Too well connected

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Permalink Reply by Steve Hargadon on June 5, 2007 at 3:01pm

So, I would have no trouble believing that our brain wiring is significantly impacted by the types of activities we do. And then I start wondering about all the kids whose adolescent lives have been actively involved in technologies that are new, and have to imagine that the studies of how their brains have been impacted/improved/wired differently will be fascinating.

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Permalink Reply by Rsmith on June 5, 2007 at 6:15pm

I was so suprised to see that someone else has heard of this. I first understood synaesthesia when I read about it in a Smithsonian article six years ago. I've always associated numbers with colors. One is white, two is yellow, three is red, etc. And higher numbers are a blend of colors. For example 23 is a combination of yellow and red, which makes brown.But since the number two comes first, it would be more of a yellow. And if I take certain words, like bird, I might look associate it with certain colors, like the color pink. I make that connection because pink equals the number four, and the word bird is made up of four numbers. It's a little muddled, I know, but I've always made these associations.

You asked through active participation in Web 2.0 technologies, are we all developing a new kind of sense, which may possibly be called "thinking in linking"?

I think it's too early to tell, but I can see where you're going with this. For students, however, it's almost an organic thing. I think that when they're older, we'll realize that they have been making different types of connections that we made (just as our teachers noted with us as a result of the development of computers). This is a fascinating subject. Anyone else out there have strange associations?

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on June 6, 2007 at 6:55am

Rachel,

Your post is fascinating! Have you figured out whether it runs in the family? I have a friend who has synaesthesia, and her father and grandfather also do. She is Native American, and she said that she knows other Native Americans who think this way.

Regarding the Web 2.0 activity and brain changes, I agree with Steve, that it's likely that brains of today are being actively wired in new ways. I'd really like to hear about this from the neurologists. So much information is available now that wasn't before, through brain-imaging techniques. (Recently read that violinists have different patterns of neural activity than others--if they began young enough, and pursured the instrument in depth. Violinists are of particular interest to neurologists because of the particular asymmetry involved in their hand-brain work.)

So much to think about. I'd also like to know whether there are studies of elderly people and how computer use may be impacting their neural patterns. Anyone know of such studies? One thing I have experienced through extensive use of computers is much-improved memory! (And I can hear my son piping up with, "Yeah, well, there wasn't any other direction to go, other than up, if you know what I mean...")

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Permalink Reply by Kevin on June 9, 2007 at 11:11am

Fascinating subject matter! How did the play go Connie?

I spend much time reading brain research and considering how fascinating it is that this organ is working so hard to understand it'self. I liken the use of tools like the web, computers mind-sharing tools like blogs, wikis and social portals like Classroom 2.0, to the adding of peripherals to our existing nervous system. The extension of existing senses to enhance the brain's already amazing functions. What excites me is the myriad ways I can use these technolgies to fill in holes in my understanding or to overcome or work around neural disfunction that limited me for much of my life. I believe that we are on the edge of a very exciting age that will allow people to circumvent some of their biggest challenges and become and achieve anything they can imagine. What will these amazing new tools do to fire imagination in people who felt they had none. I could spend a lot of time talking about the brain and the changes that have come and are still coming and what we could/should do to maximize the human potential in all of this rapid change. : )

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Permalink Reply by Skip Zilla on June 9, 2007 at 12:11pm

Kevin,
I remember reading a section of Arnold Weinstein's book Recovering Your Story: Proust, Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, Morrison and will quote it at length here. The section's title is

"Technology as the Voyage 'Out'"

"Marshall McLuhan argued, many decades ago, that the history of evolving media tells us about the externalizing of the human brain, the expansion of its reach. To be sure, horses and cars and trains and planes have played their role in extending our physical whereabouts in space, but the still more dramatic breakthroughts are arguably to be found in the invention of the radio, telegraph, television, and, of course, today's Internet. Each of thse venues explosively aggrandizes the outward reach of the human subject, enabling contact and communication in unheard-of ways, transcending physical proximity, yielding a kind of network that criss-crosses the planet, driven by electricity or digital technology, pushing the frontiers ever further. I think there has never been a comparable moment in history where so many people are able to access so much of the globe, expanding our parameters in a dizzying, revolutionary manner, empowering us to go further and further out. But: What about inside? How do we get there? Modern medical imaging can show us the precincts of our somatic corridors and organs in unprecedented fashion, and even though a story can be deduced from these images (sometimes a terrifying story involving cancer or disease), no one is likely to greet these pictures as their secret self."

"Doubtless the oldest technology for extending (as well as representing) human reach would be language itself: The very structures of grammar enable us to domesticate, even to colonize, time and space. We make use of verb tenses in order to represent events or projects taking place in the past, in the future, and in the conditional. Is this not time travel? Likewise, the syntactical arrangements involving subjects and objects enable us to incorporate space as well into utterance or writing, and of course adjectives and adverbs add point, nuance, specificity, and coloration to those arrangements. I am not a linguist, and these matters are exponentially more complex than I have indicated, but already it is clear that the institution of language is, in some basic sense, a carrier of the human subject, a means of transportation, a representation of our reach. Language is the instrument for going in, for chronicling and choreographing that huge realm of feeling and consciousness, memory and fantasy, that is one's ultimate 'real estate.' Can it therefore surprise anyone that stories are among the oldest means we have for saying who we are, what we are, and where we are? No one better exemplifies this impulse than Rousseau who, in the latter eighteenth century, was so painfully aware that the inner data of his life--the true reasons he did what he did, said what he said--were invisible to his fellows that he wrote his great autobiographical narrative, Les Confessions, in order to give his true measure, to bring the opaque inner record to light and language. Whether this was depiction or invention, truth or fantasy, is another matter; what counts is that writing was the great instrument for self-representation."

Weinstein's next section is titled "Fiction as the Voyage 'In'" and begins: "The novel is born out of this same need. Narrative is humankind's magical and most precious means of mapping the entire gamut of human deeds--ranging from emotion and thought to words and acts--and it thus retrieves and makes visible the shape of a life...." (I'll stop here. I've gone far enough to compose my message.)

Hopefully, this century will be, not only one of grand further extensions of human mind in outward directions, but also one of intriguing journeys inside ourselves in which each one of us can recover her/his own story and treasure it in its telling.

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on June 10, 2007 at 11:11am

Skip,

Leave it to you to find such an astounding reference for what we're discussing. How do you do this?! My synapses are firing all over the place; it makes me want to jump up and scream that we've got to get going! I do think the heart of the matter is about us becoming actively involved in storytelling and story sharing, something so simple, yet something of infinite potential. This part of your post resonates for me: "...enabling contact and communication in unheard-of ways, transcending physical proximity, yielding a kind of network that criss-crosses the planet, driven by electricity or digital technology, pushing the frontiers ever further."

How to keep the humanness in this?

How to learn our own stories, within?

And how to guide the students we teach, while we're groping for direction ourselves?

I'm going to have to reread your post several times to even begin to understand it. Thanks for "Technology as Voyage Out." You keep us all thinking.

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Permalink Reply by Connie Weber on June 10, 2007 at 10:36am

Thanks for this comment, Kevin. You and I share the interest in neurology. Where in the world are we going, with this ability to extend our brains--to increase our personal capacity? (But that word's fuzzy, because where is the "capacity" actually located, what does that word now mean?) Where are we going when we can become just a small brain in a world network of brains? I get dizzy just thinking about it, dizzier than usual.

I'm very curious about your comment regarding how new tools "fire imagination." That is a new take for me. I typically see the new tools as implementing the imagination, giving form to it. You're talking about the new tools revving it up! Let's hear more!

Regarding how new technological tools help us overcome disabilities: Doesn't it feel like the promise-land? So much is possible. Voice for the voiceless, limbs for the limbless, organization for those with organizational challenges, freedom for those too bound. This should be a forum topic right here--how people have used computers to help bust through challenges. We need to join thoughts with the Inclusion Revolution group. That's profound stuff.

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