[roleic]

1) What brought you here?

My first contact with on-intelligence was two days ago by watching the ted-talk of Jeff Hawkins recorded in 2003 in www.ted.com. Then I got me the book and read it yesterday from end to end! I am fascinated about it and searched the internet about related stuff and found this forum. So here I am!


2) What are your main interests?

My main interest is to understand how people learn and how a better understanding of it can improve the efficiency of schools, teachers, curricula, learning materials and methods. Specially interesting for me is whether modern technology can help young people to learn more efficiently in the first, second and most urgently the third world.
After all, todays still most used teaching methods basically stem from the 18th century! One professor lecturing up-front using black or white board (using projectors or beamers hardly makes a difference) and students listening seemingly inactively. Is there a better way to do it? Can we learn from the new insights into brain functions to improve the learning/teaching methods?
This is relevant to mankind because the next generations of people can master their challenges like stopping overpopulation, keeping peace and improve environmental protection only if the whole population achieves a minimum education level. The very survival not only the wellfare of mankind will depend heavily on substantially improving its average education level. And I am convinced that education is therefore much more relevant to all of us than new text/ speech recognition machines, improved weather or stock market forecasts or having autonomously driving cars how ever fascinating that may be. (By the way I am not a teacher but a engineer sharing the fascination of technology and smart toys... )

[danshawen]

This is a promising field for the application of the ideas presented in Jeff's book.

But be careful! Taken to heart, Jeff's ideas are as likely to create controversy and consternation as Galileo or Copernicus found out the hard way.

And a pity it is, too. There is much more hidden between the lines that, if anything, will bring us more understanding of what it is to be human.

Just a tiny sample of the controversy you will be getting into:

Did you know that our ability to do the complex process of facial recognition so quickly is mainly BECAUSE WE HAVE WAGED WARS for millenia? Pause to consider how important it is to quickly discern friend from foe amongst our fellow human beings. If we could not, we would be at a considerable, unsurvivable disadvantage, wouldn't we?