.3 Non-Linear Processing

Now, one of the things that is very clear, (there doesn't seem to be any controversy at all) is that the brain is not linear. What does that mean? The brain operates on many paths simultaneously. That is the brain gets many inputs at once. Here you are sitting reading my lecture, right, but you are also listening to noises around you, feeling the chair underneath you, perhaps smelling things too. All kinds of stuff is happing.

We fool ourselves into thinking that when we go to a movie, we just watch a movie. But as we watch there are all sorts of things happening around us, like the whispering of other people, that we tend to screen out and pretend we are only getting stuff from one source: the screen. That just isn't true. We're actually getting it from many paths, or many modalities at once. Kinetics, or feeling, is one modality, sight is a modality, hearing is a modality, smelling is a modality. All these modalities bring stimulus, and each one is processed on a different level of consciousness. We get all sort of stuff, and process it, that we're not aware of, because it is dealt with on different levels of consciousness.

Anytime we try to reduce things to a linear processing, any time we try to pretend things are going one at a time in a row, we are reducing understanding. That means anytime a teacher says, "this is the way," that's a linear type of processing. Or anything that pretends we are going to do things one at a time or in order, is linear processing. That is going to reduce understanding, not increase understanding.

One of the metaphors that is used is that our brain likes to make great music. Think of a jazz quartet. What is it about a jazz quartet that makes it great? It is the blend of music improvisation. It's a matter of the way the four musicians play off each other. Each of these personalities is playing their own version independently. Great jazz is a blend of these different voices. If you think of our brain, and its liking to make great music and improvising, making it up as it goes along, hearing different voices from different directions, then that is one of the images of the way we probably really learn. We don't just learn bing bing bing, from a script. We learn from everything that is going on.

What do you do with that as a teacher? I don't know. We are just barely learning what it is, not how it will work. We just don't know how it will work. We are just really struggling with that. But what does that say? It says we have to both be a bit humble in terms on the way we go about things, and it also means we should be constantly be trying new ways and new patterns. We are so unlikely to have the correct form it is ridiculous.

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