| I believe this article misses its own point. I'll keep it short. “I” is a lie. There is no “I”. The brain has two halves, right and left. The right side is spacial. The left side is lingual. Generally. Both halves of the brain receive stimuli from our senses and build models of the environment that are optimized for their respective roles. This gives each of us two models which we use to navigate our environment: a spacial model and a lingual model. These models each run in their own hemisphere and are very different from each other in both function and form. The spatial model is innate. We are born with it. The lingual model, we acquire. (We must learn language before we hit puberty or we lose the capacity to do so. Search for “linguistics Genie” or “linguistics wolf boy” for details.) Rather, this article is a commentary on the fact that practically all schools fail us. In school, we sit in class, exposed primarily to lingual input. We consequently build an effective lingual model of explicit rules of our world. But but we are left to our own devices to build our spatial model, which we do from our own activities while following the “explicit rules” we know. Every once in a while, we stumble upon some visual/real world representation that allows our spatial side to realize a concept that is well known to the lingual side. |