ramblings from the edge

Neuro-Schooling November 7, 2006

Why is it that some ideas (memes) get fed IV-style into the bloodstream of society and are expected, nay demanded, to be common knowledge amongst every man woman and child, while other ideas/memes are relegated to be super-specialised knowledge only available to the few with the GPA, time and inclination? Who decides what’s what? Neuroscience is everyone’s business, especially parents and teachers. Everyone has a nervous system to take care of, and everyone (esp parents and teachers) is shaping their own and those around them with every thought and interaction. Surely that’s grounds enough to make the foundations more widely known??? Put em on sesame street? Make a card game? Or a sport? If kids today knew half as much about their insides as they do about their Yu-Gi-Oh cards…… <sigh>

This guy (typical big fish in a puddle) in this book was talking about a synesthesia as if it were a disorder, rather than just divergent neural pathways. When you look at things neurologically they always make sense. And you can play with them. Everyone has synesthesias, it’s how we’re wired. It’s not a kind of person, it’s a kind of neural pathway that everyone has developed to some degree or another. Usually first exposure to a given item or concept will throw out a whole bunch of different neural connections like fireworks, connecting with everything that’s in focus at the time. The connections that stay are the ones that are strengthened by being most consistently reinforced, while the others (equally valid in the first instance, but not reinforced) drop away as though they never existed in the first place. Green carpet. It’s all anchoring, triggers and where they lead to. If a particular trigger or stimulus leads to one place (that is the generally accepted and most popular place) then someone’s granted ‘normality’ but if, through habit or repeated co-incidence, their trigger fires off in two directions at once, that’s a disorder? I don’t think so, Tim!