Lecture on Imperialism

 

Reflecting on the Brain and Cognition

This post is on the general subject of cognition, not any specific activity in Social Studies and is just for educational purposes.

While flawed, this is still an excellent summative article from The New York Times on the brain and learning:

Adult Learning | Neuroscience How to Train the Aging Brain

….Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can. The trick is finding ways to keep brain connections in good condition and to grow more of them. “The brain is plastic and continues to change, not in getting bigger but allowing for greater complexity and deeper understanding,” says Kathleen Taylor, a professor at St. Mary’s College of California, who has studied ways to teach adults effectively. “As adults we may not always learn quite as fast, but we are set up for this next developmental step.”Educators say that, for adults, one way to nudge neurons in the right direction is to challenge the very assumptions they have worked so hard to accumulate while young. With a brain already full of well-connected pathways, adult learners should “jiggle their synapses a bit” by confronting thoughts that are contrary to their own, says Dr. Taylor, who is 66.Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education, she says. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different. In a history class, that might mean reading multiple viewpoints, and then prying open brain networks by reflecting on how what was learned has changed your view of the world. “There’s a place for information,” Dr. Taylor says. “We need to know stuff. But we need to move beyond that and challenge our perception of the world. If you always hang around with those you agree with and read things that agree with what you already know, you’re not going to wrestle with your established brain connections.”

There are some problems with the article, starting with the assumption that the negative differences of middle aged brains are a product primarily of age rather than habitual use. While there are developmental differences in cognition, if you stop doing something at any age which you are mentally proficient – say calculus equations, creating rhymes, playing chess – you will grow less efficient at that activity over time. Use it or lose it. People in their 40’s to 60’s are typically leading lifestyles that are very different from full time students.

There is also enormous value in mastering a second field ( which initially is all “new information”). A person’s accumulated expertise, formal education and life experience can be thought of as a “cognitive map“. Ideally, you want to both continuously enlarge the size of your cognitive map (“lifelong learning”) and improve the efficiency and versatility of your ability to access the information (recall), discover patterns or elusive aspects (insight, horizontal thinking, analogies) and use the knowledge constructively and purposefully ( synthesis, creative thinking, problem solving).By nature though, humans are mentally lazy. We are predisposed toward “Automaticity” and would find it hard to get through the day attemppting to reason through every action in a sequential series of steps, so our brains are inclined to take the path of least resistance . Recall is a lot easier a cognitive function than is generating new insights, orientation of new data into the big picture or engaging in complex problem solving, which is why the mental stimulus of novelty and conflicting viewpoints are so important. We need to be prodded.

It is no coincidence that tolerating exposure to differing viewpoints (political, methodological, religious – whatever) and assessing them objectively and critically is something that most adults have great difficulty doing. The defensive emotional surge that many people feel when facing antipodal views not only protects the ego, but by intefering with the ability of the frontal lobes to engage in critical, abstract, reasoning, the brain prevents the “waste” of time/energy of having to do the hard work of (perhaps) fundamentally re-thinking the premises that order our worldview.

Not only are many zealous partisans unwilling to listen to opposing views and process their arguments rationally and fairly, they are often cognitively unable to do so! Unfortunately, that “bitter medicine” of evaluating critical feedback is exactly what our brains need in order to stay mentally sharp and adaptive.The true believers who organize echo chambers and police the community for adherence to the “party line” are drugging their brains with ideology and corrupting their OODA Loop.

Unit Vocabulary Part II. Age of Imperialism

Empire   Imperialism   Hegemony   Sphere of Influence

Protectorate   Colony  Colonial   Native   Nationalism

Militarism    Protectionism   Colonialism   Puppet Government

Unequal Treaty   Nation   Nation-state   Satellite   Foreign Policy

Strategy   Free Trade   The Big Stick   Dollar Diplomacy

The Open Door Policy   Roosevelt Corollary   National Honor

Panama Canal   Spanish-American War   Scramble for Africa

Russo-Japanese War   Boer War   French Revolution  

The Boxer Rebellion   The Philippine Insurrection 

Missionary Society   Annexation of Hawaii   Jingoism

Julius Caesar   Alfred T. Mahan   Frederick Jackson Turner

Theodore Roosevelt   John Hay   William McKinley

Admiral Dewey   Jomo Kenyatta   King Leopold  

The Rough Riders   Rudyard Kipling   Woodrow Wilson

QUIZ Friday

Students should review their three corrected practice sheets for the Quiz on Economic concepts.

Have A Great Holiday Break!

Lecture Slides: Industrial Revolution

Unit Test on Friday

We have been working on this study guide, on and off, in class since Monday.

UNIT TEST STUDY GUIDE   Forms of Government∙ The Political Spectrum

Fill Out The Political Spectrum Line:

ß—–1————-2—————-3——————4—————-5—————-6—————7——–à

Terms/Concepts  Write a basic definition, example or description of the main idea or explain why it is important.

State of Nature:_______________________________________________________________________

Social Contract________________________________________________________________________

Monarchy____________________________________________________________________________

Democracy (Representative)_____________________________________________________________

Democracy (Direct)_____________________________________________________________________

Oligarchy_____________________________________________________________________________

Aristocracy___________________________________________________________________________

Anarchy_____________________________________________________________________________
Republic_____________________________________________________________________________

Tyranny______________________________________________________________________________

Demagogue___________________________________________________________________________

Mixed Government_____________________________________________________________________

Dictatorship___________________________________________________________________________

Revolution____________________________________________________________________________

Athens_________________________________________________________________________________

Sparta_________________________________________________________________________________

Rome__________________________________________________________________________________

Hunter-gatherer_________________________________________________________________________

Tribe__________________________________________________________________________________

Agricultural Revolution____________________________________________________________________

Cyclical View of History____________________________________________________________________

Linear View of History_____________________________________________________________________

Left____________________________________________________________________________________

Right___________________________________________________________________________________

Anarchist________________________________________________________________________________

Conservative_____________________________________________________________________________

Moderate_________________________________________________________________________________

Radical____________________________________________________________________________________

Reactionary________________________________________________________________________________

Liberal____________________________________________________________________________________

Republican Party____________________________________________________________________________

Democratic Party____________________________________________________________________________

Independent/ Swing Voter____________________________________________________________________

Negative/Attack Ads_________________________________________________________________________

Positive/Self-Promoting Ads___________________________________________________________________

FAMOUS PEOPLE WHO ARE ON THE TEST WHO YOU NEED TO KNOW SOMETHING ABOUT:

Thomas Hobbes    John Locke     Polybius     Ibn Khaldun     Machiavelli     Caligula     Confucius      Edmund Burke

REMINDER: PROJECT DUE DATE !!!!

MONDAY DECEMBER 7th

All projects are due on monday December 7th

MONDAY DECEMBER 7th

Metacognition: Thinking about Thinking

Two items struck me as useful advice for sharpening our mental edges.

First, I read  an excellent series of posts by Dr. Eric Drexler of Metamodern. All of them were good but I particularly liked the following one:How to Understand Everything (and why)

….Formal education in science and engineering centers on teaching facts and problem-solving skills in a series of narrow topics. It is true that a few topics, although narrow in content, have such broad application that they are themselves integrative: These include (at a bare minimum) substantial chunks of mathematics and the basics of classical mechanics and electromagnetism, with the basics of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics close behind.….To avoid blunders and absurdities, to recognize cross-disciplinary opportunities, and to make sense of new ideas, requires knowledge of at least the outlines of every field that might be relevant to the topics of interest. By knowing the outlines of a field, I mean knowing the answers, to some reasonable approximation, to questions like these:

What are the physical phenomena?What are their magnitudes?What are their preconditions?How well are they understood?How well can they be modeled?What do they make possible?What do they forbid?

And even more fundamental than these are questions of knowledge about knowledge:

What is known today?What are the gaps in what I know?When would I need to know more to solve a problem?How could I find it?

It takes far less knowledge to recognize a problem than to solve it, yet in key respects, that bit of knowledge is more important: With recognition, a problem may be avoided, or solved, or an idea abandoned. Without recognition, a hidden problem may invalidate the labor of an hour, or a lifetime. Lack of a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Secondly, reading through Richard Nisbett’s Intelligence and How to Get It: Why Schools and Cultures Count ( see this monster, two-part, book review by James McCormick at Chicago Boyz), the intriguing findings of the “Venezuela Project” run by none other than the late Richard Herrnstein of Bell Curve fame. Nisbett writes (74-75):

Herrnstein and his coworkers devised a very advanced set of materials geared to teaching seventh-graders fundamental concepts of problem solving that were not targeted to any particular subject matter. In effect they, they tried to make the children smarter by giving them handy implements for their intellectual tool kits.

What were those non-subject specific, cognitive skills?

• Basics of Classification
• Hypothesis Testing
• Discovery of Properties of Ordered Dimensions
• Analogies
• Simple Propositions
• Principles of Logic
• Constructing and Evaluating Complex Arguments
• Weighing opportunity costs vs. probability of success for a goal
• Evaluating credibility and relevance of data

I would have added metaphors, pattern-recognition and intuitive thinking games but it was a fine set of skills and the results were remarkable, according to Nisbett:

The instruction resulted in big changes in children’s ability to solve problems that the new skills were designed to improve….for language comprehension, .62 SD [ standard deviation]; for learning how to represent ‘”problem spaces,” .46 SD; for decision making, .77 SD; for inventive thinking, .50 SD. In short, general problem solving skills can be taught, and taught moreover in a brief period of time.

In psychometric terms, for a 13 year old, these scores represent phenomenal improvements in cognitive performance and indicate the plasticity of some aspects of measured intelligence.

We need to think of lessons and learning not just in terms of content or broad “critical thinking” but also the very specific cognitive actions that we want the students to experience – and the students need to have opportunities to use them across all subjects.

Lecture Slides from the Start of Unit

I finally managed to get the file uploaded without stalling out. These slides were from the first lecture before we studied Forms of Government.