Hard-wired for novelty
It turns out that some people are more hard-wired for defined outcomes, and some most definitely aren’t, which the Eide Neurolearning blog takes to imply different learning styles, including those for novelty seekers. (if you’re into this kind of thing). What’s more we tend to think of learning as maximising information or functions, in short of Learning, capital L. I was listening to this podcast on All in the Mind, on neuroplasticity, in which Jeffrey Schwartz and Norman Doidge point out that unlearning is just as important as learning (just as career undevelopment is sometimes necessary for good work). Schwartz sees a problem such as OCD as resulting from what he calls brainlock – which is perhaps something we might apply to much of what goes in education sometimes 
. He has a “four step program“. I’m not really a CBT person but it would be interesting to think this through in terms of learning, as it involves moving out of brainlock and into different focus – moving on so that things can become more fluid again …
matwallsmith Said,
October 1, 2008 @ 3:34 pm
Some underdeveloped thoughts….
I thought their was some spectacular revisionism going on in these two casts (which I might add I covered during 18kms of focussed intensity – take that edupunks – I am strong!). Particularly like that part where Doige suggested that the brain and the mind might be synonymous and that…..culture even….language….plays an essential component in the development of the brain….thanks be to neuroscience for showing us the way and the light beyond reductionism.
But it was interesting nonetheless. What struck me as really interesting was what Doige called the plasticity paradox, that once the the ‘wires’ are cast they provide autonomic pathways that have to be forcefully subverted in order to be unlearnt (sounds a bit familiar).There are all sort of horrible CBTish implications and therapies that will be instigated in the name of neuroplasticity – and ‘unlearning’ sounds a little to close to ‘re-education’ for me to cop it straight. Perhaps I see a remnant of therepeutical arrogance that might work in treating cases of OCD but would be highly problematic if they were then mapped across to other areas of cultural/governmental application (Neuro-leadership and neuro-learning being the two briefly mentioned in the Podcast). Maybe we should rethink neuro-plasticity in terms of the particular virtuality of the brain-world continuum it indicates. To ‘instrumentalize’ neuro-plasticity beyond a ‘therapeutical’ order or paradigm we need develop plastic ecologies capable of realizing, practicing, and rewarding plasticity-itself by allowing these ‘realized’ ‘paths’ or ‘practices’ to fold into a multitude of ‘wired’ continuities – developing frameworks that celebrate this multiplicity through collaborative engagement and reflection that celebrates and harnesses difference.
The neuro-plasticity and the plasticity paradox (although not consciously yet) acknowledges that the mind is indeed distributed (rather than extended) – but that plasticity goes hand in hand with a technical concretisation or instrumentalization that wires the plastic brain for an equally fundamental continuity – habit (recognition) and technics are fundamentally intertwined so we need to think neuro-plasticity ecologically and culturally…and we then need not put neuro in front of it at all….
Open-learning/education could be figured as in this light if it extends (is extended) beyond a new institutional order – to a new ecological order…which brings me to accreditation….