Sloan Creative

Thinking more, thinking better

I came across John Medina’s Brain Rules the other day on the radio… his enthusiasm and clarity were quite engaging. I jotted down the title for my next book shopping adventure and filed his name away in my mind under, “Interesting.”

Applied to child development

Separately this week, I learned of the Talaris Institute and their work to “provide research-based products and services that enhance parent effectiveness in the first six years of life.” Putting the latest findings in brain research into the hands of those who can really make a difference with it.

Later, I put the two together and realized that John Medina was the founder of Talaris.  Fun!

Learning to learn better

Of course, this is all interesting to me, with three children, 6 weeks to 6 years old, and a never-ending study habit.

I was happy to notice that the first rule is exercise, because it has some interesting resonance for me:

• Our children’s school has the children out on a long walk every day of the year, snow or shine and teaches math by movement games, using the children’s entire bodies to soak up the relationships between numbers.
• Thomas Jefferson, in his letter to Peter Carr, August 19, 1785, suggests that he devote 2 hours daily to walking, as an integral part of his studies.
• I usually get my best ideas walking in the woods near our house. Luckily, technology makes it easy to capture them, using a digital voice recorder and dictation software means that, now, you can write anywhere and have it end up on-line quickly.

Another interesting rule is #6: Long Term Memory- remember to repeat which, combined with rule #10: Vision trumps all other senses, reminds me of the Method of Loci as described in The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, the story of a Jesuit who traveled to China and taught the technique there.  I don’t imagine that it would matter if the vision was through our physical or mind’s eye.

So, these brain rules are great for giving kids solid foundations and keeping the elderly functioning, but what about those of us in the middle of our lives?

Life long learning

Can we still develop our minds, or did all that stop when we traded our dorm rooms for cubicles?

I stumbled upon the fact that the average college student in this country spends only 3.1 hours per day on “educational activities.” What? Even working full time, I could slip that in between the kid’s and my own bedtimes. You mean I could keep study as much as I did in college my entire working life?

Recently, I read an inspiring book by A. G. Sertillanges, The Intellectual Life in which he states that one can do a large amount of deeply intellectual work in just 2 hours per day. If you could be a contributing intellectual in addition to your current work, would you?

So much of how I think today I have learned post college, it saddens me to read that most Americans either don’t read or haven’t practiced enough to read proficiently.

Use it or lose it

What can we do to start using our brains more and more effectively? If we fail to use and develop our own minds, we may just lose the right to do so… as those who do think start doing more and more of our thinking for us. See Giambattista Vico’s New Science for a fascinating look at how this might play out in our society, as it did for the Romans.

My new mental jungle gym is the Great Books of the Western World. Amazingly fun. The Syntopicon alone is worth the price of admission. Much more on this later.

That’s all for now.

Feel free to return to the book you were reading before you landed here.

I’ve just started The Intellectual Life by A. G. Sertillanges

I’m finding deep resonance in it’s call for a life of quiet reflection… even in the midst of family life.

It’s a practical, useful work that calls us to sit still and listen for the eternal that suffuses all we see and hear.

This combined with the film Into Great Silence leads me to think I may have a monastic streak in me somewhere… of course, the soon-to-be-three children pretty much preclude that.

I have this set to come up in my calendar to read once a month. I find it helpful and thought you might too.

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common–this is my symphony.

WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING

I ran across this the other day on the Bureau of Labor Statistics site.

Time use on an average weekday for full-time
university and college students, 2003-2005

			       Hours	

Sleeping                	8.5
Leisure and sports      	4.1
Working                		2.7
Educational activities  	3.1
Other                  		2.4
Traveling              		1.5
Eating and drinking     	1.0
Grooming               		0.7

Total                  	       24.0

http://stat.bls.gov/opub/ted/2007/may/wk4/art04.htm

From this, I draw the following conclusions.
1. College kids are well-rested, in good shape, but malnourished . Maybe bad dorm food saves them time on eating, only 1 hour per day? But to include drinking in that 1 hour number seems to me disingenuous.

2. That if I want to continue my self-education at a college-like pace, it’s certainly possible, given that they are spending only 3 hours per day on educational activities. If you want to remain a life-long learner, it’s certainly possible to keep up with, or even stay ahead of the average college student by simply reducing work hours a bit and devoting some leisure time to your studies.

I’ve just purchased the Great Books of the Western World series (Thanks Joy!) and am looking forward to diving in.

I am reminded of a recent book by an author I respect, The Well-Educated Mind: A Guide to the Classical Education You Never Had, though some of the key ideas in her book are from Giambattista Vico’s great work from early in the 18th century, On the Study Methods of Our Time, which is certainly worth a look if you have the time!

Two amazing books about Central Europe in WWII.

The Visible World combines a man’s search into his family’s past in Bohemia followed by a novel that actually gets at the deeper meanings of what he finds. Mark Slouka’s writing often approaches poetry. Highly recommended. I thought it was the best book I’d read all year, until…

Last night, I finished The Book Thief. It’s mis-categorized as youth fiction. It’s actually one of the most moving books I’ve ever read. The loving treatment of the characters, even the narrator, Death, that Markus Zusak makes the ending one of the most moving I’ve ever read. I was actually glad to be ill the last two days so I had an excuse to laze about reading it in a couple of huge gulps. Has just replaced The Visible World as my favorite recent book.

As someone interested in history, I really appreciated the view Zusak gives us into the lives of poor German citizens just trying to get by and remain human during the war years. That he then ties in the power of words to comfort or control makes it all the more interesting.

I highly recommend both of these books.

I buy many books used. Why not when you buy a lot of especially older titles? However, these books I’ll buy new in hardback, after having read Heather’s copies, because I want to vote with my dollars and give a tiny bit of money to these authors and their publishers.

These titles are what books can and should be about. They look into our collective stories, our histories, and shine light on the best and worst in us all. Only by authors thoughtfully, lovingly shining this light for us and we as readers looking clearly and honestly at what’s illuminated can our civilization heal itself by connecting us to one another across physical, cultural, and temporal distance.

What a summer it has been for reading. Our time in Port Townsend was full of lazy days at the beach and at home reading as the kids played and Katie gestated.

Thanks again to Heather for these and so many other great recommendations and the loan of so many bound treasures.

If you’d like to spend a bit of time with a bright, wise delight, watch Martin Marty’s conversation on his latest book with Bill Moyers

Click here to watch

I found his discussion of “Child-ness”, that openness to the wonders and joys of life, refreshing and enlightening. His book on the subject is The Mystery of the Child

Dennis Vogt, a good friend and a good mind, forwarded me this just a bit ago… a very interesting look at our linked world.

 http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html

 It reminded me of this great E. M. Forster story I re-read just the other night. 

http://brighton.ncsa.uiuc.edu/prajlich/forster.html

As it all gets so easy, so interesting… what might we be losing? 

What risks increase as systems become more complex?

What risks does The Machine lead us to discount or forget?

An interestng article on “Normal Accidents” here:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep06/4423

No time to muse further, I’m working hard on a local loosley coupled system; connecting farmers and local citizens to the land via the Trust for Working Landscapes

I came across this wonderful word in Nietzsche’s, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.

Quisquilia is Latin for “odds and ends”.

• How to find right livelihood after selling a 12 year business.
• Is Emerson right about history? “… there is properly no history; only biography.” “All that Shakespeare says of the King, yonder slip of a boy that reads in the corner feels to be true of himself. We sympathize and the great moments of history, in the great discoveries, the great resistances, the great propensities of man; — because there law was enacted, the sea was searched, the land was found, or the blow was struck for us, as we ourselves in that place would have done or applauded.”
• How ideas roll and distort across geography and time. I’m especially interested in how the ideas of the Enlightenment, Nietzsche, and Karl Marx rolled across Europe into Hungary, forcing my family from the Hernad valley, near Miskolc, Hungary, in which they had lived for over 800 years.
• I’m curious about democracy and education and the manipulation of masses that has led to so much destruction and waste in the last hundred years. Even longer if you count the Crusades. Of course, the subject is extremely timely both here in the United States with so much manipulation apparent from the current administration and in Hungary with the recent admissions of manipulation of the elections and lies.
• How do mass movements start? Eric Hoffer says lack of self respect is a contributing factor.
• Reading the tea leaves of current events and the swirling historical forces arranging them to see if we are going to be engulfed by another era of tragedy as our grandparents were. Fanaticism unleashed by inequality and systemic failure in the age of Revolution and the Great Depression.