big history

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collective learning

bliss bus

Exercise:

• Get on board a bus
• Close your eyes and label the sounds
• Stay with the more noticeable sounds – bring the mind back when it strays
• Stop labelling
• Open your eyes
• Be non-judgmentally aware of stuff arising – thoughts, feelings, moods
• Let it go
• Get off the bus

Know thyself

The phrase "know thyself” was used by the philosopher Socrates who taught that: "The unexamined life is not worth living." Many other thinkers have given alternative meanings. Much hangs on how we understand “knowing” and the “self”.

Eagleman adds new light from the perspective of brain science:

“Your consciousness is like a tiny stowaway on a transatlantic steamship, taking credit for the journey without acknowledging the massive engineering underfoot.”

“The job of a headline is to give a tightly compressed summary. In the same manner, consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form.”

“By the same token, to know oneself may require a change of definition of “to know.” Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you. The invocation to know thyself needs to be considered in new ways.”

Eagleman, David. Incognito: The Secret Lives of The Brain

curriculum - a modern perspective

I have been a curriculum developer for several subjects in several countries. It is an essential part of the process of changing minds. The standard techniques still have relevance but the modern understandings are more holistic.

STANDARD

Jerome Bruner (1915-2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. He is very widely quoted. I remember him suggesting that you can teach anything to anyone so long as you break it down in a sequence of small enough steps. This seems reasonable but it assumes suitable levels of motivation.

Educator Benjamin Bloom (1913-1999) has written, "After forty years of intensive research in the United States as well as abroad, my main conclusion is: what any person in the world can learn, almost all persons can learn, if provided with the appropriate prior and current conditions of learning".

He gave us Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives in three domains - cognitive, affective and psychomotor. The cognitive domain had six groups - knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation  (KCAASE).

I no longer remember the source of the curriculum developers basic structure: SCOPE (how broad and how deep), SEQUENCE (where to begin, go to next and finish) and PACE (how much to include in the time available)

MODERN

"Mother Nature made sure we could survive, but did not much care for us having a "good time" while doing so." Collard, Patrizia. The Mindfulness Bible: The Complete Guide to Living in the Moment) Several researchers have noted a negativity bias and pessimistic outlook. The wary survive.

"The pressure for novelty doesn’t let up. Our brains continually goad us to battle the monotonous and predictable, balancing what we know against newness. This is what keeps our species constantly tilting away from boredom and the status quo." (Eagleman, David. The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World.)

Review of my 2017

My Parkinson’s Disease is quite stable; there is no pain, and I am calm and peaceful most of the time. Symptoms include soft voice and stuttering - I cannot sing; loss of fine motor control in my hands – I cannot play guitar or music keyboard; and I am clumsy using the computer keyboard and mouse. My handwriting is very small and illegible. I take pills five times a day.

But I am still a teacher. I do desk research to find who the cutting-edge thinkers are and what they are saying. I then write about the new ideas and make the notes available in a blog. The main subjects are evolutionary psychology, brain science, mindfulness meditation – and the links between them.

The idea is that in the last few years there has been a paradigm shift in neurology which calls for changes in various branches of psychology and it is important to note that the insights from ancient Hinduism and Buddhism are very similar – especially about taming and training the mind.

I no longer research and write like a western academic (scientist): there are many others who can do that better than me. Instead, I write subjectively and note how the new ideas do or do not make sense to me. The unconscious is forever busy with its games of making sense of material arriving from the sense organs - by comparing them with similar materials stored in memory.

Amongst other things executive functions in the pre-frontal cortex create and label metacognitive concepts which can be used to refer to baskets of short hand mini-cognitive concepts. The process is called ‘clumping’ and it is useful in that we cannot be conscious of more than four concepts in a thought moment.

Exercise: sit and notice

• sit with your eyes closed in a warm, quiet space
• set the kitchen timer for five minutes
• just sit and notice what thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) come and go
• option – after the five minutes are up write a list of as many concepts as you can remember: were you aware of clumping?

I use this exercise as one of my techniques for letting the unconscious expose itself. Quite often an item in the list will expand itself and offer several possible continuations. ‘I’ just go with the flow. There seems to be a rule about keeping stories short – and this is good for putting them on my blog which has about 40 pageviews per day from many countries.

The writing is normally in ‘flow’ so it is non-egoic. This means that ‘I’ (the illusory ‘self’) am not present during the writing so ‘I’ do not remember writing whatever appears. But there is often a noticeable sequence in a set of blogposts. But the sequence is a product of the unconscious)

There are now well over 1000 A4 doodles. They are also done in flow so ‘I’ am not involved. If I begin to be stressed and panicky because of ‘self’ thoughts switching into attention, I do a doodle and the ‘self’ gets lost. On average they take about 30 minutes to complete.

Exercise: doing a doodle

• Clear a space on a table large enough to hold an A4 sheet of paper and a box of black pens of different sizes
• Pick a pen
• Look at the paper and wait for the initial act of marking the page (There must be a first stroke and it can be large, medium or small)
• Mark the marks – and again and again
• Use lines or dots to fill enclosed spaces
• Keep going till there is no urge to add anything else
• Put the date in the bottom right corner
• File the doodle where it is to be kept until scanning takes place

The doodles come straight from the unconscious. I have not been able to invent a classification scheme for them other than purely abstract v faces, figures and landscapes. The feeling is that the default unconscious is without intention until some significant stimulus causes it to focus.

Because of the Parkinsons I have problems with voice and hands and therefore with my ability to perform live music. I have a back catalogue of 75 tunes and 66 songs. If I remember correctly most of them were produced in flow.

There is now a band “Paulina and the toonloons”. There are 6 of us with an average age of over 60. We are gradually building a repertoire which includes items written by several of us. Instrument wise there is guitar and bass, keyboard, flute, tin whistle, mouth organ, and trombone. We meet in my house on Tuesday mornings and with extra part group meetings at other times. Two of us have multitrack recording gear. Thought is being given to the production of CDs.

So all in all I am grateful to be living in such a peaceful village within easy walking distance of the Doctor’s surgery, the pharmacy, the sea, and a well-stocked supermarket. I write my little stories (lessons) and make them available to all those people who have access to an online computer.

cultural orientations

One of  my websites with heavy duty thoughts about culture from an anthropological perspective
click HERE

Constant change

It is cold, cloudy and damp and already getting dark at 15:30. So far, I have eaten twice today and exercised my voice by recording some of my lyrics. I have checked the email, Facebook and my blog, and have also been reading and dosing. Those are the main activities so far today and there is now this writing. I don’t know what it will be about.

• Existentialism for retirees.
• Why bother when the only constant thing is change?
• Why not go with the flow?
• We are stardust with a long past and future.

After the big bang many stars and planets emerged. Some died and became the raw material for the next generation. The cosmos is dynamic with some bits falling apart and other parts coming together – constantly.

Planet Earth has transformed itself since the development of our solar system. The gases in the atmosphere changed and now support life. Continental drift caused the movement of the major land masses and they are still moving. Life suffered major extinctions due to massive volcanoes and through collision with heavenly bodies - but new life forms evolved to fill the spaces.

Dinosaurs were the main type of backboned animals until a massive meteor wiped them out and left the world open for birds and mammals. Apes and monkeys evolved amongst the mammals and they included our human ancestors.

I have parents and grandparents going back from fully human to various kinds of ape men and women, and then to various kinds of fish. We evolved. Mother (Father?) Nature did not have a plan – they went with the flow. They produced children who were all different and some were ‘fitter’ than others. Natural selection. Survival of the fittest.

I am, and you are, built of huge numbers of footery bits that accumulated over time. Some bits were to do with the body and some were to do with the mind.

• Eg The body changed to permit standing upright but this made the birth canal smaller so babies had to be born sooner and required a lot of parent and community support.
• Eg The mind (brain) evolved the pre-frontal cortex to deal with higher level executive functions, especially interacting using language in social groups. There are conundrums eg being conscious of being conscious.

There are many instances of sub optimal design in our body and mind. This is most clearly observed in experimental psychology which has demonstrated that what goes on in our heads is well different from what we imagine. Huge amounts of stuff goes on in the unconscious which is essentially a product of churning star dust.


There is the notion of getting things in perspective. This involves establishing and defending a worldview usually covering a very limited set of the options that are now available through thinking about the cosmic zoom for time and space. Modern humans first appeared about 4.5 million years ago and were successful hunters and gatherers. Language appeared about 200,000 years ago and settled agriculture about 10,000 years ago.

And the rest is history. Fast changing, Machiavellian, stories of development and decline in a range of areas – social, technological, environmental, economic, political, legal, ethical and spiritual. (STEEPLES). (I have a web site dealing with the interactions. Click HERE)

SO - What is it about?

It might be unusual for a much-travelled person from a Scottish village in the 20th century to be fascinated by other ways to be human and to be challenged to make the world a better place; but there are limits.

Major activities since I last listed them include fitting the surgical stockings; lunch of pot noodles; footer with the piano keyboard; relocate the main microphone and music stand, and, try to make a good job of my songs with voice and guitar. (I failed!)

And the pre-frontal cortex is wondering about my contribution to the paradigm shift. Identify the key thinkers; get my head around their ideas; write short stories based on them and publish them to my blog. People log on from all around the world so maybe they will be inspired by the ideas which I present and maybe they will become better change agents as a result.

how many emotions?

During a day there will be many thoughts, feelings and moods (TFM) more or less virulently capturing conscious attention. Their purpose is to respond quickly to changes in the internal or external environments. This involves matching the new stimuli to successful materials held in long term memory.

It used to be thought that most emotions were hard wired in modules and networks and that appropriate stimuli could trigger them automatically. Various shorter or longer lists were hypothesised. A compiled list in Wikipedia includes:

Affection Anger Angst Anguish Annoyance Anticipation Anxiety Apathy Arousal Awe Boredom Confidence Contempt Contentment Courage Curiosity  Depression Desire  Despair Disappointment Disgust Distrust Ecstasy Embarrassment Empathy Enthusiasm Envy Euphoria Fear Frustration Gratitude Grief Guilt Happiness Hatred Hope Horror Hostility Humiliation Interest Jealousy Joy Loneliness Love Lust Outrage Panic Passion Pity Pleasure Pride Rage Regret Remorse Resentment Sadness Saudade Schadenfreude Self-confidence Shame Shock Shyness Sorrow Suffering Surprise Trust Wonder Worry

But - recent work by neurologists using various brain scanners, has failed to identify modules or networks as locations for particular emotions. It is also to be noted that there are many examples of different languages and cultures recognising and naming emotions unique to themselves. This suggests that individuals generate feelings and emotions on an ongoing process.

There are 56 items in the above list and only 17 are on the bright side. This suggests that the average person is two thirds gloomy and driven by the negativities (pessimists) and is one third on the bright side with a positive world view (optimists).

The neurologists have also given us; (a) the concept of neural plasticity whereby, if a part of the brain is damaged, the functions that it used to deal with are transferred to another location; (b) the concept of cognitive flexibility which results from there being billions of connections and thus of pathways between sensory inputs and reactions and responses and; (c) the notion of “use it or lose it” and the converse “use it a lot and make it stronger”.

The notion of flexible plasticity does not go down well with cultural fundamentalists who seek certainty and the inflexible ‘truth’. But it is a liberating notion for open-minded, would-be optimists who appreciate the Taoist notion that “the reality that can be described is not the real reality”.

Exercise:

1. Sit quietly for five minutes noticing the thoughts and feelings that pass through your attention centre
2. Write a list of as many of the items as you can remember
3. Repeat the above two steps at different times of day and in different social settings
4. Make a separate list of four main themes and emotions which appeared
5. Note the extent to which you are in control of what is going on in your head
6. What does the exercise suggest about the structure and function of your ‘I’ ?