Cerebral Lighthouse

On Sunday evening Rosemary and I watched a programme about people in Papua New Guinea and how they lived in areas also heavily populated by crocodiles. I was fascinated and excited in equal measure at how they had learnt to hunt them, using their feet to feel them through the reed beds without unduly aggravating them before administering a fatal blow. I loved how they had learnt not to kill the big ones as they would could produce more off-spring and better sustain the community. Even better was the small group of people who had lived in apparent harmony with a big mo-fo of a croc. They didn't kill him because he kept other crocs away and he returned the favour by not eating them either.
 
I love watching people and animals. Last year whilst sitting on a bank of the River Wye I watched a flock of swans swimming up-stream when the river was in spate in a formation that was similar to a team time trial in the Tour de France. I think if money was no object and I could do anything I wanted, I'd be an anthropologist who used photography to document stuff, a bit like Sebastiao Salgado who I talked about in Monday's blip!
 
Saying that, today was not far off. I've been reading loads in my own academic discipline of sports coaching recently and today was awesome in that regard. Much of the literature I'm reading doesn't make sense…….most specifically in coach learning. It's built on theoretical constructs which haven't been tested in the 'real world'. I'm not sure that my approach is novel, but I don't like following the crowd or accepting the status quo. Rather, I've developed into a romantic who prefers to look to evolution and the ancient scholars prior to considering contemporary research. What I'm learning is that humans haven't developed a great deal in the last 3000 years.
 
I had started the day in the middle of the night when I lay awake thinking about the importance of story telling in how humans learn. The academic literature tells us that coaches learn through formal, informal and non-formal learning but not much on whether it is effective or not. Further, it rarely focusses on what  is actually important to learn about and what is not. This is a wholly unsatisfactory state of affairs for me.
 
The rest of the day was mind-blowing. I read an anthropological study on story telling and loved how the writer had reflected on the perfective of learning in a small group of Solomon Islanders. The rest of the day was spent meandering through neuroscience and philosophy. I learnt about neurological evidence to support brain to brain coupling. That is, we have built in wi-fi which make learning experiences with emotional and social components far more effective.  Taking a leap of faith, this brain to brain coupling explains why some things engage us and others don't. Then I found myself reading about Swarm Intelligence……….but by that stage I was cognitively exhausted. A very fine Ethiopian coffee helped me get some of my thoughts down on virtual paper for future use.
 

Then it was home to cook risotto, which I got exactly 'on point' when Rosemary came through the front door and then I headed down to the harbour to catch the sunset!