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SOME NEUROCOGNITIVE IMPLICATIONS FOR NATION-BUILDING

Perhaps my favorite entirely apolitical blog is The Eide Neurolearning Blog run by the Drs. Brock and Fernette Eide, two physicians who specialize in brain research and its implications for educating children. With great regularity I find information there that either is of use to me professionally or has wider societal importance.

On Monday, the Eides posted “The Thinking Spot” which adds to the existing mountain of evidence regarding the role of the maturing prefrontal cortex in developing the capacity for higher order thinking that does not quite come to fruition until the early to mid-twenties but may begin as early as preadolescence. The Eides write, regarding the PDF studies cited:

“Rule-based learning has a developmental course (no big surprise), but what is a little surprising is the degree to which 12 year olds lag young adults in tests requiring them to make new rules.”

Consider that U.S. or Western intervention in Gap states, or alternatively, internal political reform movements like the ” Color Revolutions”, are essentially political efforts in forcing a ” Rule-set reset” on a dysfunctional society or failed state. If one prefers classic Lockean descriptors, rewriting the social contract to “create a more perfect union“.

Most, though not all, of the nations in which state failure threatens are also demographically undergoing a ” youth bulge”. In Iran for example, 66-70 % of the population is under 30 years of age with the “fattest” part of the population curve being aged between 10 and 20. Indeed, it is the poorest nations that tend to be the youngest. To quote a UN report:

“– Countries where fertility remains high and has declined only moderately will experience the slowest population ageing. By 2050, about 1 in 5 countries is still projected to have a median age under 30 years. The youngest populations
will be found in least developed countries, 11 of which are projected to have median ages at or below 23 years in 2050, including Angola, Burundi, Chad, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Niger and Uganda.”

What I infer from this data and the Neurolearning Blog post is that the most favorable time for any effort, external or indigenous, to engage in a positive restructuring of a nation’s societal rule-sets may be when a given country’s youth bulge hits their early twenties. A narrow window of time when the most physically vigorous and largest section of the population has reached mental maturity in terms of accepting, comprehending and processing abstractions yet are most open to new ideas and desirous of a productive future for themselves.

This is of course a two edged sword. Youthful populations that feel alienated and stymied tend to be restive, even revolutionary. 1968 was not just a year that saw tumultuous baby boomers in American streets but also the chaos of Cultural Revolution in China, the Prague Spring, riots in Paris, the rise of Marxist terrorism in Latin America, Germany and Italy and barely preceded an upsurge in PLO terrorism. Today, while Europe and China are rapidly graying and the U.S. is holding relatively steady, much of the world is very young

I suggest that we are not long for an era of great opportunities and great upheavals.

Cross posted to Chicago Boyz

A LITTLE HISTORY

I hope to have a number of posts of my own up later today but here are two on history and historians that caught my eye:

“When Archivists Deal with Power Players” by Dr. Maarja Krusten

I “know” Maarja from our interaction on H-Diplo and at HNN and she brings a wealth of knowledge to the table regarding the politics of the National Archives ( interestingly enough, she had, if I recall, doubts about Bush’s appointment of Cold War scholar Allen Weinstein to head the National Archives, something I strongly supported; I’m betting her opinion of Weinstein is more favorable today). The piece will also interest those readers, like Lexington Green, who have an interest in Richard Nixon.

“Training the Next Generation of Historians ” by Kevlvn

A great post at ProgressiveHistorians on the future of the historical profession and the relationship that universities and professional historians could have in improving the education of K-12 students in history and their own teaching of undergraduates (the quality level of which, to put it kindly, is uneven). A commendable post and one that touches on the larger question of the mission of the American university in the 21st century.

WHY SCHOOLS KILL CREATIVITY – BUT THEY DON’T HAVE TO

I watched this highly enjoyable TED presentation by Sir Ken Robinson at Dr. Florida’s Creative Class blog. Robinson has a solid critique that he delivers with gentle humor

Reproducing my comments at Creative Class, Creativity, in my humble opinion comes in several variants – generative insight, synthesis, tweaking/tinkering and the collective, stochastic/stigmergic, version of tweaking you see in open-source and/or market based “accumulated wisdom” forms of cultural evolution. They are not all the same thing nor do they, in my very limited experience of reviewing studies, look the same in MRI brain studies of cognitive tasks

Public education is not currently designed to promote any of these forms of creativity, though some instructors do. Instead the cognitive emphasis is on recall and at best, application and analysis. Certainly useful thinking skills but not the only ones students should have in their kit.

The good news is that these forms of creativity are not that hard to teach students to practice but the incentives to do so aren’t there for teachers or professors. With the former group, NCLB pressure mitigates against doing so; with the latter, the publish or perish ethic makes teaching itself an irrelevance at worst and a minor positive at best.

RECOMMENDED READING

A day late but not a dollar short. Mixing topics today.

Steve DeAngelis – ” Natural or Manmade Environmentalism?“

Steve gets top billing for his post on scientist and futurist and major “influential” Stewart Brand’s predictions of a techno-environmentalism. Any move away from the romanticist, alarmist, statist, and intolerantly authoritarian, neo-Druidism that currently prevails among many greens would be welcomed by me. As an aside, Brand earns major points from me for this unrelated argument here -in fact, it’s worth a post in its own right.

ISN The Blog – ” Mapping Nuclear Explosions“

Yes, I detonated a 100 megaton bomb in the Loop to see the blast radius extend out over the ‘burbs and Lake Michigan. Nuke your favorite city today. The disturbing aspect is on the other end of the spectrum. The small, perhaps 1/10th of a kiloton + ” backpack” nukes look more “usable” with this kind of visualization. Not sure if that is really a great idea, making tiny nuclear explosions seem more ” survivable”.

Real Clear Politics – “Coulter’s No-Brainer“

And here I thought she was talking about a bundle of sticks. On the bright side, Ann Coulter just staked her righteous claim to the imperial throne of Right Wingnutistan ( Bill Arkin is the current sovereign of neighboring Left Wingnutopotamia, having dethroned the previous ruler from the DailyKOS)

Marc Schulman – “Al Qaeda, Pakistan and the Taliban “

Marc is always on top of the breaking news on the Terror War bringing to it analytical depth and conservative commentary that is among the best in the blogosphere. Here he highlights disturbing news on al Qaida’s reconstituted capabilities.

The Athenaeum – ““Rediscovering Islam” by Brigadier FB Ali“

The Athenaeum is Colonel Lang’s other, “literary” blog. This essay is a cri de coeur about the state of society in the Islamic world by a member of the elite.

Next, an unusual and somber recommendation:

As some of you are already aware, one of my great blogfriends, Dan of tdaxp, suffered an untimely loss of his father, who passed away last week. Dan shared his grief in many, frequently touching and deeply reflective, posts. I would like to offer my formal condolences to Dan and his family and thank him for sharing his thoughts in such a terrible time.

That’s it.

THE GLORIOUS ETRUSCANS

Fabulous post by Dave Schuler at The Glittering Eye, ” Who were the Etruscans?“. Dave delves into the history, linguistics and art of mighty Rome’s Northern predecessor:

“The Etruscan language

What we know of the Etruscan language comes from inscriptions and “bilinguals”” like the gold inscription at right. A number of Roman writers testified that the Etruscans had a substantial literature but no extensive texts in the language have been found to date. The Etruscan language was written, like Latin and Greek, in an alphabet derived from the Phoenician. Deciphering the texts has not been so much a problem of determining what the letters were as of what the words meant.

The prevailing wisdom on the Etruscan language has been that Etruscan is not an Indo-European language and, indeed, until quite recently Etruscan was believed to be a “linguistic isolate”—a language with no known affinities. More recent scholarship has suggested otherwise. In 1998 the German scholar Helmut Rix published a paper that demonstrated relationships between Etruscan and a number of other languages including Rhaetic, another extinct language of northern Italy, Eteocypriot, a language of Iron Age Cyprus, and Lemnian, a language spoken on the island of Lemnos, interesting in light of the quote from Thucydides cited above”

A must read post for lovers of ancient history and cultures.