PhD graduation ceremony in December 2023 with Dr. Jeetendra "Jack" Patel (left) and Dr. Somi Shin (right), both Assistant Professors at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University's College of Arts & Sciences in Singapore.

On lifelong learning and nexialism

I greatly enjoy learning. I am a strong believer in the value of continuous education, for reasons you can read about in my learning manifesto.

I also believe that a great part of what makes people original thinkers is their ability to connect dots between emergent research in unrelated disciplines. Novelist Alfred Elton van Vogt coined the word nexialism to define that ability as "the science of joining in an orderly fashion the knowledge of one field of learning with that of other fields" (van Vogt, 1950).

The idea of becoming such a "specialist in transdisciplinarity" (Legros, 2022) is adjacent to the Renaissance man's notion that humans "should try to embrace all knowledge and develop their own capacities as fully as possible" (Britannica, 2024). I am inspired by early polymaths such as Giordano Bruno and Leonardo da Vinci.

In my spare time, I try to learn from fields outside my area of expertise in order to expand my portfolio of mental models. I then attempt to use those models to think laterally and approach modern problems from novel and unexpected angles.

To keep track of what I read and learn, I cultivate a digital garden. You may have heard of this concept under different names: exobrain, personal knowledge management system (PKMS), personal wiki, or zettelkasten) using the wonderful note-taking tool Obsidian.

Click on the button below to visit it.

References