What you want to get used to

I first started typing on a Royal Typewriter just like this one. Today I do a lot of typing on a cellphone...

One of the most spectacular characteristics of higher organisms is their capacity to rise above their instinctual programming and learn new things. The ability to learn, and to learn well, is often tied directly to survival success, or at least to level of prosperity. Humans have proven to be particularly adept at learning, and take full advantage of this tool in their struggle to get ahead in survival and non-survival situations.

Thanks to the wonderful plasticity of the human mind, an individual is capable of devoting varied amounts of its brain processing power on the subject of its choosing. If they choose to know just a little about a particular subject, only a small amount is retained. Yet, if they decide to know everything there is to know about a subject, the brain is capable of applying substantial information storage and processing capacity to that subject. This accounts for people who can carry encyclopedic knowledge about one subject—say, Star Wars—whilst simultaneously having incredibly minimal knowledge about another subject—say, girls. (I started off vowing not to use that particular analogy… but man, it was just too frakkin’ easy…)