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Comment by NoMoreNicksLeft | Hacker News Reader

I know the question is meant to be flippant, but are you not aware of where you learned most things? For any of my post-1st-grade vocabulary, I remember the first time I saw the word in print, or where I heard it. I'd qualify that to say for most non-daily words, except that I don't believe there were many of those for me after I started school.

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Not flippant at all. I’m interested in the answer, and whether the answer supports the strong claim or not.

Do you know where you learned your opinions on a novel question? How?

I am absolutely not aware of where I learned most things.

I acknowledge you as my superior.

What you describe is probably uncommon.

I'm sure there are more robust neuroscience papers, but as an example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4409058/

Your average human does a lot of optimisation to storage things (sight sound smell, etc) in the old wet ware, and retrieval can be hit and miss.

There's a difference between accumulating raw knowledge and deriving or performing logical inference to reach conclusions. I can tell you where I learned many things, cite papers off the top of my head or at least retrieve them, but I can't tell you about knowledge that I derived / synthesized on my own.

So your trains of thought are ephemeral too?

It's more that chains of trains of thought are used to derive knowledge, and said chains can be distributed across space, and across time, so you can't necessarily attribute a single place.

If this is a normal capability of most people, I am horribly broken.

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