![]()
Balancing Act: Controlling Your Limbic |
Overview We have approached genius and giftedness as functions of the physical appetite structures of the limbic brain. That ability is widely distributed in the human population, but genius and giftedness may also be viewed as matters of drive more than ability. We cited workshop training experiences where seemingly ordinary people, examining their own early childhoods, recalled episodes of suppressed genius or precocity, squelched and forgotten. They had learned it was safer to run behind than to run ahead. Would most of us be gifted, had such early episodes not extinguished our appetites for discovery? How do societies so predictably extinguish their own brightest lights? Institutions, formal and informal at all levels, like any other complex homeostatic (self-stabilizing) system, seek to conserve energy by reducing the range of variables with which they must contend. Nearly always, this takes the form of requiring people to behave predictably. In some sectors such predictability such as driving on a designated side of the road is essential. In many other sectors, little justification can be found beyond mere convenience for the institution itself whether the institution is a government agency, a school, a firm, a group of friends, or a family. Yet, by definition, creativity and giftedness and genius behave unpredictably (so far as the institution is concerned); moreover, they generate unpredictable conditions. The pain of that inconvenience, in turn, is visited upon the perpetrator of that inconvenience even when, as is sometimes the case, the institution's own survival depended upon that gifted but unpredicted act. At best, then, gifted behavior usually goes unreinforced. At worst it becomes painfully punished. Such phenomena may be so widespread that without such extinctions nearly everyone reading this report would be "exceptionally gifted." The very institutions we form to mutualize our gains may inadvertently extinguish our gains beyond a boundary point.
![]()
The extreme form of this extinction We can see further elaborations of this theme in schools. For some decades, we have lived with the consequences of a peculiar provision of Federal and state aid to education. No teacher or administrator gets more money or power (except at graduate school levels, where different dynamics apply) if Junior learns better than others. If Junior learns worse, however, more money and power are allocated into the system for compensatory efforts. This, of course, constitutes a reward for poor teaching, poor curriculum content, and poor methods. While heroic individuals are motivated by other, more intrinsic concerns, the system as a whole moves in the directions set by incentive. The European Renaissance enjoyed the Socratic method as a principal feature of schools and education. In the mid- to late-19th century, most countries, including the USA, adopted the Prussian school model, mass-educating large numbers of citizens to perform as cogs in the early industrial machine and to serve as cannon fodder. Both of these values were seen as bases for national power. Under the Socratic method, the teacher would ask a pupil such acute thought-provoking questions that the student would be forced, in seeking to answer them, to examine his internal and external perceptions and to describe what he discovered there. Thus, the exercise of the Socratic method reinforced a richness within each student's mind. This approach consistently produced genius in the populations where it was used. When schools abandoned "educating" and went to didactic teaching in the Prussian model instead, they adopted a model of pouring information and skills into tabula rasa, the virtually "empty slates" of students' minds and assessing progress in terms of the degree of failure of students to retain this poured-in information. In Socratic method, human learners were cultivated around their strengths and became, so to speak, Sequoia trees. In the tabula rasa Prussian model prevailing today, educators' attention trains on where the student "doesn't measure up." Instead of proceeding from strengths, students are mainly attuned to their shortfalls. We have nearly all become convinced, coming through such experiences, that we're not really all that good. We've been cultivated around our weaknesses and perceived shortcomings, instead of around our strengths, enroute to becoming little privet hedges instead of Sequoias.
![]() "Verification" of learning methods All human learning arrives in context. Something has meaning only in context of how it relates to other things, and/or how a change in the one thing bears upon what happens in the other things. Virtually all current educationally approved practices were validated by procedures devoid of context. Measures of effectiveness of given educative techniques were generally taken in terms of the effect on rate of (temporary) memorization of nonsense syllables and other meaningless fragments, easily quantified. Empty schooling has no relevance to human learning! We certainly do not lack ways to account for an apparent extinction of genius and giftedness in our society, especially when examining schools as institutions. Could it be that without extinguishing factors, most people might emerge "exceptionally gifted"?
![]() More on the role of the limbic brain The limbic brain, assessing the readiness of the system to handle a given stimulus, tells the cortex how to handle that stimulus whether to run with and explore it in some manner ("there's gold in them thar hills go for it!"), or whether to just "bury it under a rug somewhere and forget about it." Some of that context is the individual's own physical attitude within the body. Some of it is the "second plane of awareness" context of classroom, teacher manner, etc., in ways well addressed by Dr. Georgi Lozanov and his Suggestopedic method. Mini-demonstration: That gives you a small demonstration of the power of context working against you and for you. In that first instance, you could feel the commands relayed by the limbic, from the physical attitudes of the body, fighting even your ability to say a simple sentence! Far subtler perceptions, intellectualizations and behaviors are infinitely more susceptible to the physical attitudes of the body (especially habituated "body language"), to say nothing of Lozanov's "second plane contexts," which also operate as controlling factors. These, then, are some main elements of the emerging model in which the limbic brain dominates human learning and teaching, intellect and giftedness. In turn, we can let these few elements suggest points where the model indicates that intervention as changes in methods of educating and cultivating personal growth open new frontiers in desirable outcomes.
![]() Ways to Improve In no particular order, we can list a few possible intervention points:
These are but a few of the points where intervention could lead to greatly improved outcome, in education and career and also in general. As we understand more of the role of the limbic brain in its equilibriating and directing of the intellect, and as we grasp the implications of understandings at which we have already arrived, other key points of positive transformation should follow. It is also clear that our understandings of the cortex now must address and include the limbic, which directs that cortex. The limbic brain’s seeking of homeostasis through more and more complex living circumstances created that cortex. Already, the similarities and differences between the remarkably specialized left and right temporal lobes of the cortex begin to make greater sense than before the limbic model emerged. Many more researchers are needed to explore this field. Opportunities abound for original discovery and for major improvements to educational practice. Such discoveries can be productive for professional and career advancement. The opportunities for such discoveries are so numerous, they are easy to find. We urge further attention, whether by researchers or laymen, to what the limbic brain means and can mean to what's important in your experience.
P.S. Now that you've read this article, you are cordially invited to discover ten times more meaning and content from it than you are aware of right now. Please turn to keyboard, pen and paper, or a tape recorder, and, following the procedures of either Freenoting or Windtunnel, for some sustained rapid-flow torrential minutes record absolutely everything that comes to mind in this context, faster than you can think about or judge. Be willing to discard (afterward) a first few nonsense paragraphs to get through to some insights which will surprise you greatly.
![]() Comments to Win Wenger including its copyright notice and contact information for use with people whom you care about or wish to inform. |
Home | Mindfield index | Balancing Act | 2 | |
Contact:
Project Renaissance PO Box 332, Gaithersburg, MD 20884-0332 |
301-948-1122 Fax 301-977-4712 |
![]() |