conscious of evolution or Brain 101

[EVERETT813 at aol.com]

“Moreover, there is no way back to the old dance.”   (Funda Oral)

Funda:

if only everyone understood.

Phil

Phil- it is like how we learn swimming or walking...understanding is possible 
as we experience and live.

OST may encourage us to try, to face chaos... to jump into the water so we 
can create something original and new.

Funda Oral


Funda,

Actually, you are more accurate than you may know.   The way one learns to 
walk, or to do anything you can put the words "how to...." in front of, viz. how 
to talk, how to drive a car, etc., etc., is the same for all human beings.   
To understand this, one needs to know that the job of the brain is to keep the 
organism alive and viable in the environment in which it finds itself.   To 
do that, it has to learn.   The brain learns by doing the following:

1.   Setting an intention to learn (may be conscious or unconscious).
2.   Developing an hypothesis about the method to perform the task (the 
"how-to").
3.   Putting the hypothesis to the test by trying and usually failing.
4.   Adjusting the hypothesis and testing again, usually failing.
5.   Continuing to adjust the hypothesis until some semblence of success is 
achieved.
6.   Continuing to refine that process until suitable success has been 
achieved.

In so doing, the brain develops a physiologically-existing dendritic network 
of cells all connected up and which become denser the more that pathway is 
used.   Once you have learned to drive a car (most of us can remember some of the 
trauma and errors around that experience) you no longer have to think about 
it consciously but can relegate the process to the network in your brain; the 
process and mechanics of driving no longer require your focussed attention and 
you can then chew gum and drive at the same time.   Even listen to the radio 
and not run off the road.   Not to mention hold a conversation.   :)

Few, if any people remember it, but you learned to talk in the same way.   
Your brain was born able to deal with all the sounds of the world.   Depending 
on which culture and language you were born into, those were the sounds your 
ears heard and the brain tried to make sense of (the brain's job, remember, 
making sense of the world to survive).   Your brain was bathed in meaningful sound 
by your parents, family and the culture around you.   Pretty soon, you began 
making sounds of your own and one day you chanced on "Ma-ma" or "Da-da", or 
the equivalent in your language, and the environment went nuts.   Wow!!   Better 
do more of that because I got lots of hugs and kisses.   And, so it went, 
trying and failing, getting feedback that the sound you tried had no meaning and 
then, getting strong, positive feedback when you were successful.   That's how 
your brain built the network for talking in your language.   And not some 
other language.   Furthermore, you lose the ability to make certain sounds, 
again, depending on the language.

You can probably develop some principles from the above sequence, one being 
that failure is one of the primary methods for learning.   The brain actually 
does quite well with failure.   It's the ego that is the problem.   That's 
another subject.   

OS rarely fails, but sometimes it can be better than others, maybe call it a 
limited success?   That's opportunity knocking for learning.   The army calls 
this AAR, After Action Review, so they can close up the learning loop.   Very 
sharp practice.

There is a reading process which uses the above to develop fluent readers 
99.5% of the time and to correct poor readers (those with small errors in their 
dendritic pathways of the brain for reading) or teach those who never learned 
to read at all to read as fluently as they talk.   The stats are that 99% of 
those people learn to read correctly and as fluently as they talk.   The time 
required is about 10 tutor hours per grade level gained for adults, sometimes 
much shorter for those with only small reading pattern errors, and around 12-15 
hours for children, who have less experience of the world and hence, a lesser 
spoken vocabulary.   

Too much to explain here but.....it does work, and the schools won't hear of 
it because it requires them to abandon most of what they think they know about 
teaching reading.   So, they continue to produce 25%++ functionally or 
totally illiterate students while all the time 'blaming the students' for not 
learning.   (The students have ADD, ADHD, dyslexia, psychological disorders, etc., 
etc., and etc., all excuses they use to explain their failure to teach ALL the 
students to read, or do math).   That's a large rant, so I'd better stop.

Paul Everett  

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