Understanding the word ‘concept’?

We have to understand a very basic word, which we use very often, but haven’t paid much attention. That word is the concept. When people talk about any subject, they wish t to know that if you have a conceptual understanding, and the other person who knows it, he say ‘yes, all the concepts are clear to me’. If the concepts of some subject are clear that means you understood that subject, but if you look at the definition of the word ‘concept’, it means an ‘image’ or ‘feeling’.

The concept is a very basic word. All other words come later, the word ‘concept’ comes first.
If you split it down, the concept is an emotion- an emotion or feeling you get about something.

When you have some pain or ache and there are no words to express, then whenever you feel that pain or ache, then you ‘make an expression, or you touch that part’. That expression on the face tells that it hurts

The expression that tells what you’re feeling is the ‘concept’.

The concept is something that flows in you and you can feel it.

And now, to explain concepts human beings used to draw some pictures to express what they were feeling, and then gradually they started communicating through words- they found words to express, believing that it would become easier to explain concepts because instead of making lots of expressions to tell about something, they could just say that word to another person and the other person would understand it and the problem would get solved.

To express words, lots of research and work is done in making dictionaries and to share the history of the origin of the word.

Most of the words have come from the oldest language called Latin or German or Sanskrit. And then gradually, over some time, those words changed because one word became known in more than one way.

The dictionary became a little more complicated and a simple statement of one word started meaning more than one meaning. Now, one word can have two meanings. For example, you say, my brother is two feet tall. The word ‘feet’ has two meanings. A person who doesn’t know the meaning will get confused and will not be able to understand what you’re trying to express.

In this way, there was a mismatch between what is being expressed and what is being understood. When somebody is expressing something, and the other person is trying to understand it, he should be able to have the same exact concept or a feeling or an image. How do you make sure that the image is the same is also generated in the other person?

That is what is the basics of learning, or education. Because when education comes to you, it comes in the form of millions of words and is put together in some format which is called grammar. And from those lines, you have to get to the concept of it. It’s not an easy process. So, what happens is you go through those millions of words, to make some sense out of it. We cannot ever understand the whole sense, but some sense out of it, and with that sense, we try to understand it but always miss by a huge percentage of getting the whole concept. As a result, when you don’t get something, you start losing track of it and you go kind of blind on that- you can’t see, your attention goes elsewhere, you feel nervous because it’s not making sense.

When it doesn’t make sense, you’re angry because you have to somehow learn it, understand it, and express it again. It seems very hard.

So, what do you mean by a concept?

A concept is a feeling or an image that you want to express to someone else, either by writing or by talking through words.

What you must understand is that it is your job to make sure that what you were feeling got conveyed through words. Did the other person get the exact same feeling or is it different?

 

YouTube Channel Name: Dr. Alka Chopra Madan

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