Educational researcher Tracy Tokuyama-Espinosa invokes
a number of these modulatory and other epigenetic factors in
her survey of “major brain functions as they relate to human
survival and life skills” — skills that are needed to survive both
in academic settings and “social situations.” Her list of these
major brain functions include:
1. Affect, empathy, motivation;
2. Executive, decision-making functions;
3. Facial recognition
and interpretation;
4. Memory;
5. Attention;
6. Social cognition;
7. Spatial management;
8. Temporal management (2011,143).
These are the same functions that Singer regards as crucial
to epigenetic connectivity; they forge the ecological links
between brain architecture and worldly experience at stake in
both surviving and thriving. As I argue in Staying Alive (2013),
it’s the particular brief of the arts and humanities to enhance the
skills on which thriving and surviving depend. We cannot satisfy, a
“need,” assuming we could identify one in the first place,
without also experiencing affects and sensations (for example,
pleasure, triumph, disgust, shame). So the interconnections of
these functions are crucial — for example, the role of affect in
decision-making, in focusing attention, and in the formation
of memories. Unsurprisingly (as Tokuhama notes), nonverbal
forms of communication, like facial expressions and tones of
voice, are crucial to effective pedagogy and to the mastery of the
abstract symbolism too often thought of as their opposite. These
prosodic and performative elements are at work in the earliest
modes of intersubjectivity, which take place in the context of
the attachment process. Indeed, the profound relationality of
learning is driven by the affective power of attachment. The
psychoanalyst Wilfrid Bion (1959) emphasizes the intersubjectivity
of the work of “linking” and “thinking,” whereby the attachment
figure helps the baby to process chaotic feelings and dread
by naming them and connecting them to other experiences.
“[T]he brain is a social organ that thrives on interaction with
others,” as Tokuhama-Espinosa puts it (2011, 166). Learning
from other minds is impossible without theory of mind; learning
depends on our capacity to understand that other minds
are like our own, but also distinct from our own. But theory
of mind in turn is acquired in the context of the sensory, affective
and aesthetic dimensions of attachment. It is thus a kind of
environmental theory, insofar as our awareness of different and
non-mindedness depends also on our understanding of what
our minds are like.
Tokuhama-Espinosa’s suggestion of a link between emotional
intelligence and metacognitive capacities (such as reflection)
makes perfect sense in the context of attachment behavior in
general and “active quiet” in particular. (“Active quiet” refers to
the periods of play, e.g., peekaboo, engaged in by young babies
and their caregivers, believed to be a chief means of intersubjective
learning; these periods are punctuated by restful periods
of withdrawal of attention.) Paul Howard Jones, in Introducing
Neuroeducation Research, also stresses the counter-intuitive
importance of metacognitive factors in training teachers of drama.
Analysis is not inimical to creativity, he argues; instead,
they are mutually supportive brain functions (2010, 138–63).
The focused attention and working memory needed for analysis
are impossible without affect; associative creativity is rapid and
relatively uncensored brain connectivity, as Nancy Andreasen
(2006) has argued. Her research suggests that the corpus callosum,
the thicket of connective fibers linking the right to the
left hemisphere of the brain, is specially aroused during times
of creativity. Jones’s experiments with drama-teacher trainees
also emphasize the interactions between right- and left-brain
activity (2010, 160). Both hemispheres of the brain are needed
for linguistic processing. The left side specializes in syntax and
logic, while the right side specializes in the emotional and social
significance of utterances. But if the right brain is damaged, the
result is not speech that sounds affectless, but rather non-sense,
so important are emotional and social contexts in the construction
of syntax and logic. And hence the importance of the liberal
arts. Scientific method relies on quantitative analysis and
controlled conditions; humanistic methods address real-time
performance, rhetoric, persuasion, social and emotional expressivity
and intelligence, the capacity to improvise. But attention
and memory, affect and the senses, are vital to both, and so is
relationality.
My answer to Malabou’s well-known question “What
Should We Do with Our Brain?” is therefore “enrich it.” The fact
is that many basic brain functions must work together to enable
even the narrowest of specializations — scientific, mathematical,
musical, or otherwise.
How does the concept of “unlearning” illuminate, or question,
the neuronal complexity now axiomatic in the new science
of the brain? Is there, for example, a “before” to “unlearning,”
or even an un to unlearning? To the extent that the term
“unlearning” presupposes a learning that needs to be undone
before new learning can take place, it conjures a linearity that
is not altogether helpful. Here is an example from Descartes:
“The chief cause of our errors,” he wrote, “are the prejudices of
our childhood. […] I must seriously address myself to the general
upheaval of all my former opinions” ([1641] 1955, 23). Here is another
example, this time from the discourse of organizational
psychology: “[L]earning often cannot occur until after
there has been unlearning. Unlearning is a process that shows
people they should no longer rely on their current beliefs and
methods. Because current beliefs and methods shape perceptions,
they blind people to some potential interpretations of
evidence […] ‘[People] […] hold onto their theories until […]
failures […] convince them to accept new paradigms’”. Similar
narrative elements are at work in the story told by many developmental
and psychoanalytic theorists about how our relational
expectations — including patterns of anticipation, preparedness,
anxiety, hope, and desire — resist modification, producing
“entrenchment,” or, in the analytic situation, transference. Time
lags because the past lives on in us; nothing is altogether superseded.
But contemporary fields of knowledge-making are also
creating more complex narratives. Not all of us who are psychoanalysts
expect our patients to uproot their relational expectations
altogether before new ones can begin to form. For that
matter, Freud himself characterized all new relationships, including
analytic ones, as “new editions,” “facsimiles” of old ones.
The discourse of unlearning seems on the other hand to polarize
the old and the new, where the old simply resists the new, rather
than providing opportunities for its creation.
The Bhagavad Gita, a Sanskrit text, contains the quote, "The
Supreme Personality of Godhead said: While speaking learned words, you are
mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament neither
for the living nor for the dead".
Unlearning is a process of removing mental blocks and limiting beliefs that
can hinder creativity. It can help people think more freely and
innovatively. Some techniques for unlearning include brainstorming, mind
mapping, and lateral thinking exercises.
Learning begins with unlearning Chapter 02, Text 11
None of us like to feel ignorant. That’s why we try to keep ourselves
well-informed about things, even spiritual things. However, our information
about spiritual things tends to be sketchy, unreliable or incorrect. That’s
because often people without any authority whatsoever speak about spiritual
things. In specialized subjects like nuclear medicine or rocket science,
experts with authority elucidate the subject. But in spirituality, almost
everyone with a head on the shoulder has something to say. They may have a
right to say what they think, butthat doesn’t make them authorities – even
if they speak on TV or write in newspapers. The popularity of the medium
doesn’t determine the authority of the message. Our spiritual life begins
in earnest only when we treat spirituality as a specialized branch of
knowledge. Gita wisdom indicates that a spiritual message is authoritative
when it is derived from scripture and transmitted through a chain of
practitioners that goes back to the original revelation. This standard of
authorization implies that we need to critically examine the credibility of
our past sources of spiritual information and re-evaluate what we have
learnt. To learn, we need to first unlearn.
The Bhagavad-gita underscores this right in its beginning
(02.11). Krishna points out to Arjuna that though his words are learned,
his emotions still remain uneducated. This is the hallmark of learning that
needs to be unlearned – what we know doesn’t really help us. “"To walk
back is the first stage of walking in the path of spiritual living…the
neophyte is required to offer his loyal unlearning submission."
aradoxically, such submission is not disempowering but is empowering.
Spiritual knowledge learnt thus empowers us to connect with Krishna and
change ourselves for the better – and also help others do the same.
Bhagavad Gita Chapter 02 Text 11
“The Supreme Personality of Godhead said: While speaking learned words, you
are mourning for what is not worthy of grief. Those who are wise lament
neither for the living nor for the dead.”
Chapter 2, Verse 11
श्रीभगवानुवाच |
अशोच्यानन्वशोचस्त्वं प्रज्ञावादांश्च भाषसे |
गतासूनगतासूंश्च नानुशोचन्ति पण्डिता: || 11||
śhrī bhagavān uvācha
aśhochyān-anvaśhochas-tvaṁ prajñā-vādānśh cha bhāṣhase
gatāsūn-agatāsūnśh-cha nānuśhochanti paṇḍitāḥ
BG 2.11: The Supreme Lord said: While you speak words of wisdom, you are
mourning for that which is not worthy of grief. The wise lament neither for
the living nor for the dead.
K Rajaram IRS 12125
On Sun, 12 Jan 2025 at 07:24, Markendeya Yeddanapudi <
[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> --
> *Mar*The Continuous Unlearning of Learning
>
>
>
> There was a time, very long time, when the human lived as one organism
> among the many and diverse organisms of the flora and the fauna.
>
> Seeing, smelling, hearing, touching and participating with the other
> organisms, created diverse languages of sensing and understanding. A common
> language of all organisms of the Biosphere evolved. The diverse climates
> created diverse smell hear and sense identity languages. Many organisms
> must have developed common paradigmatic bases of understanding. Nature must
> have been conversing in smells and sounds. God was heard, smelt and
> conversed with, in the common language of nature.
>
> I often wonder what the subject identities in that language were, where
> predications must have happened continuously, the predication, getting
> enriched by the diverse exhalation and sound messages of every organism.
> The smell, sound, sight compositions must have created diverse subjects,
> with diverse predications. The paradigms based mainly on three dimensions
> with Time as the fourth dimension to cover the gigantic invisible nature,
> 99.9963%of the totality, could not have been conceptualized. The space-time
> must have been tagged with sensing also, creating the ‘Sense-Space-Time’.
> The space-time, then must have given meaning also automatically. When
> nature teaches and converses in sounds and smells, every topography of
> geography must have been giving meanings and predications.
>
> The biggest problem for planet earth, or Gaia or Bhoodevi today is that
> the human developed a different language particular to humans only, while
> every other organism depends on the holistic, smelling, hearing and seeing
> and touching.
>
> The human has unlearned the holistic language of the Biosphere. Today he
> cannot communicate in that language. The paradox is, we want to converse
> with the life forms if any in the other planets etc also, while we cannot
> communicate with every organism of the Biosphere. Even among the humans,
> there is no common language. We actually lost the real language, the
> language of nature; the common language of mother earth.That language can
> thrive only in free and healthy nature without human tampering. In that
> free nature, smells, sights and sounds, automatically create words with
> total meanings, creating often single word sentences, where that word
> contains the subject, verb and predicate. The sounds of nature become the
> language of communication.
>
> Today, we have become so jaded and stupid that we recognize and realize
> that we are destroying nature completely with our economic life, but still
> carry on with our destruction.
>
> If we constitute free nature parks without human tampering we may again
> revive the common language of all organisms of the Biosphere and also
> actually stop our destruction of nature.
>
> But how to convince the Universities to start ‘The Free Nature Parks
> Without Human Tampering’, and also reduce the technology content of the
> various subjects.
>
> YM Sarma
>
> Chat GPT
>
> This passage reflects deeply on the relationship between humans and the
> natural world, focusing on the loss of a universal, sensory-based
> communication system that once existed among all organisms. The author, YM
> Sarma, presents a vision of a time when humans were connected to the earth
> and its various life forms through an interconnected language of
> senses—sight, smell, hearing, and touch. This holistic language, seemingly
> universal, allowed for a shared understanding across the biosphere, a
> communion with nature that transcended verbal or written language.
>
> However, the passage laments that over time, humans have distanced
> themselves from this "common language" by developing a separate, abstract
> system of communication, centered primarily on words and intellectual
> constructs. This disconnect, Sarma argues, is a major problem, as humans no
> longer possess the means to truly understand or communicate with other life
> forms, much less with the planet itself.
>
> Sarma also highlights the paradox that, despite recognizing the
> environmental destruction humanity is causing, humans continue their
> harmful practices, disconnected from the deeper, sensorial knowledge that
> might help restore balance with nature. The concept of "Free Nature Parks
> Without Human Tampering" emerges as a potential solution, where nature
> could thrive without human interference, and humans might re-learn the
> language of the biosphere. These parks would offer a sanctuary for the
> planet's ecosystems, potentially allowing humanity to reconnect with the
> natural world and revive the shared, sensory-based communication once used
> by all living beings.
>
> The author's final plea for universities to support such a
> vision—emphasizing reduced technological focus and an emphasis on holistic,
> nature-centric education—suggests a call to reimagine both our relationship
> with the earth and the ways we approach knowledge, communication, and
> progress.
>
>
>
--
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