Page 120 - Microsoft Word - The Future of Learning April 2017.docx

108
Daydreaming
We can turn the ‘daydreaming effect’ into a habit by returning to a specific place and focusing on losing full consciousness, and then reflecting on the thinking that is taking place. As we do this, we will develop additional knowledge, ideas, concepts or concept frameworks to provide more resource for the brain to be creative with, so we can develop additional creative solutions. Having the ‘aha!’ moment usually generates the need for additional knowledge, ideas and concepts.
Hunches and intuition are precious in this space as they represent our brain attempting to draw connections, often from other contexts, and applying those links to the new context we are exploring. Many of the great insights over millennia have come from lazing in the bath (“Eureka!” shouted Archimedes), daydreaming, zoning out, absent-mindedly poking a stick in a fire or staring out to sea, and we need to realise that these daydreaming times are critical to the creativity aspect of the Learning Process.
The role of inspiration and curiosity in this process is the underlying drive that this creates within us and its ability to have us focus on the issue we are trying to resolve for more than just a few seconds. This process acts as a precursor to creativity. We can be inspired by people, events, films ...that creates the right hormone response in our brain for us to persevere with our learning.
In this emerging model our mood creates the right hormonal environment for hormones in our brain to alert a range of glial cells (including astrocytes) to seek out new combinations of knowledge elements, ideas, concepts and concept frameworks. These new combinations may possibly result in innovative new knowledge, ideas, concepts and concept frameworks.
This confidence in our capacity to be creative inspires us to ‘give something a go’. Everyone can be creative, as there is no such thing as not being able to be creative, there are only people who choose not to be creative so they can avoid the risk of possibly not finding a solution and ‘failing’. The risk they are avoiding is often the risk of not getting the ‘right’ answer. One of the key reasons people will not take these intellectual risks is their experience of school, where getting the right answer was celebrated and not getting the right answer was frowned on. This fear can be overcome by having the right mind-set and the belief that everyone has the capability to be creative in different domains. Struggling to get the right answer is part of the journey to getting a better answer. The distribution curve of success for creativity for humans has a very small range.
It is important to note that imagination is the tool we use in the process of developing creative outcomes. Even though the imagination is not consciously structured, it can be consciously sought after. With practice, it is possible to fine-tune the management of our brainwaves and for us to become increasingly productive in this realm.
Human beings cheat the process of evolution by evolving our brains after we are born. In this way, we each develop a brain that best suits the particular environment we find ourselves born into before it is time to reproduce. This remarkable capability of our brains to form through childhood and into adulthood maximises the probability of each individual’s survival, success and reproduction in its present environment, rather than the environment that was present in prehistoric times and recorded in our genes through heredity. In the Ice-Age as in the Space-Age, it is this ability of the human brain to mould itself uniquely to the environment early in life that separates man from animals whose brains are cast at birth. Plasticity of our brain prior to adulthood is the reason human evolution has exploded so far beyond that of any other organism.151 Douglas Fields
151 Fields, D. (2011).The Other Brain. Page 291, Simon and Schuster.