Pardon my Metaphor

Image by The U.S. National Archives via Flickr"Because we do not understand the brain very well we are constantly tempted to use the latest technology as a model for trying to understand it. In my childhood we were always assured that the brain was a telephone switchboard. ('What else could it be?') I was amused to see that Sherrington, the great British neuroscientist, thought that the brain worked like a telegraph system. Freud often compared the brain to hydraulic and electro-magnetic systems. Leibniz compared it to a mill, and I am told some of the ancient Greeks thought the brain functions like a catapult. At present, obviously, the metaphor is the digital computer." — John R. Searls.

I don't think there is anything particularly wrong with this. Humans connect with the world using language, and language is not about facts. Language really isn't information. Language describes. We understand the world through metaphors. Our metaphors are about as accurate as poetry, not geometry. Although as far as language goes, poetry is often a more complete description of a thing than the measurements of it.

I think we are moving on in our metaphors to networks. This metaphor suits me fine - it is as good as any of the other metaphors. A metaphor becomes a tool that allows us to talk about phenomena that we really have little understanding of. We know a lot more about the mechanics of the brain - we have gotten better at measuring parts of it. We see networks in the brain because that is how we understand modern communication and language.

We see the world through a complex of metaphors - through a shifting lens of definition. MRIs of brain events show that memories, sensation, and learning are all non-local events. Various sections of the brain light up and pulse like the shifting colors of a cuttlefish. I am always amazed that there are researchers that feel that they can take a limited model of how the brain supposedly works and then leap out to how we should therefore learn. I am thinking here of "Brain-Based Learning" theories where the fundamental principle is that the brain is a "parallel processor." Social cognitive theories and psychology are a little more useful because they examine interactions between people which, ideally, is something that happens in education.

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• New metaphors and symbols required! (dougbelshaw.com)

Oliver Sacks and Music

A few days ago, I was thinking about Connectivism (the theory of life, the universe, and everything) and was trying to think about how such a theory would account for music: nothing huge, a simple theme from the aria in the Goldberg Variations, for instance. I am not talking about anything complex - something that any child could pick out on the recorder. There isn't anything in my experience of music that suggests a linear, sequential, experience of music that could be plugged in successfully to a concept map. What I mean by successfully is that it would account, even partially, for the experience. I experience music with my whole body and mind (are they really separate?) emotionally, intellectually, and with some music, even a simple tune, to the deepest psychological core of my being. I don't know if I can really account for all of that. Maybe a Buddhist monk has the awareness, time, and focus. I am fully ready to admit my intellectual short-comings. How much of this kind of exercise is an attempt to lift one's self up with one's bootstraps? How does the knower know the knower or the act of knowing? Why are we reading materials that name-drop philosophers and their theories like so many baseball cards? I do not believe that anyone can "simply read modern epistemology" and find anything evident (not with a simple reading). Our knowledge of ourselves and the world around us is much too dynamic for that anyway.

Okay, so in a not impossible but highly improbable coincidence, I turn on the radio and there is Oliver Sacks talking about some of the same issues. He was talking about what our experience of music tells us about the human brain. He talked about what the brain experiences when we experience music. He says that MRIs show that there is no one place in the brain that is active when we are listening to music. There are 20 to 30 places in the brain that show activity: auditory, analytical, temporal, etc. and what is more interesting is that he says that it is never then same areas in any one person. My point about this, and I have made it before, is that the human brain may be too complex to be reduced to a neuron+neuron=learning formula. That a two dimensional, or three dimensional representation can at best only be a metaphor and not a wiring diagram of the mind. But what is wrong with admitting that it is a metaphor? The one of the messages of some of the sutras (and some western philosophers) is that we are metaphors for Being-Itself.

For me, Connectivism answers questions about networked relationships, how learning occurs between conscious beings in a network, how technology is changing the way we learn and think. Those are huge concerns. I think the idea that it is going to account for psychology, semiotics, and epistemology is a little ambitious - especially for a single class! I am not here to "influence" (unless it means to annoy the credulous, then yes) or to be a nay-sayer. I think that before we say something is the Ultimate Answer, we had better be clear about the questions we are asking and answering. You also don't get to pick and choose what questions are in or out of the realm of Connectivism's concern - that is too convenient. If it is a theory of knowledge, then it has to account for all the ways that we know things.