The Reflection Effect

Visible Yet Not Understood

There’s a certain frustration in being able to see something but not change it.

From childhood we have to deal with the out of reach, the off-limits, and the ephemeral. The learning process itself suffers from a similar issue of abstraction. As complexity increases, our issues become increasingly separated from our day to day life. This divorces people from ideas, and ideas from effects.

The issue for educators and thought leaders has been a question of how to take advanced, abstract ideas, and make them graspable. “Graspable” in this sense is not just a metaphor. How can we literally grasp, break, and alter ideas, as if they were the objects we interact with daily?

While bringing the abstract down to our concrete life has been a long used method, technology now gives us the ability to take this concept even further.

Plato, in his Republic, used dialogues to make understanding his ideas similar to a real life conversation. But imagine if immersive technology could allow you to have that conversation yourself? Better yet, dispense with the conversation altogether. Go straight into the cave, and escape yourself. Live through lifetimes in the space of minutes and see successive governments rise and fall.

The time has come to reexamine not just how we learn, but the essential medium through which we transmit advanced human concepts. Communication in the future requires world building, a vision of how humans will touch, see, and hear one’s ideas. This perspective stands in direct contrast to the method of show and tell that has dominated our discussion of ideas until now.

Like a near sighted child putting glasses on for the first time, the right use of technologies like AR and VR could bring our world into sharper focus, and give us the sight to affect unprecedented change. These tools are key to making ideas concrete and moldable and, for the most part, they already exist. The issue however is not technological, but human. Until we master how to use these tools, until we reconfigure our deep set paradigms of communication, I’m afraid we will only find ourselves in a world ever more distant and incomprehensible — airy minds floating through a fog of reflection.