For most people on Earth, learning is just another form of entertainment
When the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski traveled to Papua New Guinea in the 1920s, he discovered a group of remote and mostly naked tribes, none of whom had encountered literacy before. And without writing, he found, they organized knowledge in a different way from the rest of the world. Rather than label and categorize everything that exists into linear encyclopedic facts, for instance, they only bothered to record and give names to local flora and fauna if they were useful in their own lives. Animals that were neither food nor dangerous, for example, were treated as unimportant. That is just a bush, they would say, or, merely a flying animal. After centuries of mass literacy, we’ve forgotten that our brains still work like this, too.
