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Education like evolution

·      Emergent purpose and learning

·      Some practices and assignments seem useless and stupid—but, in the future, you can often turn around and say how it was useful and contributes to your understanding of things now

·      It’s like starting with basic features of an organism, a light sensitive spot, and moving forward until you have an eye…

o   You build and build and build and never really stop; it’s continuous and, even if there really is no purpose there, no guiding hand, we have the ability to turn around and note what was useful to us in the past and how it contributes to our present—and even how features now might contribute to our future

I also want to speak on my own experiences with "feelings" and a conscious understanding of them which, I think, are a little... "quirky." Quirky brain. 

I have SLE, systemic lupus erythematosus, and as a result I have lots of fun symptoms that interrupt my life. One of them is anxiety and related dissociative states: depersonalization and derealization. There are random moments when, for no rhyme or reason, I am suddenly launched into a dream-like state. Nothing around me seems real or, worse, I don't seem real. Everything was a movie that I watched and didn't actually participate in; my body moves and acts and interacts with the world around me, but I only observe-- I didn't actively take part. It's very bizarre and very unsettling and, for a while, usually ended in a panic attack.

But, with the help of a few understanding doctors, professors, and family members, I began to understand the world and my brain and the constructiveness of everything. By identifying these experiences for what they were (dissociative, DP/DR), and by linking them to my lupus through temporal lobe epilepsy (a not uncommon feature of SLE sufferers), I began to control my reaction to these unsettling events. They still happen and I still notice them, but as I learn more about my brain and by understanding that sometimes random electrical activity just makes me feel unreal-- that didn't mean that reality was dissolving around me or that I was going insane or having some kind of psychotic break. But understanding and recognizing what was going on and the approximate reasons for it happening, I have stopped having as many panic attacks. 

I still get anxious, no doubt. I still have the occasional panic attack. But when the world starts getting wobbly and things seem dreamy even though I'm awake, I'm able to take a deep breath and just know that it isn't the end of the world. I can role with it. And the events haven't been as bad, or I haven't noticed them as much. I've been slowly changing my reception of and reaction to them.

I guess, because of all of this, I am more than willing to acknowledge the brain as a construction, as the world as a construction, of no one, right reality. My experiences with TLE aren't wrong or crazy. They're just another perspective, another reality, another self. 

And it's helped me develop my own interests and skills and paths. Not all bad, I guess.