A useful general model in which every aspect
of humanity makes sense
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Feedback Response
Any complex system which continues for some time, and therefore nearly all such systems now around us, must respond to and accommodate changes in its environment (in this ever-changing world and universe of ours). Especially, it must relate to how the world around it responds to it and to what it is doing. Especially, then, it has to perceive and adapt to feedback, i.e., “reinforcement.”
- This responding-to-feedback is a necessary characteristic of all enduring complex systems, living and non-living, not only animal and human. This, therefore, describes a natural law of physics.
- By definition a continuing complex system, adapting in due proportion to its feedbacks, is basis for the infinite range of manifestations of: behavior; fractals, Mandelbrot Sets. (You and I are utterly gorgeous Mandelbrot Sets!)
- Within the field of animal and human behavior, this natural law is known as the Law of Effect, or psychology’s prime law: “You get more of what you reinforce.”
- As more and more of “the stuff of the Universe” gets caught up in complex and reiterative arrangements, we can appreciate that this same “first law” also defines the physics of how the Universe has organized itself into its incredible architectures and articulations. (Understanding thus how things are and how things work says back to us from that wondrous architecture what we are as living human beings, and how we might find our way into better times and situations….)
Moiré pattern by Jacob Yerex
Feedback Loops
Such feedback-loops or reinforcement principles account for this law of both development and learning: what we put out shapes us far more than does what we take in.
- Maria Montessori’s famous method largely creates spontaneous learning from rigged environments.
- Omar Khayyam Moore — design and clarify responsive environments as a main means of teaching, especially teaching of the most important skills and content.
- Santiago Ramon y Cajal (the generally acknowledged father of neuroanatomy) — what most shapes and develops a nerve or the brain itself is not genes, not nutrients, not even stimulus though these all factor in. It is that stimulus which comes in the form of feedback on the organism’s own actions.
- Confirmed by Marion Diamond — Without being part of the action and even instigating actions, even highly stimulated brains atrophy just as much as do the unstimulated brains of rats raised or held in isolation! Looking on doesn’t do it — rats have to get their feedbacks directly in order for their brains to develop.
Prime Laws
We can identify two derivative “prime laws” of development for the brain and nervous system. These two laws are clearly special cases of the above Law of Effect:
- First Prime Law of Development of Brain and Nervous System: First, find what is working. Go to the boundaries of what’s working and practice there, toward more and more refined responses. Example: if you can barely tell by touch in your pocket two different denominations of coin, practice there progressively (the feedback of successive “right” and “wrong” outcomes) toward the point where you can distinguish by touch heads from tails or even read by touch the date on a coin.
In the extreme case of someone so brain-damaged that he’s long-term comatose — even if the response is so tiny that only biosensory equipment can detect it, or if that response has to be elicited by stimuli and pattern-interrupts — reinforce those responses, selectively in the direction-of-response which calls more and more of the person back onto line. See a case history of reaching someone who suffered long-term coma in Winsights No. 35.
- Second Prime Law of Development of Brain and Nervous System: Feeling before action. First get perception into a situation (ability to perceive your feedback), then you can act upon it…as in getting feeling back into a leg which had “gone to sleep” on you, before you can use it with normal skill. It’s a matter of how to create or refine any sensory function (channel for your feedback or reinforcements so that your behavioral “prime law” feedbacks “work” in that context) so as to exert effects through and in relation to that area of perception and function.
When we take these three prime laws together in the same context, suddenly we are directed to see some surprisingly obvious ways to improve normal and high-level human performance and capability in all fields. It becomes immediately obvious that there are ways to improve virtually every case of retardation and/or brain damage, from mild to profound to even the long-term vegetative and comatose.
Are all phenomena in all fields ordered by a few interrelated simple patterns or “laws,” concepts easily recognized and understood? What can we do once we “get more perception into these?” Just the three laws cited above, taken together, are the core of a system now in design to meaningfully convey, in just a few pleasant hours, the first 12 years or so of school math to pre-schoolers. — Better than those 12 years because at the core will be built up a direct sense of quantity, numbers and of relationships instead of rote operations….
As these systems develop, it’s become increasingly evident that virtually all skill and performance areas of human activity may readily be similarly addressed. And that is just from focusing on those three interrelated laws!
A Sector of Useful Applications
When you pay attention to and respond to your own perceptions, you reinforce:
- those particular perceptions themselves, and
- the behavior of being perceptive.
How creative you are now is a matter of how often you’ve been responding to or at least making note of your own creative ideas as they come. (They come all the time in all of us, but are usually edited out before we notice them.)
How perceptive you are now is a matter of how often you’ve been responding to or at least making note of your own perceptions/observations. (We encourage you to carry with you, and use, the convenience of a pocket notepad or recorder.)
When you pay attention to and respond to your own more subtle, sensitive perceptions, you reinforce more onto line with your immediate verbal consciousness the remote-from-consciousness subtler, more comprehensive sectors of your own brain and mind, adding their intelligence (permanently) to that intelligence you already have online. Techniques to facilitate this process include the brain-integrative activity of:
- Image Streaming 10 to 20 minutes at a time, practice several hours of Image Streaming and you will have mastered the basic skills needed to make other forms of visual thinking work for you, as well as gaining improved intellectual performance, increased IQ scores, and heightened creativity.
- And, together with Image Streaming, a system of back-up procedures — described in the quickbook, You Are Brighter Than You Think, which guarantees that everyone is able to learn and practice Image Streaming. No one has to be left behind who doesn’t want to be. No one.
Most creativity training programs work to bring conscious a few of the understandings and informational contents of the brain’s subtler, more comprehensive reaches. Project Renaissance is bringing online to consciousness not only those contents but those brain resources themselves, to enrich our everyday intelligence.
Path toward order and natural law
Summing up: — Even if the universe had a beginning in chaos, it necessarily fell toward order. Those arrangements which “worked,” and so remained in effect, became the patterns we now are learning to recognize as “natural laws.”
Under these natural laws, whatever systems may exist at a given time or which emerged (stochastically or otherwise!) from chaos, successfully adapted to the natural laws which bore upon them — or yielded their elements back to the soup of chaos, to eventually fuel or become other, different systems.
The most widely recognized behavioral law other than that of “survival instinct” itself is inseparable from survival —the above Law of Effect. As noted, virtually all surviving complex systems do so largely through “obeying” the Law of Effect, receiving feedback (reinforcement) from their own actions and adapting accordingly. The Law of Effect is certainly not the only behavioral law worth considering (which was the error of some Behaviorists), but it certainly occupies a core position near the apex of any unified structure of natural laws which we may sometime define for the condition, dynamics and nature of all lifekind and of human beings.
One final note: the Law of Effect is useful —
- It is instructive to look closely at any given situation and question just what is being reinforced and what is not — going a long way toward predicting future outcomes.
- The most sensitive and adaptive organ in the human system is, of course, the brain. It should not be so very surprising, then, that many methods using the Law of Effect now exist to reinforce the behaviors and traits we associate with high intelligence. What is remarkable is how long it is taking us to start to use these intelligence-builders. Many of these cost nothing, are easy to learn and practice, and, like Image Streaming foremost among them, are free on the Web.
Other areas of physical natural law are especially interesting in this perspective — especially those pertaining to interference-pattern physics and to intermodulation. These may also be key to an eventual unified field theory describing all lifekind and important to physics as well. Certainly these are playing an unexpectedly huge role in the evolution of the universe toward more and more sophisticated forms of order. But because it defines so much of what “works” and what doesn’t, the Law of Effect has to be part of the centerpiece of such an eventual unified field theory.