Cognitive surplus and necessity are at the core of learning. We have developed the capacity to do what we need to do to survive in less time than we have and our bodies have adapted to this excess capacities with startling ingenuity sometimes.
Business writer Joseph McCormack told a group of Northwestern students that brevity was the key to catching the reader's attention because our attention spans are so short. One reason that brevity works is because the human mind supplies additional information to that provided by the speaker. McCormack noted a statistic that the human brain can process 750 words per minute, but that the average speaker only talks at 150 words per minute. This means that listener is supplying additional content to what he/she is hearing. This, to me, is very powerful. It highlights how scaffolding really works. Stories and other devices allows the listener to reflect and integrate what a teacher or other is saying.
This story from Yaakov Kirshon, creator of Dry Bones brings up balance. “An immigrant was asked for one word that would best describe his experience in Israel. After thinking awhile, he replied “tov/good.” And, if you could pick two words? “Loh/not.” In other words, his overall impression of his situation was "good" but his next analysis was "could be better."
We can take advantage of this innate self absorption by designing content that gets people inside themselves but also allows them to see outside themselves at the same time.
I went to a lecture discussing the alternative realities described by words and numbers. Words can be seen as expressions of chaos, as an attempt to describe the subjective and illogical world of perception, feeling, and actions of the physical world. Numbers, on the other hand, can be seen as expressions of order, the timeless qualities of the world that exist outside of human perception. Eternal truths, as it were.
The speaker, a lecturer from Yale University, used Dostroevsky's Notes from the Underground as part of its premise that numbers could be used to express literary qualities, as shown by 2x2=5, as opposed to just logical and irrefutable qualitites, as 2x2=4. Numbers are as important to Russians as snow is to Eskimos. The protagonist in the novel used these mathematical formulas to comment on the various forces at work on our psyches and society. In literature, 2 x2 = 4 can be a bore and 2x2=5 represents a challenge to the order, can be used to describe a wide variety of situations.
Numbers are primary qualities, they exist outside of human perception. Words have secondary qualities, they exist only because of human perception. Russian literature thorugh Dostroevsky thought that numbers and words could be used against politics and against polemics, as these equations of 2x2=4 and 2x2=5 can create a certain harmony of thought when combined/blended.
Where is the blend between the rational world as expressed through numbers and the irrational world as expressed through language? Maybe a combination is needed. Metaphor as a blend. Music as a blend. Learning as a natural bridge between the known and the unknown. Timeless order of numbers as opposed to chaos of letters.
The Indian writer Amitav Gosh uses multiple dialects in his novels and in a small group presentation talks about language being used as a metaphor for belonging to a certain community or not. He says that novels unlike myth or romantic writing is usually expressed mono lingually unlike authentic life in India for example where a person might speak his village's language at home, Hindu in school, and English in business.
Gosh focuses his writing on the voices of subaltern identity; the cooks, the sailors, and others that usually don't have a true voice in fiction. But it is not only the personal that is often forgotten, but their archives. If their writings are not saved, not consulted, not imagined, than those published voices will melt away. This cuts off valuable voices from the educational process and even with the Internet many voices are not heard.
Professor Gosh mentioned that while he writes in English he sometimes thinks in Bengali as a way of unblocking his creative juices. I think many times we might appeal to our "other" side of the brain-- be it another language or music or math as a way of expressing ourselves in a learning situation and in this way express ourselves differently than we might in our traditional approach, be it writing or in a speech.
I myself have found it encouraging as a way of changing the way I view a situation -- when I think in Hebrew or German or imagine a situation as a musical interlude. This can be a way of changing a pattern and opening up learning avenues that might otherwise skim by unnoticed. This reminds me of when I was in Israel working on an archeological dig and a person noted that "I sounded better in Hebrew." I took this to mean that in Hebrew I had to think more carefully before speaking because I needed more time to imagine and come to the words I needed. We can expand our educational register by expanding our modes of thinking and expressing.
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