[-empyre-] Resistance is Futile/ the mind is a muscle

[Christina Spiesel]

Dear All,

A couple of responses -- I will attempt to knit them but will probably 
not succeed.  I asked my husband, the pediatrician, this morning whether 
the Monsessori teacher that Johannes described [and what a wonderful 
morning with kids!] is correct about everything being set by the age of 
6. His first reply, "She doesn't see 7 year olds," and his second reply, 
"You know, I see kids who at young ages don't seem to be special who 
wind up surprising me no end with the profoundness of their later 
achievements." We are elders -- he's treating some grandchildren of kids 
he "raised" in his office.  And while I asserted in an earlier posting 
that I came into the world with a mind with a certain temper, in my 
seventh decade I am still learning what my mind can do. The best 
cognitive neuroscience that I know of describes an active brain that 
both structures inputs with perceptual capacities that are themselves 
constructive and put out many signals, both conscious and unconscious.  
When we make things there is always both more and less in them than what 
we think and if we "listen" attentively to response, we can find out 
something about what others think in response to what we have made and 
learn something from it.

We are organisms in environments.  If we can't "see" those environments, 
we can't adapt for self-protection. If we wish to sustain our lives, we 
must be able to operate under changed signals from a changing 
environment. So to borrow Terry's language, we are both "exo and endo" 
and we cannot lop off either one. What work is meaningful to do? There 
is no external algorithm for that. But one thing kids are good at that 
we can perhaps retrieve for ourselves -- they are great scientists. That 
is, their lives consist in trying stuff to see how it works and as they 
try they develop a sense of what's out there. Repeated exposure to forms 
in light over time gives them some guides both to what's out there and 
what is "regular."  So how we "attend" to what is there, I submit, is 
very important. And the capacity for play which is the science of children.

All best,

Christina



On 7/4/2013 1:08 AM, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>
> dear all
>
> following up on Terry Flaxton's postings, especially his suggestion to give emphasis to "practical investigations of consciousness"
> rather than resist the increasing uselessness (?) of theory and ratiocinatory construction (obsessive compulsive rehearsing of highly stratified bureaucratic cataloguing of meaning),
> may I ask about how Terry understands the exogram or the exogrammatic?
>
> You write that cognitive neuroscientists claim
>
>>> the human project [that] began simply by panto-miming to exchange information that would be remembered within the brain (engramatically) and eventually export all of human memory outside of our own minds into surrounding reality. Initially this was through a simple exogram like a storytelling, a henge, a pyramid, a book, a film and then recently, telematically.
> But with the advent of computers and data (big or small, it doesn't matter) then the human exogramatic project was coming to its conclusion - everything has been placed outside of ourselves into surrounding reality...
> is not the exogrammatic an import, rather than exported? is not exogrammatic knowledge and memory and kinetic and symbolic forms continuously re-adapted by the bodymind in our movement through the world, by necessity, as the unconscious, or engrammatic information, might be error prone to some extent, or overloaded, if it is true that the essential elements of our sense of the self – of the propensity for action and our memory – act at an unconscious level, not in the sense that they regard something being suppressed,  yet in the sense of a functional unconscious situated beyond the boundaries of awareness for purely operative reasons? I read somewhere that if all mental operations were carried out under the control of consciousness, human beings would be overloaded and therefore incapable of action.
>
> May I shift momentarily from ISEA context to a small Montessori school in Houston, where yesterday by fluke if accident, I was invited to teach a dance class to 4 and 5-year olds?  The teachers there had told me that by age three, much of the child's development is in place, and by age six, there isn't too much more that can be affected and changed anymore as developmental pattern or identity has been set in motion  (through the mix of genetic information, learning, the sensorimotor functions, language acquisition and environmental influence).  I had not known really that our bodymind is shaped crucially at such an early stage, and  am ignorant of developmental psychology.
>
> But I was experiencing the beauty of, if you want, the pantomine and the analogical imagination in the young children, as they went through a series of exercises with me culled from Yoga, sports, dance, vocal training, improvisation, music, rhythm, and the realm of kinaesthesia that I think has not been addressed yet in Terry's postings and the responses. I noticed that the children had no preconceived ideas of dance, but they enjoyed enacting all kinds of movements, also inventing motion on the spot or finding comparisons to what they saw others do (this is group learning, we were 18 people in the room), so external information is adopted and also internal information may not be cognitively known except in terms of motorsensory experience as well as through memory?  When I asked the children whether they had seen dance, only three or four said yes (some just looked at me curiously in silence, smiling), and each of them had something different in mind, one young girl mentioned the dance she remembered seeing in an animation (film) - and Terry, since she had no theory or concept of dance (of film for that matter) in the sense that her thinking mind got in the way, she was processing something (moving images or moving bodies). I don't know what.
>
> Fascinating, however, was the teachers' quiet instance on observing the children (this month's theme in the Montessori school is "insects") and letting them try out, and this practical investigation of "dance", that we engaged, was to a large extent kinetic or kinaesthetic-playful (how does this connect to what you call entrainment?), and they did not necessarily follow the instructor, which I enjoyed much.  I have not idea whether "programs" were running already, but I sensed that nothing about the new paradigm (big data, everything placed outside) you evoke mattered here, we were still inside the group of shared activity, face to face, physically close, a good old paradigm.  I am also of course thinking of remembering information through the body here. The stories we tell each other return to body.
>
> with regards
> Johannes Birringer
>
>
>
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-- 
Faculty homepage: http://www.law.yale.edu/faculty/CSpiesel.htm
Book: http://www.lawondisplay.fromthesquare.org
Publications available on-line:
"More Than a Thousand Words in Response to Rebecca Tushnet"
  http://www.harvardlawreview.org/issues/125/january12/forum_798.php
http://ssrn.com/author=519293