Herman Rubin wrote: > There are many which can be done with one side, and MRI > studies show little on the other. These are "thinking" > tasks, not those involving vision or bodily motion.
That's odd. Most "thinking" tasks involve both hemispheres - and most activity is cortical. There's a reason why there are masses of connections between the hemispheres. > >I'm not quite sure what you mean, but there is a lot of research on > >insight and intuitive problems solving and much of suggests that the > >division between sudden and incremental solutions is rather fuzzy. > > It is rather difficult to check this; I do know of a > study by Suppes and others around 1960 on mathematical > concept formation in children. This involved teaching > simple concepts, and using multiple choice tests, on > children aged 5 to 7. The results clearly show that > there is only a small amount of learning before the > concept is completely learned (no further errors); there > is no gradual decrease in errors. > > BTW, the study also checked for "transfer". The results > again were clear; children taught one concept took longer > to learn a related one than those learning that as the > initial concept, and the interference was greatest in > going from more special to more general. This agrees > with my beliefs, and suggest that we are using the worst > order in teaching. > > We can teach concepts and formalism directly, and then > apply it. The practice of "working up" to a concept is > both time wasting and requires UNlearning, most difficult. That doesn't accord with my experience. It's fairly easy to teach a superficial understanding on many concepts, but takes time, experience and effort to get a deeper understanding. Of course it may depend on what he concepts are. At least one major philosopher thinks that some concepts are innate. If that were true I could imagine that some concepts could be educated (in the literal sense of drawn out) fairly simply. Thom . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
