ZenPundit
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
APPLIED NEUROLEARNING
My copy of The Mislabeled Child by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, that I ordered through work last spring, finally arrived the other day ( Use private sector Amazon.com, the book arrives in a few days. Use an educational bureaucracy and it arrives five months later). I have been looking forward to reading this for some time ( literally).
The Drs. Eide, in addition to being authors, clinicians and researchers, also have two excellent blogs, The Neurolearning Blog and The Classical School Blog, where they share their professional expertise and deep interest in enhancing learning for children, particularly those in outlier populations with special needs. The Eides have been less active in the blogosphere this year but The Neurolearning Blog is one of my few daily "must reads".
It's a moderately thick text with an impressive bibliography for a book written for laymen rather than specialists. I look forward to diving in and learning something new!
My copy of The Mislabeled Child by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, that I ordered through work last spring, finally arrived the other day ( Use private sector Amazon.com, the book arrives in a few days. Use an educational bureaucracy and it arrives five months later). I have been looking forward to reading this for some time ( literally).
The Drs. Eide, in addition to being authors, clinicians and researchers, also have two excellent blogs, The Neurolearning Blog and The Classical School Blog, where they share their professional expertise and deep interest in enhancing learning for children, particularly those in outlier populations with special needs. The Eides have been less active in the blogosphere this year but The Neurolearning Blog is one of my few daily "must reads".
It's a moderately thick text with an impressive bibliography for a book written for laymen rather than specialists. I look forward to diving in and learning something new!
Labels: attention, blogroll, book, brain, cognition, creativity, education, eide, ideas, intellectuals, intelligence, metacognition, science, teaching
¶ 6:14 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
SOME NEUROCOGNITIVE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATION-BUILDING
Perhaps my favorite entirely apolitical blog is The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by the Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, two physicians who specialize in brain research and its implications for educating children. With great regularity I find information there that either is of use to me professionally or has wider societal importance.
On Monday, the Eides posted "The Thinking Spot" which adds to the existing mountain of evidence regarding the role of the maturing prefrontal cortex in developing the capacity for higher order thinking that does not quite come to fruition until the early to mid-twenties but may begin as early as preadolescence. The Eides write, regarding the PDF studies cited:
"Rule-based learning has a developmental course (no big surprise), but what is a little surprising is the degree to which 12 year olds lag young adults in tests requiring them to make new rules."
Consider that U.S. or Western intervention in Gap states, or alternatively, internal political reform movements like the " Color Revolutions", are essentially political efforts in forcing a " Rule-set reset" on a dysfunctional society or failed state. If one prefers classic Lockean descriptors, rewriting the social contract to "create a more perfect union".
Most, though not all, of the nations in which state failure threatens are also demographically undergoing a " youth bulge". In Iran for example, 66-70 % of the population is under 30 years of age with the "fattest" part of the population curve being aged between 10 and 20. Indeed, it is the poorest nations that tend to be the youngest. To quote a UN report:
"-- Countries where fertility remains high and has declined only moderately will experience the slowest population ageing. By 2050, about 1 in 5 countries is still projected to have a median age under 30 years. The youngest populations
will be found in least developed countries, 11 of which are projected to have median ages at or below 23 years in 2050, including Angola, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Uganda."
What I infer from this data and the Neurolearning Blog post is that the most favorable time for any effort, external or indigenous, to engage in a positive restructuring of a nation's societal rule-sets may be when a given country's youth bulge hits their early twenties. A narrow window of time when the most physically vigorous and largest section of the population has reached mental maturity in terms of accepting, comprehending and processing abstractions yet are most open to new ideas and desirous of a productive future for themselves.
This is of course a two edged sword. Youthful populations that feel alienated and stymied tend to be restive, even revolutionary. 1968 was not just a year that saw tumultuous baby boomers in American streets but also the chaos of Cultural Revolution in China, the Prague Spring, riots in Paris, the rise of Marxist terrorism in Latin America, Germany and Italy and barely preceded an upsurge in PLO terrorism. Today, while Europe and China are rapidly graying and the U.S. is holding relatively steady, much of the world is very young
I suggest that we are not long for an era of great opportunities and great upheavals.
Cross posted to Chicago Boyz
Perhaps my favorite entirely apolitical blog is The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by the Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, two physicians who specialize in brain research and its implications for educating children. With great regularity I find information there that either is of use to me professionally or has wider societal importance.
On Monday, the Eides posted "The Thinking Spot" which adds to the existing mountain of evidence regarding the role of the maturing prefrontal cortex in developing the capacity for higher order thinking that does not quite come to fruition until the early to mid-twenties but may begin as early as preadolescence. The Eides write, regarding the PDF studies cited:
"Rule-based learning has a developmental course (no big surprise), but what is a little surprising is the degree to which 12 year olds lag young adults in tests requiring them to make new rules."
Consider that U.S. or Western intervention in Gap states, or alternatively, internal political reform movements like the " Color Revolutions", are essentially political efforts in forcing a " Rule-set reset" on a dysfunctional society or failed state. If one prefers classic Lockean descriptors, rewriting the social contract to "create a more perfect union".
Most, though not all, of the nations in which state failure threatens are also demographically undergoing a " youth bulge". In Iran for example, 66-70 % of the population is under 30 years of age with the "fattest" part of the population curve being aged between 10 and 20. Indeed, it is the poorest nations that tend to be the youngest. To quote a UN report:
"-- Countries where fertility remains high and has declined only moderately will experience the slowest population ageing. By 2050, about 1 in 5 countries is still projected to have a median age under 30 years. The youngest populations
will be found in least developed countries, 11 of which are projected to have median ages at or below 23 years in 2050, including Angola, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Uganda."
What I infer from this data and the Neurolearning Blog post is that the most favorable time for any effort, external or indigenous, to engage in a positive restructuring of a nation's societal rule-sets may be when a given country's youth bulge hits their early twenties. A narrow window of time when the most physically vigorous and largest section of the population has reached mental maturity in terms of accepting, comprehending and processing abstractions yet are most open to new ideas and desirous of a productive future for themselves.
This is of course a two edged sword. Youthful populations that feel alienated and stymied tend to be restive, even revolutionary. 1968 was not just a year that saw tumultuous baby boomers in American streets but also the chaos of Cultural Revolution in China, the Prague Spring, riots in Paris, the rise of Marxist terrorism in Latin America, Germany and Italy and barely preceded an upsurge in PLO terrorism. Today, while Europe and China are rapidly graying and the U.S. is holding relatively steady, much of the world is very young
I suggest that we are not long for an era of great opportunities and great upheavals.
Cross posted to Chicago Boyz
Labels: barnett, cognition, eide, futurism, geopolitics, history, revolution, rule-sets
¶ 7:53 PM 2 comments
Wednesday, February 14, 2007
ON BIAS AND THINKING
I'd like to juxtapose a couple of interesting posts that I have read this week that have bearing on how we select information that subsequently shapes our thoughts.
At Complexity and Social Networks Blog, Maria Binz-Scharf asks "How does the way we process information relate to how we search for it?". A key excerpt:
"Some days ago I attended a talk on human information processing by Thomas Mussweiler from the University of Cologne who spoke at the Columbia Business School. Mussweiler and colleagues conducted an impressive number of experiments on the mechanisms and influences of individual information processing. A simple example would be to ask you to determine your best athletic performance. You have two basic options: 1) You think of every single athletic moment in your life, i.e. you engage in absolute information processing, or 2) you compare what you recollect as some of your best performances to a given standard, e.g. a famous athlete’s performance (or a famous couch potato’s performance). Not surprisingly it turns out that comparison allows to process information in a more efficient manner.
Mussweiler went on to talk about various factors that influence the comparisons we make, most importantly the standards we employ for comparing information. His experiments used a technique called “priming” to activate certain standards – for example, subjects were asked to judge a trait in a person. The result shows that priming a trait concept (such as aggressiveness) will induce the subject to judge the target person according to that trait. In other words, once activated, standards are spontaneously compared to the target person."
This is very interesting. "Priming" would be an efficiency mechanism for rapid mental screening of a large number of things. It is also a "bias mechanism" that would strongly predispose you to see some evidence of what pattern you are looking for, even if it does not exist. It would be very much like the " Framing" of George Lakoff in its effect.
How to deal with that effect, our own unintentional biases or being targeted by zealous Lakoffian framers ? Metacognition might be a helpful technique, as suggested in the post "Strategic Learning: Metacognition and Metamemory" at The Eide Neurolearning Blog . The Drs. Edie write:
"High level strategic learning often requires constant self-regulation and error monitoring strategies, metacognition (thinking about the thought processes), sometimes specific memory techniques (metamemory or conscious thinking about memory)."
Such self-regulative monitoring provides a mental check against racing ahead with a dubious but attractive premise. It would also tend to derail the the likelihood of the amygdala becoming overly engaged in the heat of the argument and turning us into red-faced, sputtering, arm-waving, buffoons with a surge of emotionality.
Cross-posted to Chicago Boyz
I'd like to juxtapose a couple of interesting posts that I have read this week that have bearing on how we select information that subsequently shapes our thoughts.
At Complexity and Social Networks Blog, Maria Binz-Scharf asks "How does the way we process information relate to how we search for it?". A key excerpt:
"Some days ago I attended a talk on human information processing by Thomas Mussweiler from the University of Cologne who spoke at the Columbia Business School. Mussweiler and colleagues conducted an impressive number of experiments on the mechanisms and influences of individual information processing. A simple example would be to ask you to determine your best athletic performance. You have two basic options: 1) You think of every single athletic moment in your life, i.e. you engage in absolute information processing, or 2) you compare what you recollect as some of your best performances to a given standard, e.g. a famous athlete’s performance (or a famous couch potato’s performance). Not surprisingly it turns out that comparison allows to process information in a more efficient manner.
Mussweiler went on to talk about various factors that influence the comparisons we make, most importantly the standards we employ for comparing information. His experiments used a technique called “priming” to activate certain standards – for example, subjects were asked to judge a trait in a person. The result shows that priming a trait concept (such as aggressiveness) will induce the subject to judge the target person according to that trait. In other words, once activated, standards are spontaneously compared to the target person."
This is very interesting. "Priming" would be an efficiency mechanism for rapid mental screening of a large number of things. It is also a "bias mechanism" that would strongly predispose you to see some evidence of what pattern you are looking for, even if it does not exist. It would be very much like the " Framing" of George Lakoff in its effect.
How to deal with that effect, our own unintentional biases or being targeted by zealous Lakoffian framers ? Metacognition might be a helpful technique, as suggested in the post "Strategic Learning: Metacognition and Metamemory" at The Eide Neurolearning Blog . The Drs. Edie write:
"High level strategic learning often requires constant self-regulation and error monitoring strategies, metacognition (thinking about the thought processes), sometimes specific memory techniques (metamemory or conscious thinking about memory)."
Such self-regulative monitoring provides a mental check against racing ahead with a dubious but attractive premise. It would also tend to derail the the likelihood of the amygdala becoming overly engaged in the heat of the argument and turning us into red-faced, sputtering, arm-waving, buffoons with a surge of emotionality.
Cross-posted to Chicago Boyz
Labels: bias, binz-scharf, cognition, eide, emotion, framing, horizontal thinking, intelligence, priming
¶ 7:47 PM 4 comments
