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Welcome to an ongoing effort to understand our nature.
The greatest challenge in attempting to understand our nature comes from the very medium we use. Speech and language evolved so that the human group could share experience and refer to what we encounter through our other biological registers.
The evolution of speech and language created a situation where we can act on what we sense and feel, both individually and as a group or we can act on social and inner language or a combination of both.
Living in a world of sense and feeling and living in a world of reference creates the mother of a conflict. Though the website shows that all life experience is conflicted for all animals no other animal has to live with such a severe condition.
The site uses plain English. In order to balance the dominance of speech and language, we use wherever possible words whose meaning derives from vision i.e. ‘illustrate a point’, and ‘look at a topic’. Before our brain was dominated by language it was dominated by vision. Just under half our brain is still used to process vision.
How did this website come about?
I am indebted to the thousands of children (from two to eighteen) whom I have observed and met in my role as an Educational Psychologist. I participated in a number of research projects and co-wrote books for teachers and parents on movement, memory and speech and language. I co-produced materials on attention and social and emotional development.
Though every human indeed every animal is unique, some variations shed light on our nature, particularly when it is possible to find a number of children who have the same rare profiles and problems. I have met groups of children that have had unusual and revealing natures.