Ray Evans Harrell wrote:(snip of earlier thread content)
> My point in all of this is that you have between four and seven
> thought
> streams that you can consciously follow given the literary educational
>
> focus that is taught in most world societies. That is the basis of
> most
> Western musical composition and the root of the Fugue. As a baby you
> didn't have the ability to focus but you took in thousands of stimuli
> at
> once and responded by dancing it in your consciousness. Today most
> people
> turn off the TV when they walk into the room and want to talk assuming
>
> that you cannot pay attention if your focus is split. That is only two
>
> streams. How do you hope to make the decisions that you are
> contemplating
> given the limited scope of today's intellectual and educational
> tools? We
> are still arguing over the three Rs and believe that Math is a
> substitute
> for the training of the Somatic perceptual tools. It isn't and until
> we
> decide to work that out IMHO this thread is a pie in the sky. Of
> course
> we could build a machine to eleminate all but one of the threads in
> the
> room. Then every home would be like the old "Get Smart" TV Spy series
> isolation bubble.
There are a couple of points that Ray makes here which strike home with
me. I am a multi-modality, multi-threaded responder to input. I can
listen to a fugue, pick off the highlights from the television, carry on a
phone conversation, and write a response to an email message with little
effort. No brag, just fact.
To a lot of people, that makes me a scatter brain. My nine year old
daughter can do the same. At first it annoyed me. As I read her a story,
she'd be combing a doll's hair, or drawing, or making notes in her spy
journal and I'd come off with one of those parental "If you don't want me
to read, you can go to bed now" responses. Abby, however, would then
repeat the last sentence verbatim and go on to explain the relationship of
the sentence to where we'd been thus far. I don't question here anymore,
but her teachers still do. She gets the same responses today that I got
forty years ago: daydreamer, troublemaker, etc.
Today they call various manifestations of this ability Attention Deficit
Disorder and claim Einstein, Beethoven, and many others to have been
"sufferers". What I see is no attention deficit, but a psychological
fugue, an ability to transpose, invert, combine, and decompose multiple
input streams. It makes for a rich psychological reality.
The deficit, in many cases (and in particular, my own) is on the output
side. The single stream required to satisfy the expectations of the
socio-economic order is boring and most often without humor. But this
output is the result of multiple inputs, social, economic, technical,
emotional, physical. By reducing it to one dimensionality, we lose the
wonderful effects that occur at the art-science interface (see Ray's full
post for a fine example).
-- John Zavacki jzavacki@wolff.com Wolff Group, Inc. http://www.wolff.com 800.282.1218Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>