sakiro wrote: if we use our inner model to locate everything new we learn, and knowing that our spatial orientation/navigation skills use the same map too, isn't a priority to enhance and take extra attention to exercise that concret skills??
Yes! Always do things in the right order : ) But there are many different ways to exercise those skills.
[s] if we have trouble with knowing our position in space, maybe when we use our abstract skills, the system will have the same problem to locate/retrieve the data from the inner model???
If we have trouble with knowing our position in space, NASA can be helpful. Don't trust Skynav; that's what keeps causing people like me to crash on planets like this (joke)
We can't actually develop abstract skills much without a critical mass of concrete skill networks in situ. A basic skill such as paying attention, for example, is needed for just about everything. Without it we'll lose things, get lost, have more accidents, AND have poor memory and categorization skills. Yet the ability to pay attention itself relies on our concrete ability to relax and 'slow down' sufficiently to be receptive and attentive.
Intelligence develops by moving from the concrete to the abstract and back again. Concrete input leads to abstract ideas, and abstract ideas lead to concrete inventions.
[s] I'm trying here to forge a link with the concret --> abstract stuff that is discussed in the tutorials (like how doing balance exercises (concrete skills) could help to understand or have better emotional balance etc)
They use the same bit of network and the same processes. This is now a Mega-long mail, as I'm just explaining some of this topic in tutorial 10, so here's some previews that might explain more. Sorry, no footnotes, the refs are all over the place and I haven't done the diagrams yet!
**** excerpts, tutorial 10 ****
The 'hub' of N4 is a conglomerate of neuronal cell bodies towards the front of the right hemisphere (area marked in blue), whose axons go all over the brain. It is involved in processing both concrete and abstract temporal, group, contextual situations we will here call constructs.
Network 4 Functions
CONSTRUCTION & CREATIVITY
Definitions: A construct is a synthesis of interacting agents that share both a similarity of function and a context. They may be concrete (for example cells, bricks, books, bees, people) or abstract (for example facts, ideas, beliefs, ontologies, words). Brought together as a construct they display both synchronized behavior and duration through time. A database, a memory, a culture, an orchestra, an engine, a living body, a beating heart, a story, a machine, a garden, N3's inner model, an ants nest and a library are all good examples of constructs. Constructs, by nature of their complexity, of necessity involve concept sets.
The heart (and quite possibly an ants nest) is an 'automatic' construct. An orchestra on the other hand is an autonomic construct -we create it from our own free will by participating in the behaviors that define it and we consciously control its behavior as a unit by each playing our own part in a dynamic group interaction.** But not all constructs are made by us. Biology creates constructs too; the heart is one.
N4, just like N1, specializes in processing tasks involving timing, order, manipulation and control; but this time round, these processes are not employed in learning to walk. That skill went automatic long ago, and we now apply the same processes to the manipulation of other objects, materials and also abstract ideas.
Unsurprisingly, the same processes that allow us to construct things in real life such as shelters, tools, buildings and spaceships, also enable us to build images of (to imagine) abstract constructs in our minds such as scientific theories, designs, inventions, mathematical formulae and computer programs, and they contribute immensely to our design skills and creativity. Constructional deficits are notably more severe after right hemisphere damage. (refs Arrigoni & DeRenzi, 1964; Black & Strub, 1976; Benson & Barton, 1970; Bradshaw & Mattingly, 1995; Critchley, 1953; Hier et al., 1983; Piercy et al., 1960).
To the core behaviors of gathering together, relaxation and balance that it shares with N1, N4 adds 'synthesis' (the opposite of analysis) -the process of bringing things together in specific ways to function in harmony or synchrony, which we use for creating constructs. N3 and N4 together, with their support from rear networks, have the programming skills necessary to understand, create and maintain an abstract construct.
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DEXTERITY, COMPLEX TOOL USE & SYNC
N4 enables both complex concrete tool use (such as playing with an orchestra) and complex abstract tool use (such as manipulating mathematics to prove a theorem, musical notes to create a melody, words to construct a poem, or code to program a computer).
We already have the ability for simple tool use provided by rear nets; dexterity isn't just hand-eye coordination but focused and synchronized interactive coordination that has duration through time. Playing a flute is simple behavior that relies on synchronization between our bodies and a tool (the flute) according to an imaginary rhythm of our choice. Playing the flute in an orchestra requires synchronization with others and the ability to keep track of a group procedure; enabling an intrinsic order to emerge so that all agents function as a unit. These abilities require mental (abstract) dexterity as well as physical (concrete) dexterity, which only N4 can provide.
Likewise making and using a spear is simple behavior, organizing a group hunt is complex behavior; a procedure requiring synchronized interaction as a construct (the hunting party) and only N4 can pull off this sort of trick in real time.
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The senses associated with any rear network are always its hardware tools for comprehension of input, and its processes are software tools for enabling physical interaction. Front networks are able to abstract both tools and processes.
Perspective
For example, our senses of distance and direction, provided by network 2, give us our awareness of physical perspective and distance-related size; we can tell easily that a closer object is not really bigger than a more distant object; it is our relative perspective that creates the illusion of things getting smaller as they move away.
We understand perspective in input once N2 is fully developed, but we can't draw 3D representations of perspective until N4 is up and running sufficiently to grasp the process or formula to reproduce perspective (between the ages of 7 and 11). With right cerebral injuries, visual-spatial perceptual functioning becomes distorted (although motor activities per se are preserved) and the person may not realize they have made an error. (refs Hecaen & Assal, 1970).
Once N4 IS up and running, the concept of perspective can be abstracted. We can 'get a perspective' on situations, other people's states of mind, or a series of events. The words 'my perspective' come to mean not just the concrete “what I can see from where I'm standing” but are abstracted to mean, 'how I see things'; not with my eyes but from my inner point of view. We say someone should 'get a sense of perspective' when they are overly dramatic or hysterical about a trivial event, and we mean something like 'see things in the bigger context of life, events and circumstances'.
N4 has abstracted the material sensory concepts -sight and perspective- and enabled them to describe events in the reality of thoughts and ideas as well as in the reality of material life.
Aesthetics
Abstraction is a major process in all front networks. For example our concrete awareness of our sensory likes and dislikes, if they are congruent, leads in maturity to a sense of aesthetics -(the recognition of/ synthesis of those shapes, colors, sounds, combinations and movements that are naturally pleasing to biology because they're beneficial to it).
Again we abstract a material sensory concept, in this case taste, to describe our sense of aesthetics; 'having good taste' means that we have the ability to recognize or reproduce those measurable combinations that communicate pleasure to healthy biology. Symmetry of form, the golden section REFSand fibonacci series, REFSalong with the 'rule of thirds' REFSare perhaps the most well known and tested, as ratios with strong appeal to human biology as experiencing them triggers the release of beneficial transmitters (perhaps the least well known is the reputed 'brown noise' that makes humans lose control of their bowels, because nobody wants to do the experiment to prove that one).
meta process wrote: Concreteness is also a mental construct.
In a sense, everything we experience is, including consciousness, but the important thing is 'concreteness' is a mental concept that refers to a specific kind of reality -the material world which can be detected via the senses and measured and consists of matter and physical forces (energy). A brick is a 'concrete' concept; a house is a concrete construct. A thought or idea about bricks or houses isn't. For intermediate NH, that's all we need to grasp.
Best,
AR
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