What and what not to keep!

Sherlock Holmes
© Made Up Media production , 2010

You see, I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out or at best is jumbled up with the lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it.

Now, the skillful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes in to his brain attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work but of these he has a large assortment and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that, that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent.

Depend upon it. There comes a time when for every addition of knowledge, you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance therefore that not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones

Sherlock Holmes, A Study in Scarlet

I can not agree more. 

To add to this little bit more,  this erasing out of fats that one has known before does not occur with an average individual who might only have one or two interests in life. 

But when a person’s interest is in many varying and contradictory lines and when one is keen in narrowing down his horizon of ignorance by learning them, it becomes of a highest importance to filter out facts that he can grab from a text book in an instance notice and only to keep concepts and tools learned in orderly fashion in his brain attic.