It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; with out this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. Albert Einstein   His eyes follow her as she moves through the room. As she bends to say hello she is surprised to see her baby’s legs and arms flailing about in effort, as he pushes his pink tongue out of his mouth. She doesn’t remember she stuck out her tongue at him this morning when trying to give him a bottle. He spent half his nap time thinking about it, and now he has returned this expression in an effort to communicate. Late for work she bundles him up and rushes to the baby-sitter’s, telling the care giver, “he spit up after his nap, and was making faces, I hope he’s not sick. The evolving self knows itself through feeling. Dennison   There is a moment when we look into each other’s eyes and we know we are seeing ourselves. We hold each other’s hands and we realize ourselves. We speak each other’s name and we know each other. This baby is present and more aware than we tend to think. The infant’s use of gestures, facial expressions, and sounds is at every stage of his progress the true medium of his being-with-others & the music of our ordinary conversations is of equal importance with the words. It is a kind of touching: our eyes “touch,” our facial expressions play back and forth, tones answer tones. We experience even the silences in a physical, structural way; they, too, are a species of contact. In short, the physical part of everyday speech is just as important as the “mental.” Dennison   What a miraculous self-regulating complexity we are! We have some tools to understand and explore but mostly we have what we have always had, if we chose to use it: ATTENTION. The Society for Neuroscience found that denial of a caregiver’s touch had serious biochemical consequences for the baby. A mother’s caresses seem to help moderate production of a hormone affecting the body’s reaction to stress. Abnormal levels of the hormone have been linked to changes in a part of the brain involved with learning and memory. Indeed, children with the greatest peaks and valleys in that hormone level scored lowest on test of mental and motor ability. US News and World Report   I remember my niece when she was around 6 months old, lying in the carriage under the apple tree. I could see her chubby legs sticking up in the air as she ran her toes through the leaves of the overhanging branches. What amazed me most was listening to her as she went through, very methodically, all the sounds she knew. “baa baa baa, daa daa daa, maa maa, dee dee dee, laa laa laa, etc.”. She was practising. Children hear what corresponds to their own way of voicing words, not the sounds adults hear themselves making. Bassett   In regards to what is happening in the brain it is instructive to look at what we now know is happening in learning disabilities. It is no coincidence that both the acquired and developmental disorders affecting reading have in common a disruption within the neural systems. National Academy of Sciences   With the use of new technology, called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI), which enables researchers to look into the brain as it is working, it has been discovered that brain activation patterns of dyslexic readers were significantly different from those of non dyslexic readers. The saying “if the only tool you have is a hammer, every thing becomes a nail” is apt. If people access information in different ways, if they perceive things differently they will not learn in the same ways They will be described as having learning disabilities. This does not mean that they do not learn. The individual’s internal store of information about the world is in fact a theory of what the world is like, and that all of our mental life —our perceptions, attitudes, plans, expectations— is colored by this constantly changing internal theory of the world… Bassett   It has been my experience when drawing or painting that I feel a shift or a ping, something like the sensation one feels when, going down a stairway, one expects there to be another step and there is not. As a child this sensation was more dramatic and I would have periods when after a lot of concentration I could not speak. The magical mystery of drawing ability seems to be, in part at least, an ability to make a shift in brain state to a different mode of seeing/perceiving. Edwards   Temple is an autistic professor who cannot decipher the simplest social exchange between humans, but has built a career out of her intuitive understanding of animal behavior. In an article Temple wrote in 1990 she states: If the genes that caused these conditions (schizophrenia, autism, manic depression) were eliminated there might be a terrible price to pay. It is possible that persons with bits of these traits are more creative, or possibly even geniuses… If science eliminated these genes, maybe the whole world would be taken over by accountants. Sacks   I hope that the attention now being paid to the brain and how it works does not lead to some sort of attempt to genetically control human evolution. As long as perhaps sixty percent of the school age population are “passing” the requirements of the education system, WAIT A MINUTE… What does any of that have to do with learning? My own experience working with children in a lunch time art program at a school in Ottawa was that often kids labeled “behavior problems” were actually very visually inclined. One such boy and I spent an hour