The best thing we have going for us is our intelligence, especially pattern recognition, sharpened over eons of evolution – astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
Them Okies from Oklahoma got no sense – John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
In a roundabout way, from my reading of Darwinism, I know that pattern recognition is important for animals, including humans. But later, in its absence, I would learn much more than I wanted. After my acquired brain injury, I fell headlong into the gaps of patterns, or perhaps more precisely, I fell into “no-patterns”, well captured by novelist Mark Haddon: “Prime numbers are what is left when you take away all the patterns. I think prime numbers are like life.” That is why a stroke is described as an acquired brain injury. One second you live within your usual patterns, and then not.
Humans are pattern-seeking. We love to turn those patterns into stories and narratives of our lives. In other words, we look for patterns to give meaning to our lives, whether it works or not. Take away the patterns in life, as what happens to me and many others after a traumatic brain injury, we experience it as a loss of what we’ve learnt or known. That is why I incessantly tried to tell everyone, and I mean anyone who would listen, that I was lost.
I remember a neuropsychologist asked me what does lost mean for me. I told her I did not know. Now I understand that, without reliable patterns, I lost my bearings. And what was in its place was menacing and unpredictable. I felt it as an otherworld which stayed with me, with the same intensity, for years after my stroke. Though it has diminished, after a lot of work, it daily haunts me in nearly everything I do, mundane or not. I know it will never leave me.
I know that some people go to a spiritual retreat to separate themselves from their daily patterns. Let me tell you, there is no spiritual benefit of the otherworldliness after a traumatic stroke. If I could have articulated it at the time, I would have asked, “Where the fuck has my world gone?” That is what happens when you lose your pattern recognition. And none of that Kubler-Ross-like classic stages of loss – all the stages arrived at the same time.
When I was nineteen, my friend Michael, who at the time was studying architecture, took me to see an exhibition at the National Victoria Gallery Melbourne: Modern Masters: Manet to Matisse from the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It was Australia’s first such blockbuster exhibition.
Like giving a guided tour to an uncultured visitor from Oklahoma (no offence to Rodgers and Hammerstein), for hours Michael showed me around the exhibit, explaining the concept of Impressionism. Despite being surrounded by masterpieces (Cézanne, Monet, Degas, Van Gogh et al), what impressed me was that Michael saw something I could not; I can still see him explaining, whether landscapes or still-life, how the Impressionists celebrated and transformed the commonplace, like Renoir’s fruit and vegetables. Sadly, it was wasted on me.
My friend had a fantastic innate ability to recognise patterns, but profoundly, he understood that Impressionism was a new way of representing the world – at the time, radically unconventional patterns in the qualities of light, colour and shade. Although he was a peer, I was too young and stupid to get it, but five years later, when I walked into a museum in Amsterdam, Van Gogh’s Bedroom In Arles floored me, it knocked me right off my feet. I was stunned. I saw a different world.
I sent a letter to Michael to thank him for more than his tuition. In fact, he is the person who taught me that intelligence means adding knowledge. I thought I was intelligent enough when I was young – but without the knowledge, about art or whatever, I clearly was not. I knew very little about a lot of things. I believed that simply attending an exhibition would suffice; Michael knew it was meaningless without knowledge.
Though I was as artless as an Okie from Oklahoma, it turned out his tuition and insights were not wasted on me. He gave me a foundation for which I was able to build on. It unconsciously brewed away as I looked at the patterns he had introduced – not just in art but also in buildings – and then, suddenly, I consciously saw it in the skewed patterns in the painting of a bedroom in Arles.
Intelligence means adding knowledge – dynamic intelligence. I do not know whether this is true, but for me, the Feuerstein Method is about building intelligence to find real-world solutions, especially for students with a cognitive disability. It assumes that you can build intelligence with the right guidance – learning to learn.
It is sometimes described as a method of unhurriedly solving ascending problems, and I suppose that is correct. But in the ascending problems within the structure of the Feuerstein Method, students are taught how to utilise the dynamic knowledge to apply to solutions to changing problems. Since the brain is plastic, as plasticity of the brain is generally accepted, then intelligence must be dynamic, even after a traumatic brain injury, or as I wrote in the last post, after traumatic life experiences.
I added what I had learnt about Impressionism from my friend Michael, and unconsciously considered it for years – when young, there is a big difference between nineteen and twenty-four – and I was able to see the patterns in Impressionism because I had added knowledge to what I had learnt from my friend. Let’s call my chronological exhibition, Okie from Oklahoma to Bedroom In Arles; or as cowboy-humourist Will Rogers said, “When the Okies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states.” I’m sure that when I entered that Modern Masters exhibition, I lowered the IQ of the National Victoria Gallery.
But Professor Feuerstein, not Will Rogers, is right in his model of the brain: IQ is overstated; learning is understated; intelligence is misunderstood.
In the next blog, I will show how patterns are used in the Feuerstein Method.