As I was working my way through my virtual pile of virtual newspaper articles (via Instapaper!), I found this: Of mind and matter: David Attenborough meets Richard Dawkins
I’ve had chances to watch any number of Attenborough’s Nature documentaries on TV, and similarly, have had the opportunity to read a number of Richard Dawkin’s books. While I don’t agree with many of their viewpoints outside of their areas of endeavor, there are certainly interesting to listen to. In this particular online newspaper article I found an interesting topic:
Where and when do you do your best thinking?
DA: I’ve no idea. All I know is if I’m stuck with something and go to bed, I wake up with the answer.
RD: That’s a fascinating phenomenon, isn’t it?
DA: That’s if I find the answer at all.
RD: Very few people say, “I think I’ll have an hour’s thinking now.”
DA: Mathematicians do. I had an uncle who was a mathematician, and one of his students said, “How long can you think for?” He said, “I sometimes manage two or three minutes.” And this young man said, “I’ve never managed more than 90 seconds.” Of course, that’s abstract thinking, and by and large I’m not an abstract thinker.
I find this idea fascinating, that the actual action of thinking, if only within the realm of physics and mathematics can be relegated to a metaphorical equivalent to weight lifting. An implication of this idea, as it was tangentially presented in this online ‘discussion’ is that this ability could be developed…
How do you develop these specific thinking skills? I imagine that for the practitioners of these areas of thought, the mere actions of going through the schooling, interacting with other adherents, and dealing with some of the tasks are the prime methods to develop these skills. In essence, to become good at ditch digging, start digging ditches…
However…
I wonder if there has been any clinical or academic work looking into which methods might help to develop these skills… For instance, in the study of…let’s say, Physics, there might be physics courses, and some related advanced cognition exercises to even whole classes…
Also, while the specific skills needed in these areas of deep abstraction are notable (at least in this blog post), this would seem to imply that there are many pother very specific thinking styles and methods in any number of other academic specialties…
In the world of K-12 education, or even in post secondary school, I have never heard of any studies into this premise. Especially when seem in contrast to the article I linked to yesterday bemoaning the fact that the meme floating out there that there are tangible, different leaning styles (which has been officially disproven of having any correlation to reality!) still has adherents…sigh.
It seems to me that doing some fundamental research into quantifying the different thinking skills related to all of these different endeavors would be worthwhile. Also there might be some similarly worthwhile experiments based upon trying to find what might be (metaphorically speaking) exercises associated to develop these skills…
There is a persistent meme called the "consultant" that is a carrier for a lot of these persistent troublesome memes. They trot out shallow slides with trite encapsulations of "knowledge" designed to impress audiences, who nod and cluck in appreciation. God knows how many trite "courses" I have suffered, especially in educational circles. Would monsieur like to try the meme pastiche du jour?
And then there are thelegions of academic researchers, with a small "r". Desperate and unimaginative research agendas that extrapolate thin psychological premises into entangled mazes of nonsense. Classic case is a paper I saw that tried to fit students into cognitive style boxes. At least there was an attempt at rational measurement. But that was as far as it went. You see the success of science is put down to the "scientific method" and so to be "modern" it is good form to emulate the trappings of science. It is a form of imitative magic. Give lots of references to increase the sympathetic magic. However the inevitable happened, the poor fit of this crappy theory then led the author to propose that teachers should employ "cognitive style flexing" strategies. Ye Gods. Ah well you have to have a conclusion you know.
I think Edward deBono has done some nice work on thinking, he calls it operacy, by analogy with literacy and numeracy. But he tends to be shunned by academics embroiled in the corrupt publish or perish nonsense of "pedagogy", even though his programmes have been adopted from time to time in some schools.
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