Michael writes: > What does our "receiving apparatus" receive? > As usual, there are no perfect words for what I was tryng to convey. I have occasionally used the word 'processing'. And at least once I used "receiving and processing". When we encounter the occasion for sense data, factors like acuity of hearing and of sight come into play. If Jones is color-blind, the sensation he "receives" will be different from yours because your two receiving apparatuses are different.
But if you and Jones are reading, chances are you and he will be "seeing the same thing". The same "words" will be ushered into your two different brains, but there they will be processed differently. I don't mean simply because you each have different acquired knowledge -- e.g. Jones "knows" Serbo-Croatian and you don't. I mean the pre-knowledge, pre-training "wiring" is different in your two heads. That's why as a teacher you've observed two very different students with very similar backgrounds. And why as a teacher you've looked at a willing and not stupid student who you nevertheless judged would never be a worthy "creative artist". I've seen Ivy League summa cum laude comp lit majors with very weak emotional/aesthetic reaction. There was no evidence they failed to receive the "words", or failed to process them lexically. They just failed to "feel" them. When we say, "Jim has a gift," we generally have in mind something about his "apparatus" as distinguished from acquired memories. In fact, the very ability to "memorize" seems a function of "apparatus". The ability to "visualize" something not physically in front of our eyes is a function of apparatus. You can see a variety of this in yourself. The processing of ushered-in "words" can be immensely different depending on your state of fatigue. In today's IQ tests, the spatial relations segment is very different from what it was decades ago. People with very high scores on the verbal or logic segments often draw a blank when asked, "Which of these four diagrams comes next?" They are receiving the same prior sequence of designs as the next guy, but their wiring can't process it as well. But then, you probably already know that intelligence tests are supposed to be "culture free" so that what they measure is inherent ability, not learning. Not always, but much of the time, if we see two young people exposed for the first time to a kind of music and we notice their responses are radically different, we are confident in judging that the difference is a function of apparatus. Three aspects of mental ability no aptitude test has ever been able to measure are sensibility, imagination and long term memory. They are all affected by experience to an extent, but at base those three are largely a function of wiring in the brain, not "text" content. A final attempt to convey what the apparatus does after it "receives": MRI's show a "normal" atrophying of the brain as people age. The brain is literally smaller. There is reason to say that much of what has shriveled away is neural matter involved in retrieval of memory, as distinguished from the brain tissue that amounts to the shelves where the memories being sought are stored. Retrieval is a function of apparatus. Relatedly, association is an apparatus function. "I can no longer make connections," said William Manchester as he conveyed why he stopped writing. ************** Worried about job security? Check out the 5 safest jobs in a recession. (http://jobs.aol.com/gallery/growing-job-industries?ncid=emlcntuscare00000003)
