Breaking Boundaries - The Syncretic Mind In Search Of Meaning

One Node in a Network of Thought-Experiments, Hypotheses, and Essays

© Mayer Spivack 1996

Definitions of the term syncretic loosely extracted from the Random House Dictionary of the English language give us the following understanding: “Syn-cre-tism...1. the attempted reconciliation or union of different or opposing principles, practices, or parties, as in philosophy or religion. 2. Gram. The merging, as by historical change in a language, of two or more categories in a specified environment into one...”

In a series of posts, beginning with this one, I will publish thoughts and essays on syncretic and associative learning that I call "Breaking Boundaries". This writing will explore how meaning and creative process germinate and bloom in the mind. I offer the proposition that syncretic association is a mental process essential to both art and science, and suggest that it is the means by which our associative minds seek meaning in a world of disorganized raw information. Until we have detected some order within the chaos of raw experience, and have begun to form patterns that are significant to our understanding of that experience, we have only made simple percepts that are without meaning. I am exploring how the detection of pattern and order—the finding-out of cognizable features (that may be inherent in the fractal ‘raw’ experience of nature)—are synonymous with the detection and invention of meaning, and how they, together, may constitute the organic process of our creativity.

If our experience remains only in the 'raw' state—as when we have mostly unsorted or unexamined information to work with— when that ‘information’ appears to be nearly lacking in order or pattern—then we may question the nature and definition of information itself as we encounter and define it in discussion and in the physical world. Perhaps there is no such thing as ‘information’ in any bit of the datum of ‘raw’ experience. The newborn has only a few innate and informed kinds of queries and responses to the booming, glaring, swishing, and buzzing of the delivery room. There is no information in that rawness.

Only repeated experiences over time reveal the pattern in the nature of being a human in the world that pre-dates our birth. Possibly information in human terms is not a only feature of the environment that we must learn about, but is instead the dynamic product of a looping participatory process involving us (or any species) as the experiencers and organizers, in an environment taken over accumulating time. An old conjecture suggests that the ‘information’ in our brains is wholly subjective—that there is no ‘real’ world in our minds—only abstractions. While that seems obvious, figuring out the exact relationship between what we call information in the mind and the kind of information that is clearly inherent in the structure of a metallic crystal is not so obvious.

Syncretic associative processes enable us to discover meaningful connections among phenomena, and thereafter to derive networks of meaning from experience. In this mental act of joining patterns of experience by establishing nodes in a neural network of personal meaning, we become creative. Creativity, then, may be described as: the process of discovering, connecting, and articulating patterns of meaning from within our experience and thought over time.

Certain forms of learning disability and some mental illnesses may result from the dynamic sequels sonsequent to severe stress in the learning environment in combination with other kinds of organic or genetic preconditions. Stress interrupts the flow of information within the brain, re-directing mental and neural activities towards defensive strategies. The brain, and ‘mind,’ then become hyper-vigilant, preoccupied with safety and survival tasks. In this state one can no longer interpret experience meaningfully. This sequence of mental events prevents learning comprehension and conceptual thought, and if the stress is extreme or continued, may even interrupt or block perception.

Thus, under the impact of repeated and intense stressors, psychodynamicaly modulated learning disabiliies may develop from earlier patterns of adaptive response to stress. If the young learner responds with an adaptive behavior to threat in the environment, she will live to learn another day. However when that day dawns, she will have learned an adaptation that may not fit a later less threatening environment, and she may not learn as easily this next time. Adaptive-defensive responses that are built by a powerless child to allow, however temporarily, an escape from stress, may over time become rigidified into globally applied maladaptive responses that later become counterproductive when or if, as a more powerful adult, she exists in less stressful conditions.

Learning disabilities do not occur in isolation. Their development is enmeshed within a system of greater institutional disabilities that hobble the way we teach, and cripple how we are taught to learn. Society fails to provide a variety of learning style options from earliest childhood. These, and many other factors become entwined within the great neural knot of the brain. It is therefore impossible to think in any useful way about learning disabilities without also re-forming ideas about even less tangible entities — consciousness for instance, and learning ability, and intelligence(s).

What are the psychodynamic influences on learning? What are the further effects of social process, didactic theory and practice? How do our minds learn when at work and at play? I could of course go on, and in later posts I will. I have to, for all these areas pervade our research, teaching, and therapies, and ultimately have great impact upon health, wealth and society. All this must be examined in ensemble.

Why are so many learning disabled individuals also extremely productive and creative? Do learning disabled persons process experience differently? How and why do learning disabilities occur? What can we learn from the study of learning disabilities that will help educate this bright, talented population, and not destroy them? Can what we learn also help us to educate the especially learning ‘enabled’ population? What do these questions suggest about the mind-in-the-brain, and braininess itself? Good questions have great value, and I hope to also provide a few interesting answers.

This is not scholarly work. Instead, I have approached the task with the desire to step as far back as possible, before my own preconceptions and those of others, attempting to freshly consider what simple questions should be asked and answered, and whether some convictions held by academics is instead prejudice in sheepskin. Like nirvana, and quantum certainty, a tabula-rasa is unobtainable. I will try to stay true to my original lines of inquiry, following them where they may lead.

In writing, I have been immersed in paradox. I am dyslexic and should not, according to popular expectations, be able to write essays or a book at all, let alone read with pleasure. I am dysgraphic, and so miss seeing completeness in pictures, maps, and graphs, nonetheless I am a sculptor. My scientific and technical curiosity is always dogged by dyscalculia, yet I spend much of my time trying to think and work as a scientist. Shrugging realistically before hopelessly large forces, I have not included statistics, and hardly any numbers at all in this work.

As thinkers, we may believe that we are concentrating on a single subject, such as a cognitive disability, but the impression of singular focus is an illusion supported mostly by old and comforting ignorance. Those areas of my own ignorance, and the shared ignorance of our culture, interest me because they are a rich source of potential discovery. At the outset I asked apparently limited and simple questions like: “Why are people learning disabled, and what, as a psychotherapist and educator can I do to help them?” Like shouting questions down to a genie in a well, the only answers I could hear were echoes of my own prior unquestioned beliefs.

I detected similar commonly held beliefs from the research community (where the echoed voices are known by their common names—Data and Finding. A harmony of echoes are sung, in duet a´ folei, by the choruses of psychiatric, psychological, and educational and communities, from where, the same beliefs are called by different names, like Norm, Lazy, Smart, IQ, Attention, Mainstream, Retard, Stubborn, Nasty, Neurosis, Psychosis, Unconscious, and the names of their many other lost cousins sharing the Greek surname— Diagnosis. No good news emanated from the well. By offering new models based upon psychodynamic process and on an intimate study of both creative process and learning impairment I hope to give new voice to the creative life of the mind, and to expand our understanding of what goes on in learning. This work is intended as a challenge to current educational and scientific models.

I write as an educator and psychotherapist who specializes in working with artists. This population (including myself) often expresses what it learns and thinks in original and idiosyncratic ways. Much of this work is about the considerable talent and creative ability that is often bundled together with high intelligence in the presence of learning disabilities. As I examine these dynamically recursive embedded and complex themes I try to deconstruct the ‘common sense’ beliefs that determine how we think about learning disability, about the ‘mind’, about thinking, and about creativity. What had begun as an essay grew, becoming this series of essays and perhaps eventually a book.

I will propose new hypotheses that describe mental processes that may be responsible for certain learning disabilities and for creativity, and some mental illnesses. This effort is directed to contributing improvements in education and therapeutic responses to the challenges of learning and learning disability, and to encourage creative dialogue with new friends.