An erudite person, who is this and how to become one yourself

What is erudition?

Erudition (from the Latin ēruditio - learning, enlightenment) - comprehensive education, broad knowledge in many areas.

This term refers to the ability of the human mind to absorb and retain in memory a large amount of information and knowledge in a variety of areas.

Erudition as a personality quality is a unique ability to demonstrate information awareness, erudition, informativeness, orderliness and structure in a wide range of knowledge and deep knowledge in the field of one’s life activity, resulting from education, systematic study and comprehension of various literary and information sources.

Erroneous interpretation of erudition

Many people confuse the concept of erudition and wisdom. But these are completely different definitions. An erudite person, not always wise and “enlightened.” Erudition is nothing more than a simply structured, ordered set of knowledge. Erudition is characteristic of people with a good memory and curiosity.

However, simply reading or hearing information and remembering it is not enough to become an erudite person. It is necessary to consciously “digest” this knowledge, subject it to criticism, compare it with other sources, test it in practice, making sure of its truth. And only then apply it in your life and pass it on to others. To use information in this way requires a high degree of intelligence.

This is also interesting:

What happens to your body if you suddenly stop drinking coffee?

Who is an erudite person

Let's consider the main question - what is an erudite person? Smart, developed, well-read, educated?

Erudition definitely has something to do with being an educated person. However, this is not the same thing, contrary to the prevailing opinion among society. An erudite person is necessarily educated, but an educated person is not always an erudite.

The main difference is that not all educated people strive to expand and supplement their knowledge, or test it through their own experience. Many blindly take on faith what they were taught in schools, institutes and other educational institutions, and never question this knowledge.

And a truly erudite person always strives to overcome his ignorance and replenish himself with new knowledge. He explores topics and areas of life that interest him, drawing knowledge from all kinds of sources. Any information is subject to analysis and criticism. If an erudite questions some fact or received information, he will definitely research and check them in order to come to his own conclusion. Also, erudites are able to consider certain knowledge, fact, situation from different points of view, without considering any of them to be the only correct one.

Such a person has deeper knowledge in some areas (science, philosophy, history, medicine) than just a good specialist or holder of a higher education.

Erudition and its advantages

An erudite person is a learned, well-read person who has thorough and deep knowledge in the field of some science, and is well-rounded.

Erudition gives a person a pass into the world of strong people.
It allows you to convince others that you are a true leader.
A person has the ability to operate with a huge amount of information.
Provides an opportunity to achieve rapid advancement through the ranks.
An erudite person, when he learns some material, constantly strives to learn even more. Erudition is a necessary trait of a true leader.
A person who has a large stock of knowledge can understand both a narrow field and other areas of science. He can easily become a role model and leader.
An erudite person can easily get out of any difficult situation. He easily starts and maintains a conversation.
Erudition allows you to gain respect for yourself and become an authority in the eyes of other people.
Thanks to her, a person is able to create an excellent career.
Erudition allows you to enjoy great success with people of the opposite sex.
An erudite person easily becomes the soul of any company and is always the center of attention.
A person who has a large stock of knowledge learns new sciences much easier while studying at a university. He is admired by teachers and students.
In raising children, erudition comes to the rescue when little ones start asking a lot of questions. A parent who knows the answers to everything that interests children becomes an authority in their eyes.

My husband is a fairly erudite person. He is constantly engaged in self-development, is interested in various areas of life, science, and studies foreign languages. It was with his intellectual knowledge that he attracted me and interested me as a man. A husband easily becomes the life of any company, as he has a large amount of knowledge and easily finds a common language with different people.

Advantages of an erudite person

Without a doubt, developed erudition is an advantage. Let’s look at exactly what advantages such an interesting personality trait provides in life:

An erudite person feels comfortable in any company. He can support almost any conversation, surprise others with his knowledge, and tell people interesting information.
He has a better chance of getting a well-paid job and moving up the career ladder.
If necessary, scholars can easily learn a new profession and change their work activity.
They are attracted to erudites; many of them have a penchant for leadership and managerial qualities.
A person has the ability to handle large amounts of information.
Such people have a higher level of cognitive abilities and a reduced risk of developing senile dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
An erudite person arouses increased interest from other people and enjoys success with the opposite sex.
It is easier for erudite people to make new acquaintances and business connections.
Erudites are more trusted, especially in professional circles.
Erudite people are more confident and have high self-esteem, which allows them to achieve success in life.
Smart and developed children grow up in a family of erudites, as their parents pass on their extensive knowledge to them and easily answer any questions.

As you can see, erudition has many advantages, and these are factors that many people should strive for.

Interesting facts about our memory abilities:

Fact 1

Memory and its properties directly depend on a person’s profession. It really is better among announcers, teachers, scientists, and actors. After all, these people have to memorize a large amount of text, constantly repeat it and learn something new.

Fact 2

In fact, a person remembers not what happened to him in objective reality, but his subjective assessments - negative or positive impressions, which can be influenced by any little thing. For example, the whole day could go like a fairy tale, and at the end an event happened that spoiled the mood. Rest assured, a person will remember exactly this, painting his whole day in black colors

Fact 3

There are two types of memory - short-term, or operational, and long-term. During a session, students manage to “push” a huge amount of information into their memory overnight, which disappears immediately after the exam. Patients with so-called senile forgetfulness remember in great detail events that happened in early childhood or many years ago, but are unable to retain in their heads what happened half an hour ago.

Meaning of the word erudite

Examples of the use of the word erudite in literature.

To be fair, some of these non-writers - purists like Homer Dos Passos - had no intention of writing anything after the destruction of the word mills, expecting their less athletic and more erudite colleagues to take care of this trivial task.
As an erudite person, my father knew a lot of flowery idioms, elegant turns of phrase, and on any occasion, even without it, he could recite Bialik’s poetry for hours, quote other titans of Jewish thought - from Yeshua to Marx - but in the world of enchantments and spells he was helpless, like a small child and unreasonable.

Some of them became my good friends; they are highly educated, erudite and very humane people.

I knew the new first secretary of the regional committee, Boris Veniaminovich Gidaspov, back in his youth from work at the Lensovet Technological Institute, and then I had an idea of him as a modern, erudite, progressively thinking person.

She introduced him to the intricacies of current Moscow life, showing herself to be a pleasant interlocutor with a broad outlook, an erudite guide to cultural sites and hot spots.

I tried to sink deeper into my chair and did not listen too closely to his erudite explanations of the features of the latest anthelmintics and their effects on Trichostrongylus, Haemonchus and Ostertagius.

Perhaps the rich Novgorod guest Sadko does not come to mind for the widely erudite Murad Adji, or the textbooks telling about the Novgorod merchants of pre-Mongol Rus' do not inspire confidence.

De Quincey refutes and absolutely compromises the erudite, deeply immoral introduction to the lecture, revealing its parodic essence.

George Kennan, a former United States ambassador to Russia and an erudite scholar of Russian politics at Princeton's Institute for Contemporary Studies, suspected for years that the young Bolshevik Joseph Stalin was an agent of the Tsar's secret police.

However, the characterization of the great poet and playwright as a poorly educated person indicates a very superficial acquaintance of Fuller himself with the poetic and dramatic works of Shakespeare, in which more attentive and erudite researchers subsequently discovered undoubted and numerous traces of the unique education and deep culture of their author.

The erudite young scientist appreciated the virtuoso skill of his relative, it was with him that Sebastian traveled to Mühlhausen, his friend assisted him during his performance and witnessed the artistic success of the organist.

The head of the KB aerodynamics group, Professor Heyitz, is a far-sighted and erudite researcher.

And Barth became such an intermediary - a brilliant, universally erudite essayist who managed to create a striking symbiosis of literature, ethics and politics, the topical relevance of which has always aroused keen interest among the intellectual elite of the West.

Professor of the Theater Institute Grigory Boyadzhiev was a famous specialist in Western theater, he was very smart and erudite.

Although, as it turns out, everyone here is so erudite that I no longer know whether it is necessary to tell how in 1962 the experiment suggested by Pontecorvo was carried out, in which neutrinos interacted with chlorine-37 nuclei.

Source: Maxim Moshkov library

How to become an erudite person on your own

Is it possible to develop erudition on your own? This survey is of interest to many who want to engage in self-development. Experts in the field of psychology and personal growth say that this is quite possible. Human abilities are unlimited and everyone can “pump” themselves to any desired level.

The concept of what an erudite person should know is very subjective. This can be knowledge in a specific area, but covering it as much as possible, or in different areas. The main thing is that it is interesting to the owner of the information.

So, tips on how to develop erudition yourself:

Read more books. These should not be romance novels and detective stories, but popular science literature, books from the field of philosophy, self-knowledge, and history. Educational textbooks are also excellent sources of useful information.
Don't blindly believe everything that comes into your mind. Subject information to doubt, criticism and analysis. This is the only way you can be convinced of the reliability of certain knowledge.
Cultivate your curiosity. Be interested in the new and unknown. The wider your range of interests, the more interesting you are.
Choose your environment. It’s not for nothing that there is a saying “whoever you mess with...”. More often be in the company of erudite, educated, successful, wise people who have something to learn from.
Attend educational and cultural events. Go to exhibitions, museums, theaters, classical music concerts, scientific conferences.
Watch science documentaries.
If you are passionate about a topic, area, subject, study it in all its depth and breadth, and not just superficially.
Travel, get acquainted with the culture of other countries.
Enrich your speech, learn new terms and words.
Don’t just learn and memorize information, but reflect on it, form your own vision and point of view.
Avoid destructive, useless information that flows today in huge quantities from everywhere and fills people’s heads (yellow press, negative news, advertising, propaganda of certain images and forms of behavior).
Develop your intellectual abilities: learn foreign languages, learn to play chess, learn poetry, solve crossword puzzles.
Make friends with similar interests and communicate, exchange information.

This is also interesting:

The danger of self-development or what they are silent about during trainings

How to find time?

In the book “Geniuses and Outsiders” by M. Gladwell, neurologist Levitin writes that after research it became clear that to achieve mastery commensurate with the status of an expert, 10,000 hours of practice are needed. This is equivalent to three hours of work over ten years.

Elon Musk and Bill Gates will tell you how to organize your day. Their productivity is enviable. They use the time chunking method. The point is that they allocate specific time to solve assigned tasks. The essence of the method is to concentrate entirely on the problem, without being distracted by other factors, until the result is achieved. The principle is especially effective when solving similar problems, as it saves time and energy.

Use your free minutes wisely

What do you do if you have a free 5 minutes at work or are waiting for an order in a cafe? Do you “kill” time by browsing your Instagram feed or writing posts? Enjoy your time.

Pay attention to educational resources
, smart communities, language games. This is much more useful than looking at selfies of the same type.
Download useful programs to your phone
. We are talking about international news applications and more. Learn foreign languages on popular resources like Livemocha, Busuu, English as 2nd Language.
If you know English, install the program
, which finds sites that are interesting to you based on the stated criteria. The more actively you use it, the more accurately it will display your interests.
Make it a rule to consult Wikipedia more often
. By following the links, you can easily obtain additional information on related topics.

Explore interesting topics

If you drew as a child, but then switched to studying law or economics, nothing prevents you from taking courses. They will help you master artistic techniques, complete culinary or design courses, floristry, and improve leadership skills during training. Steve Jobs took calligraphy classes. Who would have guessed that an entrepreneur would find elegant spelling useful 10 years later when developing the Macintosh? Calligraphy skills helped with font creation and proportional scaling.

The author of “Intelligence,” the bestseller “The Perfect Brain” and other books about thinking, K. Sheremetyev, writes: “If you solved problems well at school, it doesn’t mean anything. It is impossible to remain smart forever without development. This is comparable to pumping up muscles in youth. If you forget about them, the result disappears. If you don’t supply the brain with information, rapid degradation occurs.”

Choose popular science literature for your mind and convey new information to others. In order to put it on the subcortex, you need to understand and speak. Tips for readers:

Move your pencil under the line.
The pupil moves behind the pointer, scanning the information. Gradually speed up your movement and your reading speed will increase significantly.
About 80% of those who read silently pronounce the words.
It's time to get rid of a bad habit. While reading the text, count or mentally hum. The first week you will have difficulty understanding the meaning, but then your reading speed will increase many times over.

The founder of the Ki-Aikido Society, Koichi Tohei, states that “reading is the basis of intelligence. It increases the neuroplasticity of the mind and the speed of information processing.” A. Wasserman advises looking for connections between different knowledge. He assures that with this approach it will soon become clear what educational gaps need to be filled in order to understand the essence. “I know from experience that interesting things are remembered as you go,” writes Wasserman. Neurophysiologists explain that this happens when new and processed information is compared. An intrigued person's pupils involuntarily dilate. The retina captures more light, which allows it to capture more information.

Listen to the classics

30 years ago, psychologist Frances Rauscher conducted an experiment. She locked 30 rats in a room and played Mozart for 2 months. Compared to rodents who lived in peace and quiet in the next room, they were better able to navigate and ran faster through the maze.

Train your memory

The brain is active between 16 and 25 years of age, then cognitive functions gradually decline. To always stay in good shape, you need training. The more information in the head, the faster neural connections are formed, and the brain more actively archives data.

Develop imagination and visualization:

remember the figures made from matches;
perform actions blindly;
build a “Memory Palace” according to the method of D. O'Brien, described in the book “How to Develop Absolute Memory”.

Play board games. Chess and poker train logic and thinking. Einstein wrote: “A mind that has expanded its boundaries does not return to its former limits. Human intelligence is formed by work and results.”

Do things differently

Professor Lawrence Katz advises training your brain with neurobiics. Simple methods increase the ability to process information and prevent the processes (dendrites) from atrophying. The essence of the technique is to change habitual actions that have become automatic, adapting the brain to new circumstances:

change routes more often;
take a shower in the dark, training your sense of touch;
go to a blind restaurant;
change hands and actions.

After practicing, you will begin to come up with developmental exercises on the go.

Don't be afraid of stress

N.P. Bekhtereva, who studied the brain and human capabilities, provided evidence that intellectual and creative breakthroughs and insights occur when solving super problems. The academic came to the conclusion that stress when searching for options often leads to insights. If you open your own business, entrepreneurship will force you to get out of your comfort zone and start studying literature about finance, marketing, and document management.

Travel

A fun and enjoyable way to broaden your horizons is travel. Virtual trips to the Louvre and Hermitage are an interesting activity, but it’s better to look at photographs of ancient Greek porticos and paintings live. Today it is not difficult to find a profitable tour, create interesting itineraries, or go on a trip around the country or abroad.

The highest point of intelligence is the ability to draw correct conclusions and anticipate events. People take years to achieve such results, but this is an interesting path of learning and development. If you want to become an erudite, learn to extract information from different sources, pay attention to little things, compare causes, effects, connections, experience. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. New knowledge will help fix it.