We're entering back into the salad mix world, but we're not going to have beans for a while. The deer got in the fence and ate most of the next planting, then the rain set us back in planting for a couple of weeks, so we're going to have to wait for the next bean crop to come in. Meanwhile, we harvested winter squash and it is curing so that should appear in the next couple of weeks. In the immediate future, sweet peppers are going to dominate the scene. We've got at least one more strong tomato week, hopefully more, but the extra humidity has made those heirlooms a bit more iffy.
Here's this week's blog:
I have nearly always been fascinated by the human brain. Such fascination, if one applies oneself to it wholeheartedly, can occupy a person until the end of time. I am not quite that dedicated, but I do return to the study of it from time to time. And now is one of those times. I was just learning how the human brain assimilates new information. For example, there was a case study of people in India who had been blind from birth receiving a sight-giving surgery. “When the bandages fall away, people don’t suddenly see the people around them. Instead, they see only shapes and colors, like an infant. After a few weeks, though, they can reach out for objects and tell them apart, but at first they can’t tell whether those objects are near or far. They need years of experiences conjuring the third dimension before they can competently operate within it. Their neurons need time, just like those babies, to learn how to make sense of the new sensory information.” (from “How Minds Change” by David McRaney).
This continues throughout life, as it turns out, and we can witness it in ourselves when we are learning new things. If the novel information does not match existing patterns in our brains, it doesn’t get added right away to our subjective reality, but remains just noise. The brain needs some related experience with it.
Today, I made a lot of that noise when talking to (at) a group of community college students in an “alternative ag” class. If they came from backgrounds of agriculture at all, it was livestock or commodity crops. I could tell from their eyes (and their silence) that I was speaking gobbledygook. But the next time (if there is one) someone from this type of agriculture speaks, their brains will recognize a pattern and start to assimilate this into their subjective reality. Next time, perhaps, they’ll even know which questions to ask.
