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Balancing Act: Controlling Your Limbic
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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.

O

The extreme form of this extinction
of genius, in our schools

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.

O

"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"?

O

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:
An example, Dear Reader, of the power of the physical attitudes of the body in determining what the limbic tells the cortex to do with a stimulus, is this simple demonstration. Please stand now, with feet about two feet apart, slump-shouldered. Gaze slack-jawed at the ceiling, and say (or try to say) crisply, "I'm a brilliant genius!!!"

Now pull your feet together, straighten into a much more alert and crisp physical posture, and say that again.

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.

O

Ways to Improve

In no particular order, we can list a few possible intervention points:

  1. Improved posture while learning; improved posture in the classroom. Modify furniture to induce more appropriate physical attitudes. Research, discover, and explore contrast between the physical attitudes of genius and one's own physical attitudes, as in the Borrowed Genius procedure.

  2. Use contexts from which you — or students — may "search and describe" inner and outer perceptions, without the direction of Socratically acute questions. (Half of the methods given in this Project Renaissance website introduce such design contexts.)

  3. Reintroduce emotion, the language of the limbic, into lesson content. (Emotion and controversy have been stripped from education by competing public pressures.)

  4. Adopt procedures and programs that lead students (and teachers) to discover or rediscover their own genius. Address the feelings experienced when their/our prior precocities were being extinguished. Cultivate appetites and gusto for learning.

  5. Determine ways to relate, or even to sublimate-in, intellectual and aesthetic drives to the physical appetite structures of the brain, to an even greater extent than now. How? Possibly, as with thousands of various "disciplines," using fasting or other manipulations of physical appetite to heighten mental performance. At the very least, to defend instances of high intellectual endowment from such threats as appetite suppressants and against times of physiological appetite change.

  6. Carefully realign contexts, classrooms, students, teachers, administrators, or parents (!) in ways that elicit extra efforts and challenges to recover intellectual balance. Let ample and free discussion follow.

  7. Restore Socratic or at least perceptual search-and-describe procedures as a preferred method of "education" — working with, rather than despite, individual, societal, and group contexts.

  8. Amygdalal and hippocanthal functions, not addressed in this article, suggest among other things a careful positive reinforcement of some of the component behaviors which come together to express giftedness in relation to physical-appetite brain structures. This is not so much learning behavior a la behaviorism as extrinsic reward systems.

  9. Establish a learning context in which selected spontaneous behaviors of the learner are reinforced for persistence, rather than interrupted and squelched. Much of the original Montessori Method was based upon this. That method successfully taught "unteachable" poverty-class children for decades before being transplanted to America as an affluent-class phenomenon. That takes on added meaning in relation to the common finding that highly gifted adults and commonly regarded "creative geniuses" generally reflect high levels of "compulsiveness" in their psychological profiles, and that their high contributions historically come mostly through utter persistence in the face of discouragement and punishment.

  10. We should develop and enrich a vocabulary and language of feelings. Feelings are a primary processing language of the limbic. This can bring into better reach of our conscious mind and intent the true core of where our actual choices and decisions are made, in contrast to our conscious choices and decisions, which are usually overridden by those made in our limbic, unawares. Note in this connection the above principle of formulating contexts, within which one may "search-and-describe" perceptions, through "focusing" or some of the Project Renaissance procedures. This aspect has enormous implications for self-improvement, career-building, education, and control of addictions, among other issues.

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.

O

Comments to
Win Wenger



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