akemi’s Reviews > How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain > Status Update
akemi
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The blindspots of neuroscientists are crazy. This guy gives great empirical evidence of babies having an understanding of object coherence, deductive reasoning, and number theory, gives a speculative account of what's going on behind the curtain, then doesn't connect them together at all. He just keeps repeating all this happens in the brain, because all he's analysing are brain scans. What the heck??
— Oct 25, 2025 02:21AM
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akemi
is 40% done
Reading neuroscience next to trauma lit is interesting, because brain plasticity is celebrated as the physiological mechanism of learning, yet it's also the reason people get trapped in traumatic scripts, defaulting to what's protected them in the past, even as it wrecks their life in the present. Traumas that fire together, wire together. It's so much easier to reinforce habits than break them.
— Nov 08, 2025 12:39AM
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Oct 25, 2025 02:33AM
Like, if you're limiting your analysis to only one thing, then of course all evidence points to that thing. Of course the brain is vital to processing data, but it's situated in an ecology of so many other elements. This guy's building off control theory, the idea that we act, fuck up, then feed those fuck ups back into our model of the world, to fuck up less. This is systems theory. There's no way you can orient everything to the brain, because it's necessarily in dialogue with the rest of the body, with other people, with institutions of care and control, with a fluid morphing world that resists totalisation. Maybe I'm being ungenerous, but I find this abstraction of learning to some Cartesian/Kantian interiority alien and terrifying. Calculating machines shit, half a century after embodied cognition and sensory ecology developed. Kant went on massive walks to think. Descartes went into his stupid bubble bath to meditate. Where thought occurs informs how thought occurs. Smdh.
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im having the exact same problem with Plato atm, amongst many others. it goes all the way back it seems."And indeed the soul reasons best when none of these senses troubles it, neither hearing nor sight, nor pain nor pleasure, but when it is most by itself, taking leave of the body and as far as possible having no contact or association with it in its search for reality.
That is so" (Plato: Complete Works 57)
