From: ct (tilley@att.net)
Date: Mon Apr 24 2000 - 22:19:47 MDT
> The article by Casey Walker in Feed magazine
http://www.feedmag.com/dna/wildfall.html
> 1. "... senses of smell, taste, touch, sight and hearing have decreased
at
> a rate of nearly one percent per year."
May 20,1998 article: Joseph Chilton Pearce interviewed by Walker
http://www.ratical.org/many_worlds/JCP98.html
Walker:
Will you speak to the neurological damage in modern children, as you've
described in Evolution's End, which renders them "ineducable"?
Pearce:
It's been ten years since I wrote Evolution's End, and, believe me, the
situation today has worsened by thousands of percentile. Most people
involved in educational reform are speaking of curricular programs when the
truth of the matter is the children they are dealing with now are, by and
large, damaged past the point of educability in any real sense. The public
has yet to recognize this is so. The clearest indications of such damage
recently came out of Tunbingen University in Germany with a twenty year
study of four thousand people. It shows three significant findings as a
result of the failure to furnish appropriate sensory stimulation for growth.
***First, there has been an average of one percent per year reduction in the
sensory sensitivity of the human system*** and the ability to bring in
information from the outside world. Compared to children twenty years age,
the children we are looking at now are comprehending or registering
information from their environment at eighty percent, which simply means
they are twenty percent less consciously aware of where they are and what is
happening around them. Secondly, the kind of stimulus that does break
through the reticular activating system in the ancient reptilian brain, the
brain stem, is only highly concentrated bursts of over-stimulation. That is,
the only signals they're really bringing in from their environment are those
bursts of stimuli which are highly charged. If it's sound, it must be a loud
sound. If it's touch, it must be an impact. If it's visual, it must be
intense. Subtleties cannot catch their attention because they are not
sensitive to their environment. One comparison is that twenty years ago a
child or young person was able to differentiate 360 shades of red, and today
are down to something like 130 shades, which means the subtleties are lost
to the pure, heavy impact of red now necessary to penetrate the reticular
system. Once we look into the whole developmental system, the implications
are profound....
> 2. "Our brain is not adapting."
> 3. "Red is no longer real red."
> This extract is taken from the heading "Thresholds of the Biological"
> "Recent studies out of Germany -- from Tuebingen University and
> Gesellschaft fur Rationelle Psychologie in Munich -- show that our
> contemporary environments have, in fact, already changed our biology. In
> the last twenty years, from repeated testings of four thousand
> participants, the senses of smell, taste, touch, sight, and hearing have
> decreased at a rate of nearly one percent per year. "15 years ago, Germans
> could distinguish 300,000 sounds. Today, on average, they only make it to
> 180,000. Many children stagnate at 100,000....
http://messagenet.com/fw/f1064.html
Are Our Brains Changing?
"Our sensitivity to stimuli is decreasing at a rate of about one percent per
year. Delicate sensations are simply being filtered out of our
consciousness."
[This is one of the conclusions reported in "Research into Changes in Brain
Formation," by Michael Kneissle (Waldorf Education Research Institute
Bulletin, June, 1997). The report deals with the research at a couple of
German institutions: Gesellschaft fuer Rationelle Psychologie in Munich, and
the Institute of Medical Psychology at the University of Tuebingen. The
report is not footnoted and is rather poorly and informally presented, so I
don't quite know what to make of it -- read on at your own risk.]....
You know, Natasha, rather than eulogize the eugenickian evolutionary thrust,
can't we just get on with that "Create/Recreate" stuff? I mean....when the
hominid anatomy is squishing multiple functions into dual purpose
morphologies, isn't it time to discard some of those paisley and madras
_enhancements_?!
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 15:28:12 MST