After undergoing to historically unprecedented experience of a year and a half of remote learning in the midst of a global pandemic, everyone from educational instructors to parents, students and many other parties involved in learning have been forced to rethink the process. It is past time to take a fresh look at emerging digital technology and tailor learning based on its emergent capacities and what we know about consciousness and the human mind. How do we move forward so that all members of our society can learn what is needed to function in an evolving world and be empowered to participate?
It has long been postulated that hard cases make for bad law. While this logic may hold true for the legal arena, in science often the inverse is true, we learn most not from so much from normative cases but anomalous ones. Many take it for granted that such core academic subjects as mathematics and language are grasped through a multiple-year drawn out process of step-by-step often rote-style practices with some variation. Others suggest a more dynamic open-ended process of inquiry. Gauging from the evidence however, both more traditional and contemporary methods of teaching and learning have been found wanting in a world where multisensory modalities compete for an ever-narrowing bandwidth of attention.
Moreover, the so-called reforms of the past couple of decades have only made matters worse by placing the cart before the horse, bearing pressure on producing test-based outcomes rather than focusing on the learning process itself. There is much the world can learn from atypical minds on how information can be presented and comprehended. A prime example is autistic synesthete Daniel Tammet. Since his brain visualizing information in fine detail, he has been able to master 11 different languages and advanced mathematics. In two books he has written Born on a Blue Day, and Embracing the Wide Sky, he catalogs the process of seeing information that we wouldn’t associate with such visual properties. For example, how prime numbers in his mind in color and shape and from there distinguished in patten and context from multiples that surround them. Likewise, the phonic patterns of sound combinations in the way they are associated in a given language with letters and sematic meaning is presented in his mind with shades, movement and even feel and personality.
Of course, the majority of the human population does not possess Mr. Tammet’s unique sense-oriented proclivities. Nonetheless, when one examines it more deeply nearly everyone through the use of figurative language and image-based analogy utilizing a measure of this sense-blending approach to comprehending and imparting information, whether consciousness or unconsciously. A classic example of this is a calendar. It presents time as a visual space containing consistent increments. Another case is such common terms as high and low. We rarely stop to think of how when we use these terms to describe directions north to south, greater and smaller scoring or hotter and colder temperature, they take on a profoundly different meaning than when they simply employ literal and original definition, being the measure of distance from the earth. Knowingly or not, we use such terms for a reason; they provide us with a concrete measurement and contextualized placing of value to compare at which point on a continuum one phenomenon is in reference to another.
With all this in mind, we all have been practicing sense-blending or synesthete learning or perhaps what neurologist Dr. Danka Nikolic of the University of Frankfort entities ideastesia: the linking of abstract concepts to tangibly measurable language. Therefore, how do we utilize technology to replicate this phenomenon we know 2% of the population has been able to use to unlock vast stores of complex information? We can build a new software system that assigned sense-based values to place information and present it systematically where its building blocks of related values can be mapped and hence by the instructor can simply be walked through it while presenting with students.
It is true as critics might postulate that digital technology can only re-present two of the five (some say seven) human senses, being primarily sight and sound, but even for non-synesthetes, sense-related meaning can be analogized and two senses can be leveraged for sense-making when property understood. A synesthete mind may at times create random associations between the nature of various phenomena and their corresponding, but there are also patterns which emerge. I for one have always envisioned higher frequency sounds to be brighter and lighter, while lower frequency sounds appear darker and heavier. Time always possesses a physical space, running through a track which turn around with each season while simultaneously moving in a more linear direction. In addition, sounds, especially musical ones tend to appear colorized, while raw and technical data appears spatialized but not so much colorized (I am not that high on the most common form of synesthesia, chrome synesthesia where letters and numbers have consistent color).
With all this in mind, such learning modalities can only be exported successfully into the digital domain if they can be logically and consistently systematized. Therefore, in utilizing such a system, one must evaluate content and consider the relation of all respective components. What is the form, function and patterns of the materials? What elements comes before others? What values are greater than others? How do the components interrelate? If you understand the application, you can then select how to arrange the material, three examples are spatial layout, color-coding and sound coding.