448 449 450 451 “finger prints” deep in the neurons of my complicated brain.

Message no. 448[Branch from no. 409] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 3:27pm Subject: Re: relational summary 3

I can concur with your use of light cues for driving Pat! My worst car accident came when the morning sun made it impossible to see the brake lights of a bus in front of me. I couldn't judge that the bus was slowing down, or how quickly it was slowing down, by the size of it growing in front of me. Without being able to see the lights to cue me into action I smashed into the back of the bus and totalled my car. After that I realized that I had trained my nervous system to rely on those cues. Now I compensate for that effect by using multiple cues when I can!

Message no. 449[Branch from no. 427] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 3:28pm Subject: Learned Helplessness

I am glad you are using the concept of "learned helplessness" in your discussions! Learned helplessness theory seems to explain so much of what is going on hear in Egypt and in the poor areas of the U.S. where I worked for so many years.

Message no. 450[Branch from no. 419] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 3:29pm Subject: Re: relational summary 3

Dawn, are you suggesting that autism is growing into an epidemic, but we are unaware of it because the pace is slow? That is an interesting thought!

Message no. 451[Branch from no. 417] Posted by Thomas Culhane (1311520071) on Tuesday, February 20, 2007 3:41pm Subject: “finger prints” deep in the neurons of my complicated brain.

Dawn, this is great -- you write with a flair for description and a passion linking the text to your daily life and feelings and frustrations. There was a nice bit of "political ecology" in this post too -- getting mad at the use of the word "superior" and getting mad at your English teacher for suggesting there was "one right way" to perceive a story. It reminded me of the Beatle's song "It's getting better all the time" when they sing, "I used to be angry at school... the teachers who taught me the rules...".

I am glad when I see that what we are learning evokes powerful emotional responses and when we can use what we learn to engage in a cognitive reappraisal or cognitive remapping of our past environments.

Best of all, for me, was your point about "does one forget the sun rises in the east..." -- I am ashamed to say that it wasn't until I was in my 30s and attended my brother's wedding that I for the first time looked up at the night sky and figured out that I could use the moon to tell directions -- I reasoned that if it was early evening and the sun had recently set in the west, then if I was seeing a full moon it would have to be due East, that a "new moon" (a.k.a. a dark moon) meant I was looking due west, and that half moons were either in the north or the south (with the lit side facing west) and that the crescent moons followed the same pattern. I then learned to tell direction using the constellation of Orion. I never learned any of this in school -- our school science classes were taught by buffoons, who, like your English teacher, were more interested in consolidating their power or masking their ineptitude than teaching us anything useful!

So I had to wait until I was of an age where, in the movie Logan's Run, I would already have been cremated, to figure out that i couldn't get lost if I used common sense. Isn't that sad? !

Glad you liked the chapter -- I am now obsessed by mapping, carry a compass with me everywhere, and just ordered a great Garmin GPSMAP 76CSX! But I have also begun to learn the basics of how to navigate using my environment!

T