Art + Science, Episode 512

Okay okay, here's yet another great post by Garr Reynolds about how foolish it is to separate our thinking into subject boxes like art, math, etc. Featuring astronaut Mae Jemison, who knows whereof she speaks.

I also just finished reading Brain Rules by John Medina, all about the many different ways our brains take information and glue it together and store it places and then go find it and glue it together again. Fascinating stuff.

One of the most interesting things in Brain Rules has to do with how we learn and remember things. It turns out that the more senses and ideas you use when you learn something, the better you remember it. I've been trying this with people's names, because I am dreadful at remembering names. And you know, it works pretty well! I'm now slightly less dreadful with names. I think.

This morning I was at 826 Valencia in San Francisco, where we helped a class of 3rd graders write, edit, illustrate and publish their own story. In two hours. Let's see... they used their eyes to catch spelling errors, their inner eye to visualize what the characters looked like, their ears to listen to all the different ideas, their speech entirely too much, their hands to draw and write with, and they got all wiggly when they had ideas. Seems pretty all-inclusive to me.

One of the biggest problems with putting subjects into boxes is that it is human nature to say, "I'm good at this, so I must not be good at this other thing." If you're good at math you must not be able to draw. If you draw you must not be good at math. That sort of thing.

How many people have decided, based on this process, that they are not good at something they haven't even tried??? Did this happen to you? Argh! Argh, I say!

There, I've said it for the 512th time.