Neural pathways or grey matter ?

Sitting at breakfast, as you do, Kay and I got to talking about someone we knew who had written a book but neither of us could 'get to' the name. Our usual ploy at this point is to start at the beginning of the alphabet and work through saying the letters out loud and hoping for interventions that would reveal what we are thinking about. Several times through proved unsuccessful but then, out of the blue sky came to answer... just like that ... as if doors had been opened by the power of the brain to open them. This was interesting in itself but the next bit got me really thinking. The person we were searching for had a co-author and before I could ask Kay had said the name. It was as if her brain had its own personal tag cloud that finding one of the tags led to all the associated tags.

Now I appreciate that if I was a brain specialist or even a psychologist or had studied psychology or something I would have been aware of this and would not have been surprised ... but I was ... and I got to thinking and banging on about how we revere 'knowing' above understanding.

Trawling, mentally, through the TV programmes to substantiate my point I found that there were a large number of them, at a variety of levels that venerate 'knowing' ... Mastermind, The Weakest link, University Challenge, Question of Sport etc .

We then got to arguing about the change in focus in schools from 'knowing' to 'applying' ... and I was reminded of the discussion on a forum recently about a content .V. skill based curriculum and the idea of what the 'skills' would be proved to be a stopping point.

Heavy for breakfast ... a bit like an intellectual fry-up ... but the continuation was along the lines of - in society are the people at the top there because at some moment or other in their lives they spent doing the 'knowing' bit before they got to the 'applying' bit or were they just fortunate in not having to put any effort into knowing ... they just 'know'.

My son's girlfriend is sitting her university exams at the moment ... she says it is all about knowing.

So should there be lots more effort put into knowing just so that we know in case we need to?

Now, is this progressive or retrogressive thinking - am I ahead of the next wave of developments or so far behind that it isn't worth the thought?

Rant over ... hope you get the idea !