On 6/28/07, Andrew Lentvorski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Bob La Quey wrote: > The real issues are IMHO cognitive and may well get wired > pretty early on (Mother Duck Syndrome.) For an example see > > http://www.newscientist.com/channel/being-human/dn10689-what-you-speak-may-affect-what-you-hear.html > > > BobLQ "My problem with Spanish is a I do not hear it well." Ooooo, this is one of my favorite topics. I'm in the school that our brains are more plastic than we give them credit for. My opinion is that we hurt the ability of our brains to learn new things because we change the mechanisms for reinforcements.
Were that it was true. But I am of the school that believes the limits to plasticity are quite real. We are born. We grow through a number of stages. There is a plateau. We get old. We die. We are individuals with individual talents, cognitive systems and natural abilities. How we are "reinforced" has very little to do with this. Our body and that part of our body, the brain, goes through stages. Early on both are quite plastic. But later the plastic nature is lost. In some more rapidly than others. Then we all die. Death is the ultimate non-plastic state. I think this is a good thing. It allows for cultural progress. The persistence of a particular individual is not very important. Well, except for me. An exception should be made. I should be allowed to live forever in a child like state, learning from a loving all wise mother and father. LOL, at least that is what my father said a few months before he died, a suicide, the consequence of thirty years, in and out of mental hospitals, for paranoid schizophrenia. He did not want to revisit the mental states he had so often visited before. I admired my father. He was a good man who fought a good fight with a body/brain that was seriously ill. I am thankful that I do not hear voices or see things that others do not see. But I do believe there are real limits to this "plasticity" you talk of. I have known and been close to people for whom the reinforcement you speak of is no more relevant than a fart on the dark side of the moon. Inner directed, yeh. BobLQ -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
