Noodle

Devolving. If my brain had ever been brighter than this, it had been so long past. Like a bowl of pasta left untouched past cooling, the noodles coagulate, the network paths stick. They are glued, immobilised, their sauce is forced to drip along the same old grooves.

Mindkiller

Excessive stress and all its causes, these are the things that are bad for you. Fear, as Herbert said, is the mindkiller.

But in what sense is the mind killed?

The mind is the phenomenon of perceived cognition that operates out of the body. The body is overly stressed, it becomes dysfunctional. Since emotion is the physiological response to circumstance as mediated by biochemistry, it also manifests abnormally.

So the mind becomes a phenomenon of perceived dyscognition, and thus is seen as disabled, and in the ultimate extrapolation, killed.

Haha. All this, from the phenomenon of perceived personal experience.

Learning

The problem with learning these days is that there is insufficient antagonism. Each student I meet seems to be the protagonist of a private drama. We have pussyfooted around so much that it is hard to move them away from their solipsistic lotus-dreams. In some cases, they seem less like lotus-dreams, though, than bad trips.

Whatever it is, I think more students would do better if they had constant rigorous antagonists. I suppose that a teacher could do the job, but only if that teacher were consistent, kind, and genuinely interested in being a creative and productive antagonist.

Why do I think so? I think that just as a drama with an unopposed protagonist is flat, or even one-dimensional, so too are the learning lives of students without someone to challenge them where it is needed and warranted. In order for constructs of depth to be created, somebody has to create the orthogonal and shift these self-involved people out of their ruts.

The problem is not confined to this generation; we were like that too. The difference is that now the rut-digging apparatus is more complex, ubiquitous, attractive. The whole 'cheap information network' idea has made people contributors and digesters of facts and information-bites, but not of knowledge and theory.

Or so I think.

Clogged Brains

Clear your clogged brains, said the ads. Use [Substance X], which more often than not seemed to be largely composed of some incredibly caustic chemical (powdered sodium hydroxide, perhaps) or some strong acid (like concentrated hydrochloric acid).

This happened before I discovered the joys of selective dyslexia and when I was prone to accidental dyslexia. But this morning, I remembered it.

I have a clogged brain. I think that since the beginning of October last year, fragments of waste have been swirling around so much that my normally impeccable filters have been clogged. Almost every day, somebody asks me about stuff I'd rather not think about. Each shrug I make in response releases a little piece of sewage, the stub of spam, the s... o' s....

It is hard not to think of the huge stool-accumulation that the pigeons have built over at the Citadel. And it is being piled higher and deeper too. By the time THIS year ends, the monument of the previous age will be something like Nauru.

And so I shall attempt to clear my clogged brain. With something really caustic, perhaps a dose of Chesterton, or any one of the fine writers I seem to have stockpiled. The Good Book has always been wise in recommending lack of speech as an alternative to badly-clogged brains.

Soft in the Head

I think students need to be taught to access information the hard way. Somehow, teaching them to access information through easy ways like hitting the internet doesn't seem to work well.

Perhaps, the journey is indeed more important than the destination. Hunting for information through a nearly impenetrable thicket of bookshelves and librarians, without easy cheats and aids, trains the mind to the questing paradigm.

In the questing paradigm, the quester knows that a number of trials (three is common, but the number may be as high as twelve) must be completed successfully before the objective is achieved. Then the quester gets to access the next level of the game, whatever the game is.

The problem with students these days is that hugely superior access to information makes most information-finding problems too easy-looking. Students think that information is as easy to obtain as dirt, and hence don't bother.

If you confront modern students with this, they will raise all kinds of examples to prove this isn't so. Two main possibilities then emerge.

The first is that they are indeed self-aware and it is true that they are able to work through the quest paradigm, finding value in what they find, keeping useful stuff for later use, and so on. They use this paradigm all the time.

The second is that they don't know what they're talking about. They can't tell you how to evaluate information yield from data, or information value. But they are good at telling stories about information which may or may not be true.

Sometimes, the old practices of index card searching, manual note-taking, and document collection through physical curation, are more useful than this. Physical arrangements challenge the brain better than purely abstract formulations; hard copy is better than soft, as far as the mind is concerned.

Perhaps, people need to be more hard-headed about information processing.

Trapped

It's sometimes possible to see the world as a trap. Here you are, a transmaterial entity, stuck in a world where your corporeal behaviour is dictated (and dictated to) by mere physicality.

Then again, modern philosophers have also tried taking the ghost out of the machine by saying that this perception (along with all your sense of self and such) is just an emergent property of physicality. This is of course science at the it's-all-I-can-see-and-all-else-is-vaporware level, which to be honest is about all science should aspire to (which is why philosophy is its metacognitive overview).

In this latter view, you can't possibly be trapped. Rather, your emergence is just that and signifies nothing. It's an illusion of self-awareness because there isn't really a self, just a corridor of mirrors. It's not so much a butterfly from a cocoon as one of those stereo images that you don't see until you've focussed on them just right. And you're the image.

What's always bugged me is that of course everything I use to evaluate anything is pinned to this emergent (or pre-existent) sense of self. All your tests are circumscribed by this sense of self. There is literally nothing that can be objective without being acknowledged as such by the subjective. And if the subjective is illusory, the objective may be more so, since it is merely the subjective at one level (or any number of levels, if you like) removed.

This is all old stuff, but it hits you sometimes that for all the illusory nature (or not), you can't escape from the self. You're stuck with you. Best make the best of it.

Stuffing

Just yesterday a friend of mine remarked, "How do you know all this stuff?" Without going into all that 'how do I know I know' business, it's of course a comment on how much clutter seems to have accumulated on the shelves of my brain.

It's also the kind of comment I've heard a number of times before. I've wondered about that myself. My conclusion is that the sheer mass of bits and pieces in the storeroom comes from two tendencies. One is the corvid tendency to go (as Khayce might say), "Oooh look, shineeeeeeee!" and pick up yet another piece of mental bling. The other is the corvid tendency to go, "Eh, what's this..." and end up spending hours of a perfectly useful day delving deep into some esoteric subject.

The two things are related in some ways, but the former tends to increase breadth and the latter depth. It's acquisitiveness and inquisitiveness, or (to the more sinister-minded) acquisition and inquisition. Or Memory and Thought, but that's another thing altogether.

There is a third thing, the urge to deliberately fill in spaces in one's education that seem to be void for one reason or another. This is relatively rare; I'm happy with some of those voids, never having had the urge to try things like colonic cleansing (for example).

I think that all these put together make me a good research partner to have. I tend to do all the random-correlation, what-if, how-about-this stuff while someone else does all the heavy lifting. It's not that I can't do structure, but that I can more or less do the basic stuff and the value-added stuff too. I'm far less efficient than other people, though. Too easily distracted...

"Eh, what's this... oooh look, shineeeeeeee!"

Presentation Skills (Part III): Structured Instruments

A presentation is a structured instrument. Most of us cannot just enter the room, dazzle everyone, and take their loot. Some of us can, but that doesn't make it a presentation.

Essentially, a presentation has perhaps three common components. First, there is some sort of visual device: in the old days, there were chalkboards, flipcharts, and physical models; now, there are those ubiquitous PowerPoint and Keynote slideshows. Second, there may be handouts and other physical takeaways so that those with a slower intellectual digestive system can get their fibre. Third, there is the lecture, exposition or other form of oral presentation.

The key is that all three should be nearly orthogonal: the three components should not overlap except where they reinforce key points in different ways. They should all tell the same story, but the forte of each mode is not the same. The visual device shows something that can best be shown visually; the handout gives details that would otherwise bog the presentation down (and stuff that may need a longer cognitive process, like some kinds of numbers); the exposition provides a narrative that inducts the audience and conducts them through the domain under examination.

Within this combined triadic process, the presenter must say what the topic is, why it is important to the audience, and what to do about it. This can be further enlarged in some cases to be a section on definitions, a section on concepts and principles, a section on the situation and how it is to be improved, a section on actions to be taken, and a simple summary conclusion. In an argumentative presentation, the slant is more prescriptive — perhaps 'actions to be taken' becomes 'why you should do something rather than something else'. But in general, this tends to be an effective narrative flow.

As your grasp of presentation technique develops, you'll realise that it's a bit like music. With control over the basics, you will find exceptions to most rules. The one rule that is most unlikely to be broken is that presentation is a form of communication. The presenter intends to communicate something, most of all, and everything else follows that. All the points I've given are actually guidelines for the clueless; some who read this will already know that they can do other things and still perform outrageously well.

That too is in the nature of human communication. That is why our neocortex is such a complicated mass of neurons.

Not Knowing

This is one of my rare rants at the sort of language people use. You can skip it if you want.

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I've come to feel that one of the worst lines I can ever hear or read is, "I don't know how to respond to that." It may seem uncharitable to you, this reaction of mine, but that may be because you aren't trained to mount a serious response to any admission of ignorance on someone else's part.

This is not to say that I am making fun of the ignorant. I am saying that I respond like most educators. If someone says, "I don't know," my first instincts are to ask: a) what don't you know, b) what do you mean by know, c) are you sure you don't know, and d) how can I help you.

When a person says, "I don't know how to respond to that," it literally means that this person has no knowledge of how to respond to a given statement. On one level, as when confronted with a unique statement, the novelty of the experience means that there is no prior 'database' and hence no knowledge of how to respond. It is often true, for most of us.

But what it also says is that by making a statement that you don't know how to respond, you are stopping there. You are not going to respond, or take the effort to respond, or use your various talents and thinking processes to create a response. You are being idle, lazy, or incompetent; and if not, you are deliberately not bothering.

Worse, by saying, "I don't know how to respond to that," you have actually given a response which is one of self-proclaimed ignorance. You are saying, "Well, here's my non-response, and you're welcome to it."

When a student responds to my question with, "I don't know," I don't really mind. But sometimes I am able to elicit, by Socratic questioning, that the student is well able to figure out the answer for himself. It's just that it was more convenient to say he didn't know than to think about how he might come to know. It's always easier to watch the teacher tell you than to work it out for yourself.

My first face-to-face response tends to be silence. Sometimes, students just need to be given mental space to continue.

My second such response tends to be, "Think about it." Sometimes, students just need to be asked to do what ought to come naturally.

My third response is often, "Give it a try, " or "Guess!" Sometimes, students do already have an idea, but are too uncertain or shy to try it out. If they make random guesses, it's easy to tell; but if they make some kind of reasoned guess, or a pattern of guesses, you can also tell what their brains are doing.

Like I said, I don't really mind. I just don't like it that for some people, their very first response is to plead ignorance and stop there. Surely you'd think that people would want to move on and actually try to learn something.

Global Consciousness

Listening to Howard Gardner is like the modern equivalent of the 1960s psychedelic era. These days he is touting his vision of global consciousness and how it should be nurtured in students. Everyone should have a working knowledge of how the world works, he says. Everyone should have access to the Internet and make use of it. Socioeconomic competencies and flexible skills, that's the way to go.

Well, he's right. But there is one small problem which we need to grapple with. How long does it take the billions of the world's population to transit successfully from one mindset to another? In the old days, you could sequester populations because travel was not easy. The technology gap could be steadily exploited and one population could dominate another that way.

The problem now is not a wide technology gap in the sense of how we navigate physical space. The old days of ships and planes as conduits for information are largely done, except for courier services and packages from Amazon and other niche areas. The problem now is a wide technology gap in the sense of how we navigate cognitive space.

This gap is an oscillating one. As the world progresses at its current pace, everyone will eventually have broadband access. Technological development is so rapid that whole societies can jump forward in time, from landline phones with plug-in exchanges to broadband wireless in five years. But the human cognitive gap is unpredictable.

These days, I struggle with Google and all the other paraphernalia of modern Internet life. Don't get me wrong: I've lived more than half my life on the Internet and I'm not that bad for an old fogey. The searchable infosphere makes information retrieval so much easier than it used to be. Everyone can now call up expert help. But the skills required to determine the validity, reliability and utility of the information are harder and harder to teach. There seems little point in constructing an excellent bullshit detector only to have it fail under the sheer weight of the ox-dung.

It leads to some sort of anomie in which people don't want to memorise anything because the information is always out there.

Somehow, the idea that having the data in your head for processing is faster than getting online to retrieve it has not quite sunk in. About the only area where this is too obvious to avoid is what I call art-form physicalities: things like dancing, fencing, sculpture—the more tactile and physical arts. You can't plan your next move online in such things yet, or if you can (as in some of the graphic or language arts), you will still not be able to compete with the mercurial power of the human instinct.

You can have the whole Library of Congress online, but the skill required to research a topic and mould it into something that will influence others is as elusive as the attempt to pin down an approach that will work for everyone. You can have the entire history of the world online, only to discover that it comprises many histories, and it's difficult to tell which ones are more reliable than the others, and where.

These are the limitations that Gardner and gang are trying to address. But I suspect that every school and every individual must craft their own approach to knowledge. Now that we're all drowning in data, the issues we need to deal with are far more complex than they used to be. The questions still sound the same though: What is truth, and where can we find it? If we think it's true, what do we do with it? And how can we communicate this truth, this quicksilver ephemeral thing, to someone else?

64 Reasons

The number 64 has always had broad significance for me. I remember that when I was four and learning how to play chess from my grandfather, I counted the squares on the chessboard and always came up with a total of 64. To four-year-old me, the fact that such a large number of squares always came to 64, and that the board was always eight squares across and eight squares deep, was a minor miracle.

When I later became a qualified computing teacher, I had already learnt the importance of 64 as 2 to the sixth power. Take a '2' and double it, and on the fifth doubling, you have a 64. Nowadays, and probably for a very small window in the years ahead, the term '64-bit computing' is in vogue. Moore's Law seems to predict that computing power will increase exponentially along those lines, but there are all kinds of caveats which make this less of a law and more of a benchmark to be exceeded.

But I do remember the days of computers with only 1 kilobyte of RAM, and that allows me to see things with some sort of less excitable perspective. Computing power does indeed double all the time, but the human capacity for intelligence or stupidity (the other side of the coin) does not. We remain stuck at the high watermark of complexity and the low watermark of linearity. Linear thinking does not come naturally to humans unless the situation is rigidly constrained.

The other thing I always remember when pondering cognitive development in students is the way my parents educated me. Whenever I asked for something or said something, I was first mostly cautiously encouraged (well, sometimes discouraged and sometimes enthusiastically encouraged) and then challenged to provide reasons. 'Ten good reasons' became something I realised I would have to prepare in advance before attempting certain things.

I also learnt the repetition or deviation (and sometimes hesitation) were bad things. You tried very hard to speak at length for a few minutes, coherently and in a deliberately ordered manner, on a relevant topic for discussion. It wasn't till later that Dad introduced me to the late Kenneth Williams (and others) and Just A Minute, and I learnt why.

It's not easy to come up with 64 reasons for anything. But I've found that a good reason can be split into 64 bits. At this moment, I'm thinking of chessboards and multi-dimensional strategic games. I'm also thankful for the 64 questionnaires I received in a very short fortnight or so. They are bits of a big and messy puzzle which looks like it will be 100k words long.

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Oh yes. I have realised one thing for sure. The Age of Complacency concept applies in some pretty obvious ways to the education sector. And the fallout, while being harder to quantify, will be more severe.

Fivefold

This is all about what today has meant to me. So here I sit, reading and writing at my philosopher's chair in the park, munching cookies and eating cupcakes, imbibing coffee and assimilating chocolate. For I have come to realise that there is a specific mode of response to every thing in its own place and quality.

There has always been the mystery of five. The ancients called the fifth element the quintessence – the fifth element of reality after air, earth, fire and water. There are simple correspondences between that which is and that which ought to be, according to the ancients, who saw:

• air as that which is dry and cold, the element of intellect and cognition, a sword in the hand;
• earth as that which is moist and warm, the element of fecundity and negotiation, a shield for the body;
• fire as that which is dry and warm, the element of deeds and action, a club in the fist; and
• water as that which is moist and cold, the element of feelings and caprice, a helm for the head and a cup for the lips.

And so, what does it all mean? I think it means that for everything we encounter, there is a mode of acceptance and celebration that is more appropriate than most. We use many words interchangeably, but this should not be so.

My dear students, let me say this:

I thank you for your deeds, for thanksgiving is an act of the body which cannot be entirely contained in the heart or mind or spirit. I am grateful for your feelings, for at the heart of gratitude is grace unearned, accepted and enjoyed. I recognize your thoughts, for recognition is an act of the considering will, whether in focus or not. I appreciate your gifts, for appreciation is an act of assigning value, whether tangible or intangible. And my being, all of it, is glad, is joyful, is replenished and renewed by you – who you are and why you are and how you are.

Meritocracy & Mnemosyne

If you want to be a teacher, I suppose it would help to have a teaching philosophy – and the implicit love of learning about teaching and education that must come with it. Over the last decade, advancements in neuroscience have made our blindfolded guesses about some aspects of education a little clearer. The ramifications of this are simple: 1) we need to upgrade our teaching habits, 2) these practices must be based on cognitive neuroscience, 3) they need to be part of the progressive development and upgrading of the learner's brain and not work against it.

Here are some simple points related to education then.

Capacity: The human brain has a finite and self-limiting capacity for perception, interaction, content development and memory. When it exceeds this capacity, it will overwrite, transform, or otherwise alter its data structures. In fact, this happens all the time. This is why we now know that eye-witness accounts can never be accurate although they can be extremely precise in detail – the brain has an outstanding ability to manufacture and maintain illusory memories. In another sense, the brain has practically infinite capacity for storing things – it's only a problem of establishing permanence and recalling specific information which has been established. The same datum can be stored in several different and redundant ways, which are reassembled or reconstructed on demand, and then reproduced in a form that is unique each time.

Content: The brain doesn't store data in equivalent bits. This might sound strange, but in this age of largely digital information, the tendency is to see data as blocks of uniform chunks (bits, bytes etc). The brain creates holographs, which for a time we had no other way to represent except as 'pictures'. Hence, there was a well-intentioned but not very useful move towards mind-mapping. The brain really stores content in multidimensional structures with no easily quantifiable chunk size or shape. The structures interlock and change frequently. You cannot say 'a memory' usefully when each memory is just a temporary focal spot in a microcosmic universe. Can you remember the number that comes after '3'? You can? What do you remember it as? And was there any sidetracking or interference? Did anyone think of pi instead?

Creativity: The brain iterates, reiterates and associates among all its nodes. Sometimes, this is called reverie, or dreaming. Sometimes it is something else. Certain numbers tend to be associated with certain things – patterns, structures, designs. This is because the brain favours symmetry and proportionality, as these take up less 'space'. The brain respects asymmetry and disproportionality because they require greater processing effort, and hence 'attract attention'. This is why it automatically creates patterns (and why pattern is comforting to humans), while at the same time, it focuses on what is different. Human creativity therefore is a combination of making things fit in place and making things that don't fit. It is somewhat analogous to the margin between chaos and void in patterns like the Mandelbrot set.

Conclusions: It is therefore important for an educational system to develop the effective use of the natural modes of the brain. No point excessively stressing linear thought, recall, non-linear thought, verbal expression etc. Rather, if we had to design a system of education from scratch, it should be as broad and random as possible while maintaining a few constraints. You would have to develop ways of teaching which include the following:

1) Give the brain some overarching concept which is visually symmetrical and has enough elements to engage it while not having enough to confuse it. Think of hexagons and triangles and other simple data structures.

2) Show parallels and patterns which share data elements. Obvious examples: {seven dwarfs, seven samurai, seven days of the week, seven colours of the rainbow}, {blackbirds, ravens, crows, jays, rooks, magpies, jackdaws}.

3) Teach learners how to express non-linear data as a linear communication. Conversely, teach learners to unpack linear communications into non-linear structures. The main thing is to train the brain to pack and unpack efficiently and effectively. Examples include poetry writing and poetry analysis.

4) Allow for creativity within strict limits. This sounds odd, but it is the norm – consider sculpture (material and mass limits), painting (chromatic and size limits), music (equipment and harmonic limits) and so on. There is no such thing as lack of creativity; there is only a problem with contexts in which creativity is minimally useful or too diverse to be processed.

5) Develop learner ability to create and define tasks and task sets, weave them into plans, and carry them out. In the long run, letting students decide what homework to do and entrusting the choice to them will prepare them for the real world.

6) Enforce random and gruelling assessment with periods of recovery, rest, and relaxation in between – and equally enforced. This is what most of the world is like!

A philosophy of education would simply have to be a collection of coherent ideas and thoughts developed systematically from these principles and deployed in the service of learning. Future cohorts of teachers should think long and hard about this. Actually, present cohorts of teachers should too.