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I agree on both counts. Repetition is valuable (and I will say even necessary) and it is overused. Maybe overused, or maybe it's that it was used to the exclusion of everything else. I wonder if it is because people didn't really give a lot of thought to how to teach.
I think the experiment is important -- the playing with ideas, which can happen mentally or physically. It's not just that repetition is important as in how one might practice the times tables. It's also necessary to have variation in the repetition - at least for some skills. I look at these like trials in an experiment. A baseball player may not learn something every single time he hits the ball, but over time he might recognize a few things, like where the ball lands when he hits a certain way. A chess player might realize that a certain line of play leads to a less constrained situation for him. A speaker (or writer) may realize that some phraseology is evocative.
And others repeat the idea or the phrase, sometimes consciously and sometimes not. Pretty soon uncommon words and phrases and neologisms become commonplace and then everyone's using infrastructure and baud rate and everything-gate and gradually the novel twist of phrase becomes hackney.
I say this as if it were purely calculated, because it often is, but I reckon the process is commonly unconscious. The tune we have blissfully enjoyed for so long grows tedious. The evocative phrase fails to evoke.
For some people. Maybe for all people at some times.
Example: children can listen to the same damned story night after night for weeks, or even months. (I confess I have never wearied of "The Butter Battle Book.")
There's considerable comfort in saying what everyone else is saying, or what has always been said. But for some people that's not sufficient. So they write poems or they make puns or they read eclectically or they solve crosswords and suddenly their agents are hypothesizing new associations and assimilating new patterns. I wonder sometimes if they might be forming new agents in their brains.
k
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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what do you call it when you go up that staircase into the room with something important to say, but, once entering the room, you can't remember what it was that you wanted to say?
Destinesia
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I think there is an entendre vu as well. Something to do with experiencing a situation in two different ways.
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old hand
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old hand
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Now will you please explain what you mean by "emotional loading"?If I have had a thought during a heated argument or a passionate love affair, a higher "emotional loading" is attached to it than if it occurred during an instruction how to fill in an innovation process form or a tax questionnaire  . It will be burned into memory more durably and be of faster access.
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There's probably strong evolutionary advantage to this method of mental organization. We ignore most of the raw data we receive. It never gets converted to information or assimilated into knowledge. It's doubtful we could function well (or at all) if this filtering mechanism were not in place. And I vaguely recall reading about certain mental illnesses where it wasn't and the afflicted was bombarded with too many signals. (I imagine the mental state of a person with such an illness or condition might be like three mile island where they had hundreds of alarms going off at once and no way to prioritize them.)
Even after the data gets perceived and assimilated, some of it is vastly more important than others. Emotional tagging is not a perfect mechanism, but it wouldn't have to be to give early animals competitive advantage.
k
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Pooh-Bah
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It's doubtful we could function well (or at all) if this filtering mechanism were not in place.
Indeed, this inability to filter input seems to be one of the foundations of the pattern of disabilities we label "autism." People with autistic spectrum disorders seem to be unable to ignore sensory input, no matter how repetitive or trivial, and their perceptions also seem to be more sensitive. For instance, many autistic people are overwhelmingly distracted by fluorescent lights, because they can see the lights flicker, even though people of normal perception cannot detect the rapid flicker.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Uh oh, acording to sparteye, distracted by fluorescent lights, because they can see the lights flicker, even though people of normal perception cannot detect the rapid flicker, --ergo, i am not normal
well, yes, i knew that to be true, but really, Sparteye! did you have to tell everyone?
actually, a percentage of the population notices the flicker of light bulbs, (and moniters that refresh at 60 Hz.. new ones allow for other frequentcies,) and lots of people hear electricity.. (i just read a confirmation of that recently, too. i don't usually, but i do often hear dimmer switches)
humans exist on a continuum.. those of us only two standard deviation from the mean can pass as normal, at least most of the time. but when people function 3 or 4 deviation from the norm, we usually notice it.. an label it. autism is just one of those cases.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Dear Doc,
You wrote: Re: what it was that you wanted to say?
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I think there is an entendre vu as well. Something to do with experiencing a situation in two different ways.
Many more than two ways, I would suggest! There's some theory of scaffolding in which the situation, say, of reading a novel is expienced in multiple ways--that are constantly changing as long as the novel's still being read. There's the experience of reading it as conceived by the author who imagines the various audiences reading the work---but there are the experiences of future kinds of audiences the author never could have conceived of out of the period in which he/she lived. And there are the experiences of readers discussing the work that are in no way related to what the writer was thinking because the readers are completely insane, uneducated, misinformed, or just having a good time warping the material at hand.
This make me think of people witnessing an accident--and there being so many different versions of what happened. And sometimes the truth gets stomped under altogether.
Best regards,
Wordweary
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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OP
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flicker of lights
Flickering lights can also cause some people to have epileptic fits or bring on migraines.
We had one odd incident here in Montréal when a our tunnel crossing to South Shore was renovated. The tunnel is quite long and was always kinda dark. So, the city decided to put in much more lights. Unfortunately, the lights were placed in such a way that going through the tunnel at the speed limit created the same speed of flikering required to trigger epileptic seizures and migraines.
I didn't know that was what was happening but had taken to avoiding the tunnel since I'd always come out with a migraine on the other side.
It was only when they finally fixed it and the explanation appeared in the papers that I understood why it was happening.
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