B is for Books (and Battleships)
B is for Books (and Battleships) Don't forget to read books while researching your family history will you? And read them over and over. Any new area of research is challenging...filled with unfamiliar words and phrases. Your brain is trained, I think, to look for the familiar. It's a kind of efficiency mechanism. We get so flooded with information that our brain, in processing the onslaught, hones in on the familiar - "Look, that's what you've seen before. Is that what you want?" That's why learning is difficult. We're looking at new things - a new ontology (there's a big word for you that I learned at Uni - I think it means a ways of capturing and analysing knowledge in a subject area). Yet our brain scans continually for the old and previously encountered stuff beause it recognises it and, via shorthand, you know how to respond. So keep reading and re-reading until the new information/structure of the new subject...