why it may be difficult to re-focus on work: your mind is elsewhere

By the way, Immordino-Yang does great work on Creativity, Education and the Brain

Rest Is Not Idleness
Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education

When people wakefully rest in the functional MRI scanner, their minds wander, and they engage a so-called default mode (DM) of neural processing that is relatively suppressed when attention is focused on the outside world. Accruing evidence suggests that DM brain systems activated during rest are also important for active, internally focused psychosocial mental processing, for example, when recalling personal memories, imagining the future, and feeling social emotions with moral connotations. Here the authors review evidence for the DM and relations to psychological functioning, including associations with mental health and cognitive abilities like reading comprehension and divergent thinking. This article calls for research into the dimensions of internally focused thought, ranging from free-form daydreaming and off-line consolidation to intensive, effortful abstract thinking, especially with socioemotional relevance. It is argued that the development of some socioemotional skills may be vulnerable to disruption by environmental distraction, for example, from certain educational practices or overuse of social media. The authors hypothesize that high environmental attention demands may bias youngsters to focus on the concrete, physical, and immediate aspects of social situations and self, which may be more compatible with external attention. They coin the term constructive internal reflection and advocate educational practices that promote effective balance between external attention and internal reflection.

Here’s what you wrote on the 15th.  You can use this as  the basis of your initial draft summer plan, due Next Monday, Jan 30

Paul Chaney talking about his drawings made recently at Donetsk. Super interesting diagrams of nature-culture interactions, going back to the Big Bang, and forward to this coal town in the Ukraine.

https://www.facebook.com/drawingandcognition/posts/10154057450761604?notif_t=page_wall&notif_id=1484669394141119

http://tranzitdisplay.cz/cs/vystavy/paul-chaney-donetsk-syndrome-diagrammatic-vernisaz-15-12-1900

http://www.paulchaney.co.uk/

 

Brette’s post on Chihuly reminded me of this show.  The Insititue for Figuring should be on every list of STEAM resources!
Crochet Coral Reef: TOXIC SEAS celebrates the tenth anniversary of the “Crochet Coral Reef” (2005–present), an ongoing project by sisters Margaret and Christine Wertheim and their Los Angeles–based organization, the Institute For Figuring. Mixing crocheted yarn with plastic trash, the work fuses mathematics, marine biology, feminist art practices, and craft to produce large-scale coralline landscapes, both beautiful and blighted. At once figurative, collaborative, worldly, and dispersed, the “Crochet Coral Reef” offers a tender response to the dual calamities facing marine life: climate change and plastic trash.
Margaret Wertheim’s TED talk here.

main-image-color

http://madmuseum.org/exhibition/crochet-coral-reef-toxic-seas

It was a pleasure speaking with most of you, and I’m looking forward to see your work in person in the winter session!  Many of you have aluded to the difficulty of making art when you are spending almost all your time and energy dealing with under-resourced and sometimes chaotic schools and classrooms.  This week, this reading seemed timely.  As usual, creative and visual responses are welcome!

Vermeer in Bosnia by Lawrence Weschler