They don’t love you like I love you.
I’ve been thinking about hippocampal place, space, and prediction maps the last few days and realize that this construct of maps must be pretty pervasive for dorsal dominant thinking, and the overweight stapling function in the CA1 region is probably the genesis of why my thinking patterns are so much more associative than “normal”. Since overweight CA1 also seems to be pretty common etiology for “positive symptoms” of “schizophrenia” it makes me wonder whether the difference between the two is the effect of the CA2 regions prediction/expectation mapping function. I need to find some data on whether “schizophrenia” affects ventral vs. dorsal presentations differently, and this might be sussable via MRI scans showing cortical hemispherical weight differences. There might be some EEG work as well, although most EEG work tends to be even worse quality than MRI work for “mental health” conditions.
More relevant than that I’ve been thinking about the concept of creating subject maps in general as a modality for education. Rather than building knowledge the traditional way of incremental tree building, introducing students to as broad a field as possible then training them to run “searches” against that knowledge field might be a much more natural way to address the developmental process for some types of “autists”. It seems the overwhelming question that many get stuck on is the question of “why”, and our education and social structures are not designed to answer or even accommodate the question most of the time. By introducing maps of information and allowing individuals to generate their own “whys”, and focusing the educational training more on how to reconcile maps (both internal and other people’s) we might be able to introduce a far more resilient social paradigm with less risk of self annihilation as our technology progresses.
Essentially instead of focusing on having the “why” synchronized as many social systems focus on, we enable social cooperation around consistent maps. How well could ventral dominant presentations adapt to this paradigm? Would they have the same struggles as many dorsal dominant presentations have with our current paradigms?
Edit: It seems like one of the most common points of social friction is when individuals “know” things without any consideration of external data points. It seems that often knowing an answer leads to selectively biasing the data used to build a knowledge map and these why’s lead to wildly varying maps on a topic. Because the “why” is already established, there’s no ability to reconcile these knowledge maps to generate a new position. Regardless of map expansion, the result will always be the same because the why is fixed and returns the same results, even if the map is full of information contradicting the why.
An example of this is watching the supreme court confirmation hearings, and it’s pretty clear that most of the republicans on the panel have pretty fixed why’s. They are presenting bizarrely distorted map information in order to support that why. There’s literally nothing that the nominee could assert which would change, because the map for these individuals is irrelevant, the only relevant is she is incompatible with the “why”.
Is it possible to hijack this fixation on why in this type of interaction?