I recently found myself in conversation about how a colleague found myself to seemingly be a confused person because I often have a habit of questioning as to where they were talking about in relation to mental maps and building Geography and whilst I think upon the simplest of explanations I gave was understood thought that I would go into it again a little more here.

So as a child of my generation in schooling terms we are taught lists and that we have to remember these lists and for most of us these processes happened in a very LINEAR fashion so for instance

We have Dave House

Dave House Corridor, Dave House Lounge, Dave House Kitchen, Dave House Bathroom, Dave house Dining Room and so on.

Then we go to Deirdre’s House

Dierdre House Corridor, Deirdre House Lounge, Deirdre House Kitchen, Deirdre House Bathroom, Deirdre House Dining Room and so on

Then we go to Philippa’s House

Philippa’s House Corridor, Philippe’s House lounge and so on.

So each environment has it’s own map and the data is all the same yet repeated over and over, so in the LINEAR model we all of us have thousands of duplications of these maps, and whilst they can seem great when you have spent enough time in any given environment you also have huge levels of redundancy’s, repetitions of maps that you have collected throughout your life that are years out of date or for peoples and persons that you no longer know and so on.

In the OPTIMISED strategy we take a KEYWORD and then SEARCH A KEYWORD down through our maps.

So instead having millions of repetitions of these words and lists that are all the same you simply have key word lists and environment lists and that is perhaps where WHOLE BRAIN THINKING is about as opposed to LATERALISED thinking that many of us get caught in.

So A Key Word List might be

House, Corridor, Lounge, Kitchen, Bathroom, Dining

And An Environment list might be

Dave’s, Deirdres, Phillip’s,

And likewise you can see how these lists can again be used in differing areas or aspects of life so again we are reducing MENTAL REDUNDANCIES and REPETITIONS

The downside of course is that you have to learn how you are putting the information IN and then taking the information OUT-so this is pretty much where Learning Strategies courses come in in the sense that they allow you to shift from the tradition LINEAR thinking into WHOLE BRAIN thinking that uses a COMBINATION of LINEAR and NON-LINEAR

The downside of the NON-LINEAR strategy is that if you have multiple named places in an environment that are the same or have a shared KEYWORD’S you can seem CONFUSED to someone who is DOMINANTLY using the OLD TRADITIONAL LIST SYSTEM.

So for instance you say a KEYWORD PLACE NAME Dave’s House Corridor that applies to the Environment Map that you are using and a Traditional Model will get you the result and you will know instantly to where they are referring.

Yet if you have an ESTATE with 200 Dave’s House’s then further NARROWING DOWN Criteria is REQUIRED in order to IDENTIFY that you are communicating about the same place.

Again these things are choices, so whilst I might seem CONFUSED at times to colleagues when some areas are referred too, it is simply that the INFORMATION was put IN/OUT in the WHOLE BRAIN METHODOLOGY as opposed as to the older LATERALIZED brain strategy and where multiple places exist with a shared KEYWORD I have to establish other KEYWORD’S to NARROW the criteria to the correct place.

Again these things are all swings and roundabouts yet on the whole I have found that understanding the different STORAGE and RETREIVAL SYSTEMS that people KNOW and use can make huge differences about the JUDGMENTS that we make about them-so for instance I think a popular one that appears over and over again is that so and so is DYSLEXIC when in fact they perhaps just have a more NATURAL WHOLE BRAIN System already operating and everyone trying to beat it out of them into the traditionally more popular in schools LINEAR and LATERALIZED system.

So in many ways this is where school can be good for some people and bad for others because all to often the IN/OUT STORAGE RETRIEVAL MODELS are geared towards one section of the community or Society over the other.

The same can be said for the Sex’s whereby it was claimed in the 70’s 80’s that schools were failing the female pupils in there design of TEACHING & LEARNING models and huge emphasis from then onwards has shifted it all around through the 90’s and 2000’s , so now as all the Teaching and Learning Statistics show Modern Schooling appears to be failing the MALE population.

Will they ever find a best of both Worlds?  Well I think they have had it in some ways in some communities simply through one sex schools whereby the Teaching and Learning was geared to the respective sex and I think in those models both sexes prospered-the problem of course is that to have a mass-scale version you would have to make huge investments that are not going to happen-so they basically have to seek to find some best place of balance that takes into account both MALE and FEMALE Thinking & Learning Strategies that can be applied across the entire nation.

That’s the first one for today, I think I might find another topic to write about and see where it leads later.