What follows is an excerpt from The Complementary Nature, where we outline a novel learning paradigm. It is framed in a subset of the complementary pairs (squiggles) of coordination dynamics. The complementary aspects of each of these squiggles is in itself a well known phenomenon in learning (or any adaptive process).
However, it is often the case that one aspect is considered more important or fundamental then the other, and so more important, valuable, valid in learning. Moreover, the habit of division and specialization often results in different groups studying and practicing what are actually inextricable complementary aspects in isolation.
All too often this results in false dichotomies. These can and often do generate rifts in communication, and can lead to ironic policy scenarios. For example, assumed-to-be adversarial groups compete for dominance of their contrary ideas or policies and positions when those contraries are in fact inextricable, complementary and dynamic.
In the world of education, such false dichotomies are exceedingly detrimental, and lead to all sorts of avoidable difficulties for students, teachers, and educational institutions alike.
What is needed are policies, ways~means to overcome such detrimental false dichotomies, where contrary ideas, policies and methods can be reconciled.
Fine sentiment, but often very difficult to put into practice. Why? Because in battles of words, advocates of both sides of any polarized dispute can interpret such reconciliations as ‘centrist’, fence-sitting, nebulous, not good for generating clear cut policies. And many an attempt to reconcile polar camps has ended in frustration and despair. Many a critical thinker has simply folded the hand, given up their efforts to quell intransigence.
A main premise of The Squiggle Sense blog posts and pages, is that a main obstacle to overcoming either/or thinking and false dichotomies is by demonstrating that complementary contraries are actual natural phenomena, that can be studied scientifically.
For example, which is more important in learning, the individual or the collective? Which is more fundamental to learning, cooperation or competition? Whole books have been written advocating one or the other in both cases, and major differences in the educational systems of different countries often reflect an overall bias for one of these aspects of the other.
But in the science of coordination dynamics, individual~collective and cooperation~competition are thought to squiggle – they are understood to be reciprocally causal, inextricable, complementary and dynamic. While one aspect may dominate in a given scenario in a given context, its dominance waxes~wanes with its complementary aspect depending on laws~exceptions of the individual~collective dynamical system.
As often is the case in our posts and pages, this sounds very much like a ‘yin~yang’ kind of thing. That’s right. It is a ‘yin~yang’ kind of thing. But as historically resonant as that is with ancient Chinese wisdom, saying this doesn’t get us very far, unless of course one happens to be a master of ancient chinese philosophy, which most of us are not.
We could very loosely describe our overall quest in the following way:
1. we support the premise that complementary pairs (yin~yang like structure~functions) are actual natural phenomena, that no matter how they actually work, they can be observed and studied scientifically. We have called this appreciation of knowledge as the philosophy of complementary pairs (also called ‘squiggles’).
2. Complementary pairs as natural phenomena are studied, modelled, interpreted and understood by the science called coordination dynamics.
3. We refer to the whole package, the whole philosophy~science, as “complementary pair~coordination dynamics.”
4. There are now many complementary pairs that are quite well understood, obey laws that can predict observable behavior. In other words they are understood scientfically.
5. This means that polarized debates regarding inextricable, complementary dynamic aspects becomes limiting and oxymoronic, and present an obstacle to deeper understanding. It also means that whole new vistas and avenues are available to explore: the great undiscovered universe of multistability~metastability.
6. A branch of this quest has to do with learning~education. Following in this complementary pair~coordination dynamics way of thinking, we have begun to try to transcend either/or thinking in the context of learning~memory and teacher~student, by thinking of complementary pairs that happen to be understandable via coordination dynamics, but lie at the core of learning~education.
TCN Excerpt:
“The following preliminary list, terse though it is, amounts to at least a partial reevaluation of the social, psychological, and neuronal basis of learning. Although learning principles are encapsulated in complementary pairs, the learning process itself is described by coordination dynamics.
A serious commitment toward assessment of individual preexisting capabilities as constraints on the learning process and the need to structure the learning environment in light of them has potentially significant consequences for education and educational policy, as well as many other fields. However, as a practical means to guide and improve learning, therapy, etc., this strategy remains largely untapped.
1. Novelty~Experience
The individual is not a tabula rasa.
To assume the opposite is to place an unreasonable bias on novelty over experience.
Four months after conception, for example, the six-inch human embryo can suck its thumb, grasp with its hands, and kick with its feet; shortly thereafter, it can recognize its mother’s voice.
More generally, every individual enters a new learning situation with an existing set of innate~acquired capabilities, their own make-up, repertoire, dynamic landscape, signature, or fingerprint unique to them.
2. Individual Inference~Group Inference
How or why people change the way they do will remain forever hidden in the absence of knowledge about individual susceptibilities and predispositions.
Such an individualized approach holds great promise in education and also in medicine, allowing the clinician to base a patient’s treatment and therapy on that person’s unique ‘‘signature,’’ or set of susceptibilities and predispositions.
The coordination dynamics of learning, with its emphasis on identifying individual susceptibilities and predispositions, relies on identifying commonalities among the distinctive ways individuals learn, in addition to using conventional group averaging methods to assess how performance changes over time.
Averaging often smears evidence of common behavior across individuals, missing essential details of how individuals change. On the other hand, anecdotal evidence about individual change is no substitute for the scientific method, i.e., identifying and measuring key variables, parameters, etc.
The main strategy of coordination dynamics is to group people on the basis of the way they learn as individuals, not simply to average them together as one homogeneous population.
3. Intrinsic Dynamics~New Information
In order to understand the nature of learning, the predispositions of the individual learner need to be identified.
This does not mean that all predispositions have to be identified—only the ones pertinent to the context or frame of what is to be learned.
The reason this is so important is that the preexisting knowledge and capabilities of the individual learning system influence the way new skills are learned and remembered. In the language of coordination dynamics, such predispositions and susceptibilities are collectively referred to as ‘‘intrinsic dynamics.’’
Knowing the latter, new information can be structured in terms of the learner’s intrinsic dynamics, thereby facilitating learning (training, therapy, treatment, drug response, organizational change, etc.).
4. Accommodation~Assimilation
Learning, fundamentally, means the modification, expansion, and elaboration of preexisting capabilities and potential for change.
It is not, or not only, a reinforcement-repetition-association process.
In fact, CP~CD views reinforcement as the stabilization of functional information.
Learning is a process in which new information becomes functional, serving to stabilize intrinsically unstable patterns of behavior.
Just as the learning system must be able to accommodate new information, so also must it be able to assimilate such information into its preexisting repertoire or landscape, thereby modifying the learner’s dynamics.
5. Cooperation~Competition
During the learning process, new information cooperates~competes with the learner’s current predispositions.
Cooperative~competitive processes along with noise inherent in all complex systems determine the rate of learning:
Learning tends to be fast when new information cooperates with the intrinsic dynamics,
but tends to be slow and laborious when it competes.
Transitions in learning occur when competition between new and old information is reduced, giving rise to pattern stabilization, a cooperative effect.
Here again, we see how important it is to understand the intrinsic dynamics of the learner, that is, to have accurate probes/measures of preexisting biases, susceptibilities, and capabilities.
6. Gradual~Abrupt Change
Learning isn’t necessarily a smooth, gradual process.
Nor does it necessarily consist of a series of quantum-like improvements in performance.
Rather, depending on the degree of cooperation~competition between new and existing information (intrinsic dynamics), learning may involve smooth shifts in behavior or proceed via highly nonlinear, abrupt transitions
(e.g., the eureka effect).
7. Stability~Instability
Memory is a quantifiable network property of, e.g., genetic, metabolic, neural, and social systems that refers to the stabilization of learned functional information over time.
In the brain, it is thought to be due to enhanced synaptic connectivity among neurons.
An example taken from studies of neuroplasticity (an experimental neurophysiological model of learning) is long-term potentiation~long-term depression.
Again, short-lived patterns of intrinsic activity in the brain may reflect ongoing circuit memory, which can be updated and stabilized by new inputs.
8. Local~Global Reorganization
When the human brain is learning or relearning a skill, activity in local neural populations and the coordination among distant neural areas may undergo dramatic spatial~temporal reorganization.
Moreover, measures of blood flow show that the individual brain, after it has learned, functions far more economically than one that has not
(global~local; persistence~change; efficiency~cost).
9. Boundary~Domain
The degree of functional~structural brain plasticity—that is, dynamic changes in the size and distribution of active regions in the cerebral cortex following learning (or following recovery of function after a stroke)—is remarkable, unexpected, and currently the subject of much serious investigation in both children and adults.”
