Inquiry Institute 2009

I wonder what it would look like if we could graphically represent the ripple effect of the summer institutes on the wider discourse about science and education? My experience is that while I am participating in a summer institute, I share surprising ideas with anyone who will listen...and when I can't corner someone for discussion I post here or on Facebook. The result is that throughout the year following a summer institute I get emails and letters from folks saying something like, "in light of the ideas you were talking about this summer...I thought you might be interested in..." Pretty neat, right?!

Well, here is one such "I thought you might be interested" found in a psychology textbook:

"Ask any scientist what he conceives the scientific method to be, and he will adopt an expression that is at once solemn and shifty-eyed; solemn, because he feels he ought to declare an opinion, shifty-eyed because he is wondering how to conceal the fact that he has no opinion to declare. If taunted he would probably mumble something about 'Induction' and 'Establishing the Laws of Nature,' but if anyone working in a laboratory professed to be trying to establish Laws of Nature by induction, we should begin to think he was overdue for leave." --P. B. Medawar

The pm session was very informing but a lot of material to absorb.  When I think of neuronal activity and the  brain and "the cells that fire together are wired together" I now remember that in my searching of the brain connected to music, I did find that if you have taken music lessons in early childhood then your brain is  expanding  and enlarged because of the discipline, concentration and doing the exercises over and over. The neuronal activity must be truly going when creating music, choreography and connecting with the motor part and other parts of the brain. So that's why scientists say that more parts of the brain is in use in music because it uses the sensory, motor, theory, emotions, reflections etc.