"Last Child in the Woods" by Richard Louv

[_Jersey Girl]

I'm reading a new book regarding what author Richard Louv calls "Nature Deficit Disorder" in children being raised up in our high tech society. This is the kind of reading that interests me and I'd like to share the following quoted material with you to see what you think about it.

"Frank Wilson, professor of neurology at Stanford University School of Medicine, is an expert on the co-evolution of the hominid hand and the brain; in The Hand, he contends that one could not have evolved to it's current sophistication without the other. He says, "We've been sold a bill of goods-especially parents-about how valuable computer-based experience is. We are creatures identified by what we do with our hands."

Louv continues with Wilson:

"Much of our learning comes from doing, from making, from feeling with our hands and though many would like to believe otherwise, the world is not entirely available from a keyboard. As Wilson sees it, we're cutting off our hands to spite our brains. Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump, he says, "because these students have so little real-world experience; they've never siphoned anything, never fixed a car, never worked on a fuel pump, may not even have hooked up a garden hose. For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods, has been replaced by indirect learning, through machines. These young people are smart, they grew up with computers, they were supposed to be superior-but now we know that something's missing."

What do you think about this? Do you think that given the lifestyle of today's families, the accessiblity of and dependency on technology in our homes and schools, that children are missing a critical piece of learning in preparation for life and life's work? Are we, as adults, presenting them with a trade off between outdated memorization of fact and learning via virtual reality? Are they missing out on the development of concept construction through hands on experiential learning?

Jersey Girl

[_Gadianton]

in The Hand, he contends that one could not have evolved to it's current sophistication without the other.

I think that's pretty obvious. But his conclusion doesn't follow. Just because a certain selective pressure and set of skills were necessary for us to evolve a couple million years ago, doesn't mean we've lost our humanity or our ability to improve the world if we're not constantly honing those skills today.

Much of our learning comes from doing, from making, from feeling with our hands

Funny enough, the last time I heard this argument was from the key villain/murderer in the horror flick, "Hostel". He argued in the beginning, before his identity was revealed, that we've alienated ourselves from ourselves because we don't experience our food with our hands properly.

As Wilson sees it, we're cutting off our hands to spite our brains. Instructors in medical schools find it increasingly difficult to teach how the heart works as a pump, he says, "because these students have so little real-world experience

Why doesn't he make a video preaching from his backyard like Shirts did, complaining about "those darn kids" and put it up on YouTube? It also might be the case that Wilson is getting older, grumpier, and doesn't know how to communicate through an increasing age gap with his students.

For a whole generation of kids, direct experiences in the backyard, in the tool shed, in the fields and woods,

To be honest, I don't really want my kid playing around in a toolshed where she could lose a finger or get severely injured.

For all the huge American backyards of the 50's through 80's, for all the broken cars on blocks in those backyards, for all the homemade pipe bombs and experiements with M-80s, the access to tools, for all the bike riding and physical play, all America has to show for it is the Harley Davidson, the most horribly engineered, white trash motorcycle ever invented and a couple inferior car companies that always worry about bankruptcy. Whereas Japan, with so little open space that they need to have a lottery to bury someone, seems to have produced kids that understand pumps very well, better than anyone in the world.

[_harmony]

I think he was referring to the type of learning that is associated with hand's-on experience. Like playing with tinker toys or lincoln logs or blocks. Like playing pick-up basketball or baseball with the neighbor kids in the vacant lot across the street. Like playing trucks in the back yard, complete with a water hose to make the lake. Like playing fetch with the dog in the back yard or the park.

Children who grow up focused on a keyboard or a monitor/tv screen may find it difficult to interact with others, since they've never played the daily game of kickball in the vacant lot out back.

Balance in all things is what's needed, I think. A little keyboard goes a long ways; fresh air and team play cannot be replaced by a monitor.

[_CaliforniaKid]

Here's the flip side:

digital technology is changing the way people absorb information. The digital native’s brain is physically different as a result of the digital input it has received growing up, he claims.

“It has rewired itself. It responds faster. It sifts out. It recalls less.”
...
To evangelists of the digital age such as Marc Prensky, an American consultant and author, modern interactive computer games are “deep, complex experiences” that challenge the intellect far more than, say, passively watching Big Brother. Socialising through chat rooms and online forums, he argues, both requires its own etiquette and overcomes old prejudices: it doesn’t matter nearly so much what you look like. The author Steven Johnson pursues a similar argument in his book Everything Bad Is Good for You. Far from popular culture dumbing down, he says, much of it has become more challenging; he points to the intricate, multi-layered plots of modern TV series such as The Sopranos or 24, compared with the linear plots of programmes 30 years ago.

This complexity is having an effect, say academics.
...
Andy Clark, a former director of cognitive science at Indiana University, believes we should already regard ourselves as cyborgs. Our thinking no longer goes on purely inside our heads, he contends; it is intimately bound up with the tools we use. He illustrates this with the example of people using software to trawl the web for news, music, information and goods personalised to their tastes. Where do the “thinking” and analysis stop? As the interfaces between people and computers become more sophisticated, he believes, “It will soon be harder than ever to tell where the human user stops and the rest of the world begins.”

Will this lead to greater intelligence? Some might argue that is already happening. In what is known as the Flynn Effect, underlying IQ scores — before adjustments to keep the average steady — have been rising for years. Nobody is sure why this is so, though few believe it is simply because we are smarter. “Otherwise you would have to conclude that people 100 years ago were all morons by our standards,” says Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University. Instead, the type of thinking we do may have changed. “It may be that there are certain kinds of abstract thinking that we get much more exposure to now, and that might simply make us better at taking IQ tests.”

Newsweek adds,

According to Small's new book, "iBRAIN: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind," a dramatic shift in how we gather information and communicate with one another has touched off an era of rapid evolution that may ultimately change the human brain as we know it. "Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."
...
The findings, to be published in the American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry, suggest that Internet use enhances the brain's capacity to be stimulated, and that Internet reading activates more brain regions than printed words. The research adds to previous studies that have shown that the tech-savvy among us possess greater working memory (meaning they can store and retrieve more bits of information in the short term), are more adept at perceptual learning (that is, adjusting their perception of the world in response to changing information), and have better motor skills.
...
there's no reason to believe the two behaviors are mutually exclusive. In fact, a 2005 Kaiser study found that young people who spent the most time engaged with high-technology also spent the most time interacting face-to-face, with friends and family. And as Small himself points out, digital natives and digital immigrants can direct their own neural circuitry—reaping the cognitive benefits of modern technology while preserving traditional social skills—simply by making time for both.

In the meantime, modern technology, and the skills it fosters, is evolving even faster than we are. There's no telling whether future iterations of computer games, online communities and the like will require more or less of the traditional social skills and learning strategies that we've spent so many eons cultivating.

[_harmony]

there's no reason to believe the two behaviors are mutually exclusive. In fact, a 2005 Kaiser study found that young people who spent the most time engaged with high-technology also spent the most time interacting face-to-face, with friends and family. And as Small himself points out, digital natives and digital immigrants can direct their own neural circuitry—reaping the cognitive benefits of modern technology while preserving traditional social skills—simply by making time for both.

Now this, I can get behind.

[_Jersey Girl]

I think he was referring to the type of learning that is associated with hand's-on experience. Like playing with tinker toys or lincoln logs or blocks. Like playing pick-up basketball or baseball with the neighbor kids in the vacant lot across the street. Like playing trucks in the back yard, complete with a water hose to make the lake. Like playing fetch with the dog in the back yard or the park.

Children who grow up focused on a keyboard or a monitor/tv screen may find it difficult to interact with others, since they've never played the daily game of kickball in the vacant lot out back.

Balance in all things is what's needed, I think. A little keyboard goes a long ways; fresh air and team play cannot be replaced by a monitor.

I haven't read further up the thread than this, but if you're referring to the "Hand" comments in Louv's books, you're right on the money. What Louv attempts to do, and I feel does it well, is demonstrate the value of nature related play (real play, not adult constructed play), the impact of shrinking green spaces to the development of the child's body, mind and general sense of well being, and also the real fact that children are being taught (via adult behavior and legislation) that nature is something apart from them and something to be feared.

That may have not been apparent by the OP. I'll post more about this as I have time.

Think about the reduction of time in our school systems for outdoor learning and recreation via recess.

Think about the homework load placed on children as young as kindergarten who already spend a full day at school except for those who are in part-day kindergarten. When adults take work home with them, we caution them against burn-out, yet we do it and allow it to be done to our developing children on a daily basis.

Think about communities/schools/parents/educators that prevent children from doing what children will naturally do in an outdoor environment: climbing trees, using skateboards on sidewalks, tinkering around in ponds and such as that. We teach our children to fear outdoor play because of our adult fear of injury and lawsuit.

I'll post more about this later.

[_Jersey Girl]

Gad, I'll reply to this one part of your comments because I don't believe you are in touch with the topic nor do you have the benefit of understanding what constituted play and the value of it prior to the commercialization and institutionalization of childhood.

To be honest, I don't really want my kid playing around in a toolshed where she could lose a finger or get severely injured.

And that's where you go wrong. If you taught your child how to use tools or if your child was male, you might have a different answer. You will pass your fear on to your child. Are tools something to be afraid of or respected? Tools, REAL tools, are a part of good early childhood classrooms and have been for many several years. My classroom, for example, is equipped with a work bench, vise, hammers, rubber mallets, common and phillips head screw drivers, roofing nails (we start with golf tees hammered into pumpkins before hamming real nails into real wood) and I'm looking for a good manual drill...and we've always had real shop goggles. We use knives on a regular basis, metal graters, grinders, sifters and all sorts of things.

No one has lost a finger in 20+ years.

You also misunderstand what is being referred to by the "toolshed" remark. Do you think he's promoting the children be let loose with power tools? No. He's talking about construction of loose parts.

My classroom is filled with just such objects. Wood, PVC pipes and joints, things that children can use to construct any number of things. Their construction itself provides me with insights to their development.

There are few objects that you would consider toys. Why? Because human beings play at human life in exactly the same way that animals do. That same play is what prepares them for life.

Try watching them. Take away the electronics, the Dora's, DVD's and contrived crap that is marketed to young children and their familes...and watch what children do naturally when they are permitted to be their authentic selves.

Are children who spend several hours a day "plugged in" missing something important?

[_Jersey Girl]

Another quote from Wilson:


Within the text you will see a reference to Lev Vygotsky, whose constructivist theory is a main pillar of approaches in early childhood and especially for those who engage in facilitative learning vs instructional learning for young children.

Harvard Education Newsletter, Jan/Feb 2000.

http://www.edletter.org/past/issues/2000-jf/forum.shtml

Frank Wilson's Talk

Frank Wilson: Thank you very much, Ed. And welcome to you all. It is a great pleasure and an honor for me to be here this evening.

The title of the talk that you came to hear this evening is "Neurobehavioral Implications for Hominids Related to Morphologic Transformation of the Hamate Metacarpal Articulation since the Pliocene." [Audience laughter.] However, I think, "Handmade Minds" works for the title, so if you want to hear either of those talks, I welcome you to stay.

Let me begin by telling you what I guess is the important take-home message that came to me after the years that I worked on this book. Ed's right: one of the reasons that I feel so strongly about this message is because I think something is happening in our education system that misses the point and the lesson of biology in learning.

There are something like 25 million years of experience and engineering behind whatever the processes were that are unknowable, but were profoundly important in shaping hominid life, and another five million years or so of experience specifically related to life in the upright posture. And as Darwin said, we have the opportunity, with the hands freed from the need to bear body weight and the need to support the body in locomotion, to do something else with the hands. I've always had it in my head as I've thought about this that a couple of things might have happened to the early hominids. They might have come down from the trees, and the upper limbs could have turned into something like the kangaroo paw. They might have turned into the upper limb of the gorilla, which is architecturally a magnificent structure, but relatively indolent in terms of its activities. Gorillas, for example, have never been known to use tools.

What was different about the experience of our earliest ancestors was that they weren't large or aggressive animals, as far as we know, but they got big and fat in the trees and fell out. And after that, they had to learn to do something in order to survive. The story of the evolution of the human brain and human body is really, I think, the story of the solution that was found in that process over some millions of years.

So here's the bullet: for the hominids who started an experimental life about five million years ago, evolution favored specializations of hand anatomy and specialized operations in the brain to control the movements of the hands, and to give it a central role in the creation of a new domain of cognition. And that's what our life really is.

Steven Pinker, the director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, refers to language as an instinct. I don't quite agree with him, but let's say I agree that the compulsion to learn languages is very strong. For me, the same term, "compulsion to learn," applies to humans in relation to the hand. That is that we have acquired a species level-a heritable trait, a compulsion to create a smart hand, a knowing, inventive, and articulate hand, a part of the body with a privileged role in action, cognition, and communication. And I do think that the Robertson Davies quote from his book, What's Bred in the Bone, is appropriate: "The hand speaks to the brain as surely as the brain speaks to the hand."

The important corollary, and one reason I am happy to be speaking to you today, is that I believe that we have an opportunity now, and perhaps an obligation, to understand that for the better part of the first 10 years of human life there are processes that are critical for a child's development that are related to the use of the hand, just as the first four to five years are critical for the development of language functioning and capability.

Charles Bell, a hero of mine, wrote a book called The Hand in 1833 in which he talked about the developmental process in which hand movements become linked to vision and to understanding and learning during the first year of life.

Lev Vygotsky wrote about the same process 60-70 years ago--the development of language and cognition in relation to the handling and labeling of objects. We now have a growing body of research coming from a number of quarters, including the work of Patricia Greenfield at UCLA, who has been studying children in object manipulation and puzzle-solving. Other researchers have been looking at what are called "exploratory procedures," movements that children use to touch and manipulate objects that are quite specific and which are essential movements in the development of handling and precision handling, exploratory handling, of objects.

There's also the work of Hans Forssberg in Sweden, who has found that the simple process of reliably holding a glass of milk-a big task for a child-takes almost four years. Something profoundly important is going on as the child begins to learn to manipulate real objects in the real world. And that process, in my estimation, is one we need to understand much better than we do now. We particularly need to understand it now because of this insane rush to replace these experiences with supposedly information-loaded experiences, which are considered somehow better for children, for reasons that I do not understand-actually I'm afraid that I do understand them, but we won't spend time talking about that.

Now, let me just give you a quick tour of where I hope to go tonight. I'm first going to talk a little bit about my experience with musicians then I'm going to tell you about my experience in Düsseldorf, where I met a young man who made me realize that musicians are not the only people who are passionate about what they do. The next thing I want to talk about is a short tour that I made through anthropology. I made the mistake about a year before The Hand was done-or when I thought it would be done-of reading Donald Johanson's book, Lucy. A couple of questions occurred to me, and after I made some phone calls I ended up at Arizona State University with a woman named Mary Marzke, who has spent something like 10 years looking at the evolution of the hominid wrist. She set me back a couple of years.

After getting the anthropology story down, I spent some time learning a little about grips. And we'll talk about grips, because that's something that's really very important in understanding why the human brain has become the way it is, and why it takes so long for us to become adept at using our hands in skilled action.

Then I want to talk a bit about the implications of this newer evolutionary model for understanding the human developmental process, human ontogeny. I'm going to introduce you to someone whose name I hope will become familiar to you if it is not already, a British psychologist named Henry Plotkin. Finally, I will talk about ideas in relation to movement.

The beginning for me, as Ed said, was in my years working with musicians, which started an I became interested in my daughter's capabilities, in what it is about the brain that makes it possible for the fingers to move the way they do. That was in the late 1970s, the early 1980s, when a lot of work was being done in neurophysiology, tracking sensory-motor processes in skilled movement. So, it was a good time to be interested in that question.

I decided I couldn't really understand it unless I took piano lessons myself, so I did. And it was a horrible experience for my family, but it was a good experience for me. I even wrote a book about it called Tone Deaf and All Thumbs?.

In the process of doing this work, it became known around our area that there was a doctor who knew something about music, so if you had a hand problem he would be a good guy to talk to. And I started seeing musicians as patients.

I became interested in what we now call the Graffman-Fleischer problem. In 1982 pianists Gary Graffman and Leon Fleischer went public with their hand problems. It turned out they both had something called focal dystonia and had lost the ability to control their hands. I started taking films of musicians with the problem and showing these video clips. At one of the talks I gave, a man in the audience, a guitar player, fainted. I thought, This is odd. We're just watching somebody moving their fingers across a keyboard, and this person reacted as if it was an ax murder. Then it happened a second time, and a third time.

I eventually realized that I didn't understand what it meant to be someone who lived a life in music, to see and to be in the presence of someone who was tortured in the process of trying to do that-that there was some emotional connection that had developed in relation to the act of music-making that was so deep that I could witness it. I couldn't actually understand it.

It was that emotional connection, the process of being a musician, that I wanted to understand. The questions were, Are musicians just professional emoters? Are they emotional about everything? If something goes wrong, do they simply fall over in a dead faint? Or is there something about using the hand as a primary tool of expression and development that over a lifetime forges something inside, an emotional connection with work, an emotional basis for learning, that really transforms people?

At that point I met Anton Bachleitner. When he was eight years old he saw a puppet show in a little town in southern Germany called Bad Tölz. And he knew instantly that that was what he was going to do with his life. He went to the guy who owned the theater and said, "I'm going to be a puppeteer." And, in fact, he has spent the rest of his life doing exactly that.

It isn't just a matter of his being enchanted with children and doing shows. First of all, marionette theater in Europe is a big deal. It's very serious theater not simply children's theater. Bachleitner's father was a carpenter and he thought being a puppeteer was a very bad idea because you can't make money carving wood. But Bachleitner became a master wood carver. He carved the puppets, he trained himself to be a marionetteer, he developed a company, he began to select plays, and the story goes on and on. He's now in his forties. His own son is now 12 and is doing the same thing.

It's an extraordinary experience to see [Bachleitner's performance of] The Magic Flute. There are, I think, eight puppets flying around on the stage. To see how this happens and to trace this back through all the years of his own childhood and his development tells us a story about how these kinds of passions and skills evolve over a lifetime. [One can] get a sense of what it's like to be a non-musician who has developed a highly personal expression through the hands.

I want to talk a bit about the deep history of this ability. Let me tell you the story about Lucy-I'm sure plenty of you here know that story. Donald Johanson was a graduate student in anthropology, and in the early 1970s he and a group of people on a fellowship went to the Afar region of Ethiopia. It's just north of the area where Louis and Mary Leakey had been working since the 1930s.

When the Leakeys were working the Rift Valley, they were working on a hunch that an early ancestor of homo-species would be found not in Asia, but in Africa. And, against all odds, they expected to find an early pre-homo hominid.

And, in fact, in about 1960, Mary Leakey did find the first African homo-species, Homo-Habilis. But Johanson found the second Australopithecine, the first pre-homo-species. The Leakeys had been working in the Rift Valley looking for this human ancestor for well over 30 years. And Johanson, this upstart graduate student, on the last day of his first field expedition, right after he got his his Ph.D., saw this bit of arm bone sticking up out of the dirt, looked at it, and began digging. And before the end of the day, they had this skeleton and they knew that because of the structure of the pelvis and the knee joint that this was a habitual biped. That night in their camp they were listening to the Beatles, "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds." And so this became Lucy.

One of the remarkable things about this skeleton is that there's so much of it. Paleo-anthropology typically turns out to be a corner of one tooth or a corner of part of the mandible. But to have this much is almost unheard of. And, indeed, to have parts of the hand present is also almost unheard of. There are very, very few fossil remains of hand bones. I guess they make good hors-d'oeuvres for hyenas. I'm not sure. But they don't last.

Within a few years they had recovered almost 20 more individuals or parts of individuals, and had actually collected this many bones from the hands of the Australopithecines, which were now called Australopithecus afarensis, Afar-- the region of afarensis being the region of Afar. And Australopithecus was the name assigned to this, meaning "southern ape."

When Mary Marzke began to work with this hand, she was struck, as I had been, by a comment made by one of the anthropologists who looked at it that the hand was really not like a chimp hand. It was sort of modern. What was modern about the hand was on the radial or the thumb side of the hand; the thumb itself was actually considerably longer than a chimp thumb in relation to the rest of the fingers.

What Marzke described was that the fingers could actually be pulled apart and rotated around the axis. With the long thumb, Lucy and her family would have been capable of what she called a "three jaw chuck," a special grip that would have allowed the grasping of a regular-sized stone. And because of other features of the skeleton, Lucy would have been capable of doing pretty much everything that a pitcher on a baseball mound can do. Because she had a fully brachiating arm-that is, she was capable of throwing overhead-she had full range of this movement: pronation and supernation. And she also had musculature and attachments in her pelvis that would have allowed axial swiveling, so that an acceleration and deceleration movement would have been possible.

So, it was quite possible that Lucy could have had, as a new behavior that would have been valuable, the ability to throw stones. Now we don't know how much of this was done. Some of you may know William Calvin's book, The Throwing Madonna, which postulates that the beginning of hemispheric specialization came with over-arm throwing and hunting.

The neurologic side is that in order to throw accurately, you have to be able to control the timing of release. So this behavior that was important to the animal and had real survival value also required something very special: the ability to control, at the millisecond level, the exact muscular responses that would allow accurate placement of an over-arm thrown stone. This was really the beginning of this process.

But one of the things that Lucy did not have was the ability to move the pinky side of the hand toward the thumb. We've all been trained and conditioned to think of ourselves as having a hand that's unique because we have an opposable thumb. Well, in fact, we are not remotely the first species to have an opposable thumb. What we do have that no other hominid has is an opposable pinky and ring finger.

So you have essentially the capability of forming an extremely mobile, sculpted form that can adapt itself to almost any shape. But there's something else. The fourth and fifth fingers in the human hand actually rotate toward the base of the thumb, and the thumb is really quite long compared to that of a chimp.

The other thing that we gain with this is a whole series of what are called precision handling movements. I don't know when we started handling textiles and manufacturing thread, but this, along with many other tasks, was made physically possible because of the biomechanics of the hand, which developed over literally millions of years of human life.

I think one has to say that the hand and brain must have co-evolved as a system. What skills were built into this system really depended upon, and were in fact created out of, countless interactions between people and their environment, natural materials and objects, over literally millions of years.

So, you can say I think, that the hand built the brain as much as the brain built the hand. We know that both statements are equally true, according to the principle of co-evolution, which was actually first stated by Sherwood Washburn in 1960:

The structure of modern man must be the result of change in terms of natural selection that came with the tool using way of life. From the evolutionary point of view, behavior and structure form an interacting complex with each change in one affecting the other. Man began when populations of apes, about a million years ago, started the bi-pedal, tool-using way of life.

The other thing that has happened is we've manufactured objects that exist in a dazzling array and variety for our own use. We have manufactured tools, we have manufactured entertainment devices, we have manufactured a technology that is based upon our understanding of what the hand can do.

I've spent maybe 20 years trying to understand the relationship of the hand to this instrument, the piano. Homer Smith wrote a book called From Fist to Philosopher, in which he talked about pianists. He said that the pianist is the summit of mammalian evolution, and he talked about the number of muscular contractions that must be possible in a pianist who's playing the Schumann "C Major Tacata." I don't know how he calculated that, but he guessed that it was something like 400 individual muscle contractions per second. What was the evolutionary or selection pressure that created the need to be able to articulate these movements with this degree of precision?

My answer to this question is that it was the control of movements in gestural communication, such as that used in sign language, that probably predisposed us to be able to develop the kind of physiological control of rapid, precise movements with a communicative intent, which we now see represented in the skilled movements of the musician.

When I went to England to talk to Henry Plotkin, I went because he'd written a book, Darwin, Machines, and the Nature of Knowledge. It is an extraordinary book, and there had been no book like it in cognitive psychology. The book became important to me because I had come to wonder what it is that we owe to, or what it is that we gain from, the history of hand/brain co-evolution. There can be no doubt that our hominid past left its mark on all of us in the form of extremely powerful rules that define the unfolding of individually distinctive perceptual motor skills and intelligence. Each of us begins life crying to see the world, to learn from it, and to forge our own personal strategies for surviving in it in rather particular ways.

The human genome dictates that at the species level we are all the same, while at the individual level we are all different. How does that work? Plotkin says it's done with what he calls heuristics. By that he means inherent, individually specific physical and mental capacities by which we tune into and react to important conditions or events in the environment. He uses the term heuristic because he wants us to understand that we are not only equipped to survive physiologically, but also to learn how to survive behaviorally in the face of both certain and uncertain dangers.

Since heuristics is an uncommonly stubborn word for people to cozy up to, I will tell you that Plotkin also adds what his notion of knowledge is. He says knowledge is any state in the organism that bears a relationship to the world. A bullfighter's knowledge is the sum of multiple integrations of joint angles, muscular attachments at the hip, in the spine and the knees, the ankles and the feet, all transformed into poised synergies of movement.

This knowledge also includes a thirst for adrenaline, a capacity for total concentration, and just in case the bull is unimpressed, the flawless chemistry of clotting factors and antibodies in the blood. The bullfighter's heuristic, in other words, provides for advanced preparedness not only of the hand and the eye, but also for a wide range of arousal and protective mechanisms reaching down to the cellular level.

And the bullfighter who has been gored by a bull has knowledge that goes even deeper. Not only does he or she have the words el toro in the head and a memory and powerful emotions connected with that incident informing his or her own internal representation of the animal, but a scar on the chest wall as well. And that scar represents the bull. It's a registration on and in the body of the bullfighter, a permanent reference to and a symbol of an encounter with it.

There's a great book by a Canadian named Kieran Egan, The Educated Mind, in which Egan talks about what he calls "the romantic stage of learning." This is a period in pre-adolescence when a child suddenly becomes aware of the larger world. And I don't mean just the world outside. I mean the word writ large. It's a time when kids see someone doing something and they say, "I could do that."

This is a biologic time. It's a sort of burgeoning moment of consciousness about adult life, and it has all of the power of youthful sexuality. There's no way of predicting where it's going to go, any more than you can predict where a crush is going to go. But when it happens, it's a big deal.

Serge Percelly was the son of two Belgian circus performers; he's the fifth generation of performers. I met him when his parents allowed him to come on a trip for the first time, when he was about 13. He said this was the first time he'd seen a juggling act:
I saw one of these jugglers, and I was just fascinated. I was amazed by it. And I knew it was something that I wanted to do. I was hypnotized. It wouldn't go out of my head. I didn't know if I had the talent. But after I saw him, before even trying, I knew that that was what I wanted to do, and I knew it without knowing if I actually could do it.

And he said, "I didn't even wait to buy balls. I started with stones." That's interesting, the genetics of seeing that stones and throwing stones was something was naturally available.

Then he said something else to me. I'd asked him how he, as a juggler, developed the ideas that he used in his act, and he replied:
Well, you know, nobody ever really invented juggling. Most of it comes by just practicing. But as you do it more, you get little ideas that just come with the practicing. When you practice seven hours a day, like I used to, you get to a certain state of mind where you just do whatever goes through your head. You just try anything. You really don't care what goes where. You just try things; you experiment.

I think that there is something about the process of involving oneself in learning with the hand that generates what we call ideas.

I want you to think about the complexity of Plotkin's idea of heuristics-that we have a mind and a body that we grow up with, and what we do with this physical structure, and what we do with the culture in which we are embedded, and what we do with the technology, which we spend our lives adapting to, turns out to be a very personal journey for all of us. It's subject to remarkable misinterpretation, and it's also a subject of wonder.

[_Jersey Girl]

Many thanks to mod's who haven't seen fit to jettison this thread to the Old Testament forum. Feel free to assume that we are discussing LDS children.

:-)

[_Jersey Girl]

CK's Newsweek link:

"Perhaps not since early man first discovered how to use a tool has the human brain been affected so quickly and so dramatically," he writes. "As the brain evolves and shifts its focus towards new technological skills, it drifts away from fundamental social skills."

Do you see this as a plus in favor of overall human development?

If so, why?