You have to put yourself in the “correct” state of mind to learn

Please close your laptops, and relax. That is what a professor from New York said during his first visiting lecture at a European university. That felt like an unusual request for the students, who certainly did not expect it. Everyone was ready, yet again, to have their laptops open throughout the course, sometimes taking notes, sometimes hearing the words coming out of the professor’s mouth, sometimes chatting with someone who was not in the class through an instant messaging tool, sometimes hiding their feelings of inadequacy behind the bright screen.

Can you be in a lesson without your laptop? This is what we may have asked ourselves at that point, so accustomed to associating a laptop to “university” we had become during the Covid-19 pandemic period. Masks on, laptops off. A laptop is much more than a piece of tech. It is one of your main contact points with the external world. You can browse the hottest Amazon deals on your laptop. You can chat with people through your laptop. You can watch videos, read the news, work on an assignment from another course. Anything but be completely receptive to the present moment and relaxed.

I thought—and still think—there is a valuable argument in favor of “keeping your laptop close”. You have to be in the correct state of mind to learn. The same is valid for writing: you have to put yourself in the correct state of mind to write something worth reading. In writing, you need to ensure you have conducted thorough research, understand the topic you are writing about, have something to say about it, have a clear outline on how to communicate what you intend to say, let go of Resistance, and write. Then there is editing, which is a whole different task in and of itself.

So is for learning, I believe. Learning requires a high degree of receptiveness to the inputs coming from your environment. Those inputs can be sensory or conceptual. When you relax, it means you are not tense. “Tension is who you think you should be, relaxation is who you are” (Ravikant, circa 2019). A state of relaxation encompasses a heightened ability to process inputs. Complete relaxation means letting go of the ego and your competing commitments. If you truly intend to learn, that is necessary. Learning means reconsidering your current beliefs, thoughts, principles, opinions. Disassembling them, exploring new points of view, incorporating those new perspectives, and then reassembling things back in their place in your consciousness.

Maybe you change some of your beliefs in the process, or maybe you reinforce the arguments in favor of them. Either way, you do not pick one of those options just to fulfill your ego. You do it because you are in a state of complete openness to new inputs. And you look to be a bit less wrong and faulty in your worldly perspectives. Then you iterate from there, in a state of relaxation and openness to experience. That is why you may want to “keep your laptop close” the next time you intend to learn.