GENIUS FORUMS

I don't know about you, but I can't stand being taught models and fancy words without seeing with my own eyes the thing that the word or model is signifying. Right now I'm taking a hormones and behavior course at school, and the massive quantity of scientific terms that have been thrown at me in the past two days, I find quite stultifying to the potential of human intelligence. In my opinion, one should never try to impart words or models without using those words to point to the actual perceivable topography that the words or models are supposed to refer to. Use words to point to the sensed phenomena first, and only then should you expect the student to be interested in memorizing words. Immediately get the student using his right brain by visualizing what must be named, and then the student will be able to appreciate the name or model for that phenomena. Right brain first (visual spatial), then left brain(language). Don't go the other way around and indulge in the superficial sensations that can be derived by fancy language. In my experience learning from people, whether from a friend who tries to teach me the biology or geology he thinks he has learned, or during the times I've taken a course in school myself, whether it was in electric circuits or endocrinology, I always find myself bombarded with large quantities of fancy words and dinky 2-dimensional models before my so called teacher makes an effort to correspond his words and models with perceivable phenomena. It almost makes the teacher or knower seem like he doesn't really understand anything, but has merely made a lucrative career for himself, or attained some psychological security and self esteem, by merely memorizing a bunch of words which he has attached to some really flimsy, dinky models. I think that's the problem with academics. They are often ignorant people who think they know, which is much worse than simply being aware of your ignorance.

I find that mainstream secular-scientific people (a great deal of university professors) love to jack off with big scientific words and simplistic models. It doesn't impress me at all. Science, when it is used to merely explain (rather than carefully 'point') only dulls peoples minds and makes them idiots who think they understand something when they only know empty words and simplistic models. They are hardly different from theologians. Superstring theorists exemplify the crassness that I'm referring to here.

Here is a great example of an intellectually lopsided imbecile:

The Amino Acid photo collection

Don't get me wrong, the photos of amino acids on the site I just linked are amazing, I'm very happy I found them. But the piece of writing above that links to the photos was obviously written by someone whose brain is very lopsided and silly.

Consider the first paragraph:

Amino acids are very small biomolecules with an average molecular weight of about 135 daltons. These organic acids exist naturally in a zwitterion state where the carboxylic acid moiety is ionized and the basic amino group is protonated. The entire class of amino acids has a common backbone of an organic carboxylic acid group and an amino group attached to a saturated carbon atom. The simplest member of this group is glycine, where the saturated carbon atom is unsubstituted, rendering it optically inactive.

What makes the above so silly, is that it is aimed at the layman, as the website is trying to sell posters, screensavers, calenders, etc.

Idiots.

It wouldn't be quite so bad if the piece of writing was aimed at a colleague who has worked with his fellow chemist quite a bit and has gone over some actual photographs of amino acids and agreed upon what names to give certain distinctions perceived in the topography.

I'm guessing that they think they are educating people with their eagerness to display fancy scientific words, but it's really quite ridiculous.

Also, consider this model of an amino acid or this one, and now compare those simplistic models to the actual phenomena, sensed through a microscope, and here's another one.

If you're someone who values truth, the models really aren't that helpful, are they?

Pretty awesome pics of the amino acids though.

Right now I'm taking a hormones and behavior course at school, and the massive quantity of scientific terms that have been thrown at me in the past two days, I find quite stultifying to the potential of human intelligence. In my opinion, one should never try to teach words or models, or even say words to people who have never glimpsed the actual perceivable topography that the words or models are referring to. Point to the sensed phenomena first, be sure the student is using his right brain by visualizing what must be named, and then introduce the name or model for that phenomena. Right brain first (visual spatial), then left brain(language). Don't go the other way around.

Similarly, I find that in my hormones and behavior course, the teacher has spent no time at all referring to any sort of general human behavior, and instead we have dove exclusively into the details of microcosm, getting fed massive amounts of complicated words. I think a teacher should begin by pointing to generalizations in the macrocosm (some basic human behavior), and then show how those basic generalizations correspond to the more detailed microscopic reality. So far, it's been the opposite. We are learning a dreadful amount of complicated words and dinky models, all of which seem isolated and without relationship to anything I presently understand.

Cory,

You make a valid argument.

Non-Linear (right brain) to Linear (left brain).

('scream' and throw up your 'desk')

Heheh, Hey Steve. Yeah, I went on a bit of a rant there, a bit of emotion involved, but yeah, to summarize what I was trying to say: the problem with most people who try to teach, is that, they don't realize words are just pointers, they don't really know what they think they know. To borrow the trusty old Zen cliche, they mistake the finger for the moon. In fact, they are frightened of the moon.

I have to say I disagree with your implication that there is a right way to teach concepts. I happen to be a very verbal/auditory learner, and the spoken word is the way I best grapple with difficult concepts. Images are helpful, but secondary. My girlfriend, on the other hand, needs something visual on the page in front of her. I think there are different styles and ways of conceptualizing, and while some may be better suited to certain material than others, in general I don’t think there is a single best way to teach or learn.

Simon wrote:I have to say I disagree with your implication that there is a right way to teach concepts. I happen to be a very verbal/auditory learner, and the spoken word is the way I best grapple with difficult concepts.

Interestingly, those difficult concepts have been produced by scientists carefully observing empirically, and using their brain visual/spatially. The concept that the scientist produces, functions as a sign pointing to a visual reality. The concept and words themselves, which the scientists produces by being right brained, are secondary. So, you may prefer people to be very verbal and auditory when they teach you, but if you aren't able to take the words given to you and use them like maps to navigate over visual terrain, then I dare say that your knowing is at a level hardly different from a theologian.

Images are helpful, but secondary.

The phenomena perceivable by the senses is most important, and then there is the model of that phenomena, which can be very helpful. The least important thing is the mere word. Although it too can be a very helpful tool.

I still dn’t agree. Some concepts are much clearer when expressed mathematically than visually. You can say “mere” words as if language were somehow incidental to the process of complex thought, but I think it is integral to this process in many cases, and certainly to the communication about concepts necessary to do science. I think this is a case of taking one’s own bias and assuming it is fundamental to reality instead of simple how one tends to think about things. As for left brain/right brain, that dichotomy is significantly less meaningful than the popular imagination has come to believe, and is itself a bit misleading.

Beware, any visual seduces the onlooker with the illusion of reality exposure and often deludes more than it enlightens.

I agree with Cory on this one, For the most part, University professors are scoundrels when it comes to their teaching methods, they have absolutely no sensitivity with the student, the present system is very industrial, and Darwinian in its approach.

Cory – If the professors created more effective models to teach, ones that were interactive with dynamic visual animations, then their self-esteem would be totally destroyed. Professors need to feel elite, but the truth is that most young people (before they are conditioned and frightened to death by overcomplicated methods) are very capable of understanding science.

Science could be much more simplified, and accessible to people.

An interesting idea would be to create a website like YouTube, but the site would only have the highest quality scientific videos, using interactive dynamic animations, and message boards could be attached to them to discuss. Basically, The Internet could undermine the corruption in the universities for all the suckers that are wasting their money on these so-called academic ‘degrees’. (Myself being one of them.. lol)

What ignorance and corruption!

I remember one conversation I had with a geology professor, and we were discussing an in-depth idea that not many people had ever questioned him on before, and I could tell by his body language that he felt threatened, so he started spitting out all these advanced geological terms that he knew I had no idea what they meant as a means to try to make me confused. And it worked, so I asked him, I said, "Professor, you have never used many of these terms in lecture before, so could you define this one for me, and he smirked and said, "Looks like someone needs to brush up on their definitions, the bookstore sells a geology dictionary at a reasonable price, I recommend you buy one"
That man never wanted me to learn! He was afraid I may surpass him in understanding, And that is the sort people that hold the highest positions in these institutions... scum.

Rats, Cory, you've flushed me out of read-only time with this subject near and dear, for what you are putting forth here is a long-held pedagogical insistence of mine that a student get to see an idea in action before they are encumbered with memorization of proper names.

When you go in from this angle, students become self-taught. With one or two well-worked examples of an idea (in this case philosophical), they are able to recognize the same mechanisms at work in any other related idea (as well as the contrasts), and they start naming (recognizing) those ideas all on their own. This actually prevents the (bewildering) need to memorize, because one is already familiarized on the macro level, as you say, and as we all know, the process of memorizing is not the process of thinking.

Sad fact is, not just higher education, but most all education is restricted to this one process as the litmus of success: memorization. And paradoxically, nothing flies faster from the mind than what one has been made to memorize, and to up the ante, I actually find this process to interfere with thinking, and students who are well-trained in it to be less-apt at anything philosophical. So I get these "all-A's" students (so they tell me) in some of my classes who are excellent memorizers and who are shocked, hurt, and offended when they don't do so well with me. When they go to answer essay questions (that demand working with the ideas in various and sundry hypotheticals), their idea of the "right" answer is repetition of what they already read (or repetition of almost my exact words from lecture). They seem unable to reach beyond repetition and do any thinking/creating on their own (but we work on it :)).

This is the poor status of american education and its production-oriented approach. Proficiency tests are the jewel in this (tarnished) crown, and the dead-weight to the possibility of thought. In goes the input; out comes the output, and round and round we go, and nary a thought in sight. I have actually had students come up to me in distress early-on, explaining that they don't understand what's going on in this class, saying - I swear - that they've never been asked to think. I have the occasional student out on the other end who e-mails years later, almost nostalgic for a time when they once thought. It'd be almost funny if it weren't so flat-out sorrowful.

But I can't say about science, where rapid assumption of terminology seems the order of the day. I finally found a math tutor during my college algebra days who could tell me what we were attempting to accomplished in the different types of calculation (macro-talk), and sometimes even why the process was revealing, and once done, I didn't need a tutor anymore.

As for professorial scum, that, too, is another sad long story that is built into that deadly word, deadly process: "tenure." (My mind often remarks upon that word's similarity to the word "manure.") I have actually seen this process ruin a decent thinker/teacher or two, whose concerns, necessarily are bent by the academy's demands, because if you're there for the academy, you will be assimilated. And if you're there for the academy, then academic demands are all-too often antithetical to teaching and students.

Anyway, thanks for the goose. I'll look for this thread again middle next week, because even if there is no more to say, there is so much more to say . . . .

Simon wrote:I still don't agree. Some concepts are much clearer when expressed mathematically than visually.

All you seem to be saying here is that sometimes you find that it's better to visualize (whether it's the trajectory of a space shuttle launching, or the statistics of human behavior over many years) phenomena using mathematical concepts, rather than the concepts of nouns animated by verbs and analogies. That's fine, but my point here is that the most important part of the human brain is the ability to use concepts, whether mathematical or linguistic, to visualize action in space/time.

Here is an example:

Consider this list of words. Each word will be followed by a question, and all you have to do is answer yes or no.

1) POTATO "Is the word in capital letters?"

2) horse "Does the word rhyme with course?"

3) TABLE "Does the word fit the sentence, "the man peeled the ______?"


Each question above requires effort, but each differs in an important way. The first question requires the most superficial kind of processing, given that you only have to notice how the word looks. In my view, this is totally left brained stuff, with no right brain involved.

Question 2 requires a bit deeper processing, because you must process the information phonologically, meaning you must sound out the word to yourself and then judge whether it matches the sound of another word.

Question 3 requires the deepest processing, because you must pay attention to the meaning of words, corresponding the words to phenomena in action in space/time. Recollecting what you know about tables, peeling a table may seem absurd at first, but then on the other hand, you may imagine peeling the paint off a table. The question is, relative to the others, a deeper one, as it involves the right brain the most.

You can say "mere" words as if language were somehow incidental to the process of complex thought

Complex thought doesn't impress me unless those thoughts are about the phenomena I have experienced. If I am introduced to a massive amount of complicated words or mathematics, and none of it is organized to reflect phenomena that I've experienced, then to me, it's garbage. It's a waste of my time.

Cory wrote:All you seem to be saying here is that sometimes you find that it’s better to visualize (whether it’s the trajectory of a space shuttle launching, or the statistics of human behavior over many years) phenomena using mathematical concepts, rather than the concepts of nouns animated by verbs and analogies.

No, what I’m saying is that the best way to undertand some concepts is NOT by visualizing them, but via math or language or movement, or whatever. The point is that I don’t accept the primacy you give visualization for understanding or teaching.

Simon wrote:

All you seem to be saying here is that sometimes you find that it’s better to visualize (whether it’s the trajectory of a space shuttle launching, or the statistics of human behavior over many years) phenomena using mathematical concepts, rather than the concepts of nouns animated by verbs and analogies.

No, what I'm saying is that the best way to understand some concepts is NOT by visualizing them, but via math or language or movement, or whatever.

That's very contradictory. For instance, math is a concept. Language is a concept. Movement? What are you referring to when you say movement? Sounds pretty visual.

The point is that I don't accept the primacy you give visualization for understanding or teaching.

Well that's not a very good point, in my view. It seems as if you have missed the whole point of why we have concepts to begin with, which is to rationally account for perceived phenomena.

I think there are two faculties of understanding: the visual and the verbal, and I think most people develop one at the expense of the other.

Matt Gregory wrote:I think there are two faculties of understanding: the visual and the verbal, and I think most people develop one at the expense of the other.

It's true that people can be, and generally are lop-sided. But I don't think it's possible for a person to be exclusively verbal, as words mean things, and things are introduced visually.

I was just going over this article on left and right brained psychology, and came upon the following passage:

In a test in which split-brain patients had to match a series of household objects, the left brain would match by function while the right would match by appearance. So, when seeing a cake on a plate, the left brain would connect to a picture of a fork and spoon while the right brain would select a picture of a broad-brimmed hat. This evidence appeared to support the idea of a highly modular brain in which, for example, thinking in logical categories was a strictly left hemisphere function while mental imagery and spatial awareness were handled on the right.

I think the left brain must download the information that the right brain initially assimilates, as it's my impression that the right brain realizes relationships between things, and visualizes their function, whereas the left brain merely downloads and stores that knowledge, which is later recalled. The right brain is more fluid, whereas the left brain is kind of a coagulation, a rigid conditioning that results from taking samples from the awareness of the right brain. For instance, the left brain only recalls the fork and spoon have some sort of relationship to cake as a kind of reflex that has it's origins in the right brain initially beholding this relationship.

And that's my beef with conventional learning. They try cramming a bunch of words and knowledge into your left brain at a rate that makes it impossible for you to really come into direct mental contact/awareness with the sensory appearances that all concepts have originally intended to serve.

Yeah, I totally agree with you. I didn't like classes where they bombarded you with terminology or isolated facts like a history class. I would much rather look at a depiction of the history of the Middle East like this than read verbal descriptions of it, which I've always found boring and incomprehensible.

I mean, there are a lot of things that are easiest to express verbally, but if I can't comprehend the basic principle of something then I feel like I can't understand any of the details being unable to put them in context, so I guess that's another valid distinction: people who can memorize isolated facts and people who need to form a complete picture before they can learn the details.

Pye wrote:Rats, Cory, you've flushed me out of read-only time with this subject near and dear for what you are putting forth here is a long-held pedagogical insistence of mine that a student get to see an idea in action before they are encumbered with memorization of proper names.

I know we're largely on the same wavelength, but I just want to get something straight: Aren't 'proper names' in themselves ideas? My point is that when we find ourselves encumbered with the goal of memorizating proper names, I think what's happening is that we are being encumbered by ideas that don't apply or have any relationship to what we already know.

With one or two well-worked examples of an idea (in this case philosophical), they are able to recognize the same mechanisms at work in any other related idea (as well as the contrasts), and they start naming (recognizing) those ideas all on their own. This actually prevents the (bewildering) need to memorize,

Again, I think I see what you're getting at, but I just want to clarify something else: I don't think the need to memorize should be prevented, or should be escaped, but just made a hell of a lot easier. Or perhaps you meant the struggle, effort and stress to memorize should be prevented. Definitely. Memorizing new information shouldn't be a strain.

In my psychology class last year (not a bad course at times) it was brought to our attention the difference between merely being exposed to information, and actually processing it on a deeper level. For example, try drawing from memory a picture of your country's penny, accurately modeling its markings. Few people can do this. Thus, even thousands (of what psychologists call 'shallow exposures') to stimulus do not establish long term retention. If teachers want students to memorize information as efficiently and effectively as possible, then they should see the difference between shallow exposure to new information, and deeper processing of that new information. Like you were getting at in your post above, students need to be inspired to 'think' about new information, to be elaborative. This means, we need to think about how the new information applies to our own lives, relating it to more basic things we already know.

I think the problem, as you were getting at, is that the university rewards and encourages students who can memorize without thinking, whereas the one's that can't memorize such large quantities as quickly, despite they may have gifts for penetrating more deeply and reaping greater insights, are neglected.

Sad fact is, not just higher education, but most all education is restricted to this one process as the litmus of success: memorization. And paradoxically, nothing flies faster from the mind than what one has been made to memorize, and to up the ante, I actually find this process to interfere with thinking, and students who are well-trained in it to be less-apt at anything philosophical.

Yes, very true. There are people who I find very obnoxious in their eagerness to display what they memorized, showing to me that they have no knack for organizing and presenting the information insightfully.

In goes the input; out comes the output, and round and round we go, and nary a thought in sight.

It's kind of a game. We have set up conditions that fulfills our instinct to want to identify and celebrate giftedness, but because we don't want to produce a level of intelligence that challenges our most animalistic values, we encourage only the shallowest kind of giftedness and neglect or fail to notice individuals who have other, perhaps more profound and ultimately useful gifts.

But I can't say about science, where rapid assumption of terminology seems the order of the day.

Yes, that's what I'm dealing with now. It was last week when my teacher said: "Now, I know all these terms seem overwhelming and your not going to necessarily understand them, but when you hear these words in future classes you take in psychology, you can say (excitedly) "I remember that word!"

So it seems like, to my teacher, it's all about knowing words, and really not much else. I dropped the class by the way. Not worth the money.