Part Eight - Barriers

Part Eight - Barriers

What is not truly emotional in terms of the human mind? 

(Explanation is at the end of this Chapter  - 12/5/16©)

            Nearly everything in our lives has a major link to some kind of an emotion.  Research has proven that the brain reacts to emotion chemically, organically.  This puts up or takes down barriers to good cognitive and meta-cognitive processing.

            It can be safely said that we know this.  The human brain reacts physiologically to emotion.

            We also know many things can set up a chain reaction physiologically, which are interpreted as emotional reactions.  These can be visual, auditory, odors, any number of various stimuli.  What is it that roots these perceived stimuli to a patterned emotion?

Whatever it is, it can become a barrier.

            How is it that no matter how overloaded the brain becomes with massive, even traumatic, stimuli, certain individuals are able to overcome all of the stimuli and carry out actions that are cogent, logical, constructive and not at all reactive to the stimuli?  Have these persons somehow been able to transcend brain input and substitute mind input or control? 

            A barrier is flutter of concentration, a temporary loss of focus, between steps of placing recall into appropriate places (memory drawers, as it were) in the brain.

These are the various barriers influencing the recall storage process.  I have observed two basic styles of learning barriers my students encounter.

            These would be the barriers of which they are aware and the barriers of which they are unaware.

            I have designated these as Awareness Barriers and Subliminal Binary Barriers; or A-barriers and S-barriers.  These barriers can occur between any levels of recall, but tend to follow a specific pattern for most people

Many A-barriers are consciously put in place to avoid certain properties of an experience or to protect specific personal values a person holds.  These barriers can operate from a sense of need, and be almost involuntary, except that you are aware you are avoiding something for a specific reason.  A-barriers can also operate on a request/demand basis.  There may be times when you want to not be influenced by particulars of an experience, and other times when you do.  E.g., when you get on an airplane you do not want your fear of falling to influence you, when you get on a roller-coaster at the amusement park, you do want to experience that fear of falling.

Subliminal Binary Barriers are binary in nature because they are either on or off.  There really isn’t any possibility of training them; or, educating them away.

Most S-barriers are founded on some kind of an emotion.  These barriers are fairly easily overcome after they are determined.  The more permanent s-barriers­, such as dyslexia, require tactics or some kind of tool to overcome.  These can often require the skills of someone trained to deal with the issue more specifically.

In the first few years of schooling, be it prior to actually attending a school, or in Pre-school, Kindergarten or even higher, conditions such a dyslexia and dysgraphia can remain hidden.  The child has no idea that things look any different than as how they appear to them.  The natural assumption being, "this is what X or Y looks like to everybody".  The child is often unaware that what they are drawing, or attempting to write, is not correct.  To them everything is just rosy.

This type of barrier is fairly easy to determine however, and observant parents and/or teachers often do discover them; at least in our current world.  Even with early diagnosis and remediation, plus tactical adjustments, persons with this barrier (flutter) must adjust their mental processing to accommodate it between levels of recall.  Assuming the teacher can get both the student and their parents to accept that this characteristic is real – avoiding the judgement and stigmas that can accompany that acceptance.

If a person has dyslexia, they have it and generally this condition is either genetic or due to some physical issue from an accidental change is neural tissue.  This specific type of brain processing has its positive, as well as negative sides.  It is a subliminal barrier, and for the dyslexic it is always on.  Many of us, who do not process in the dyslexic fashion, may have found that certain circumstances can bring about a dyslexic perception though.  We read, or hear a string of numbers and somehow transpose one or two integers.  Whenever I see the word EXIT on a sign and it is not white lettering on a red background, as most exit signs are, my mind reads EXIST.  I do not know why.  This, for me, is a subliminal binary barrier.

I believe in many instances to ignore unique mental barriers, whether learning or teaching, can lead to a very real loss of effort on the part of teacher and student.  That would be in the best of instances.  At its worst, ignoring these barriers can set a child up begin to just shut down.

I have witnessed many teachers do just this and end up greatly frustrating themselves and royally traumatizing a child..

Whatever the cause, most of these barriers seem to occur in about the same place in the cognitive process.  Between definite stages of stimuli and perception are definitive barriers for just about everyone.  The barriers exist with differing causality, duration and density, but they tend to occur at pretty much the same place in the stages of processing.

                        The traditional approach pedagogically has been to punch through these barriers; to pound them down through rote, review and other systematic means of destruction.  Of course, the barriers are often in place as a result of an earlier developed survival instinct.  So the destructionist method adds another layer of emotional insulation.  In some instance this method removes the barrier temporarily only to replace it later with one that is nearly identical, but thicker and denser.

            An example would be to strong-arm a left-handed child to learn to write right-handed.  The result is at best an unhappy child, the worst is the development of a dyslexic view of written language.

            There is a limitation to every human organ and what it can perform.  We can assume there is a similar limitation to the human brain.  Once again research has proven this to be true.  Higher mind functions appear to be nearly limitless, but the brain does have limits.  This being the case it would seem reasonable that before transferring data from temporal status to more permanent status within the limits of the organic brain, that some form of filtering take place.

            The first obvious filter would be the emotional filter?   This is part of the survival instinct, or alpha recall.  There are, of course, other filters; such as those related to genetically inherited characteristics.  Any filtering system slows down the passage of whatever is being filtered.  This is a simple matter of physics.

            If the filter ever becomes too dense, or constricted for whatever reason, it can also become a barrier.  This situation can coagulate into major problem for a person.  It can slowly become a clouded lens through which a person accustoms themselves, believing the problems lies outside of their own perception.  Often this is an emotional issue; being related to self-esteem.  However, it can also be just a simple matter of not being able to see on the top shelf because you are short.

            Myself, being a short person, I most often don’t even think of the top shelf as having anything on it.  It rarely occurs to me to ever look there.  I gotta get a stool, or a chair, or something to stand on and tippy-totter around on it.  I have developed a top shelf filter that has become a barrier to finding lost stuff.  My wife knows this and that’s where she hides the chocolate.

Graphics Explanation:  I have spent far too many hours trying to memorize all of the keyboarding commands to "insert Special Characters" to include in this book (writings=blogs).  So, I have hundreds and hundreds of evaluation calculations and - well, I am just going to insert jpgs for a while.  

In the next Part (Chapter=Blog", I will delineate ... that is expound, on this one (jpg).

Thank you for joining me here and joy be unto you.

All material in this blog is from “Equations for the Joyous Mind”  © 2016 by Dale Clarence Peterson

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