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NEW THINK FROM A BRAIN SCIENTIST

ALISON GOPNIK
Psychologist, UC-Berkeley; Coauthor, The Scientist In the Crib

Imagination is Real
Recently, I've had to change my mind about the very nature of knowledge because of an obvious, but extremely weird fact about children - they pretend all the time. Walk into any preschool and you'll be surrounded by small princesses and superheroes in overalls - three-year-olds literally spend more waking hours in imaginary worlds than in the real one. Why? Learning about the real world has obvious evolutionary advantages and kids do it better than anyone else. But why spend so much time thinking about wildly, flagrantly unreal worlds? The mystery about pretend play is connected to a mystery about adult humans - especially vivid for an English professor's daughter like me. Why do we love obviously false plays and novels and movies?
The greatest success of cognitive science has been our account of the visual system. There's a world out there sending information to our eyes, and our brains are beautifully designed to recover the nature of that world from that information. I've always thought that science, and children's learning, worked the same way. Fundamental capacities for causal inference and learning let scientists, and children, get an accurate picture of the world around them - a theory. Cognition was the way we got the world into our minds.
But fiction doesn't fit that picture - its easy to see why we want the truth but why do we work so hard telling lies? I thought that kids' pretend play, and grown-up fiction, must be a sort of spandrel, a side-effect of some other more functional ability. I said as much in a review in Science and got floods of e-mail back from distinguished novel-reading scientists. They were all sure fiction was a Good Thing - me too, of course, - but didn't seem any closer than I was to figuring out why.
So the anomaly of pretend play has been bugging me all this time. But finally, trying to figure it out has made me change my mind about the very nature of cognition itself.
I still think that we're designed to find out about the world, but that's not our most important gift. For human beings the really important evolutionary advantage is our ability to create new worlds. Look around the room you're sitting in. Every object in that room - the right angle table, the book, the paper, the computer screen, the ceramic cup was once imaginary. Not a thing in the room existed in the Pleistocene. Every one of them started out as an imaginary fantasy in someone's mind. And that's even more true of people - all the things I am, a scientist, a philosopher, an atheist, a feminist, all those kinds of people started out as imaginary ideas too. I'm not making some relativist post-modern point here, right now the computer and the cup and the scientist and the feminist are as real as anything can be. But that's just what our human minds do best - take the imaginary and make it real. I think now that cognition is also a way we impose our minds on the world.
In fact, I think now that the two abilities - finding the truth about the world and creating new worlds-are two sides of the same coins. Theories, in science or childhood, don't just tell us what's true - they tell us what's possible, and they tell us how to get to those possibilities from where we are now. When children learn and when they pretend they use their knowledge of the world to create new possibilities. So do we whether we are doing science or writing novels. I don't think anymore that Science and Fiction are just both Good Things that complement each other. I think they are, quite literally, the same thing.

---- http://www.brainconnection.com/topics/?main=conv/gopnik

READ MORE ABOUT THIS SCIENTIST

A VITAL SITE http://www.pdkintl.org/kappan/k_v89/k0802jen.htm
Hi papertalker i suffer with you the lack of responce to your main purpose in life the promotion of Pupets in teaching with me its the abacus and teaching every child to read well and enjoy it,

full mentall involvement with the story and concentration involved is where the massive teaching bennifit comes from, your remarks on new thinking are very relevent , just keep kicking and one day we will walk through the door to the future together. :pcprob: :pcprob:

The Learning and Skills Council says Educational Maintenance Allowance payments are now being processed efficiently.

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With the end of the year approaching, it still remains unclear how many students might still be waiting for their EMAs.

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ST. LOUIS, - Benjamin Akande, dean of the School of Business & Technology at Webster University in St. Louis, Mo., presented Timothy Olagbemiro, vice chancellor of Bowen University in Iwo, Nigeria, with more than 500 business, computer and math books for the Bowen University library. The presentation took place on Monday, December 22, 2008, at Webster University.

Named after the Reverend Thomas Jefferson Bowen, who pioneered Baptist work in Nigeria in 1850, Bowen University is a private institution owned by the Nigerian Baptist Convention. The University was founded in 2002 and has grown to a current student population of 4,200.

With its home campus in St. Louis, Webster University is a worldwide institution committed to delivering high-quality learning experiences that transform students for global citizenship and individual excellence. Founded in 1915, Webster offers undergraduate and graduate degree programs through five schools and colleges, and a global network of more than 100 campuses. Its 20,000-plus student population represents almost 150 nationalities. The University's core values include excellence in teaching, joining theory and practice, small class sizes, and educating students to be lifelong independent learners, fully prepared to participate in an increasingly international society.

Since opening its first campus overseas in Geneva in 1978, Webster has become a recognized leader and innovator in global education, with an international presence that now includes campuses in London; Vienna; Amsterdam and Leiden, the Netherlands; Shanghai, Shenzhen and Chengdu, China; and Bangkok and Cha-am, Thailand. Webster also has educational partnerships with universities in Mexico and Japan.

Source: Webster University -- Saint Louis Campus