zenpundit.com

This sounds very much like Crossfit:

New soldiers are grunting through the kind of stretches and twists found in “ab blaster” classes at suburban gyms as the Army revamps its basic training regimen for the first time in three decades.

Heeding the advice of Iraq and Afghanistan combat veterans, commanders are dropping five-mile runs and bayonet drills in favor of zigzag sprints and exercises that hone core muscles. Battlefield sergeants say that’s the kind of fitness needed to dodge across alleys, walk patrol with heavy packs and body armor or haul a buddy out of a burning vehicle.

And this is hilarious – and largely true in my observation, at least for most LMC -UMC suburban teen-agers who become Army recruits:

Trainers also want to toughen recruits who are often more familiar with Facebook than fistfights.

….But they need to learn how to fight.

“Most of these soldiers have never been in a fistfight or any kind of a physical confrontation. They are stunned when they get smacked in the face,” said Capt. Scott Sewell, overseeing almost 190 trainees in their third week of training. “We are trying to get them to act, to think like warriors.”

Godspeed to you, Captain Sewell. And a hat tip to Dave Dilegge. 

The culture has changed. School anti-bullying programs have eliminated a lot of the physical aspects of student conflicts but had the unanticipated effect of making the nonphysical but verbal and social bullying far worse because organized ostracism, slander and anonymous internet harrassment are far harder for school authorities to prove in court when challenged by the always litigious parents of the chronic bullies who have (finally) been disciplined.

Consequently, most suburban kids a) feel quite safe in saying unbelievably heinous things to each other that a generation ago, and certainly two generations earlier, would have resulted in an instant punch in the mouth, if not a savage public beating; and b) are completely inept at defending themselves when they come across someone outside their narrow, whitebread, cultural zone who takes offense at their wanton disrespect and reacts with an “old school” response. They are the Emo generation.

Coupled with a widespread loathing of physical exercise and an expectation of gratuitous consumer-debt financed luxury, a sizable segment of young Americans are better prepared for conflict in the court of Louis XIV at Versailles than joining the Army. Or even a moderately resilient soccer team.

Thus concludes my cranky, old man, rant. 🙂

Charles Cameron, my regular guest blogger, is the former Senior Analyst with The Arlington Institute and Principal Researcher with the Center for Millennial Studies at Boston University. He specializes in forensic theology, with a deep interest in millennial, eschatological and apocalyptic religious sects of all stripes.

High Conceptual Thinkers

by Charles Cameron

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen Eric Drexler’s advice on this topic, but unless Zen mentioned it previously, or perhaps John Robb, I don’t know where I’d have seen it before. This is the part that gets to me:

Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.

Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you – instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.

Each time I see that, I have to laugh. Here’s the same tale, told from the arts and humanities side of the house…

*

When I was a lad, they sent me to Wellington College, the private boarding school that prepares officers’ sons for admission to Sandhurst, and the life of a British army officer. I was not that way inclined, to be honest, and soon found myself a nice corner of the library with a comfortable chair, which I made my own.

I scanned the books in that area more closely than most, and one set of books caught my eye. It was the set of six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks.

Eranos was a yearly gathering in Switzerland, at which CG Jung more or less presided, and at which his scholar friends read learned papers to each other at the highest levels of their own expertise.

These books night as well have been in Ge’ez, as far as I was concerned. They talked about things like “Theriomorphic Spirit Symbolism in Fairy Tales” (which is actually about gods in wild animal form, Ganesh with his elephant’s head for example), “Aeschylus: The Eumenides” about the Greek tragedy of that name, “The Spirit of Science” (that would be Erwin Schodinger speaking, which will give you an idea of the caliber of invitees) — and those are just picked from the first of the six volumes.

And how these folks went at their discussions! If a nice quote from Horace was in order, Latin’s the language. French, yes, German too, for Kant or Nietzsche. That’s okay. But Coptic? Egyptian hieroglyphs? Diagrams culled from Kabbalistic treatises about how there’s a waterfall of grace that falls constantly from G*d through ten distinct steps to the creation we inhabit, and how to climb carefully back up before the Throne?

Scattered through the six volumes were Jung, Schrodinger, Rahner, Kerenyi, Zimmer, Puesch, Quispel (between them, these two covered the waterfront on Gnostic studies), Massignon, Corbin (ditto for Islam and its mystics and martyrs), Neumann, Eliade, Tillich, Suzuki (he brought Zen to the west), Danielou, Zimmer, van der Leeuv, Wilhelm (he brought the west the I Ching), LL Whyte… I don’t believe Wolfgang Pauli ever   attended, but 400 of his dreams were discussed there under cover of anonymity by CG Jung.

I had not the least idea what these folks were on about, maybe a third of the nouns and verbs were nouns and verbs I’d never met before, and maybe a sixth of those weren’t even in my trusty Concise Oxford Dictionary: this was true scholarship, and I was aware I was in paradise.

I left that school, thankfully, and went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where I studied Theology, and learned early on that my interest was not in studying that “particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it” — I scraped by Oxford’s intense finals with what was called a “gentleman’s Third” — and I have spent the rest of my life searching out scholarship and experiences having to do with inspiration, intuition and imagination.

I’ve found myself trotting around the globe, studying now Zen then Hinduism then Lakota shamanism, at last returning to the European west via Jung and Hermann Hesse, singing Gregorian Chant under the baton of the choir master at Solesmes, meditating, sweating my buckskin out (as they say) in “stone people’s lodges”, teaching creativity in the Los Angeles atelier of a master artist, Jan Valentin Saether — and somewhere around the age of forty, I discovered the six volumes of the Eranos Yearbooks again in a second hand bookstore, and once more read them.

This time, I found they were heady but somewhat comprehensible reading, covering the entire extent of the studies to which my fascinations had led me in the intervening years — Alchemy, the Gnostics, Sufism, Zen, the Mystery cults, poetics, comparative religion, cultural anthropology, depth psychology, symbolism, the philosophy of science.

And that roll call of contributors was the roll call of half the modern masters in each of those fields.

I have the hope that I shall live to be seventy five, and read those papers as though a peer of those who assembled by the lake there in Eranos at Jung’s invitation: that those miraculous inkings of paper will at last make almost perfect sense to me, and that maybe, perhaps, it might be, may it be so — insh’allah and the creek don’t rise — I might even be able to write the odd footnote updating a passage here or there with my own insights.

Science and Nature didn’t get a look in. For me, it was Eranos all the way.

And one more story, unrelated to Eranos, but still describing my time at Wellington:

I seem to be one of those High Conceptual sorts the Eide’s are talking about — eccentric, to be sure — and I vaguely recall being hauled into the Headmaster’s office at Wellington and being accused of plagiarism, because I had written a fifteen page paper on the Contortionists of Saint Medard, the Jansenists, and Pascal. Here we go again — prior to that, I had submittedeach week three page essays on assigned topics such as “The football game” or “What I did on vacation” — but this week my English master was sick, and had   phoned in to say we could write about whatever we wanted. I’d taken him at his word, and spread my wings — and lucky for me, I could point out that the College library didn’t have enough material on the subject of the Jansenists for me to have plausibly plagiarized my essay.

Why were the strange people of Saint Medard so interesting to this young lad? Because they contorted and tortured their bodies like yogis, in what was (as far as I could tell) the first experiential attempt within Christendom to prove the hypothesis of the triumph of mind over body.

*

Now that’s all a bit selfish and introspective by way of background. But it lets you know the kinship I feel for Drexler’s crafty strategy, and likewise for the Eide’s notion of (I hesitate to write the words) “High Conceptual Thinkers”.

I want to make two points about HCTs here.

The first is to suggest that what Zen calls seeing meta-patterns is pretty much analogical / metaphorical thinking (ie lateral vs linear): the poet’s spécialité de la maison.

The second is that there exists a great project — great as in the Olympics, great as in the search for the Grand Unified Theory in physics, great as in the Italian Renaissance — for the assembly of all human cultural and scientific knowledge in a single architecture, in the form of the conceptual Glass Bead Game of Hermann Hesse.

Lewis Lapham,  in a Harper’s editorial back in 1997 said he expected the editors at Wired would soon discover Hesse’s book, and that Microsoft would want to name software in its honor.

It hasn’t happened yet. I hope it does. And that’s another story, for another day.

The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, has long been one of my favorite blogs, probably the top non-.mil related, SME blog among my regular reads. Here’s an example of why:

Gifted Big Picture / High Conceptual Thinkers

 High Conceptual Thinkers are often…- Omnivorous Learners: The world may be their oyster. Because of their quest for the “interesting”, they may love the Internet, read entire encyclopedias, or incessantly question adults about the real world, and so learn a little bit about everything. They may not hit ceiling scores on the conceptual knowledge IQ subtests because their omnivorous approach to figuring out the world around them.- New is the Thing: HCTs prefer novelty (this is how they develop new conceptual categories) and are tickled by unconventional viewpoints or discoveries. – Big Picture, Not Little Details: HCTs don’t always transition well to the “precision years” of late elementary, middle school, or beyond.

– Boredom is Death: Although using the ‘b’ word is notoriously a “no-no” word when talking to teachers, these kids rebel against what they see as boredom. Boredom may really seem like death to young HCTs. If young HCTs seem “driven by a motor”, it’s intellectual restlessness and it can be a blessing as well as a burden.

Not surprisingly, these kids often find classroom learning unsatisfying. After all, much of early education is focused on mastering basic skills or established facts, this is not what these kids are about. They’d rather be finding new worlds to conquer.

Although these kids are challenging to teach and parent, they are also a delight, and Dan Pink and others have suggested that the Conceptual Age is upon us and this pattern of thinking should be what we should be encouraging.

“High conceptual thinkers” – those with an insatiable intellectual curiosity, who see meta-level patterns and excel at constructing paradigms, extrapolation, synthesis and consilience are probably not a large percentage of the population and, most likely, they include eccentrics and cranks as well as highly accomplished individuals like E.O. Wilson, Buckminster Fuller, Freeman Dyson, Nikola Tesla, Richard Feynman and probably figures like Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, Sir Richard Francis Burton, Winston Churchill, Robert Hooke, Da Vinci and numerous others.

There seems to be some congruency between HCTs and the category of people known as polymaths, which raises the question of whether HCT are born or can be encouraged to develop such a cognitive profile from education and life experience. The Eides offered a list of techniques for teaching children recognized as HCTs, but to my mind, these would also benefit a fairly broad section of students:

Teaching Big Picture / High Conceptual Thinkers

– Sky’s the Limit: If an idea or a lesson would be interesting to a wonky tech-y post-college 20-something, then it’s fine for the HCT. If a story or thing could be written about in Wired, Fast Company, or Mental Floss, then you’re probably on the right track. Sky should be the limit. Even some generally excellent gifted programs we’ve seen may grossly underestimate an HCT’s ability to think about advanced concepts. Also because HCTs develop their ideas through pattern recognition, they may want to see many examples and permutations, and complex presentations in order to help organize their ideas into simpler concepts.

– Play with Ideas: Conceptual thinkers like and need to play with ideas. Play expands ideas, creating a new opening for associations. Play means not micromanaging learning experiences – allowing some dabbling, and taking away some of the “high stakes every time” routine (e.g. not everything should be graded).

– Argue with Ideas We think many educational curricula wait way to long before they allow young HCTs to consider different viewpoints, learn how to frame arguments or actually debate, but this is often what HCTs love. If they don’t get it at school, make sure they get it home…maybe at the dinner table? Half of the 400 eminent men and women profiled in the Goertzels’ Cradles of Eminence came from “opinionated” families: “It is these homes that produce most of the scientists, humanitarians, and reformers.”

Compare these recommendations with the advice offered by nanotechnologist Dr. Eric Drexler of Metamodern:

Studying to learn about everything

To intellectually ambitious students I recommend investing a lot of time in a mode of study that may feel wrong. An implicit lesson of classroom education is that successful study leads to good test scores, but this pattern of study is radically different. It cultivates understanding of a kind that won’t help pass tests – the classroom kind, that is.

1. Read and skim journals and textbooks that (at the moment) you only half understand. Include Science and Nature.
2. Don’t halt, dig a hole, and study a particular subject as if you had to pass a test on it.
3. Don’t avoid a subject because it seems beyond you – instead, read other half-understandable journals and textbooks to absorb more vocabulary, perspective, and context, then circle back.
4. Notice that concepts make more sense when you revisit a topic.
5. Notice which topics link in all directions, and provide keys to many others. Consider taking a class.
6. Continue until almost everything you encounter in Science and Nature makes sense as a contribution to a field you know something about.

Intellectual curiosity would seem to be the axis that would make these approaches work effectively, and possibly, that’s what these techniques stimulate.
 

There have been some thoughtful posts on visual thinking lately which (according to Wikipedia) is the dominant form of thought for 60-70% of the population. I am somewhat skeptical of that unsupported figure because many people report thinking in a combination of words, images and other nonverbal prompts but I can accept that the percentage, whatever it may be precisely, is significant. Here are the posts:

Drs. Eide – Writing for Visual Thinkers , Mind Over Matter: Imagery at Work and in the Classroom

Dr. Von – Importance of Imagery for Memory & Learning

Austin Kleon – VISUAL THINKING FOR WRITERS: NOTES AND SLIDES 

Gerald Grow – The writing problems of visual thinkers

On a related note, a while back, Dave Schuler and I, along with Dave Davison, had some exchanges on “visualcy” that are also worth consideration:

Dave Schuler – “I Can Read a Passage in a Book 20 Times and It Doesn’t Click”, More On Visualcy, The Visual Imagery Society, cognitive reliance on visual media:

ZP – On the Virtues and Vices of “Visualcy”, Visualcy and the Human Terrain

Dave Davison – MuralCasting – Improving ROA (Return on attention) -corrected 2.8.08 , Logic + Emotion: Developing an Experience Strategy in 4 Parts, Too many ripples in the pond?

Visual imagery is exceedingly powerful on a neurocognitive level, even with populations that are highly educated and predisposed to think in words and therefore, lends itself well to disinformation, propaganda, IO, advertising and mundane distraction and wastage of time. “Surfing the web” is a visual activity, albeit one that can involve a good deal of reading but ultimately sites like youtube have a definite advantage in attracting and holding attention. Usually to no productive purpose.

On the other hand, I would like to suggest that visual imagery or thinking in pictures is a critical component of insight. We like to use the term “visionary” to describe a trailblazing genius in some field and it is an apt description. Many an empire or artistic acheivement or intellectual discovery was crystalized as a hazy image that served as a template within which many future problems, known and unknown, could be addressed successfully. Or be refined and extrapolated in a tinkering, tweaking manner by trial and error by individuals or groups over time. Imagery can also be a useful starting point for strategic thinking in the form of brainstorming conceptual outcomes.

Furthermore imagery can be used as a “bridge” to improve the comprehension of difficult concepts and make learning more efficient. Dr. Von explains:

….For readers, 60% of 5th graders report naturally using some imagery during ‘think aloud’ breaks in reading stories. It appears to be a natural reaction, even for children, to try and ‘see’ the scenes that words are trying to convey in order to develop memories of a story that we, ourselves, are not part of in reality. Humans are more visual creatures, as I like to tell my own students, and it is important to remind and also teach students how to visualize physical events and experiences. In fact, in problem solving in physics, I try and teach as an essential part of every single problem to draw a picture and mentally ‘see’ what is happening in the problem. We use a technique that requires making pictures and labeling all forces on the picture, and then use the picture to actually set up the math (for F = ma problems). So science and imagery are naturally connected, just as reading, writing and imagery are connected. Memory improves when visualization and imagery are used for stories or for how physical events play out in reality. The experimental finding that a good majority of the brain used for the physical activity is used in imagery, too, begins to explain why this process works.

This is a great example of using imagery as a tool toward a calculated end rather than having imagery overrule or hijack the rational faculties ( which may be the majority of the time when imagery is involved). We should respect the power of visual imagery in cognition when considering the impact on our own thinking but we should not fail to exploit the opportunities the use of imagery can provide.

While flawed, this is still an excellent summative article from The New York Times on the brain and learning ( hat tip to Michele):

Adult Learning | Neuroscience  How to Train the Aging Brain

….Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them.

“The brain is plastic and continues to change, not in getting bigger but allowing for greater complexity and deeper understanding,” says Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California, who has studied ways to teach adults effectively. “As adults we may not always learn quite as fast, but we are set up for this next developmental step.”

Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.

Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world.

“There’s a place for information,” Dr. Taylor says. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.”

There are some problems with the article, starting with the assumption that the negative differences of middle aged brains are a product primarily of age rather than habitual use. While there are developmental differences in cognition, if you stop doing something at any age which you are mentally proficient – say calculus equations, creating rhymes, playing chess – you will grow less efficient at that activity over time. Use it or lose it. People in their 40’s to 60’s are typically leading lifestyles that are very different from full time students.

There is also enormous value in mastering a second field ( which initially is all “new information”). A person’s accumulated expertise, formal education and life experience can be thought of as a “cognitive map“. Ideally, you want to both continuously enlarge the size of your cognitive map (“lifelong learning”) and improve the efficiency and versatility of your ability to access the information (recall), discover patterns or elusive aspects (insight, horizontal thinking, analogies) and use the knowledge constructively and purposefully ( synthesis, creative thinking, problem solving).

 By nature though, humans are mentally lazy.  We are predisposed toward “Automaticity” and would find it hard to get through the day attemppting to reason through every action in a sequential series of steps, so our brains are inclined to take the path of least resistance . Recall is a lot easier a cognitive function than is generating new insights, orientation of new data into the big picture or engaging in complex problem solving, which is why the mental stimulus of novelty and conflicting viewpoints are so important. We need to be prodded.

It is no coincidence that tolerating exposure to differing viewpoints (political, methodological, religious – whatever) and assessing them objectively and critically is something that most adults have great difficulty doing. The defensive emotional surge that many people feel when facing antipodal views not only protects the ego, but by intefering with the ability of the frontal lobes to engage in critical, abstract, reasoning, the brain prevents the “waste” of time/energy of having to do the hard work of (perhaps) fundamentally re-thinking the premises that order our worldview. Not only are many zealous partisans unwilling to listen to opposing views and process their arguments rationally and fairly, they are often cognitively unable to do so! Unfortunately, that “bitter medicine” of evaluating critical feedback is exactly what our brains need in order to stay mentally sharp and adaptive.

The true believers who organize echo chambers and police the community for adherence to the “party line” are drugging their brains with ideology and corrupting their OODA Loop.