Seeing Inside the Mind (Book 2 of the four book publication Minds in Bloom)

Seeing

Inside the Mind

BOOK 2

of

Minds in Bloom

Copyright Glenn Fieber

Kamloops, B.C. Canada

December, 2010

Revised 2012,2013, 2014

Smashwords Edition

ISBN: 9781311106162

Minds in Bloom

(a book about thinking, teaching, learning, the universe, and anything else that matters)

Minds in Bloom was first published as an e-book by both Smashwords and Scribd Publishing in 2010. Since the book deals with brain/mind, teaching and learning…and the universe, there has been a continuous flow of new information for me to consider. I have attempted to include much of it in the several revisions I have made since 2010. This latest revision in 2014 has brought me closer to home. But not home.

Minds in Bloom combines 4 separate books:

Seeing Inside the Brain

Seeing Inside the Mind

Seeing Inside the Theories of Behavior and Learning

Seeing Inside the Universe

Each of these books is also available separately so that a reader interested in only one area can more readily explore it.

Minds in Bloom is also available from the following e-book providers:

Smashwords

Sony e-books

Apple iBooks

Barnes and Noble e-books (for Nook Readers)

Kobo e-books

Diesel e-books

Also by Glenn Fieber:

Emperor of Stone: Qin and the Terracotta Armies, China Intercontinental Press, 2008

Aristotle eating ice cream and other poems that float,

also available as an e-book from Apple iBooks; Sony e-books; Barnes and Noble e-books (for Nook Readers); Diesel e-books and Kobo readers.

Minds in Bloom is not just another book about the brain. It is more about what reaches beyond the narrow boundaries of the skull and into infinity: the mind.

OK, there is some brain in here: I describe how it operates as a system for storing and sorting whatever the senses deliver to it; but what is even more interesting is how the mind often steers us down weedy paths without our realizing that we are being taken for a ride until we look down and see the mud on our shoes.

The main purpose of this book, however, is to take a new look at teaching and learning. More than ever, society needs people who think. Learning is the key to that Holy Grail: Progress. And also to happiness and well-being. If we can make teaching better, then schools will become better places for learning. To that end, I describe the traditional theories that we use to try to explain both human behavior and how we learn. But I do it all from a new perspective: the exciting discoveries being made by neuroscientists, whose machines can look inside our heads while we are thinking.

Then I conclude with an ambitious reach: how the universe is all connected—or interconnected—to each of us.

And I enrich all that with some personal experiences and observations about learning harvested from my 45 years in the field—65 if you add in my time spent as a student. Sixty-five years teaching and learning? Either I am insane, or I have something to say. Or both.

Glenn Fieber, M. Ed.

December 2010; March, 2013, January 2014

Preface to the 2014 Edition

I have been working on Minds in Bloom forever: In today’s digital world, the flow of knowledge is more like a tsunami that both inundates me and requires me to reconsider everything I once thought I knew.

In this revision I’ve added new information on how free radicals from gluten and glucose can damage our cells, including our neurons, and thereby impair both our brains and our bodies, causing dementia and a myriad of other conditions, none of them good. Yet we cling to old ideas about nutrition in a death grip. Also, exciting new approaches to teaching and learning. And there is new evidence that regular fasting sharpens brain function. Who wouldn’t hunger for more information on that?

My favorite idea: tantalizing reflections on the interconnectedness of organic and inorganic matter, of man and machine. It’s coming: mind-controlled exoskeletons are here; Her is here.

Writing this is both frustrating and exciting. New ideas pop up their heads like Whack-a-Moles, and I want to include everything relevant to learning and brain function. But at the same time I want to be finished—closure. In university I read the poems of A. E. Housman and was amused by his titles: his second book was Last Poems, but after that came More Poems. I understand now that nothing is ever finished.

Glenn Fieber, M.Ed.

Kamloops, B.C.

mindsinbloom@gmail.com

St. Genevieve’s School, 1947 (photo courtesy of Liz Rowe)

That’s me in the 2nd row, just behind a Priest whose name I forget—though I fondly remember the white-haired Mrs. Pearce: she gave me a detention for being flippant but asked interesting questions. I am grinning like a monkey—perhaps because we had been let out early for the picture.

All these faces looking out into our futures, with no idea of what life had in store for us.

Contents: Minds in Bloom

[Only links for Book 2 are active.]

Thanks

Windswept

BOOK ONE: Inside the Brain

INSIDE THE BRAIN

WAYS OF THINKING

OTHER WAYS OF THINKING

BRAIN ARCHITECTURE

Sensory Regions of the Cortex

Plasticity

Homunculus

Conscious and Unconscious Mind

Glia Cells

Astrocytes

Right and Left Hemispheres

The Frontal Lobes

MEMORY

Changing our Minds

Making Memories Last

Mega-Memories

THE FORMATIVE YEARS

ADOLESCENT BRAIN DEVELOPMENT

AUTOMATIC PILOT

MINDFULNESS

ON LANGUAGE AND THINKING

BRAIN DAMAGE

BOOK TWO: Minds in Bloom Inside the Mind: Controlling Behavior

one: shock therapy

two: Lobotomy

three: Hypnosis

four: Teaching and Learning

Three Sisters

Other Teachers

Tour Guides

Inside My Classroom

Philosophy

Curriculum

Structures for Learning

Measurement

Open-Ended Alternatives

Reflections

Conclusions

BOOK THREE: Inside the Theories of Behavior and Learning

Behavior Theories

one: B F Skinner

two: Abraham Maslow

Learning Theories

three: Jerome Bruner

four: Howard Gardner

five: Benjamin Bloom

six: Maria Montessori

seven: Waldorf Education

eight: Reuven Feuerstein

nine: Knowledge is Power (KIPP)

ten: Zen

eleven: Seven Arrows

twelve: Sugata Mitra

BOOK FOUR: Inside the Universe

one: The Mind is a Universe

two: Becoming Us

three : Changing our Minds

four: Foods for Thought

one: The Body as an Energy System

two: Prahlid Jhani

three: Does the shape of a building matter?

four: What about Prayer?

five: Music and Healing

six: Qi

seven: The Shaolin Monks

eight: Reiki

nine: Feldenkrais

ten: Gaia

eleven: Full Circle

REFERENCES

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thanks

Nothing ever comes from nothing—unless maybe it’s the universe. Though this book is small, it is the product of a very large debt:

To Kurt Vonnegut Jr. whose Sirens of Titan first introduced me to the idea of cosmic interconnectedness; to Cliff Noakes, whose gift of a bound copy of my letters from China planted a seed; to Donna Martin, who swaps ideas and books with me at the generous rate of two for one; to my friends who’ve never seemed to tire of discussing ideas; to Doug Butler, who helped re-open the doors to the Inner School, and whose pictures unlocked memories. And to Principal Gordon Armes, who took risks to encourage learning.

And to my five children, Paul, Shelley, Cameron, Kirstie, and Joel, and to my grandchildren Elliot, Karolina and Casey, who, though they carry the burden of my DNA, have wonderful minds of their own. (What time is it? Zero. How bad do you have to poop? Fifteen dollars.)

And to my wife, Daryl, who continues to find me rabbits and keep me from getting lost.

Tennyson (Ulysses) reminds us of what we already know: that we are a part of all that we have met; of each other; of the universe. This, too.

Glenn Fieber

Windswept

Einstein tried to explain the workings of the universe with his Theory of Relativity, a formula that connects time and space. As if the universe were a place that could be measured and described mathematically. (Einstein readily accepts this limitation: Not everything that can be counted matters. Not everything that matters can be counted.) When his calculations did not work for quantum mechanics, along came Stephen Hawking and others with the Theory of Everything to tidy things up by sweeping them under the carpet and into a few black holes.

But Einstein and Hawking miss the key point: the important events that shape the universe and our lives lie in places beyond description—mathematical or otherwise—because we cannot know the connectedness of all things; we can only get a sense of them after the fact. Sometimes long after the fact. In The Tao: Lao-Tse tells us there are roads we can know, and roads beyond our knowing, though we must travel both. And while we think of definition as an aspect of knowing, Lao-tse tells us that there is a place for naming to stop. Definitions are borders we put around things and they divide us and prevent us from thinking.

Guanxi in China are calculated connections that will get you somewhere—a job, a promotion, a wife—tickets to life. Or protection. (When the intoxicated son of a police chief in Baoding drove into two university students and killed one of them, his defense to the security guards was simple: My father is Li Gang. And it worked—or would have were it not for the fact that the social media are now beyond the reach of even Beijing.)

This book is about connections, the uncalculated ones. It is a subject that has come to occupy me because the interconnectedness of everything controls the universe…and our little lives. I read Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea, and I am writing this book, because of a gust of wind.

We once rented a storage locker to accommodate all the stuff that wouldn’t fit in our one-bedroom. I had been carrying a writing desk out of the storage building. My wife had previously opened the heavy outer door of the building and secured it with its drop-down doorstop. But she hadn’t pushed the door up against the wall and secured the stop firmly, and as I came through the door with the writing desk in my hands, a gust of wind released the door and slammed it into my hand, crushing my wedding ring into my finger. At home I used pliers to remove my ring and went off to the jeweler’s. Next door to the jeweler’s was a bookstore. Inside on a clearance shelf was Three Cups of Tea. It caught my eye. Mortenson, I would learn, had built a network of schools in Afghanistan because of a misadventure while climbing K-2.

Reports that have since come to light that challenge the truth of Mortenson’s claims to have built and equipped schools in Afghanistan change nothing (though in the end he may have generated dangerous cynical forces that do more harm than global warming); at the time, I believed his story and in its message that Life leads us down paths with an intent beyond our ken.

Morgenstern’s book led me to dwell on the events of my own life; then everything began to seem like it was a part of a mosaic. I began to wonder who was moving the stones of my life.

To be fair, Einstein did not limit his view of the universe to mathematics; he was as much a philosopher as a physicist. What does a fish know, he once asked, about the water it swims in all its life? This book is about that fish.

Seeing

Inside the Mind

BOOK 2

of

Minds in Bloom

Controlling Behavior

With few exceptions, animals are social: