Replying to LO21226
Dear LO'ers, dear Terry,
I am glad with your reaction on my contribution, which I hope was not one
of the ordinary bombardments of daily information that we all suffer in
these days. Your remarks were for me certainly not part of the ordinary,
colorless and laminar stream of information.
You made an interesting point: the emergencies outside an observer, and
the emergencies inside the observer.
> Another related event may be occurring that increases this level of
> complexity. That is the event of an observer coming upon an heretofore
> unexperienced situation. No matter whether it's a "laminar" situation -
> one that's been stable for some time and not demonstrating anomalies to
> another long-term observer - or an easily recognized, once focused on,
> very turbulent situation, the new observer is confronted with a novel
> experience that will have some amount of impact on his/her memory.
There are several situations possible.
a. no external emergencies, i.e. laminar flow of the environment; no
emergencies inside the observer, i.e. no development of
knowledge/memory.
Examples: Parable of the boiled frog; the initial 'experience' of At de
Lange who was not realising that he was victim of diabetes.
b. no external emergencies, but although the 'outside' was laminar, this
very fact generated an emergency inside the observer.
Examples: Observing the 'obvious', for instance the fact that wind
causes waves on a watersurface; the fact that it is dark at night; etc.
c. external emergency, which was not observed by the observer and internal
laminar flow continues.
Examples: the work of Prigogine, before At pointed our attention to
it.
d. external emergency generating an internal emergency too.
Examples: ofcourse, here are the most examples which are personal. For
instance the murder of president Kennedy (but what year was it?); the
Nato bombardments; your day of mariage; etc.
> Is part of our sense that time is moving faster, that the gaps between
> events is getting shorter, caused by the fact that we are being bombarded
> by an increasing amount of new information - new experiences - that, from
> our point of view, deviate from the norm? Our memories may be becoming
> taxed by all the new "stuff" that our work, our news, our civilization
> makes so easily available to us. And it takes us some amount of time to
> "process" this new information - again, whether its inherently turbulent
> or laminar.
Our sense that time moves faster has probably to do with the state of
alertness of us (one must have an open mind). And of course, as you
stated, the time to digest so the emergency could develop itself in full
colors.
But it has also to do with the scale of our observations. We could look or
think of years and we only observe the regular pattern of the seasons. In
that case we don't notice the changing phases of the moon, or the
individual days and nights and also more detail is not in our scope of
vision. These smaller deviations of the ordinary are on that large scale
of observation, just the grey laminar flow. It is also like the
'bombardment' of information. The fact that our newspaper arrives daily in
our mailbox is so regular that we only realise the day when the newspaper
is not, or too late delivered.
> So it seems like we have a distinct challenge: helping ourselves to
> remember those events that have relevant information content while
> creating sustainable personal and community methodologies that permits us
> to continually broaden our perspective about our environment made possible
> through expanding information networks - and in a way that's compatible
> with our internal capacity for time acquisition of memories and our
> "anchorplaces for our thoughts".
Here is a very, very interesting point. But also important. Because it
effects our learning and memorising capacities. It will be a nice
experiment to look at the daily regularity of schools. For schoolchildren
each day seems as boring as all the other days. Each lesson is just
another lesson. If something unexpected will be introduced in this school
life, it probably will generate an anchorplace and it genereates the
emergencies in the child's minds.
For instance, I remember very well that on the night (it was about 20.00
hours that the news arrived in the Netherlands) that JF Kennedy was
murdered, I was studying in my room the biology examination of the next
day.
I am not advocating such rigorous anchorplaces, but it illustrates how
effective such happening is for our memories. So if the teacher in
schoollessons introduces now and than 'strange' happenings, the lessons
will be much better remembered. So are the memory aids, or mnemonics, the
stories 'around' the subject (as an example, remember the twin syndrome of
the primer on entropy of At).
I guess, that it is very difficult to generate and create the very
anchorplaces in your own mind. I think this needs help from the outside,
the environment. It could be done by observing (that means using all the
senses) the environment at different scales. And this hits the subject of
systems thinking again.
I wish you all the ability to see the (subtle) deviations within the
laminar flows outside yourself.
dr. Leo D. Minnigh
minnigh@library.tudelft.nl
Library Technical University Delft
PO BOX 98, 2600 MG Delft, The Netherlands
Tel.: 31 15 2782226
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Let your thoughts meander towards a sea of ideas.
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--Leo Minnigh <L.D.Minnigh@library.tudelft.nl>
Learning-org -- Hosted by Rick Karash <rkarash@karash.com> Public Dialog on Learning Organizations -- <http://www.learning-org.com>