Day: May 9, 2014

I had the pleasure of sitting through a lecture about brain strengthening. I learned that a lot of what I held in certainty is wrong. As it turns out, multi tasking actually hurts the brain. Furthermore, the overthinking has the same effect–as does wrote mechanics. The way to innovate and grow the brain is to innovate and to critically think. The brain is naturally curious and wants to work. This is as important in the boardroom as it is in the classroom as it is in the bedroom.

I’ve always been the victim of lengthy meetings. Classical thinking says the team meeting is a place where people are supposed to get things out in the open, feeling free to think through their problems. What if this thinking is dead wrong? The speaker, Dr. Sandra Chapman (Make Your Brain Smarter), made the suggestion that we should liit meetings to 30 minutes. Tell each person who must speak that they need to limit comments to 5 sentences. In other words, come to the table having thought about and engaged the brain to consider the comments. This will limit time and empower the meeting goers greatly.

Dr. Chapman suggested, ‘The brain is quickly jaded by routine, but it thrives when facing challenges.’ We also know that learning and discovering meaning is a constructive process. When peole are engaged actively in the process then the process is more likely to yield results. So, what does this mean for the classroom? Incentivize transformative thinking: Reflect, Rework, Revisit, Reinvent — come up with something innovative and reward people for that.

I want to suggest Dr. Chapman’s website: Brainhealthdaily.com This is an excellent way to connect to the conversation about the brai and about learning. We discover more about the inner-workings of the brain everyday, which means it is important to learn about the brain constantly.

There is a fundamental difference between being an intelligent researcher, a skilled research writer, and a skilled presenter. The speaker who informed my understanding of the brain today was an intelligent researcher. There is no question today’s speaker was an intelligent man. I could see from his writing (which was displayed on the big screen as he read it) that he is skilled in research writing. At first, the presentation piece was not there. 

The first sign of trouble was when the 4 projection screens each popped up the lecture he was reading. The slides tracked his reading from one pagr to the next, chasing his voice down the page. Once the speaker introduced images, he started to read less and freesyle more. 

The speaker, Dr. Erik Kandel, took us on a historical tour of the idea of female sexuality and the relationships and influences of the psychology of such things on art. He talks about Frued (and his bottled up idea of sexuality) and he talked about Klimt and his open and oft agressive image of sexuality. Kandel spoke about art largely as an expression of ideas about sexuality. He supported his ideas thoroughly with story and with images. One set of images that stood out was the traditional female nudes, which Kandel pointed out are almost always representative of the female Gods, always facing the beholder (artist? viewer? who?) and covering their pubus with the left arm–leaving the reader to assume that this is either a reflection of modesty or a subtle suggestion of masturbation. Meanwhile, Klimt offered no such modesty. Klimt allowed his models to pose as they will. He suggested to them that they behave naturally and if they strike a pose or perform an action that catches his eye, he would paint them in that moment. 

As a result, many of the models would perform sexual acts of self-pleasure or otherwise. Klimt captured this in his art and captured the reality that these women were neighbors, every day figures that by the nature of themselves and their activiities juuxtaposed the female imagery that came before. 

Kandel suggests that this art leaves a certain amount of ambiguity that supports the need for a cognitive psychology of visual perception. In short, we rebuild the images we see inside our mind, which means the brain may alter or trick itself as to the nature of visual perception. He demonstrated this through illusory contours and similar visual tricks. He broke it down into 3 steps: The perception of the beholder, the psychological process, and the final phase which he called brain mechanisms. 

Kandel improved over time, finally giving himself room to be a creative and useful presentor. He relied on notes for the meat of the work, but when discussing the science he freestyled and showed that he was a knowledgeable man. It started slow, but it was clearly worth the journey.

Had occasion to enjoy a museum today. It’s funny. I spent k-6 getting off the bus in front of the. MET and never recognizing the beauty of what was at the top of those steps. I think youth is like that. We get so wrapped up in the immediacy of what is important to us that we can easily forget to open our hearts and minds to the beauty of possibility. 

Now I sit here flanked by a thousand years of culture and art and all I can think is that the little boy I was all those years ago is so very reminiscent of the students I encounter every day. If something doesn’t matter to them immediately or doesn’t conform to their often narrow worldview then that something is dismissed usually out of hand. We watch hours of television filled with catchy slogans like ‘Go anywhere. do Anything” (Jeep), but they never go anywhere unless it is the falsehood of vacation. They never do anything that is more than a contrived opportunity to forget what they did in the bliss of alcohol. Voices coalesce in classrooms like the droning of worker bees seeking their next assignment. Among the din rises a handful of voices curious and brave, wondering about the possibility of more and I strive to answer their charge–meet their questioning with a sense of purpose and the courage to tell them that experimentation is okay. Failure is okay. Learning is an experiment. Failure is an opportunity to see what is right for you and what is not.

None of this made sense to the little boy who only wanted to get to the playground fast enough to catch the last few moments of stoop ball. None of this makes sense to the hungry college kid slaving at a dead end job for 34 hours a week only to come home to 16 more hours of homework that reads like an alien tongue. Perhaps the student and the little boy were not ready. Perhaps there would’ve been a better time or situation for the exposure. 

But when? I still believe in creating opportunity out of the moments we have and reaching deep into the soul to find out what resides there. Art exposes that part of ourselves. Moreover, even when we aren’t really ready to experience it, art connects with that part of ourselves. It helps it form and watches it grow. 

When I came to the museum I knew exactly which direction to go. I followed many twists and turns knowing that at the end of the hall there would be a room lit by sunshine and in that room there would be a temple–an ancient place that helped introduced me to wonder. It is still there, and so is my wondering spirit.

Some Thoughts:
1. Just got network access back. Expect blogs to be back to the regular daily schedule. I’m dumping what I wrote over the last two days right now…