I’ve been thinking about academic learning and what often goes missing in the process. Too often it becomes about memorizing isolated facts rather than exploring the story of discovery—how one insight leads to another, how meaning emerges through connection.
The Franchise Problem
When academia becomes a franchise of knowledge, the system focuses on efficiently delivering established ideas rather than fostering discovery. Instead of asking, “What new insights can we discover?” or “Where do we disagree?”, the driving question becomes, “How can we systematically transmit new data?” or “How do we build on what we already agree on?” The system becomes structural and predictable: come in, absorb the pre-existing framework, get credentialed, get out, and repeat.
The ideas that have already established themselves are the ones most likely to get developed further. Imagine this: You become a student of a scientific field, learning everything that shaped it into its current form. Then you set out to discover something new—and when you do, it had better fit the architecture of the field as it stands. You join a lab, adopt someone’s style of thinking, and perhaps eventually develop your own but often, that new style remains constrained by the intellectual framework you inherited.
Rarely do people completely break out. The ones who do—many Nobel laureates—discover something no one else did, precisely because they think like no one else does, because they create their own architecture.
Consider Frances Arnold, who shared the 2018 Nobel Prize in Chemistry with George P. Smith and Sir Gregory P. Winter. Arnold pioneered the directed evolution of enzymes—mimicking evolution itself to create enzymes with novel functions. The approach was obvious to her, yet the field had largely overlooked it. Absorbing the framework of four billion years of natural selection, Arnold used it to create enzymes that catalyze chemical reactions in entirely new ways—enabling applications from biofuel production to pharmaceutical synthesis and enzymes capable of breaking down environmental waste.
This kind of revolutionary thinking cannot emerge from rigid academic conditioning. While some mentors and programs do foster genuine exploration, structural incentives too often favor standardization over curiosity. And the curious minds? Too often, they remain silent.
The Courage of Unpolluted Curiosity
Breakthrough thinkers share one essential trait: fearlessness. It doesn’t matter what established wisdom says—they follow their vision. Breaking from accepted norms is terrifying. Will you be supported? Taken seriously? Able to continue your work?
Beyond bravery, they also possess something rarer: childlike curiosity. There’s a spark in their eyes when they discuss their work. A clarity. Curiosity in its rawest form—like a child determined to understand exactly how a cricket jumps, following it patiently until they see what they need to see.
What do we call this desire? ‘Purity’ comes closest. A quiet fire. No boxes, no corners, no walls. If I need to travel 5,000 miles north to eventually come back 10,000 miles south for the answers, I’ll do it.
When curiosity moves organically, we are guided by the discoveries we make, the new knowledge we generate. For this, we have to be free.
Information versus Knowledge
Take music, for example. You can memorize the framework—the notes, the standard scales—but that’s just retaining information without depth. You could instead learn to appreciate why beautiful sounds emerge, how notes weave together to create melodies that move something in you.
Genuinely solving a scientific problem is similarly immersive. Clues can appear anywhere—while performing daily tasks, learning an instrument, or walking through Central Park. Knowledge emerges once information has been fully internalized and made personal.
Information is the gathering of data. Knowledge is data digested and transformed into understanding.
Many PhD programs theoretically provide freedom—minimal coursework after the first year, flexibility in choosing courses and research direction, complete autonomy over when and how to work. But something crucial is often missing: the space to ask fundamental questions like, How does this knowledge shape my understanding of the world? How does it inform my work or thinking? That’s when understanding acquires depth.
This distinction between information accumulation and knowledge creation became intimately clear to me during my own PhD journey, when the space for genuine reflection revealed insights that months of conventional work had not.
The Silence That Speaks
I was in my second year, grinding through experiments in the lab, collecting hundreds of datasets, testing antibody combinations, trying to establish a strategy to isolate the main cell types from the human cortex—work that felt urgent and important, yet the goal felt frustratingly elusive.
I had learned the foundations from my mentor and absorbed established frameworks. But in the day-to-day grind, I hadn’t found the silence I needed to truly review, sit with, and dive deeply into the data.
Then the pandemic hit, and suddenly I had nothing but time and quiet.
In that silence, everything shifted. Without the chatter of the academic machinery—the pressure of daily experiments, the noise of frequent meetings—I could finally see what had been there all along. The breakthrough became obvious: I could sort the cell types all at once using a step-by-step filtering approach—like a decision tree. First, separate cells broadly into groups by a first defining feature, then within those groups, sort by another feature that creates subgroups, mirroring how biology naturally organizes itself.
It was all mapped out in my head. I knew it would work.
When I finally returned to the lab, I couldn’t wait to run the experiment. I did it. And it worked. That day, my colleague looked at the results in amazement: “Are you taking off two weeks now?” Puzzled, I asked why. She smiled: “Because you just sorted 16 cell types from one sample—work that usually takes two weeks.”
She was right, and the breakthrough wasn’t just the speed—most of these 16 cell types had not been cleanly isolated. Now, they could all be captured in a single experiment. What wasn’t visible was the foundation that made this efficiency possible: the weeks of silent work where information transformed into understanding. I had the freedom to step back, examine the data from multiple angles, and let patterns emerge. That reflective space didn’t just clarify the datasets—it revealed a concrete strategy, a way to combine markers and sorting steps that made the experiment succeed in one run.
That’s the difference between collecting information and creating understanding. Knowledge emerges when we allow ourselves the time and space to process, reflect, and connect the pieces in a genuinely new way. Even within supportive environments, the daily responsibilities and pressures of academic life can crowd out the space needed for genuine reflection.
The Foundation Needed for Collaboration
Before meaningful collaboration can happen, knowledge must first be created individually. When people bring genuine understanding rather than accumulated facts, their different ways of processing information can complement each other to build something new. Then insights can be shared, exchanged, and built upon.
If you want to partner with someone intellectually, isn’t it essential to understand how they generate their knowledge? Are they bringing information, or moments of genuine understanding? Are the conversations based on integrated knowledge or mere facts?
The difference determines whether we’re building on a foundation of wisdom or simply adding to the noise.
That’s the foundation we need to create—the intentional cultivation of spaces where genuine curiosity can flourish. Spaces where the freedom to reflect transforms information into knowledge, enabling meaningful insight and innovation.
And the real question is: are we willing to create these spaces where we are, and do we have the courage to protect them when external pressures demand otherwise?
Your Turn
What spaces have allowed your deepest insights to emerge? Have you experienced moments when silence or intellectual freedom transformed your understanding? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.