I like the thoughts presented. I dont think the material presented stays true to the topic intially presented. Essentually the subject starts with talking about how creativity sparks intelligence, but goes off into how dyslexics and people with ADD learns or sabotage their own learning.
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Like I said it wasn't complete. The next section was intended to link the ideas together but I haven't gotten to it.
I have been working on an essay dealing with the human intellect. I was wondering if you guys could review it. Please treat this as intellectual property as I am hoping to submit it someplace and I don't want it copied. It is not complete yet, but I want to post what I have so far.
The Key to Intelligence
How athleticism, the arts, and science are linked
And how to unlock the brain’s full potential
What Makes Us Intelligent
What makes us intelligent? This is the paradox that has puzzled the great minds for many hundreds of generations. What can we do to become smarter? How do we learn? What determines our mental capacity and abilities besides genetics? How do we unlock these abilities? The questions, once the center of the above mentioned paradox, shall now be resolved by an answer so simple and so mind bending that your entire life could change. The key to intelligence is playtime.
Playtime is seen as useless to human productivity, and yet, the main issue that many mentally retarded people, and some functioning people, cannot overcome is that they are unable to, or have a difficult time, accessing the inaccessible portions of the brain that would otherwise allow them to imagine, create, and predict. The most intelligent people in the world have no trouble finding connections between seemingly unrelated topics, nor do they have trouble in solving puzzles, or seeing the results of a chess game ten moves before the end actually materializes. Intelligent people do this by mentally manipulating the image and accessing the creative side, or right side, of the brain, where creativity, fun, and unexplored territory hold reign. The population with an average IQ or lower search for answers using common, already tested solutions, without foresight or creativity. These are the supreme rulers of the left side of the brain, the side used for everyday tasks and boring, mundane responsibilities. This is the root of the problems of the “issues” that we call daydreaming, Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and dyslexia, as well as other learning disabilities.
Throughout history, daydreaming has been frowned upon by many people except the most brilliant minds who, coincidentally, also advocated for the various arts. Plato said that “Music… gives soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination, and charm… to life and to everything” while Leonardo da Vinci, one of the most brilliant minds in history (also a suspected dyslexic) was a painter, inventor, and sculptor, yet teachers constantly scold students for daydreaming, while these students, who are bored out of their minds by the slow and unchallenging lesson and are seeking an intelligent refuge, are probably dreaming up more useful and mind-bending ideas than anything any teacher could ever hope to understand, let alone teach. It was through day dreaming that Albert Einstein conceived the theory of relativity, where he saw himself running alongside a beam of light. The theory of relativity, by the way, explains the very heart of time/space related physics, a subject that requires textbooks to explain and is considered by most to be one of the most difficult subjects to comprehend and/or teach.
Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) is daydreaming, but to a further extreme. A person with ADD cannot focus on any one task for too long, moving from one idea to the next, quickly and without completion, moving the moment that idea is exhausted of entertainment. This is due to the fact that the right side of their brain is unchecked by the time constraints and limits that the left side of the brain attempts to shackle to the right side of the brain. The multitudes of chemicals that are rapidly pumped through the brain while travelling through its fast paced, colorful, and creative aspect are too enticing, too addicting for a child with ADD to submit to the slow paced, gray, and unimaginative left side of the brain which houses thought processes that don’t produce the same heavy amounts of dopamine, adrenaline, and various other drugs (because that is what they are) that this child is addicted to. Thus, even when aroused from their dream by the teacher, they will inevitably and inexorably fall back into their dream if the topics they are being “taught” are mundane lessons that do not snare the child’s imagination and captivate his attention. Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD) is a more extreme form of ADD in which a child’s metabolic levels are higher than normal, some would say abnormal. This results in unusually rapid digestive and neurological processes. This means that a child with ADHD, already addicted to the various chemicals produced by the right side of the brain (like a child with ADD), would process food and neural activity far faster than normal, resulting in a vast amount of energy and neural connections. This child will think even faster than one with ADD, flitting from one idea to another in the same manner and speed of a humming bird moving from flower to flower, sipping each thought’s nectar until depleted, then move on to the next thought.
Dyslexia is a complex learning disability and has yet to be defined, but has been described by Ron Davis. He describes the major symptom of dyslexia as being disorientation triggered by confusion.
Ron Davis was, as a child, severely affected by dyslexia. However, with the help of various “eureka” moments throughout his life, he was able to ultimately take control over his dyslexia and develop a method that allows other dyslexics to do the same with a 97% success rate. This method is based on his theory in which the disorientation is triggered when visual or verbal stimulus does not coincide with a dyslexic’s current knowledge. But so far, this given definition would hold true for anybody who is learning something new. What then separates dyslexics from normal people?
The Mind’s Eye
The reason I am dedicating an entire section to this one topic is because the subject of this topic is central to the answer to all of those questions, but that is for later discussion.
If dyslexics are confused through the same stimuli as normal people are, then why can’t they learn the same things at the same pace as normal people? The difference between normal people and dyslexics is that normal people have a fixed point of mental visualization. The term “fixed point of mental visualization” is confusing, so I will use the term used by Davis, which is much easier to understand. He calls it “the mind’s eye”.
The mind’s eye is what a person uses to think. Create an object in your mind. The place where the object is being created is what I call “the soup bowl”. The mind’s eye, which is normally at a fixed point, looks at the soup bowl. This is the heart of the subject, because if you noticed my usage of the word “normally”, you probably have already made the connection. To put it simply, while a normal person can only imagine an object from a fixed point, a dyslexic can move the eye wherever they need it.
*The example I am about to give is extremely basic. It would be best not to overanalyze it*
Here is the simple definition of a dyslexic’s abilities. A dyslexic child learns by associating new knowledge with old knowledge and finding patterns by manipulating mental images. They don’t build entirely new neural pathways for each piece of knowledge. Instead, they build neural pathways that twist and combine and overlap each other. They make shortcuts. This allows the dyslexic to excel in the creative portions of school, the portions that let them think and connect dots. Let’s call this dyslexic person X for now. In these aspects of school X flourishes and is ahead of his class. While his peers build new logic chains like; “if A + B = C, and D + E = C, that must mean A + B = D + E”, our friend X has already found a pattern in his neural network and has come up with “A + B = C = D + E” and only goes through half the effort. This method works very well for a while and the parents and teachers are astounded by the precocious behavior exhibited by the child. But what happens when X tries to learn reading and writing?
X gets to first grade. The teacher has written the word SOUP on the board. The teacher asks the class “What does this say?” The class choruses back “SOUP!” But X is very confused. But what is there to be confused about? The part that confuses X is that, simply put, the word soup doesn’t look like soup. Even though the confusion is only small and temporary, the damage done by rectifying that confusion is life damaging. Why? Because in analyzing something that can only be learned by taking it for granted, X becomes confused and disoriented. Remember what I said about how a dyslexic learns by manipulating mental images? At this very moment of confusion, X is trying to learn to read a word by manipulating it!!! By learning in the only way known to him, X is being kept from learning what he is trying to learn through attempting to sabotage the lesson for learning’s sake!!! If you understood that sentence, you understand that it is impossible to learn anything that way. If you didn’t understand it, you should still understand my point. You can’t learn by destroying the lesson.