Interview
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Q. So your intention has always been to draw our attention to these undeveloped capacities and limitations we impose on ourselves and on our children?
To grasp the nature of adult spiritual development we must understand the nature of child development which in turn, opens fully to us only when we understand the self organizing properties of the brain and the way our brain draws on fields of intelligence and memory. The paradox of the idiosavant is a dramatic example of this and challenges large sectors of commonsense and classical belief.
Q. What is the savant?
Do you recall the movie Rain Man, with Dustin Hoffman? It was supposedly based on a autistic person in our current pathological use of that term. The film actually presented a combination of an autistic person and the idiosavant. Savants are people with an average IQ of 25. They can give volumes of information in one specific, limited field such as geography, mathematics, or calendar dates. Careful research shows that most of these individuals are uneducable, illiterate, and cannot have acquired or "learned" the information they so liberally dispense. They are incapable of learning even rudimentary functions much less abstract systems such as numbers and letters. Yet, if you ask them a question concerning the particular field of knowledge they are apparently plugged into, they can respond without error.
Howard Gardner proposed that a particular intelligence such as mathematics or music are, in effect, their own field of operations with which the brain can interact. Recent discoveries in language formation bear this out. Carl Pribram proposed that the brain "translates from nonspatialtemporal realms," potentials and functions not in timespace but which give rise to our timespace experience. All these point toward a new perspective in realityorganization and suggest an openended capacity at birth that closes prematurely.
Q. How do savants enter into this?
Consider the mathematical savant who was asked what would happen if you take a grain of rice and double it on every square of a checker board from top to bottom. This turns out to be 2 to the 64th power, which is a number greater than the atoms we estimate to be in the sun. It reads 18 quintillion, all the following quadrillions, trillions, billions, millions, hundreds of thousands, etc. The savant, who couldn't read, write, or learn by our processes, took about 45 seconds to spell out the answer.
Only the most advanced computers can fill in all the gaps of a number like 2 to the 64th power, as the savant did automatically. We can't say the savant's brain "computes" the answer, since he hasn't been trained in mathematics. The neurons of the brain are no more "computing" information than are the transistors in a television set "computing" the information coming from the station. The television set is "translating" from a field electronic activity generated thousands of miles away, but it can hardly be expected to be aware of its function. The savant is translating from a field of activity not in timespace, but one that gives rise to our perception of timespace.
Through training we learn about a field, as mathematics, and can engage it in dynamic twoway exchange. This opens that field of intelligence to introspection, creativity and invention, but also makes us subject to error. The savant has no awareness of his own knowledge. They can't reflect on their response nor hesitate in doubt, and never makes an error. But they can't enter into the operation or learn about the subject. If given the appropriate stimuli, a question or request about their one area of information or function, they simply actout, through speech or actions the operation as it takes place through them.
Q: What other examples draw attention to this new view of realityorganization?
The Eureka! phenomenon is a good example of the paradox of brain/mind and fields of intelligence. Gordon Gould, awarded the Nobel for his discovery of the laser back in 1957, spoke of that discovery falling into his head in a single flash when he was just loafing around. He spoke of being "stunned, electrified" at the enormity of what he saw in that splitinstant, and spent the rest of the weekend writing furiously to get down on paper all that this insight implied. He couldn't account for the burst of knowing, but reflected that he had studied physics and optics most of his life. All this, he felt, had "fed the bricks and mortar" which had put together this magnificent edifice beneath his awareness. What then is mind, and what is awareness who is aware of what, and in every case of Eureka!, why does the answer or discovery occur when the person is not thinking about that issue at all?
Q: This seems to imply a quality of perception that is beyond our normal definition of thinking or intelligence.
First, intelligence is the capacity to respond for one's own wellbeing, and so, peripherally, the wellbeing of one's society or even species. Intellect is a particular form of intelligence, one that abstracts from a broad field of phenomena some narrow part to examine in a linear, logical, inquisitive, exploratory, inventive way. Intellect however, only asks what is possible and is driven to explore accordingly, without any particular concern for appropriateness or wellbeing. Intelligence, on the other hand, moves for our wellbeing, or survival and asks, in effect, is what we do appropriate?
This intelligence moves the infantchild toward education, which begins in the womb. Education is being led forth into knowledge. Knowledge is knowing on many levels, such as bodyknowing and intuitive understanding, emotional awareness, perceptual delight, the stuff that our real life is made of. Most learning of this sort takes place beneath awareness simply through contact with a rich environment, as Maria Montessori understood so well.
We equate education with teaching, as pouring information into a child. Montessori claimed that no teaching took place in her schools, the adults were there to keep the absorbent mind of the child open to absorb knowledge of its universe.
What we must provide is an appropriate environment, which means one rich with concrete experience and offering complete emotional security for the child, free of threat. Do this and you can't keep the brain from learning, because that's all its designed to do. Only through learning of this kind can wellbeing, which means highquality survival, come about. As adult models we need to think of facilitating education rather than teaching, and ponder what wellbeing entails, what the brainmind is after, what it needs. Otherwise we'll continue to spend years and huge sums of money on very little real learning.