Читать книгу Demystifying Research for Medical and Healthcare Students - John L. Anderson - Страница 14

We start researching the moment we are born. Some scholars might insist that we explore our environment and learn whilst we are still in the womb. Maybe so. I know that as soon as we are born we start to explore out environment to learn more about it and to get answers to important questions such as ‘What is food?’ What is the first thing a newborn baby does? S/he will search for food. Can I eat this, or this, or that? It puts things in its mouth and lets the universe know it is looking for food by crying out. This early, trial and error learning (literally – suck it and see) experimentation is a fundamental type of research. The results will inform the baby's future actions. That's how we learn. We are continually testing our environment (the world around us). So, when we give an infant a clock to play with and it ends up in pieces on the floor, be proud, not angry! That infant is trying to make sense of the thing we call ‘clock’ and is trying to answer the excellent research question ‘how does this work?’ Sometimes we are aware of it. Sometimes we are not. We do it in our physical world and in our social and psychological worlds. If we are lucky and don't stick our finger in a live electric socket, we live and learn and are all the wiser from it.