Loving to see liars squirm when nailed

People lie all the time. The greatest teacher of all said, though, that people speak from the storehouse of treasures found in the heart. I take "heart" to mean the psyche, so I study the area of psychology and language, and presto, one can tell when those lies are being created. It's really a little fun to know that the liar has to squirm for a little while, while you or someone you have related the secret to grills the liar for the truth.

Here's an example. The word "well" has 4 uses, 3 of which are negative in nature. One of the uses means that someone is in outright disagreement with what was said. Another use means that a person is searching for common ground with the other person in the conversation in order to continue the conversation because the first person doesn't exactly agree with the second person's statement.

Imagine an attorney asking someone a question in a deposition or a voir dire. The person answering begins with "Well..." A problem has arisen, but the attorney doesn't recognize it. And which of the 4 uses of well did the person answering the attorney have in mind? Is (s)he disagreeing with the attorney, sorting for common ground, trying to fix just the part that is causing some disagreement, or stalling for time to formulate an answer?

That's why language experts need to be in the loop in all sorts of situations. What about the detective interviewing a suspect for a crime? Is the suspect agreeing or disagreeing with the detective? Is the detective trying to lead the suspect to say something that sounds like the truth so that (s)he can proceed with an arrest? What about non-legal arenas such as arbitration or non-court hearings such as the kind that take place in educational systems?

Since virtually all people use language to get what they want or hide the truth or hedge in giving statements or speak partial truths in all kinds of situations, formal and informal alike, then people think they know how to judge the language use of others. They really need someone familiar with the science of langage in the formal situations, and many times in the informal circumstances too. Someday maybe.

A mirror reflection would be nice

I love hearing people well-versed in their fields. The last two days I was able to hear a couple of people who have done original research in their chosen fields. Lovely. They are comfortable in the information they have mulled for a while, and they know how to talk to others about it. The lecture format is not always the best method of delivery, but I am old-world enough that I can still listen and appreciate the format. There's something about experience in a field coupled with familiarity of facts that makes for a stimulating time.

One of the experts focused on teaching that responds to students' whereabouts in a subject area and spoke of types of teaching to use with a variety of student reactions to the different types, like innovation and reflection. The other expert actually said there are no "gifted" students. That was brave considering the conference was one that GT/AP teachers had to come to for renewing their certifications. She spoke of Socratic questioning and student independence from a teacher as well.

Of course, the type of teaching these two scholars spoke of does work with students who are motivated to learn. Power to them. Advocates for the downtrodden always bring up that there are different strokes for those who were not as privileged, those who "struggle." Perhaps the government should relinquish its stand on mandatory education. People in 2100 will more than likely look back at this time in history and refer to it as the time of the failed mass education experiment. The sooner we admit that, the better. 12 years of daycare for children who grow to adolescence without any responsibility should make us think about doing away with their socialized pampering. It probably won't happen because the children who graduate under this system will not have the skills to critically think through whether or not their experience of school actually benefited them.

With all of this system's best efforts, still only 28% of the population at large finish college. Let's look in the mirror on this! The two experts mentioned above talked of methods that work for anyone who is interested in learning. Obviously 72% of the population have other designs for their lives. What about a conference on what 72% of the population might want to better their lives? I don't think Socratic questioning is helping the lady at the salon to win her Golden Scissors award or the realtor to make the million dollar club or the soldier to defend his life in the streets of Baghdad. Of course, these 3 professions have a "company" retrain them in the particular arts and skills they will need in the shop, the residential world, or the streets in which the IED or bullet rules. So what good really did the 12 years of daycare serve?

What a deal. A kid past 14 gets free meals, A/C or heating, and a crowd of people to disappear into. Who wouldn't want this Peter Pan world where no one really ever grows up until that word "graduation" comes around.

I don't mind hearing about how teach students of any age who are engaged in learning to begin with. Bring on more of them. Let's just be honest about the rest of the situation, face up to its failure, and move on toward a new, better-suited situation for our society. The sooner, the better.

Quantifying knowledge accumulation - what a silly, silly notion

What's the deal with people wanting to know how they stack up against others? I'm talking about the intelligence game. Who really cares about an intelligence rating? It seems like another of those prestige games that needy people want play, so they make up this scale of numbers to quantify what they are good at. Of course, the same scale can't apply to any other talent area than the one the needy person is good at because that would ruin the prestigious feeling of the needy person.

Intelligence—bah humbug! There is no such thing. Try defining it. If you can arrive at a definition, try measuring it. If you could somehow quantify it, try replicating the results. Even if you could replicate results in one language group, could you guarantee that humans in different parts of the world would show the same intellegence levels with the same test? Exactly! That's my point.

Intelligence might be the sum total of choice + opportunity, but it is not some nebulous idea that some people's gray matter allows them to be "smarter" than other people's gray matter. Brains weigh the same. They function the same, except in rare cases of defective wiring from birth. They store information in the same way. They follow a general pattern in forming how information is transmitted and used. So, where is there room for competition in saying that somehow intelligence exists?

A little trip through the book, How the Mind Works, of a leading neurolinguist, Steven Pinker, would show how silly the formation of the question, "Is there intelligence?" is. Brains work the same way. There would have to be a fundamental difference in how different the brain works in people who are considered "smart" from those who are not "smart" before there could be a possiblity for intelligence to exist. There is no fundamental difference. Neuropaths form. Synapses form. Dendrites form. Electronic impulses carry the same amount of information in them when they are sparked.

Hopefully, we are past intelligence as a society. People are equal in brain function. It boils down to choices people make about what information they learn, when they learn it, what kind of personality governs which information is learned and how much of it to store. One might want to clear up the influences of personality on learning before taking on the notion that intelligence exists.

A freed person

I recently heard that someone who has known me for 35 years said that she saw how my son's loss has left me broken. Well, there's no doubt that I was stunned, thrown off course, and otherwise disoriented for about a year. But, from that time on, I really think that I have learned to shed the things from the past that don't count for anything and have moved into exciting arenas of life.

As far as I'm concerned, I'm singing a new hallelujah. I have learned what is really important. I have learned where game playing is taking place. I don't have time for game playing anymore. Majoring in majors is the only way to go. Perhaps the comment was made because what this person thinks I should be doing now is what I was doing before my son's loss. That shows a lack of understanding. Staring death in the face is very liberating. I am no longer bound by striving for false values. I don't have time for those. Much of what I was doing before didn't really get me anywhere in life.

Now the blessing is clearer vision. What anyone sees in me now is not a broken person, but a much freer person, I'm glad to report.

Call it connectivity

E-Harmony is onto something. Their whole idea is that two people can come together and stay together because they are compatible. Actually, that's based on some very good research. But what e-harmony is really onto is that two people can share a genetic fabric seamlessly. Allow me to explain.

It's time to go way beyond the adage, "Opposites attract." People are alike in a number of ways even though in some ways they remain different because the genes program the cells differently. What if the genes that produce cells for the body also produce personality. And although we are all alike in that we can more or less get along in the world, we are different in personalities. A number of companies have put out personality tests or predictive indexes, but it's way beyond that. There are probably as many combinations of personality strands as there are genetic trait appearance strands.

What if people's personalities shared traits like people's appearances share traits. For example, people share the traits of hair color,fingernail roundness or ridges, nose pointedness or roundness, size of ears, etc. In other words, we know others, even outside of our families, who share with us certain appearance traits. If personality is genetically produced, it would stand to reason that personality "shapes" would also be shared. But, itstead of saying personality shapes, let's say that personalities have points of connection with others' personalities - not attraction necessarily - connection. Some points of connection might truly be opposites connecting, such as one kind of personality trait in one person appreciating a certain personality trait in another person because they are complementary or supplementary. I would think much more of the time the connection would be derived from having the same personality trait, though. There might even be certain personality traits that are connected because of admiration of one trait for another. So, one would have connecting points of opposites, sameness, admiration, maybe tolerance or blindness to certain other traits, even connection points of pleasantness, one trait feeding another's trait. Attraction would fall under this category, but the category is larger than attraction and subcategories could be exclusive of its fellow subcategories. Call this series of combinations compatibility if they match up perfectly and incompatibility if they are mismatched completely.

Of course, there is no such thing as compatibility or incompatibility. Put another way, there is a low probability that compatible and incompatible, as defined above, would combine perfectly for a match or mismatch. E-harmony has shown that compatibility to a degree can make a difference, however, in the way humans can live together successfully. The good work that e-harmony has accomplished is deceiving though. Since it is successful, people miss the point about compatibility. E-harmony sells its idea in the love arena so that compatibility is seen only as attraction. But two people can be compatible without attraction. We know this is so because of the coined term platonic relationship. Two people can be compatible and attracted to each other. People, for example, refer to spouses or significant others as their best friends besides being their lovers. Two people have also been noticed to have complementary and supplementary connections. Thus, the term soul mate was coined outside the terms for attraction.

But, I'm trying to ask a different question. Can two people share the genetic personality points that connect them to the extent that age boundaries even generational boundaries are crossed? Can two people share so many personality points that familial or romantic connections are superseded? Can two people of different generations, different races, different religious beliefs be connected whether or not they ever meet? And if they meet, would the two notice it immediately? If e-harmony is any indication just in the one arena it caters to, the answer is yes to the above 3 questions. People of different ages are compatible. Regularly, mates meet that are a decade apart in age. On a smaller scale, and probably due to societal taboos or philosophical views, different races are compatible for e-harmony. People of different religious beliefs are compatible we know for sure from the e-harmony experiment.

For sake of illustration, if, out of the thousands of points for possible connections to combine, just 4 areas of combination were perfectly matched, I might start to notice some compatibility. If those 4 areas were identified as opposite (complementary and supplementary), sameness, admiration, and pleasantness, I could notice certain specific manifestations. What if, for example, I met someone with the moniker, number girl, knowing that my moniker is wordman? I would immediately notice a complementary opposite. What if that same person shared the same humor as mine? What if the same someone possessed a trait I admired, such as the ability to mix well with people and accept people for who they are? What if this person's trademark laugh was an area of pleasantness my own personality craved? And what if there were a thousand other points of connection in a number of other areas? We would be compatible, then, whatever the beliefs, race, or age happened to be. And the more connecting points, the more compatibility.
Some would say the two share souls. That's an easily misunderstood metaphor, though. What they share are seamless points of connection in a genetic fabric of compatibility, not e-harmony style, but total harmony style.

Now how do you spell d-i-g-i-t-a-l?

The rocks of the earth tell us much about the earth if we want to listen. Many people don't believe in radio carbon testing for time and ages. But, even if a person doesn't, one still has to somehow account for bones that no person has written about, assumedly not having been seen during recorded history. One must account for the way the scars on the earth's surface appear that tell a story that predates human settlement. The Grand Canyon, the huge lake basin (now dry) in California, the location of mountain ranges all the way from Chile to Alaska that appear mainly on the western portion of the north and south American continents. And then there is the story of the KT boundary.

The Cretaceous-Tertiary (KT) boundary is a layer of earth, not too thick, that can be found no matter where one digs. It is significant because certain life forms didn't make it from the layer of rocks found below the boundary to the layer of rocks found above the boundary. Dinosaurs are the most significant life form that failed to make it past the KT boundary. Theories abound on their extinction, but they definitely didn't survive the KT boundary event. Not many argue the origin of the KT boundary since it contains material that comes from space outside the earth's atmosphere. Something huge hit the earth from space and life that existed up to that time didn't make the fossil record after that time.

I would like to sound the death knell for two very significant processes that we now use all the time—reading and writing. A KT boundary event is about to happen to these two processes. It has everything to do with advancing to the next level of civilization. In the next phase, there is no place for either process because they are too slow and take too much processing time. Note the book iBrain by Gary Small and many others like it. Note that it was predicted in 1991 by Jane Healy in Endangered Minds. Public schools will die. They will not make it past the KT boundary of digitized information. They exist to perpetuate old habits. Their fossil remains will be found when holographic imagery becomes commonplace in about 10-15 years. Business will not put up with so many young people coming from schools who can't compete in the global economy. They will take over the schools and form a KT boundary. Communication and presentation of ideas will be the rule of the day that can be communicated and presented fairly instantaneously. What a person can measure in numbers and see with their eyes or spectrometers will be the skills needed.

Already liberal education is not nearly as important as it once was. Success comes to many who know the digital language rather than the printed text. Digital language comes in numbers, pictures, videos, symbols, color codes, waves. Printed text is dying already and the digital revolution is barely underway. Teachers and students alike have very little time to adapt. A significant event has happened that so many educators never recognized. Goodbye—you are the weakest link. Your fossils will litter the countryside on the other side of the digital boundary. You saw the bright light in the sky, heard the rumble, felt the quake under your feet, and died from the radiation, disease, or famine caused by the stellar event.

The good news is that life did make it past the KT boundary. It was life of a different kind. But society is sure more advanced now than when the dinosaurs reigned. So be it.

Fragility doesn't fit

Life is fragile. Anyone can point that out. Without heart medicine, some people wouldn't live very much longer. The same could be said about those who take blood pressure medicine. Those who have cancer and are taking chemo know so well about fragility. Step on a plane and land in the Hudson River, and then you call it a miracle if you live. Much more could be said.

Apply this saying (Life is fragile) to spirituality and the examples fail to come so fast. The One who said, "I am life" didn't mean that he was fragile or that following his teachings would make fragile followers. It's a non sequitur to say that spiritual life is fragile. "I am life" implies that something is robust and full of satisfaction.

Not everything that applies to the physical world can be transferred to the spiritual dimension. Hopefully people aren't careless like that.

Qs about life

I think this year I would like to blog about the idea of life. Last year I studied and blogged about drinking water that knocks out thirst and learned a lot. This year I think I will see what the expressions of the Teacher are about life. I know where to find them and have covered them before, but studying with an aim in mind sometimes uncovers some nuggets of refreshment for the soul.

I don't know the best place to start, so I'll just start in the middle of things when Jesus said that he was the the way, truth, and life. He said it in first person, of course, "I am life." I don't think it is worth quibbling about the presence or absence of the article in front of life. Jesus = life is the basic equation either way. So, I'll just explore a little about the basic equation.

Sometimes it is implied and sometimes it isn't. Jesus is talking about the afterlife, a spiritual life that people can't see, or the apparent lifestyle a person lives. Those choices might be overlapping easily enough, or they could all be separate threads of thought. I'll just have to take time and explore. It will give me something to think about this year.

Toll, please

I shed tears these days a little more often than I did when I was a young man. Perhaps that means I am more sensitive about the human condition. I hope so. I find that I don't watch nearly as many scenes from movies or TV that offend this newly found sensitivity. I think the tears also come because I understand more of what is involved when things go awry.

The other night in bed, after lights were completely out, I was listening to one of the most beautiful songs of the Christmas season pulsing out the fact that God expressed good will to people. I'd heard those words before, of course, even though the song was new. This time, though, I understood the human side of the matter. Humans don't want good will toward God or fellow human beings. It was really sad. In the particular mindset I had that night I could see the ill will humans have in the arena of betrayal. The Maker, I know, experiences it everyday, as do many humans. But, it touched me that night. Tears were shed. I saw betrayal among humans. I couldn't quite hold back the tears for the toll it takes on a life.

Whomever, whoever, whatever

Many views we take are a matter of interpretation. The lady on the news tonight said that some benefactor was giving away something "to whomever wishes to take it." Well, normally, "whomever" is the grammatically correct choice. It's objective case all right. It follows a preposition all right. But, "whomever" does not appear alone. It's in a clause. Now, another rule could come into play. Select "whoever," the subject case pronoun when the indefinite relative pronoun is the subject of its own clause. Now, there is room for interpretation. Should one use subject case to follow the rules of choice for clauses or the object case pronoun to follow the case rules for words that follow a preposition? The news anchor made a choice. I would have chosen the other rule. Who's right?

I find this to be true in other areas besides grammar. It happens in socialization of speech, in acceptable rules governing cultural habits, in religion, and elsewhere. We all make choices that others would not choose, and sometimes, in fact, choose the direct opposite option. I visited a restaurant not long ago with a friend. Before we received our meal a family was seated next to us with very small children. My friend thought that it was so impolite of the people to come to a restaurant in the first place with children who would have to be corrected in public and force others outside their family to have to put up with such obnoxious behavior. He even went so far as to make comments loud enough for the couple to hear so that they would know his interpretation of correct public behavior. I also know another person who will ask to be moved if small children are seated near her.

Somehow, we all get along with each other in the end or there would be mass killings. Of course, we all have preferences and don't want those violated with any degree of frequency. One of the most beautiful songs I heard at the close of the year 2008 was a song by Casting Crowns called "I can hear the Christmas bells ringing." It was about the announcement from angels to humans, "Peace on earth, good will to its people." But, it also talked about how people really hate each other and peace on earth can never be achieved.

Should I care that the news anchor used "whomever" when I can think of a rule of equal weight that would select "whoever?" Should I care if a family with small children get seated next to me in a restaurant? Should I opt for peace when it can never really be achieved? I don't know. I learned a long time ago that you can't change the stripes on a zebra. People are who they are. Mostly, rules are relative. But, it sure is hard for people to realize the relativity or arbitrariness of their views and beliefs.