LEARNING, TALENT AND TEACHING

Yesterday I posted a remark about Human Whispers (Face and Body Language: firetreepub.blogspot.com), the concept being that we have innate abilities that we use at a subconscious level. We are able to read facial expressions and body language of others. I mentioned education as a way to enhance these abilities. In addition, there are micro-expressions we seem to be able to read on the faces of others. With training, we can learn to better interpret what we are reading on faces—raise the subconscious to the conscious level.

The more I thought about this the more I believe this really is at the heart of something about learning that I had not appreciated before. In the past, I have written about talent and about instinct in a muddled way, not separating one from the other. For example, as a small boy, I seemed to have a talent for knowing about worms and frogs; insects fascinated me; I found fish interesting, and birds enchanting.  Later in life, I found myself in a narrow situation where electronics, not biology, seemed the only occupational option open to me—I was on a ship, bouncing world the world.  I had a teacher on that ship who understood electronics in a way that I did not; in contrast to me, he seemed to have an intuitive understanding of the subject I did not have. I went on to a career in veterinary medicine and he went on to a career in physics and engineering.

In another context (+Education Revolution; Google discussion group), I wrote a piece equating artists to teachers; people who can see something hidden in a roughly shaped stone of knurled piece of wood and carve it to something beautiful. I am beginning to think that perhaps each one of us is born with some universal senses, emotions, and talents somehow related to survival; adaptive products of natural selection.  Some of them seem universal such as walking, nursing, fear, happiness, language, expression of emotions and on an on. Psychologists apparently recognize some of this and refer to it as ‘imprinted’ or ‘patterned learning’. A classic example seems to be the idea that monkeys, as infants, are not afraid of snakes but as they reach the end of their adolescents and become responsible for their own safety learn to show fear and avoid snakes. I had a hard time documenting this example with a literature search; nonetheless, the citation expresses the idea of subconscious knowledge.

Putting this all-together means to me that a teacher, no matter how good he or she is at their profession, would have a hard time teaching me to become a Mozart or a Beethoven but would have had an easy time teaching me how to be a veterinarian. The job of a teacher is not just to teach everything to everybody but also to recognize talents in their students and carve those talents to perfection. Of course, there is a “biological” core curriculum of sorts based on understanding evolutionary psychology as it applies to survival. In addition, teachers have to be able to recognize, understand, and mold both the basic biological “instincts or talents” that are universally ingrained with those special talents more or less limited to certain individuals. It should be intuitively obvious the mother takes over where instincts end, kindergarten teacher takes over where the mother leaves off, and the higher-grade teachers takes over where childhood and adolescent clash. Either the “hard knocks of life” or college professors takes over from there. Each step fades into the next.

Psychologist as teacher could easily teach all of us to understand and use micro-expression seen on faces to interpret what they are thinking, feeling, and saying because we already know—we have an innate talent for that. If I could watch your face as you read this post, I could tell a lot about what you think about it without waiting for your +1 on Google.  Come to think it about, maybe Google is now our subconscious being and is teaching us how you think.  

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