[just me]

Was speaking with a specialist in the medical field yesterday regarding something he most likely studied many years ago and has little to nothing to do with his field. He mentioned a couple of other words related to what I was talking about before he said, "That's old news to me". I just said I was sure it was.

"Old news" reminds me of closeminded thinking for some reason, though I would never expect all personality types to look at it that way. I see knowledge as important, mind you. However, I also see it as a stepping stone to help uncover and reveal new knowledge. I just cannot force myself into believing everything I read as the final factual explanation of things....with exceptions. There are exceptions to rules, so to speak.

In the medical field, I think an infj would do well in research and development. I know I get so involved in research just trying to better understand things that interest me, especially if they could help others one day if not in the present. Any comments? Jokes? Building blocks?

 

[Flavus Aquila]

Key ideas/concepts are the begining of radical changes in the way one thinks. Upon realisation they are exciting or interesting, but down the track, once their implications have been grapled with, the new challenges become the issue, not the key concept.

Hence many important concepts become "old news" - like the theory of relativity.

 

[just me]

I agree about the new challenges, but see the cornerstone as a possible beginning step toward finding a new answer. I think it possible to forget the old knowledge when the old knowledge might have part of the key to unlocking the new. I also feel we miss opportunities by not looking back at an original idea.

While reading from VS Ramachandran's "A Brief Tour of Human CONSCIOU5NESS", he speaks of perception through seeing. I will quote parts of what I had such an agreeable awareness of.

"Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted."
"One common fallacy is to assume there is an image inside your eyeball, the optical image, exciting photoreceptors on your retina and then that image is transmitted faithfully along a cable called the optic nerve and displayed on a screen called the visual cortex."
"We have not just one visual area, the visual cortex, but thirty areas in the back of our brains which enable us to see the world."

This man constantly compares the new pathway of light, or reflections of light on objects we see, with the old knowledge of pathways of light. I like this because he is using the old knowledge for comparisons of the new knowledge, leading further to a better understanding of possibly even newer knowledge. When he does not use the old knowledge for comparisons, the new knowledge cannot be used to its fullest extent. Hence, my discomfort in the medical field of one's viewing something one might have learned years ago as "old knowledge".

 

[just me]

I would like to add I feel we miss many opportunities when we think or feel we know everything about a given subject, especially when the brain is involved. We feel we know everything about speech. I look for other paths. I do believe that old saying, "When a door is closed, a window is opened somewhere else".