Neuroscience and the Creativity of Connections

What a neuroscientist can teach you about life.

Since as usual The New Yorker has decided not to post the full text of the best article in it's latest issue, I'm going to quote from it liberally. (As a side note, this drives me nuts. I just don't get it. If you ask me reading The New Yorker in print is 100 times more enjoyable than reading it online because of the length of the articles. Seems like the website should just have everything and be used as a way to promote print subscriptions -- which should cost more. But that's neither here nor there, they can do whatever they want.)

Anyway, the article Brain Games is a profile of behavioral neurologist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran who has made a number of kind of crazy advances in neuroscience (including the only real progress on phantom limb pain). First off, Ramachandran's general approach is pretty amazing. He recognizes the power of illusion to solve brain problems (reminds me a little of the neuroscience of magic article I pointed to a few weeks ago). Take, for instance, his solution to phantom limb pain:

In his office in Mandler Hall, Ramachandran positioned a twenty-inch-by-twenty-inch drugstore mirror up right and perpendicular to the man's body, and told him to place his intact right arm on one side of the mirror and his stump on the other. He told the man to arrange the mirror so that the reflection created the illusion that his intact arm was the continuation of the amputated one. Then Ramachandran asked the man to move his right and left arms simultaneously, in synchronous motions - like a conductor - while keeping his eyes on the reflection of his intact arm. "Oh, my God!" the man began to shout. "oh my God, Doctor, this is unbelievable. For the first time in ten years, the patent could feel his phantom limb "moving," and the cramping pain was instantly relieved

First off, holy crap. Second off, basically what Ramachandran realized that was the phantom pain was worst for people who had an immobile limb for sometime before it was amputated. It turns out that while the limb was immobile "a kind of 'learned paralysis' was burned into the brain's circuitry, as repeated commands from the patients' brains to move the limb were met with touch, visual, and nerve evidence that the limb could not move. When the limb was later amputated, the patient was stuck with a revised body-image map, which included a paralyzed phantom whose neural pathways retained a memory of pain signals that could not be shut off." Total madness. Just amazing stuff.

Later on in the article Ramachandran goes onto explain his appraoch, which he calls "opportunistic."

"You come across something strange - what Thomas Kuhn, the famous historian and philosopher of science, called 'anomalies.' Something seems weird, doesn't fit the big picture of science - people just ignore it, doesn't make any sense. They say, 'The patient is crazy.' A lot of what I've done is to rescue these phenomena from oblivion."

This, maybe more than anything else in the article, made me smile. Over the last few months I've been putting some thought into building a cirriculum to help kids learn how to make stuff on the internet. Basically my feeling is that "making stuff" offers an interesting interdisciplinary opportunity for kids. While part of it is certainly learning the actual building, there are lots of other lessons you can make part of the process: From coming up with ideas to help getting the word out about them. Anyway, thinking about it a little more (and discussing it with my mom) I got to thinking about teaching really little kids where ideas come from. Essentially it's been my feeling that the best ideas really just come from people paying attention to the stuff that doesn't make any sense. While most of the world ignores or gets angry when things don't work, inventors see an opportunity to fix a problem (or at least think about why things are the way they are). This is certainly something I strive for and I really liked how simply Ramachandran stated it.

Finally, one more quote from the article to wrap things up. In his studies of synesthesia ("an intermingling of the senses that causes some people to see each letter of the alphabet in a particular color"), Ramachandran noticed that artists had a propensity towards synesthesia. He explains the link quite simply:

"What do artists, poets, and novelists have in common?" Ramachandran asked me. "The propesnity to link seemingly unrelated things. It's called metaphor. So what I'm arguing is, if the same gene, instead of being expressed only in the fusiform gyrus, is expressed diffusely through the brain, you've got a greater propensity to link seemingly unrelated brain areas in concepts and ideas. So it's a very phrenological view of creativity."

I don't even know if there's anything to say about that except yeah. Oh, and go read the whole article. I'm tempted to scan it and post it.

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Fun with Safire and Networked Learning Theory

Lot's of interesting stuff to talk about today (an incredible amount of which was in the New York times -- check my del.icio.us links). Let me start off with William Safire's last column titled "Never Retire." Safire sums up his reason for leaving to two bits of advice he's received. As he explains, "combine those two bits of counsel - never retire, but plan to change your career to keep your synapses snapping - and you can see the path I'm now taking." The first piece, never retire, is a little too far away for me to really think about, but I believe the second piece is incredibly important. My biggest worry leaving college was stagnant thinking. After spending four years being constantly fed new and (mostly) interesting information, how was I going to keep those "synapses snapping" after I was left to fend for myself?

What I found was that writing and reading blogs were a great way to keep things working. All those millions of people writing have given my brain plenty of fodder. This space has replaced the essay writing I once did for a grade, and I think it's done a damn good job. I have found new joy in committing my ideas to paper and to discovering new thinking and connections that I may have overlooked.

One of those connections, which I just discovered, is from something I wrote on a precursor to this blog. In an entry about the static nature of education I wrote:

I think the problem with teachers and teaching in general is that the information they're teaching is so static. For whatever reason, it has been determined that history will only exist as some kind of dead entity rather than something which is ever evolving. History is important because it effects the decisions we make today, that is why people should learn it. However, there is too often no mention of the fact that history is a monologue rather than a dialogue (which connects us back to Plato). It is written by those who are victorious and accounts can often be incredibly different. If history teachers refuse to accept that the world is an evolving place and their style and technique must change, then how could they ever hope to communicate the fact that history is not a static entity?

This immediately made me think about an entry I read this morning from Aaron Swartz, titled Stanford: Day 63. In the entry Swartz talks about a professor who made an example of him in a humanities by asking the class, "Why is Aaron wrong?" He writes about their confrontation after class:

I corner her afterwards to ask what’s up. She says that she talks over me because I’m the only one who talks over her, which is only somewhat convincing. She says that I purposely exaggerate things, which I deny (although I admit that language is imprecise). She explains that the goal of the course is to look at ideas, not at facts. I wonder how one can possibly have useful ideas if you ignore the facts. I could hypothesize all sort of absurd things and come to all sorts of absurd conclusions, but the clear implication of philosophy is that the hypotheticals and the conclusions are applicable to our world.

So many academics have trouble finding the line between facts and ideas. To avoid static thinking requires understanding both. Otherwise, you get caught going in circles. This can happen two ways. One possibility is that there are so many disconnected ideas that there's nothing to tether the big idea to the real world and make people believe it's possible. Otherwise, an idea can be so heavily weighted with facts that there's nothing to lift it off the ground, nothing to excite people.

The best way to make people see something is to show them the connections. That's how we think. Making connections is not a new way of thinking, however, it's more evident than ever before thanks to the giant network most of use every day. Educators need to understand and embrace this idea generally and the internet specifically. Although it often seems hopeless, there are those who get it.

I recently read an entry on Smart Mobs titled "Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age", which talks about a theory of learning that George Siemens advances in an article in the International Journal of Instructional Technology & Distance Learning. Siemens writes:

We can no longer personally experience and acquire learning that we need to act. We derive our competence from forming connections. A network can simply be defined as connections between entities. Computer networks, power grids, and social networks all function on the simple principle that people, groups, systems, nodes, entities can be connected to create an integrated whole. Alterations within the network have ripple effects on the whole.

That is an illustration of how we think that would have never existed before the internet. In fact, the internet is encouraging people to try and better understand how the brain functions. Which gets me right back to Safire. I got an email from my mother this morning telling me to read the Safire op-ed. Here's an excerpt:

Also, he's going to a foundation that focuses on brain science. As we discussed the other day, and as David Brooks wrote in his review on BLINK, I think that in the next 25 years, brain science will have more of an influence on how we view the world -- and hopefully, on how we educate -- than anything since the industrial revolution. (Remember I said that!)

I can't disagree with her (for one because she's my mom and second because she knows much more about the topic than I), but I would say that a major reason for the revolution she sees are the breakthroughs in technology and networking brought forth by the net.

Remember I said that!

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