Important Variables
Ian's Mission: Understanding why the most brilliant people are the worst learners in the modern world and how to transform that reality.
Neurological Realities
- Learning is only possible when the brain is at a high enough level of consciousness. And the more conscious we are, the faster we learn.
- Higher consciousness results from increased differentiation among neurons and a seamless 2-way feedback loop between them.
- Our perceptual capacities are more evolved and take more brainpower than our motor skills.
- Our motor skills are improved when there's a clear dominance between left and right hemispheres, making someone left or right-handed.
- But our perceptual capacities are conversely diminished because our brains instead focus on projecting ourselves into the world.
- Similarly, our ability to be conscious is severely undermined when we're reacting to stress: we lose both self-awareness as well as awareness of others' needs.
Environmental and Physical Realities
- For hundreds of thousands of years, people were migratory and adaptive-- both seasonally to find food and over time because of massive shifts in the earth's climate.
- Many prehistoric tribes would even change political systems every season, depending on whether it was one of abundance or scarcity.
- Earth warmed up around what's called the Neolithic period, making farming a reliable food source.
- Over thousands of years, more and more people across the world settled down and started making physical structures to live in.
- Our exposure to toxins, and especially neurotoxins, catapulted, primarily because of the growth of indoor mold in permanent structures. On average, indoor air is 8x more polluted than outdoor air.
- The prevalence of chronic autoimmune diseases has simultaneously catapaulted among humanity.
- As townships became cities, survival became less about our individual relationship to the natural world and more about our relationship to each other.
Resources Read More: Problems with Learning
