Healers of Intelligence

Kurt Fischer and Todd Rose wrote the chapter in The Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence about Intelligence in Childhood.  They present a theory of Dynamic Assessment and Dynamic Skill theory of intelligence.  The idea is that the way in which children solve problems is very influenced by the situation and the specific demands of the task.  They introduce other theories of intelligence, as well.  They are certainly of the opinion that there is a lot you can do to help students to be better problem solvers.  They give information about a study by Fischer and Catharine Knight that shows different routes a child might take to becoming a reader.  I quickly found a link to the article involved.  It is here.  That never would have happened in 1971.  I'd still be looking for the article.  Anyway, they also expand their theory to emotional problem solving in an interesting way.  Check this stuff out!

Increasing Intelligence

Raymond S. Nickerson wrote the chapter about Developing Intelligence in the Cambridge Handbook of Intelligence.  He believes that at least half of IQ is attributable to environment.  He discusses this issue, and programs developed to provide children with the opportunity to improve their "ability to learn, to reason well, to solve novel problems, and to deal effectively with the challenges - often unpredictable- that confront one in daily life."  Some of these are Head Start, The Carolina Abecedarian Project, and Project Intelligence.  He reviews the evidence for brain plasticity and other factors supporting improved functioning due to experience.  Some of the things that he thinks are helpful are: teaching domain specific knowledge, providing experience with at least informal (if not formal) logic, training in probability and statistics,  supporting executive functioning skills, modeling heuristics and other strategies to solve problems, teaching metacognitive skills (self-management), helping students to develop good habits, and managing students' beliefs about learning.  These all seem to be helpful skills, no matter what relationship that the have to measured IQ.

Nim, and Other Animals

The latest Planet of the Apes movie, and the documentary Project Nim (NPR story here) have brought research with animals into the spotlight.  The story is about 100 years old.  A Russian scientist raised a chimpanzee at home, and studied it extensively about that long ago.  She was impressed, among other things, by the empathy it showed.  Many studies of trying to teach language to animals have been carried out.  The books Nim Chimpsky and Silent Partners tell about some of the studies.  The late Alex, a parrot, was also studied and cared for.  Many of the scientists doing this work are controversial figures.  Sue Savage-Rumbaugh wrote a scientific paper about primates in captivity with three bonobos.  Janis Carter lived in Africa for several years with Lucy, to help her to adjust back to the semi-wild.  William Lemmon and Roger Fouts found it difficult to work together studying chimpanzees.  There are now a number of healers using animals in treating PTSD for people, and working with animals who have been research subjects.  There are many questions about whether and how animals should be used in research.  The trend is towards understanding the natural methods that the animals use to communicate and cope in their environment.

A Healer for Sure

If you define healers as people who carry out activities to help people, Kurt Lewin should be included.  His biography, The Practical Theorist, by Alfred Marrow, tells about his life and thought.  He worked at Iowa, where Julian Rotter was his student, and where my daughter lived, which is one of the reasons that I got interested.  It also rounds out the biographers of the early Gestalt Psychologists, for me.  Anyway, Lewin did studies of what could be done to help people meet their goals at work.  He did action research involving how groups made decisions and got along with each other.  He was active in the WWII efforts.  He used a Jordan Curve to represent a person in his or her environment.  I was never sure about how to pronounce his name.  It turns out that he always said "La Veen", but when his children were always asked why it wasn't "Lou In", he started saying it the latter way.  A saying is attributed to him - there is nothing so practical as a good theory.  I'd say read The Practical Theorist, and if you want to, get it now on line, because there aren't a lot of copies available!

Pro-Oedipus

Since school is about to start, I'm going to shelve Anti-Oedipus and Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari Intersecting Lives (no capital letters on the dust jacket) for now.  Anti-Oedipus was kind of a big deal when it first came out.  I've read just the first two sections.  They discuss schizophrenic individuals, although one wonders how the diagnoses would be different these days.  They talk about some use of medications at the Laborde Clinic, but things are so much different today in that regard.  An important idea in the book is the degree to which social/governmental/institutional factors influence behavior.  It is really hard to get used to the terminology they use, but probably worth it to get a picture of this point of view.  It is interesting to see how these authors, and the early Gestalt Psychologists bring in the ideas of philosophers.  Nietzsche comes up often in Anti-Oedipus.  Anyway, Felix Guattari and the people he worked with were important Healers around the 1960s in France.

A Talented Writer and Therapist

Your Voice in My Head by Emma Forrest is about a lot of things.  I'll focus on the insight it gives into the way in which Dr. R worked as a healer.  He both prescribed medication and carried out talk therapy.  The combination appeared to be an important part of what made it work.  A colleague described him to the author as not being a blank slate, but instead reacting as a person to the input given to him in therapy.  After he died, people he had worked with described his ongoing influence on their lives.  A letter by a patient other than than the author of the book described him as helping people by "lending his humanity, and leaving no doubt that they were understood."  The above link for the book's name is to the Goodreads page for the book.  Threre are about 75 reviews, many of which are from women.  The rationale for the one star rating makes me glad that nobody reads my book.  The link for the author is to her blog.  It's strange to have that much access and connection to an author.

The Mentality of Gestalt Psychologists

The title for  the post is, of course, a knock off of Kohler's The Mentality of Apes.  I'm two thirds of the way through the book.  The descriptions of how the chimps got their food in the experiments are fun to read as well as educational.  You develop a liking for the "subjects" of the research, and can tell that the Kohlers liked them, too.  There is also the edge of the ethics of animal research, of course.  The main point of the book is that the chimps acted with "insight."  The question of individual differences between the chimps is interesting as well.  Some of the phrases used to describe what the chimps did were: "unhesitatingly pilfered", "was never uncertain as to where he had to put it", and "the expression of discouraged desire."  Principles of Gestalt Psychology by Koffka is also an interesting read, even after all this time.  Finally, I've got Productive Thinking by Wertheimer. When I'm finished with those, and books about the four major people involved, I'll be ready to write.  When I learned psychology, this way of thinking was not emphasized, so it is interesting to supplement it now.