Thursday, January 29, 2004

Only short stuff since I started the theological treatise (?!!) on truegrit. I sewed the head back on the bear for one of my little girls last week. Only took a year or so to get to it. heh.

In homeschool we read some material on ..... are you ready..... I have to look it up: the reticular formation of the brain. It was very complex. I will have to have us re-read after we are done with the rest of the booklet.

Fascinating stuff..... on how we program to expect certain things, and thus can fool ourselves. Prejudice in other words. Our brains actually function to have a sort of prejudice in judgement.

It is useful in important ways, I can see that. It keeps us from having to process all the information anew each time, it gives us a trusted base to work from in our decision and action. We have to learn some things, after all....can't approach all sensory input as totally new, we would never get anywhere.

But the whole concept of how that works makes other things about our thinking very suspect. I know we have checks and balances elsewhere... but that wasn't in this booklet. Just the fact that we catch ourselves and put our sensed facts to a check of logic or method, unless that is just another learned response to sensory input. Hmmmmmm.

Anyway.... I was probably more interested than the kids. They had to wade through all that technological language. That is why I want to revisit it. Putting repetition to use;)

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