WHOLE-BRAIN KNOWING

Marilyn Ferguson

( From The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in Our Time)

Another development is unprecedented.  Once mind became aware  of evolution, Teilhard (de Chardin) said,  humankind entered a new phase. It was only a matter of time until we would see evidence of a worldwide expansion of consciousness.

  The deliberate use of consciousness-expanding techniques in education, only recently well under way, is new in mass schooling. Never before has a culture undertaken to foster whole-brain knowing in the general populace. The transcendent state in which intellect and feeling are fused, in which higher cortical judgment makes peace with the intuitions of the old limbic brain, was the province of the few: the Athenian philosopher, the Zen master, the Renaissance genius, the creative physicist. Such heroic stuff was not for "normal" people. And it was certainly not the business of the schools!

But there is no longer reason to confine whole-brain knowing to an elite. Both science and personal transformative experiences of great numbers of people demonstrate that it is an innate human capacity, not just the gift of artists, yogis, and scientific prodigies. The brain of each of us is capable of endless reordering of information. Conflict and paradox are grist for the brain's transformative mill.

We need only pay attention. By creating what psychologist Lester Fehmi called "open focus," the psychotechnologies amplify awareness. They boost memory, accelerate the rate of learning, help integrate the functions of the two cortical hemispheres, and promote coherence between the old and new brain regions. They also allow greater access to unconscious anxieties that may be standing in our way.

They help the learner, old or young, to become centered-to create, connect, unify, transcend.

And it soon becomes obvious that our underestimation of the brain's capacity and our ignorance of its workings led us to  design our educational systems upside-down a and backward. Leslie Hart, an educational consultant, described schools as "brain-antagonistic":

We are obsessed by "logic," usually meaning ... tight, step-by-step, ordered, sequential (linear) effort.... But the human brain has little use for logic of this kind. it is a  computer of incredible power and subtlety, but far more analog than digital. It works not by precision but probabilistically, by great numbers of often rough or even vague approximations.

The brain's calculations do not require our conscious effort, only our attention and our openness to let the information through. Although the brain absorbs universes of information, little is admitted into "normal" consciousness, largely because of our habits and wrong assumptions about how we know what we know.

Discoveries about the nature of the mind, unfortunately, have been like the slow-spreading news of armistice. Many die needlessly on the battlefield, long after the war is over. Young minds are dampened and diminished every day in numbers too great to bear thinking about ' forced through a system that stunts the capacity for a lifetime of growth. In contrast to insects, as someone said, human beings start out as butterflies and end up in cocoons.

Brain science was long absent from the course work in most colleges of education-understandably, since it tends to be swathed in technical language. The discoveries about the specialization of the right and left hemispheres, however oversimplified, have offered education a provocative new metaphor for learning.

The scientific validation of "intuition," our term for knowing that can't be tracked, has shaken science and is just now having its impact on education.

On the common-sense level, we try to trace ideas from point to point, like hard wiring or a "train of thought." A leads to B leads to C. But nonlinear processes in nature, like crystallization and certain brain events,  are A-Z, all at once. The brain is not limited to our common-sense conceptions, or it would not function at all.

The dictionary defines intuition as "quick perception of truth without conscious attention or reasoning," "knowledge from within," "instinctive knowledge or feeling associated with clear and concentrated vision." The word derives, appropriately, from the Latin intuere, "to look upon."

If this instant sensing is disregarded by the linear mind we should not be surprised. After all, its processes are beyond linear tracking and therefore suspect. And it is mediated by the half of the cortex that does not speak -our essentially mute hemisphere. The right brain cannot verbalize what it knows; its symbols, images, or metaphors need to be recognized and reformulated by the left brain before the information is wholly known.

Until we had laboratory evidence of the validity of such knowledge and some inkling of the nonlinear process, it was hard for our one-track selves to accept this knowing, much less trust it. We now know that it derives from a system whose storage, connection, and speed humble the most brilliant investigators.

There is a tendency to think of intuition as separate from intellect. More accurately, intuition might be said to encompass intellect. Everything we have ever "figured out" is also stored and available. The larger realm knows everything we know in our normal consciousness-and a great deal more. As psychologist Eugene Gendlin put it, the dimension we used to call the unconscious is not childish, regressive, or dreamy but very much smarter than "we" are. If its messages are sometimes garbled, that is the fault of the receiver, not the sender.

"Tacit  knowing" has always had its defenders, including many of our greatest and most creative scientists and artists. It has been the essential, silent partner to all our progress. The left brain can organize new information into the existing scheme of things, but it cannot generate nezv ideas. The right brain sees context--and, therefore, meaning. Without intuition, we would still be in the cave. Every breakthrough, every leap forward in history, has depended on right-brain insights, the ability of the holistic brain to detect anomalies, process novelty, perceive relationships.

Is it any wonder that our educational approach, with its emphasis on linear, left-brain processes, has failed to keep pace with the times?  In a way, it makes sense that evolving human consciousness eventually came to over-rely on that hemisphere in which language Primarily resides. Some theorists think, based on the research data, that the left brain behaves almost like a separate, competitive individual, an independent mind that inhibits its partner.

  Our plight might be compared to the long, long journey of twin sailors.

  One is a verbal, analytical, the other mute and sometimes dreamy. The verbal partner earnestly calculates with the aid of his charts and instruments. His brother, however, has an uncanny ability to predict storms, changing currents, and other navigational conditions, which he communicates by signs, symbols, drawings. The analytical sailor is afraid to trust his brother's advice because he can't imagine its source. Actually, the silent sailor has wireless, instantaneous access to a rich data bank that gives him a satellite perspective on the weather. But he cannot explain this complex system with his limited ability to communicate details. And his talkative, "rational" brother usually ignores him anyway. Frustrated, he often stands by helplessly while their craft sails head-on into disaster.

  Whenever their convictions are in conflict, the analytical sailor stubbornly follows his own calculations, until the day he stumbles onto the schematics for his brother's data bank. He is overwhelmed. He realizes that by ignoring his twin's input, he has been traveling through life half- informed.

  Jerome Bruner, one of the leading scientists interested in the realm of learning, remarked that the young child approaching a new subject or an unfamiliar problem-like the scientist operating at the edge of his chosen field-would be paralyzed without intuition. We do not "figure out" how to balance, for example. More often than we realize, we feel our way. The A-Z computer fine-tunes its guesses, and we move.

  If we are to use our capacities fully and confidently, Bruner said, we must recognize the power of intuition. Our very technology has generated so many options that only intuition can help us choose. And because our technology can handle the routine, the analytical, we are free to refine the attention that gives us access to holistic knowing.

Now we realize that the right brain sees relationships, recognizes faces, mediates new information, hears tone, judges harmonies and symmetries. The greatest learning disability of all may be pattern blindness-the inability to see relationships or detect meaning. Yet no school district has remedial programs to overcome this most basic of handicaps. As we have seen, our educational system aggravates and may even cause it.

Research confirms what observant parents and teachers have always known: We learn in different ways. Of our assorted brains, some are left-dominant, some are right-dominant, some are neither. Some of us learn better by hearing, others by seeing or touching. Some visualize easily, others not at all. Some recall odometer readings, telephone numbers, dates; others remember colors and feelings. Some learn best in groups, others in isolation. Some peak in the mornings, others in the afternoon.

No single educational method can draw the best from diverse brains. Findings about the specialties of the two hemispheres and the tendency of individuals to favor one style or the other also helps us understand why we differ so much in how we see and think.

Brain research is also revolutionizing our understanding of differences in the ways males and females perceive. The sexes vary markedly in some aspects of brain specialization. The left and right hemispheres of the male brain specialize at a much earlier age than those of the female brain, which gives them certain advantages and disadvantages. Male brains are superior at certain types of spatial perceptions, but they are less flexible, more vulnerable than female brains to deficits after injury. One recent study found almost no language loss in women who had suffered injury to the left brain and subnormal language in males with the same type of trauma. Vastly more males than females suffer from dyslexia (reading difficulty).

Dyslexia, which afflicts at least 10 percent of the population, seems to be associated with a dominance by the right cerebral hemisphere in the reading process. Those with a strong holistic perception are often handicapped by our educational system with its emphasis on symbolic language and symbolic mathematics. They have initial difficulty in processing these symbols. Yet this neurological minority may also be unusually gifted. They typically excel in the arts and in innovative thinking. Ironically, their potential contribution to society is frequently diminished because the system undermines their self-esteem in their first school years.

Schools have taught and "graded" a kaleidoscope of individual brains by a single program, a single set of criteria. They have over rewarded  and conditioned some skills to the exclusion of others, "failing" those whose gifts are not on the culture's most wanted list, thus convincing them for life that they are unworthy.

Individualistically, and as a society, we have urgent needs that an only be met if we think differently about learning.