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I have featured Sir Ken Robinson here previously. I saw this short 11 minute “talk” today in John Hagel’s   twitterfeed. It’s great!

 This Mark McGuinness gentleman is the anti-Nick Carr:

….Pick up just about any book on Buddhist meditation, and you’ll find a similar description. Texts often refer to the ‘monkey mind’ hopping from thought to thought like the branches of a tree. And considering they are all based on the 2,500-year-old teachings of the historical Buddha, it seems a little premature to blame the internet for our monkey minds.

When Nicholas Carr writes “I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory”, it’s as though the internet were imposing some alien thought patterns on him. But all the internet is doing is exaggerating the natural tendency of the mind to keep skipping from thought to thought.

What is unnatural is the habit of spending “hours strolling through long stretches of prose”. The internet may be changing our brain, but books changed it first.

Artificial savants? Savant augmentation? The path to mentats?

Imagine the effects of  fine-tuning this crude stimulation with precision, then additionally doing “x”so as to amplify the remaining abilities, not simply suppress the contraindicative cognitive process.

Now imagine the potential effects of doing it on a systemic, societal, basis for a generation or two.

Hat tip to The Eide Neurolearning Blog.

Is it right? Horribly wrong? Missing variables?

Fire away in comments.

ADDENDUM:

Joseph Fouche offers up his graph of schools of strategy at The Committee of Public Safety. Note that unlike me, he has placed them in terms of “Influence…..Coercion…Violence”:

Dr. Chet Richards, in his turn, kindly drew my attention back to graph he created -if memory serves – around the time he wrote Neither Shall the Sword, but I am still trying to figure out how to convert the file to something I can post here. Until I do, go to slide 89 in the link below:
4GW and Grand Strategy

Sugata Mitra desribes this as an example of a self-organizing system, but a more concrete way to look at it is using technology, collaborative grouping and small doses of emotional-social reinforcement to facilitate autotelicism in students. The key cognitive info is between a third to two-thirds of the way into the video:

The social component ( both student groups and the “granny cloud” of remote adult facilitators) is not a mere frill. Children, like adults, are not Vulcans The neuronal connections related to learning content information tend to be strengthened by emotional and contextual associations.

ADDENDUM:

More here from Stowe Boyd on the counterintuitive results of brain research about learning.