Future Skill

Waiting for my car in the shop I picked up a Wired Magazine and was quickly involved in an article about a college curriculum for the future. What really got me excited was the hypothetical course “Applied Cognition” which was basically aimed at making brain science useful. It was described as “beginning with a sequence on neuro-rhetoric”. A class concerned with how to see through advertising and other forms of persuasion that are already making use of the relevant science. Even more important among the course objectives, “We’ll learn how emotion influences reasoning and how language influences emotion.”  Emotion is best represented visually. The feeling at the sight of the space around us is a response to its overall meaning so understanding visual perception is useful not just for awareness of how our inner image of reality is organized but for becoming aware of the emotional responses attached to overall visual patterns. This is one of the reasons art can be so important to training the brain because art trains sensitivity to emotional patterns that will lead conscious thought.

As synchronicity would have it I’d already started this essay when I read the article because as I was preparing for my classes, I was thinking about illusionism as a skill for the future, part of a large-scale use of skills developed that make practical use of all the newly available knowledge about the brain. The brain is our first tool, and now we know it’s endlessly programmable, and knowing how it works facilitates better use. Books are written about how video games train important brain functions like problem solving and navigating new areas while learning the rules of a place. This is much more useful than being able to remember lots of information; navigating the information is the more important and efficient use of our cognitive potential.  The brain has very specific expectations about what counts as real. If it gets what it expects that sense of reality can be applied to what’s imagined. You see how early layers of processing, long before you’re conscious of the mechanisms behind them, create assumptions that can actually interfere with accurate seeing. The particular discipline of illusionistic drawing and painting has the most available information because the science began with the gestalt psychologists of the mid twentieth century who focused on perception, how the brain constructs our image of the world. This image is the home to what psychologists call “tacit knowledge”, knowledge that’s difficult to express in words and is best shown, from riding a bike to a surgical technique. As a skill, illusionism enables one to communicate complex and specific information about relationships and qualities.

The fact that I’d been thinking about the importance of learning and applying brain science concurrently with other people absorbed in the topic reminds me that the patterns were emerging in the larger consciousness and I was tuned to the frequency to pick it up. That’s another skill for the future, creating opportunities for synchronicity to happen. I never take a book with me when I have to wait any more. Like at the car shop, a doctor’s waiting room recently provided me with an interesting article on the high priced art market and the stars that are now forgotten. Consciousness is always prodding us with what advances our explorations.

Hidden Forces

The Image of God

One of the last conversations I had with Kris Hjelli before he died has particularly influenced many of the thoughts I’ve had since. He believed that beneath all the problems we face in the world is human anthropocentrism, the species wide self-absorption that sees everything else on the planet as existing for our consumption. It begins with the idea of a single God in charge of all there is. The hierarchy is reproduced from top to bottom and implies control over what’s below. Separation and status on the pyramid are implicit in all aspects of the metaphor. At the pinnacle the image gives us a bigger version of ourselves, the ultimate judge of our behavior and controller of everything. The metaphor itself puts us down. Many people turn to Buddhism to find a more enlightened view of reality that is connected and compassionate, that’s respects the environment and every being as part of a connected whole. All contributions are important to the underlying intelligent consciousness that learns about material being through us. We all have a Buddha nature, the same Self beneath the separate selves, and have only to realize it. Likewise, a system based on that metaphor, that recognizes and utilizes all human gifts, could cope with the complex developments of the current global situation.

I remember hearing of a scientist who when asked if he believed in God, said

“No. What I believe is much bigger than that.”

The crisis of religions is a crisis of image. As a noun, the word ‘God’ objectifies, reduces and personifies in a way that clashes with the modern zeitgeist. So much religious art envisions God as a glorified human male, forcing a set of metaphors based on the power of an ultimate single authority that punishes deviance from his laws. But people have discovered that they don’t need an authority to be good people. Being good feels good because it connects us to others. The positive brain chemistry rewards and promotes virtuous behavior because we’re societal beings connected in myriad ways. With an image of a unified consciousness that flows through everyone, helping others is helping our own deepest self. Visionary artists to a great extent are trying to express these connections and find new ways to represent the divine flow of energy. We’re part of continuous unfolding manifestation. As artists what we show is the trail of our inquiry into underlying patterns. A recent student created a triptych that represented spiritual qualities as pure continuous energy, pulsing at many frequencies without a deity or any sense of separation. Each artist offers a fresh vision of the primal intelligence reflected in the elegant order of our material reality. It will take many different images reflecting the insights of many different minds to help people see their embeddedness in the unbroken continuum of waves and frequencies bearing the patterns of information and intelligence. Humans didn’t invent the relationships that science measures and describes, and description can get in the way of understanding by limiting what is described, thus separating it from the whole. Everything acts on everything else.

Likewise the descriptions in story-based religion can limit our conception of the underlying intelligence that needs to be visualized in a way recognizable to modern consciousness. Imagery can guide contemplation and reflection, be the finger pointing to the moon. With multiple artists working to envision divine intelligence we can build a multidimensional personal sense of our connection with the fundamental consciousness we share and harmonize with the universal flow.

Transposition

This was done in the nineties but went well with the essay about faces

Face Gazing

Anyone who has been in my class has probably heard me say, “You have
an interesting expression on your face” as a way to solicit the idea I
saw brewing there. One student even made a T-shirt with that written
on it and then the class talked about how it functioned as a way to
open conversations. Being able to read faces is essential knowledge to
living in a world of people. Face expert Paul Ekman says it’s key to
determining the danger or safety of our surroundings. We see how
people feel about what they see behind us. Others broaden our
perspective with what we can’t see for ourselves. We see a certain
expression and know from the inside what that means. Powerful response
instincts geared to survival are hard wired in. So we see and respond
to facial expressions unconsciously even where they are not and it
affects our assessments. A while ago there was a study looking at how
people reacted to the different grills of cars which until the study
tended to have shapes that were wider in the middle and slanted down
from there. When they reversed it and had grills that slanted up at
the outside, more like a smile people judged the car as better made.
They generally weren’t aware of the facial expression quality but just
got a better feeling from it. The knowledge we gain from faces is
applied in other contexts often unconsciously and inappropriately.
Being aware of this influence helps us interpret non-verbal
information more accurately.

When it comes to right hemisphere knowledge, nothing matches the
sophistication of facial expressions. We recognize thousands. Visual
understanding is very specific. The advice to spend lots of time face
gazing with newborns makes sense now that we understand how dependent
seeing is on what we’ve seen before, knowing what we’re looking for,
having inner templates for recognizing the outside world. It’s what
babies are looking for and why they’re so entertained by people making
faces at them. They’re learning a way of relating to the world packed
with information. Making faces at a baby lays a foundation for better
reading of this important resource throughout life.
The differences in others perspectives afford us a view not available
where we stand. We construct a more accurate picture when we take more
views into consideration. We’re coming out of an age of right and
wrong and into a time when we value the difference in point of view as
enlarging our own perspective. We so often wall ourselves up in the
themes playing out in our heads. The holidays are an opportunity to
drink in the available non-verbal information available in the faces
of our friends and relatives. There’s so much to be seen in a face.

Cleft

Skateboarding and the Brain

Recent studies have shown that squirrels are smarter than dogs. Researchers suggest this may be due to the inner representation necessary to building the world as they live it. The 3d map in their heads includes not just horizontal territory but vertical space. Extra skills are necessary, like assessing whether a branch will support them or the best path to navigate among the tops of trees. The way they use their front paws to hold and manipulate things, how their tails can be a roof in the rain or a way of keeping balance, the huge range of positions they can take on trees, and remembering where they put nuts requires lots of neural space for such a big inner image of their reality. Their way of being in the world is far more complex and self-sufficient than the world of dogs. The brain grows in accommodation to the experience we live. Dogs have more social intelligence, are interactive and bond oriented.  But that’s not what’s measured in problem solving oriented intelligence tests.

The neural benefits of adapting to such complex surroundings seen in squirrels makes me think of the skateboarders I see around monuments, like the one at Mt Royal Ave. and Cathedral St. with irregular steps that creates an interesting skateboard challenge. It’s experiential physics, cultivating deep understanding of speed and trajectory, angles, distance and gravity that’s rooted in the body. Not to mention physical agility and balance. It didn’t occur to me until recently that the perceptive intelligence of students who carried skateboards might not be coincidental. Even though their verbal smarts could be quite different from each other, reflecting the quality of their education, what they shared was insight, an ability to get to the heart of things, seeing the patterns that matter in a circumstance. One person I emailed about it said that every urban environment is seen as a different obstacle course. Like squirrels they have a broader range of physical assessments in how to interact with the world and so create a bigger inner representation of ways to move in their surroundings. They learn how to gauge possibilities and what’s the best fit for a given situation. Another mentioned the power of danger for sharpening focus. Like with acrobatics, the risk involved in skateboarding forces a level of attention not required in mental challenge. A current student described it as one of the most intensely meditative activities available, saying “Skateboarding is living in the moment”.

Skateboarding schools the body intelligence that George Lakoff describes as the underpinning of our conceptual structure, the basis of many metaphors. Using the body in novel ways gives us more patterns to structure ideas and analogies. Being aware of the importance of physical experience to thinking has been central to continuing my practice of T’ai Chi and Yoga. Anything involving balance and assessing the best path develops nuance in applying those metaphors. As David Bohm emphasized, “All of our concepts and explanations…have at their core the perception of a totality of ratios and proportions.” Perception is key to understanding. Like the arts, skateboarding extends the sensitivity of right brain knowing and the vast realm of non-verbal intelligence. With so much life being experienced through machines, it’s important to keep the body tuned and give dimension to our reasoning.