Originality of Thought and Knowledge

Knowledge.

It is a Noun. Defined as facts, information, and skills acquired by a person through experience or education, the theoretical or practical understanding of a subject. Knowledge is something that many attain or hope to attain. What do we know? Is it knowledge based on what we were taught from the first time we entered school? Is it knowledge based on what our parents taught us? It is what we read in a book that gives us knowledge. Or is knowing what we learn from other words and behaviour? Is it both? Perhaps it could be a mix of both.

Starting school at a young age is usually mandatory. Many gain a knowledge base with numbers and the alphabet of the spoken language of their geographical area. When something is mandatory, it can be difficult to pay attention because it is something we are made to do. However, as we get older, and grow in maturity, finding knowledge that interests us can be more easily attained.

It is part of learning. Knowledge is learning. Learning is knowledge.

There are numerous reasons for wanting to learn.

1. Curious to know more. Curiosity motivates learning. Learning creates more knowledge. Even if it's already known knowledge.

2. Sharing an interest with someone else. Learning is a way to reduce lack of knowledge, to understand more about an idea as possible to satisfy your curiosity, to increase your independence or efficiency, to improve how you do things.

3. Satisfying a knowledge requirement for something. The environmental factors are used to make ideas more interesting to learn; we learn to recognize information that suggests that something may be interesting. We need to learn it to achieve a specific goal.

A desire to gain knowledge has many parts.

1. Challenge: a challenge in the present context means an unresolved query, a state of 'wanting to know' or 'wanting to resolve'. Individuals 'frame up' a challenge in response to environmental information. The information itself can be in the form of a question but learners experience the challenge or the 'want to know.

2. Curiosity: a diffuse emotional wanting to know more, an amalgam of seeking answers to questions and emotion. It operates when people say to themselves "What's going on here? That's unusual/ strange. I didn't expect that / It doesn't make sense".

3. Goal: a goal is an intention or desired outcome of the learning.

4. Interest: interest in the present context is a positive emotional state that is likely to lead to attention being directed to an idea in the future.

5. Motive: a motive is an emotional-desire-based factor that determines the direction of a person's activity towards achieving a particular goal or outcome.

6. Motivation: is the level of effort, energy attention a learner invests in pursuing a learning outcome. This effort initiates and maintains the process or activity by which learners pursue their goals.

Knowledge is an accumulation of all of these factors. There is usually an outside force that creates the need to learn, but it is usually something already known by someone else. Original thought is a bit harder to attain. Unoriginal though is the way to get there. It is how we get new theories, scientific breakthroughs, and many other things. Even this article isn’t completely original. The way it is formatted and worded could be considered original, but the ideas are influenced by outside sources.

Being Original is not really something achievable. It is based on the knowledge that already exists and expands from that. Learning is a desire.