The Neurodegenerative Classroom

"Enfermedades Neurodegenerativas: el reto de la ciencia del siglo XXI".

It is a Lecture's title: "Neurodegenerative illness: the challenge for 21 century science". Yes, o.k., Neurodegeneration is the challenge. If Neurodeg is the challenge, we would look for the causes. If the causes are mainly structural, structural changes will go in this direction.

Neurodeg may be considered a symptom, a very crucial one, to understand the kind of illness beyond the symptom. The illness is socio-cultural. To understand that open new ways in our neurosemantic networks that take to a wider road in front of us.

Civilization is crossing a bottleneck.

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Brain takes 20% of our body energy consumption. But our brains didn't born to think, but for action. And for that action be efficient, our brains must be clean and open, and not overpassed by the repetitive process of thinking and thinking almost permanently.

To force people to learn and memorize during years and years means that these people will developped less their attention capabilities.

The attention capabilities depend on our abilities to perceive any change or distinction in our ecosystem.

For our bodies take attention of ecosystem changes or distinctions they must practise perception under a diversity of circumstances.

Our everyday lives gives us the opportunity to practise our degree of attention that is, our attunement in our sensorial systems.

Sensorial systems have been denied by science, because their complexity. But complexity is not a problem, but a characteristic of all systems. The particularity of sensorial systems for scientist, until now, not to have coped with them, must be search on a wide and transdisciplinary scope.

Humans are animals, mammals, characterised by a good development in our sensorial systems. But for this Human-Body Advanced Technology to develop, our bodies must be implied in a process of learning that take in account all these characteristics of the Human Mammal.

"Animal" comes from "Anima" and "Animated", thats imply movement, locomotion. In fact we humans have two legs to walk and dance and jump and so on.

In this way we are discovering that Neurodeg sindrome may be related with our way of life (or "not-life").

Learning process in nowadays school and universities is mainly based in Theory, or abstract knowledge.

Learning process is dominated by the hierarchical structure of the classroom.

Learning process in hierarchical classroom imply a static structure for each student, reduced to some half a square meter of "free" space, in a orthogonal bidimensional space. It actualy looks like a colective armor, that fix all people also in a physical way.

Learning process in hierarchical classroom imply a "desertization process" of all our Sensorial Advanced Technology. In only one minute outdoors, students (and teachers) may meet more sensorial information diversity than in hundreds of days inside the "sensing-deprivated" conventional classroom.

At ecosystem level, hierarchical classroom is deprivated for sensing because only one species is found there: humans.

At social or community level, hierarchical classroom is deprivated for sensing because only one person (teacher) dominated the arena, and the other have a "residual" pasive sensorial role.

If we take in account that schooling coverge with the age or more quickly changes on the life of people, we could understand that their bodies and sensorial systems only achieve a minimum level or degree of their potentials.

Sensosphere have coevolved during the Earth life-span. We humans have coevolved, within sensosphere, during humankind life-span. But only recently, urban life have being changing this sensorial panorama.

We actualy have the solution. We have developped very good technologies. With the help of all this modern tools, we can demonstrate why are we in this critical situation. We can take measures of the sensosphere diversity inside and outside classroom. We can take the same for hierarchical and circular classroom. In this way we will discover that a complementarity among the different learning styles may be the best solution. Also to complement indoor and outdoor activities enhance the development, not also of our sensorial abilities, but also of our critical thinking and general knowledge about the ecosystem (city) where we live everyday.

On the other hand these new technologies are a true revolution in the way of learning. We call Instant-University the use of google, and chat (for example) in the everyday classroom. Because in general our infrautilization of new technologies in education may come from the real fact that a good part of teacher community are Inmigrant Digital. The use of chat to connect with a dozen of other education centers in the world, ¡instantaneously! break the closing character of the classroom. Students can interchange information with students and teachers from all over the world. And without cost (Zeronomics). We don't need sophisticated multimedia infrastructure. We don't need more money. We have the classroom, plenty of Native Digital students that know technologies better than many teachers. We have, thus, a infravalued resource: the students. After all the global investment, and promotion, of the World Wide Web, any classroom not interconnected, at least certain days a week, by internet with other groups of students may be considered a "died" classroom.

In the same way that modern technologies have demonstrated the reduction in eficiency of our hierarchical classroom and our sensorial systems, we could make the way now to outdoors, in order to recharge our sensorial systems of communication and critical thinking.