Introduction

Time blindness—the two books

If you want to understand the physics that explains why holding back children increases their injuries, read the note at the end of this introduction. If you want to understand that learning process and its implications for human wellbeing, read this book. I describe how normal learning results in behavior that causes scarcity, social conflict, and environmental destruction, just as surely and unintentionally as holding back the unrestrained increases their injuries. I show how normal learning fails to accurately predict future conditions, weakens values for predicted conditions, and diminishes ability to connect predicted conditions to behaviors that cause them.

Some of these learning processes are acquired after birth. Each of us learned them from interactions with the environment. Part of this environment was produced by our culture. Therefore, part of six billion sets of imperfect behavior is the unintended by product of cultural activity.

These behaviors might be improved by changing what culture contributes, not to knowledge, but to cognitive development. Finding and implementing these changes might develop a new generation whose thinking and learning takes them to an environmentally balanced, abundant, and peaceful future.

The learning processes on which I focus contain a common thread "time." Our perception of time shapes both our predictions and the values we assign them. When a person fails to use available "temporal information" I call these distortions in prediction and value, "temporal blindness." When an entire society is time blind, and we try to fix social problems by changing the temporal cognitive abilities of all individuals in the next generation, I call the activity "cognition based solutions to global problems."

In the first book I describe the "time blind problem" for the lay reader. I show that our weak abilities to gather, process, and value information, distort our expectations. These distortions cause people to smoke, skid off roads, not wear seat belts, and contribute to global problems. The book's conclusion:

The text is not designed to upgrade the reader’s temporal thinking abilities. The text is designed to get each reader to acknowledge: 1) their own thinking limitations; 2) the implications of these limitations in terms of their behavior’s impact on future conditions; and 3) the utility of creating new "thinking development environments" that prevent these limitations from being a part of a future generation’s cognitive tools.

In the second book I outline a solution to the time blind problem. I connect "behavior selection" to "thought processes," and "thought processes" to "learning environments." I show the ability, to predict and value outcomes of behavior partly results from nurture and partly from nature. Some of our global problems occur because "nurtured cognitive abilities" produce predictions or values that are too weak to compete with those produced by our animal nature. Or they are too weak to compete with the incorrect predictions, and shortsighted values we obtained through rote learning.

I show, using graphs of information flow, how existing development environments unintentionally induce temporal blindness. I hypothesize how alternative learning environments may prevent it. The conclusion:

Let me provide an overview of the problem outlined in the first text.

Time Blindness—the social problem

"Time Blindness" Topples Trade Towers

No one will receive additional goods, services, land, jobs, health, or freedom from a terrorist act. At best the act gets the attention of people whom the terrorist feels "have taken" these from his people. The important word is "taken." It is not being poor that motivates an individual to become a terrorist. It is the loss of wellbeing. For a dirt farmer, it is not the absence of a flush toilet or an electric light that promotes extreme action. It is the loss of land or water, and thus dignity. If this analysis is correct, to rid ourselves of terrorism we have to change the behaviors that cause "taking."

For most of us the world appears too complex or uncertain to connect our personal behaviors to the "taking from others." Even if we realize the underlying importance of "takings," in the creation of terrorism, we assume institutions do the taking. We fail to realize that "institutional taking" is driven by the taking behaviors of its constituents. We fail to realize that individuals, creating their families and lifting them to a better life, drive political or economic taking. Our benign personal behaviors are seldom seen as responsible for the "takings" that result in social conflict, or terrorism.

The connection between individual action and "takings" is easily seen in the case of our forefather settlers. Their benign acts (providing for their families) took enough from the existing tribes to provide today's Native Americans reason to be terrorists. Today, still performing the same "family providing behaviors" we are still taking from someone on the globe. These people or their children experience losses that could make them terrorists. The problem is that we often do not realize and cannot internalize the actual consequences of our behavior when those consequences are remote either in time or geography.

I call this failure to connect behavior and results accurately and to give adequate meaning to results at the time of choosing behavior "time blindness." Individuals’ time blindness has been creating terrorists from the beginning of civilization. It will continue making terrorists until people overcome time blindness. And therein lies the problem. Time blindness in not another word for selfishness or ethnocentrism. It is the result of the way we have been trained from birth to analyze and understand the consequences of actions.People who suffer from it cannot personally overcome it. However they can understand its meaning and structure, decide that life with terrorism is too big a price to pay, and work toward preventing that thinking limitation from becoming part of the next generation’s cognition.

In order to understand temporal blindness you must first understand what is meant by a thinking limitation. A thinking limitation can be described in the abstract, or though examples, such as a 15-year old’s decision to smoke, the ugliness of a simple social system, or the structure of our global community which has as a hidden integral part, the nurturing of terrorists.

What is a thinking limitation? A house cat sitting in your living room makes the same size image on your retina as a tiger at the end of a football field. A cognitive process converts one of the two images into a serious danger. If the process did not correctly use the "distance to the tiger" in calculating its size we could call ourselves "space blind." Time blindness is a similar limitation in cognitive process. It miss uses "time to event" in assigning the event’s meaning. As a result, a loss expected to happen next year looks smaller than that same loss happening next week. An expectation of your son being killed next year brings you less anxiety than an expectation of your son being killed next week?

Let me use a young person’s decision to smoke to demonstrate the immense bias created by "time blindness." Each smoked cigarette robs an individual of about 5 minutes of life (1)(2). On average, smokers die nearly seven years earlier than nonsmokers (3). As a result, each smoker loses three times the vacation in retirement than he or she has enjoyed during his or her entire working life. Furthermore smoking causes major capital losses that diminish retirement conditions. Taking grand kids on trips in a motor home and up to a cottage on the lake are prevented, because the pack a day smoker bought 18,000 packs of cigarettes at $3 a pack. Without investment, that’s $54,000 not available to purchase the motor home. With investment that’s $341,000 not available to purchase a cottage. If these losses were not enough, the smoker will also suffer the pain of coughing and shortness of breath. He or she will lose additional retirement vacation in medical treatment.

Which brings us to the crux of a young smoker’s choice "to smoke," — he or she makes the selection early in life. At age 15, retirement at age 65 is 50 years in the future. The above future liabilities, from here, look pretty small. The mental scales filled with "peer pressure to smoke" (translated heavy) on one side and "abstract future liabilities" (translated light) on the other, tip toward smoking.

In this case time blindness successfully inhibits the creation of a future image of oneself suffering. Time blindness inhibits the connect between the smoking behavior and the suffering condition Time blindness inhibits the transference between a parent suffering lung cancer and oneself suffering from lung cancer. Time blindness even discounts a transmission of the connection, for example the Surgeon General’s warning

Now let me turn to the role of time blindness in shaping an individual’s "taking behaviors." Visualize a large ship. The ship never makes port. Getting "on" the ship requires a birth. Getting "off" requires a death. Each couple has around two children. Some people do not have any. The ship’s population is constant.

The ship has limited space and materials. It has energy sources and technology that allows it to create shelter, food, water, healthcare, and recreation. Each person on the top deck gets a large portion of living space and ship’s services. Each person on progressively lower decks gets a smaller portion.

From any deck people can see a better life. There is a constant scramble by each person on the ship to improve his or her conditions on a deck or to move up a deck. The channels of success are achieved either by increasing productivity and efficiency or by redistributing existing resources through social structure, cunning, or violence.

Shipmates welcome increasing productivity and efficiency. However, during redistribution, one person’s success pushes another to a smaller space or to a lower deck. Some people get pushed so low they have too little food and die from starvation. Some die from lack of healthcare. Some die from physical hardship of hard work. Some die in the conflicts that arise from violent acts of redistribution.

Each day just before sundown everyone gathers at the back of the ship for sea burial of the dead. All those who died from old age or natural accident are buried off the sunny side. All those, whose lives were cut short by starvation, inadequate healthcare, hardship, or violence, are buried off the shady side.

If this society wanted to assign responsibility for shady side burials, it might consider the following paragraphs, which describe the consequences of various behaviors.

Which behavior caused the death of a child if the parents had the flow of resources to feed the child when they conceived it, however, after living conditions changed aboard ship they did not? In this case, the child’s death can be attributed to an individual whose behavior consumed additional resources, which were not offset by an increase in productivity. That is, if the individual did not consume these additional resources (and the starving child did) death would have been prevented.

When a person kills or is killed in fights to regain lost resources, people who increased their consumption and first took these resources share responsibility. For if they did not take the resources in the first place there would have been no need to take them back.

If a ship has too few resources to support all its passengers, even no change in distribution produces shady side burials. Anyone who consumes anything helps account for the shady side burials already in place. That is, if any individual ceased to exist, the resources that supported him or her could be used to keep others from shady side burials. Thus, every individual shares some responsibility.

This responsibility might be calculated by taking the total number of shady side deaths viewed during a lifetime and dividing that number by the number of passengers. For example, if half the people were going over the shady side, then each person would be responsible for half a person shady side burial. Every pair of consumers, on average, would be responsible for one shady side death.

Let me propose a behavior that will stop all hardship and conflict due to resource limitations. While it will not sound humane, it will be enlightening. Assume that society commanded each pair of consumers to shoot someone. The released resources would prevent shady side burials that were caused by starvation, lack of medical attention, physical hardship, or social conflict induced by scarcity.

This new social design will produce the same number of shady side burials. The shooting acts would produce the same number as the consumptive acts of the non-shooting system. The only difference between the two social systems is the people in the shooting system can see the connection between behavior and result and in the people in the consumptive system can not.

Because the relationships among the ship's resources and population are simple, they allow one more hypothetical extension. If one individual lowered his or her consumption to alleviate starvation and someone else besides the starving party consumed these relinquished resources, then, responsibility for the starving person’s early death would then be transferred from one consumer to another. The mobility of responsibility suggests that each individual on the ship is not equally responsible for the downward push of people to a lower deck or off the shady side in a burial. Those with larger consumption must take a larger portion of responsibility.

If we allocate responsibility as a function of consumption, the pairs who consume 100 times those that are shooting just one person would have to shoot 100 people. Pairs that consume 100th as much, shoot only one person to fulfill the responsibilities of 100 pairs. If everyone followed this proportional proposal the shady side burial number would be the same.

What does it imply when the shooting behavior and the consumptive behavior have vastly different acceptance among the ship’s company but create the identical results? It may mean each individual’s thinking process can make the connection between the shooting behavior and death but not the connection between the consumptive behavior and death. The difference between the two "behavior/consequence combinations" is the time delay between action and outcome. It may mean, time blindness makes a death due to consumption mean very little in selecting the behaviors that cause it.

Now let me move on to the meaning of our temporal blindness to our social condition. The earth, being physically and socially more complex, has many additional ways to produce shady side deaths. On earth poor people have children they know they can not support. Power hungry leaders cause violence for their own self-aggrandizement. Benevolent parents have as many children as they can support. These behaviors, not present on the ship, on earth cause additional shady side deaths.

However, there is no reason to assign all shady side deaths to these "additional" bad behaviors. If you are not a person who had children you could not support, an evil leader, or the parent of three or more children, do you want to know how many people you kill through your consumptive behavior? Would you like to consider the number you would have to shoot if our global society chose the "proportion to consumption shooting protocol" as a means for eliminating the deaths due directly to scarcity and conflict that arises from scarcity?

My analysis uses two numbers, 75 (the average age at death in developed countries) and 62 (the average age at death in undeveloped counties.) The age difference is 13 years.

The relationships connecting consumption and longevity of these individuals are complex. However, if I assume that there exists a reduction in consumption of a person from a developed country (not large enough to affect a change in his or her longevity), that will release enough resources to help four people in undeveloped countries increase their longevity to 75 years, then, each individual in a developed country, in choosing to maintain his or her consumptive pattern **, takes 13 years from each of four people in an undeveloped country.

Four times 13 is 52 years or 70% of a 75-year life span. Thus, living a developed world life style on average means shortening another human being's life by 70%. Each of us, by living in the developed world, is doing the same harm to our fellow humans, as if we shot someone who was 23 years old to prevent him or her from consuming resources the rest of his potential life. It is like killing 0.7 people.

This analysis overestimates and under-estimates the number. For example it increases the number because it does not adjust for the deaths of children of irresponsible parents. It does not adjust for the deaths due to irresponsible leaders or deaths due to people who have three or more kids. It increases the responsibility of a rich person and decreases the responsibility of a poor person by assigning all of the "shady side" deaths to the top 20% of the consumers even though they account for only 80% of the consumption. The calculations also overestimate an individual’s responsibility because they do not adjust for the deaths caused by our predecessors’ behaviors.

However, the largest error in estimation of an individual's responsibility caused by this computation, an underestimation that may more than compensate for its over-estimation, may be that it does not adjust for the future deaths that result from today’s behavior. Thus the .7 number is probably a conservative estimate of the responsibility of an average person living in the developed world.

If this number does not seem significant in the selection of a terrorist target, consider that this average does not take into account that among the top 20% of the world’s consumers, consumption can vary by more than a hundred fold. Some of us are responsible for killing one and two people every year just by living our normal life style. If a shooting protocol was implemented, that is how many we’d have to shoot.

With our time blindness, most of us did not see our consumptive behavior as this deadly. We did not have to accept responsibility for "shady side burials. We could think that our individual and institutional behaviors that increased production through technology or created safety nets that redistribute goods and services to the weakest group members, were adequate to compensate any people we might have inadvertently pushed aside in our trip to our current well being. But the above description shatters this view. It shows that these behaviors, even when successful, only momentarily stop "shady side burials." Increasing consumption by all individuals from all decks undoes any success.

If we had temporal sight we would see, that in the long term, stopping shady side deaths will require different personal behaviors of all shipmates. To prevent "taking" would require a birthrate that lowers the ship’s population enough to compensate for any expanded consumption of the remaining population (that is expanded consumption not addressed by advances in technology).

However, we are time blind. "Population reduction behaviors" that reduce shady side deaths remain as invisible to us as past consumptive behaviors that contributed to them. Most of us do not see the earth as a large ship. Most of us don't keep track of the difference between a sunny and shady side burial. The harshness of other people's lives in the future does not influence our behavior.

Even those that have a vision of the "taking" problem and are motivated to search for a solution will not immediately find the "population reduction" solution. Even if they did, lowering the birthrate could only be implemented by actions of six billion individuals whose temporal sight causes them all to choose a one child per family behavior.

With our time blindness, we, the six billion people of our earth do not have the abstract cognitive abilities to see our procreative acts as causes of, or potential cures for, the hardship realized by 80% of the earth’s future inhabitants. We do not have the temporal sight to give much value to those future injuries. When we balance the expected benefits that accrue to us as parents of a second child, against the "invisible" or "under valued injuries" that accrue to others, possibly our grandchildren, the scale tips in favor of having the second child every time.

With our time blindness we fail to see that our children will live in a world with even greater pressures pushing them to lower decks. We cannot see that these pressures will increase generation by generation. We fail to see that each generation of children will have to be launched to higher levels than were their parents. Each future generation will have to be brighter than their parents just to live on the same deck. And shamefully, each generation will have to be more ruthless and more indifferent in dealings with their less fortunate earthmates.

Six billion people promote global problems because their abilities to see and value future conditions created by present behavior (to perform temporal inference) are no stronger than those of a 15-year-old potential smoker. If the temporal inference thinking capacities of a future generation could be free of these limitations, then, it would be possible for that generation to see and feel in their gut the future their actions promote. It would be possible for that generation to choose behaviors that we can not choose. It would be possible for that generation to create a world we want but cannot produce.

To overcome time blindness, our challenge is to create a generation that has temporal sight. The challenge is to describe the temporal inference thinking processes that allow behavior to reflect its future outcomes. The challenge is to create the learning environments that develop these thinking processes.

This solution will require an enormous research and development effort. It will be attempted if the losses caused by temporal blindness look equally enormous; that is enormous to people who live today; that is enormous to people who are as time blind as you and me.

The terrorism we now face may be this motivation. Bin Laden may be a deranged diabolical power hungry maniac that should be in a mental institution. However, the people that trained in his camps can not all be that crazy. Many are men who see themselves as victims (and children of victims) no different from Native Americans. Their people had land and resources that were taken away. Some see the supports of their present life still being taken away. As long as our global society creates these men we will have terrorism.

Terrorism may motivate this enormous effort because it shatters the myth that the twenty-first century is a time of wealth, health, and longevity; a time when the smartest will live like kings supported by a peaceful population of 6 billion paid servants. Terrorism speaks for the 40,000 children who die each day die from starvation or its related diseases. Terrorism speaks for those whose average age is 13 years shorter than it could be. It speaks for the people who see themselves losing their wellbeing and dignity.

As these numbers grow, terrorism will grow until it wakes us up and we implement what we thought we could not do — create a community of individuals who allow the future to influence their behaviors.

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(physics of injury" note)

During a 30-MPH crash both the car and the child must abruptly stop moving. The stop is like landing on the pavement after jumping off a 3rd story balcony. If any of the parents had a choice between landing on a thick cushion or a thin one, they would all pick the thick one. However, the "pull back behavior" is like picking the thin one. "Not holding back" is like picking the thick one.

In such a crash, the car’s front-end crushes 15-inches. This crush acts like a 15 inch cushion for the dashboard and everything that slows down with it. If the child is against the dashboard at the instant of crash, he or she slows down in 15 inches. The dashboard applies a 500-pound force to the child’s body. It seems large. However it causes no severe injury. Seat belts prevent injury because they act like the dashboard. They apply the 500 pound force for the 15-inch stopping distance.

No parent however, can create 500 pounds of restrain with one arm outstretched to the right. The child’s body overpowers the arm and continues moving forward at 30 MPH. Unfortunately, by the time the child moves from the seat to the dash, the dash has already moved 15 inches and has already slowed to zero MPH. When the child collides with it, he or she slows to zero MPH in the 1 inch or so the dash deforms. What could have been a 15-inch cushion is now little more than a one inch cushion. The forces on the child are ten times higher and so are the injuries.

---> This analysis is confirmed by crash data of unbelted car occupants. Sleeping passengers, drunks, and un restrained children, that slid forward during braking, and were "on-the-dashboard" at the time of collision, walk away from accidents only slightly injured. Passengers that hold themselves, or are held like children, away from the dashboard during braking, and then collide with it during collision, get seriously injured or killed.

Time blindness—prevention

The book may have created a understandable argument that to create an abundant, peaceful and non polluted world for our great grand children we would need to limit each family to one child. Yet few if any of these readers will implement the logic.

When the time comes to have the second child, each will revert back to an irrational belief that "if everyone limited themselves to just two children, humankind would have a great solution to present global problems."

Why this regression. Why will the reader not change his or her personal procreative behavior or change his or her advocacy. I suggest that "knowledge of" is not the same as "meaning for" future events.

Meaning depends on, not only creating a view of the future, but also creating a belief that the view will happen and feelings that would be had by the individuals who would exist during the expected conditions. These latter two parts require the conversion of "knowledge of" into the stuff that shapes behavior. And this too is a part of the temporal inference skills for which we search and hope be able to develop in some future generation.

Thus the contents of the first book is but a description of the problem. It is in the following book that I describe thinking, and learning-to-think, in a way that helps the reader find a course of action that does not require changing his or her own procreative behavior. It does not require the reader to change his or her values about procreation. The course of action is to:

The course of action is to create a new generation that can:

• create the solid future images which remain hidden to us,
• create and hold values that seem unreasonable to us, and
• perform behaviors we think second best.

****** edit from here on ****

The constructions in the following book help in the research and development of new learning environments. When a reader is not him or herself such a researcher, the intent is to encourage the science reader to help facilitate this projects. Together, the advocate and the researcher, can create a cognitive development environment, which will create a world full of temporally sighted individuals.

In the chapters I explain:

• how each of us may have become temporally blind,
• why the reader will find it difficult to fix his or her own cognitive damage, and
• how to prevent such damage in yet undamaged minds.

I do this by building and presenting an expanded model of learning and thinking.

Success depends on overcoming two challenges.

• Temporal blindness is a defect in thinking, which the reader can not see or feel with his or her senses
• resulting from the first, our English language lacks words to adequately describe this part of the temporal domain.

The limitations of our language and our senses are overcome though the use of abstraction.

Consider: Inuit languages have dozens of words for frozen water. Each word conveys information about which mittens to wear, which sled to take, and the time of day to start a trip to get the best travel conditions. English words for frozen water, for example, "snow, sleet, and hail" don’t begin to convey enough utilitarian meanings.

The reader is about to embark on an adventure to discover missing workings of his or her own thinking. The workings are temporal. Like the failures of English words to describe frozen water, English words also fail to describe the implications of objects "in change" or "in motion." Motions of moving objects which appear stationary to the eye are not easily conveyed by the terms "slow," or "sluggish." These terms do not help us in choosing controlling behaviors any more than the word snow helps Inuits plan trips.

As the reader works to understand how the human mind could "learn-to-connect" the almost invisible societal motions toward tragedy to the seemly harmless personal behaviors that bring them into existence, he or she will have to allow abstraction to do the job of creating the gut feelings of danger. Like those we all get when we look over the roof edge of a tall building. The reader will have to get the "willies" from looking at a signal flow graph when it predicts harm.

The graph themselves are presented only as hypotheses to be tested. There will be no laboratory evidence presented to support their accuracy. However, the abstractions have a special power. They describe in symbols, concepts we can not directly grasp with our senses.

Like Asimov’s jumper, the reader sees or feels only a portion of the temporal world in which he or she is immersed. Our physiology, optimized over millions of years by natural selection, pays close attention to some temporal aspects of the environment and is indifferent to others.

To learn about the missing portion is a challenge. The effort is similar to that of a colorblind person learning that "objects that appear in his or her mind’s eye as identical grays are very different colors of a rainbow." Special types of examples must be used. Because the color blind person can not directly sense different colors, an understanding that they are different must be derived using abstractions.

For example, the locations of the two identical gray bands in a black and white picture of a rainbow formed by a prism can be used to determine that the two bands are different colors, Figure P-10.

• the shortest wave lengths at one edge,
• the longest wavelengths at the other and
• all the intermediate wavelengths distributed between.

Thus if two non-contiguous bands appear the same shade of gray they can not be the same wavelength. One is longer than the other and thus is a different color.

As I used the prism to show a "color-blind man" that two things that appear the same are different, in this text I use signal flow graphs to present to the reader temporal aspects of the environment that remain equally hidden by physiological limitations. The models are temporal analogs to prisms. They describe our temporal blindness, and developmental activities that may prevent it in future generations.

He could see the future with the same clarity as the past.

Chapter 10. Thinking about changing thinking

When we begin to think about changing thinking. We must answer questions like:

• "How does the new thinking differ from the old?"
• "Can a person make a transition from the old thinking to the new?"
• "If not, can we nurture the new thinking before the old is in place?"

To answer these questions, we must take the thinking that we use everyday; the thinking we use almost unconsciously, and explicitly describe:

• its parts
• the interactions among its parts, and
• the acquisition of its parts.

Consider the possibility, that while you may not be forcing your daughters into prostitution, you may be (unknowingly, through your temporal blindness) performing some equally unpleasant behavior. Consider the possibility that your approved behaviors, result in liabilities that remain invisible (or if visible undervalued). Consider the possibility that you, like the Deveadasi, are ill equipped to answer the following questions,

After the briefest consideration, most of us will conclude that:

• we can not answer these questions;
• we do not think about how we think; and
• most of "how we think" remains invisible to us even though we think from the second we are born until the instant we die.

Since we have discovered in Time Blind -the problem that our thinking leads to behaviors that result in conditions we do not want, we are now faced with a challenge to improve our thinking. The first step is to make the invisible visible.

To begin this task, let me compare the invisible parts of our thinking with the invisible parts of our speech. When we realize that thinking is shaped by accents just as our speech is shaped by accents it provides a stepping stone to this understanding.

Consider we can't hear our own speech accent. We probably didn't know what a speech accent was until we heard a person outside of our region speak. Even then we did not assume that we had one. All we knew was that "they" had one.

Once we believe that we have a speech accent, we realize we have no idea how we got it. We don't remember learning our Texas drawl. We don't remember having anyone teach us to roll our R's.

Further, the drawl or the rolled R's remain such an invisible part of our uttered sounds, if we learn to speak French, we unconsciously include the drawl or the rolled R's in speaking the French language.

Our "thinking accent" is much like our speech accent. We do not know if we have a way of gathering and using information, which is different than other people. We do not know if we could have a different way of gathering and using information than we have.

We did not realize that we learned our thinking indirectly. Our thinking accent was given to us, by parents, peers, and teachers. These people didn't know it was part of their agenda to give us a thinking accent. Actually they had the agenda of giving us some knowledge and love and the thinking accent was just thrown in unconsciously by them and subconsciously absorbed by us.

While differences in speech accents merely denote different regional origins, differences in thinking accents shape our behaviors. It determines which information gets sensed, manipulated and valued. It determines what additional knowledge can be constructed from information in memory. And finally, it determines which behaviors our brain can create, compare, and value.

A person who speaks Australian English opens a window by which Americans can perceive that each of us might have a speech accent of our own. Consider the case where all human beings on the globe have the same speech accent. Then, this avenue of discovery would not be available. We would be blind to our accent.

It follows that if we all had the same thinking accent, then a deficiency in our information gathering and using would be a perfect blind spot. We, nor our peers, nor our leaders, nor our teachers could directly perceive it.

However, thinking accents do change over time. We can use history to demonstrate differences in thinking accents and thus provide a window by which we can suggest to ourselves the existence (if not the form) of our own present day thinking accent.

Begin by investigating the behaviors of an individual who existed several 100 years ago and who in that time period was assumed to "Think very well." Then assess his or her use of information and a behavior using today’s thinking accent. If this great figure of history appears incompetent or immoral to us, there are grounds to believe that we will look equally incompetent and immoral to those in the future whose thinking accents have advanced beyond ours.

For example, an investigation of Thomas Jefferson illuminates a man with both extraordinary thinking capabilities and a thinking accent that includes a blind spot. Jefferson could see the injustice of the rule of the English monarchs, which raised them above the men of common standing. Jefferson wrote the constitution of the United States to eliminate these unjust privileges. He did this when most of his countrymen were still paying allegiance to royalty. However, as bright and as free thinking as Jefferson was, his constitution did not extend equal standing to women or slaves.

If Jefferson could treat a man as a horse simply because the fellow had been sold as a horse or diminish the privilege of a woman because of her sex, then it is possible for an individual, to have cognitive limitations superimposed on otherwise exceptional thinking powers.

With this observation it is possible for those living today to postulate the existence of their own thinking accent. It follows that in our state of partial perception; we could be taking actions, which are equally heinous.

For example, our thinking accents could be allowing us to degrade the lives of future individuals just as Jefferson degraded the lives of slaves and women.

If we accept this hypothesis, we can try and outline the temporal aspects of our thinking accent, how we learned our thinking accents and how we might have learned different thinking accents.

For example, Jefferson's thinking accent is different from ours in that he could touch the flesh he abused. We can not touch those we abuse because they exist only in the future. His thinking blindness had to do with allowing the difference in color and sex to justify differences in his behavior. Our thinking blindness has to do with allowing differences in time or space to justify differences in our behavior. That is, a behavior is prohibited if it kills a person who is standing in front of you, and allowed if it kills a person a distance away or in the future.

With our present thinking accent (way of processing information) we conclude that we can have as many children as we can properly nurture. The immoral people are those who have children they can not properly nurture.

This thinking accent is blind-sided because it does not utilize available information, which shows that each additional child (in support of his or her existence), does enormous harm to future individuals. Thus, with this blind-sided accent, six billion decision-making parents are contributing to crimes no less heinous than are those of owning slaves or adopting constitutions that deny equal rights to women.

Like our nation’s founding father, it is our thinking accent that prevents our comprehension of our crime. Our thinking accent fails to appreciate information which connects "having as many people living at one time as we feel a need to father or mother" and "the harm these people create for future generations because of their existence." Our thinking accent hides the future harm of present action and makes the immediate results pristine and beautiful.

In this book I have hypothesized that to prevent an inhumane future requires a decreasing global population rather than a stable or increasing population. To obtain this decreasing trend, each parent would have to limit him or herself to fathering or mothering only one child.

Like Jefferson, who sometimes argued that giving up slaves was like giving up economic well being to gain nothing, most parents would say this giving up a second child is like giving up parenting benefits to gain nothing. However, I suggest, the parent’s reasons for outrage is the result of a thinking accent different but no less blinding than Jefferson's.

While Jefferson's thinking accent, allowed him to disregard information that suggested blacks and women were fit to be free and vote, our thinking accent allows us to disregard predictions of future environment troubles and social injustice. It is thinking, shaped by this accent that approves two child families.

It is clear we need different thinking accents. Accents that would implement trends away from war, famine, and pollution. However, for the same reason it is almost impossible to change the speech accent learned first, it may be almost impossible to change the thinking accent learned first.

It may appear this leaves us without a solution until we consider what a trivial task it was for the child to obtain his or her first speech accent. Possibly, for a child, developing his or her first thinking accent is an equally simple task. The "ease of learning" is facilitated because it is one he or she learns first. This is the solution that I proposed in the book.

In the remaining chapters, I describe the process that developed or nurtured our thinking accent. I focus on the learning activities that shaped our temporal cognition. Then I propose changes to these activities that will create new individuals whose thinking accents do not discount the future liabilities of their present actions.

When an individual fails to develop cognitive skills that others have, differences in capacity are visible. Experiments can measure the difference. Other experiments may show why one group obtained the skills while other did not.

However, when no one develops a cognitive ability, there is no measurable difference. There are no experiments to perform to show how a cognitive ability is developed. Explanations for an absence of skill are at best hypothetical. In this vacuum, two pieces of research may show why some parts of temporal cognitive development remain absent.

The first suggests that humans are born with latent capacities, or latent components of those capacities. Thought interactions with the environment some are activated, and integrated into cognitive abilities. Without these interactions they remain dormant.

The second piece of research suggests there is a window of opportunity in early infancy where these latencies can be easily accessed. Over time this window partially closes and further activation and integration becomes more difficult.

***Need the original source reference- Janet Werker Vancouver infant studies

It has been shown that the human mouth and vocal cords can make over 100 different sounds. These are called phonemes. Infant research has shown that very young infants, those less than 4 months old, pay equal attention to all 100 sounds. That is, if the parent utters one of the hundred sounds the child will attend to it equally with any of the others.

However, after the child is six months old, he or she attends equally only to the small fraction of the phonemes that are part of the adult communication he or she hears.

For example, if the parent is communicating in English, the 26 phonemes used in English are those the infant has learned to attended to. The remaining 74 are given lessor attention. They are heard just as a door slamming is heard. However, like the door slamming sounds, are not considered speech, the 74

unused phonemes are not considered speech. For example, if I click my lips, you can hear it however, you can not make it part of a word in a sentence. Yet in other languages that click is a part of a word.

Consider the possibility that:

• finding these new activities,
• exposing an infant to them,
• measuring if the exposed infant had a bigger than normal set of temporal cognitive abilities.

***(NR needs original reference)

Roger Sperry’s experiments at Cal Tech in the 50’s were designed to describe when an infant cat developed its cognition of images. Sperry learned that when kittens first opened their eyes, the eye neurons sense the objects in their field of view correctly. However, the brain could not convert the sense information into meaningful objects. The brain processing that converts senses to objects, the "wiring up" of the cortical neurons, took several days to develop.

He also asked the question, does this cortical wiring process occur throughout the cat’s life or does it happen mostly during this brief development period.

Sperry designed an experiment to test this idea. He presented the infant cat special pictures of objects. These pictures were created so that the object in the picture was constructed with, let's say, only vertical lines. There were no horizontal line segments. The subject cat developed its cortical brain wiring using information the eye neurons transmitted.

Later Sperry presented the same cat a second picture of the same object; however, this picture was constructed with only horizontal lines. The cat could not recognize what should have been a familiar object.

Sperry’s work suggests that the visual cortex proceeds through development using available information during a developmental period. If certain information is not in the cat’s field of view (horizontal lines are omitted) at the time when that part of the brain is developed, there is a chance that, that kind of information would remain unrecognized, even if it was sensed after the developmental period.

The temporal learning model in this text hypothesizes that human brains may also be "temporally" wired up during a development period at infancy. Further, that our learning environments lacked the stimulation, which may have developed our more, advanced temporal skills.

If our brains developed in a temporally impoverished environment, we, like Sperry’s vertical line cats, might be destine to proceed through life with only a subset of our potential temporal cognitive capabilities?

It follows that for my temporal learning model to help achieve temporal sight, it must be able to suggest additions to the environment experienced by the infant during brain development.

This does not completely preclude learning to drive safely. For example, colorblind people can learn to infer a light’s meaning from the:

• light’s geometric location in a group of 3 lights, or
• motions of other drivers, or
• coaching from an advisor about each intersection.

Consider the learning that can take place at an intersection where there is a single flashing light, not in a geometric group of three lights. Assume the driver has no previous experience with, or knowledge of this intersection.

While the colorblind person can not tell if the single light is flashing red or gold, he or she can learn the traffic light’s inference by gathering the movements of other drivers at the intersection. This however only works if there are other drivers present.

Even if there are other drivers present, there is no way for the colorblind person to know if the other drivers are

• correctly obeying the lights or are
• chronic "red-light-runners," or
• chronic "yellow-light-stoppers."

The correct behavior, at a particular single light intersection, can also be acquired if taught by an advisor. However, this learned behavior too can be incorrect. The teacher could be colorblind. The information he or she transmitted could be a repetition of incorrect information the teacher learned from their teacher.

If the student, the teacher and the teacher’s teacher are all colorblind, and all learned a behavior for the intersection from advise, it is impossible for any of them to know, if:

• the information they accept and pass-on is correct or that
• their processing of the light’s information is not all it might have been.

After we understand that the colorblind student is at the mercy of his teachers, and the idiosyncrasies of his learning environment, we, the temporally blind, might postulate:

What does it mean if we know:

• we have an impoverished way to learn. Or
• that our peers, teachers and parents are all temporally blind; and blind to the fact that they are temporary blind?

It means that:

• the accumulated knowledge contained in our history and the behaviors demanded by our cultural, reflect the experiences and thinking of the temporally blind.
• when historical records reveal that our enlightened scientists, and leaders did not see truth when it depended on temporal sight, we remain unaware of our own personal temporal blindness. And
• a student’s direct experience with his own behavioral failures caused by his own temporal blindness, will fail to provide him or her with a clear image, of his or her cognitive limitations. Let me give three examples:

Temporally blind people can be coerced, physically or socially, to perform a behavior that appears second best. However, the goal is to get the best appearing behavior be the one arrive at through temporal sight rather than the one arrived at through temporal blindness.

The book will help the reader recognize the tragedy of being temporally blind. It will help the reader appreciate the need for our society to be made of individuals who have temporal sight. And it should help the reader understand some of the mechanics that could promote the development of temporal sight in future minds.

Cognitive development can be thought of as a continuum where a person begins with just a few skills to gather, manipulate and give meaning to information and expands these skills. For example, just basic skills are needed to convert physical objects into mental abstractions. Additional skills are required to covering physical symbols of objects into mental abstractions. And a few more skills are required to transform mental images into new images that have never existed as physical objects or symbols.

Advancing one’s cognitive development:

From:

To:

Is probably no more complicated than advancing cognitive development:

From:

To:

However, teaching as we know it can’t explicitly describe what parents, peers, and teachers did to help a child make the first transition.

The student’s change, in how he or she gathers, processes, and gives meaning to information, is an unconscious by-product of the living experience.

I hypothesize that we are temporally blind because the experiences that would have advanced us to the temporal inference level of cognitive development, or temporal sight, are either absent from our natural living experience or are present but are ignored by our minds after they proceeded through previous learning.

A goal of creating a model that describes a process for the development of temporal sight, is to make explicit the process of cognitive development (meta learning) that is being completed implicitly in the first transition and to extend it to implement the second.

This book is such a study. That is, I focus on,

When we see that the environment’s components are more layers of problems caused by behaviors, caused by thinking, caused by learning, caused by environment, etc. we see that our discussion will span many connected levels.

The words below appear in discussions of many of these levels.

At all the levels, a word’s definition is held constant. However, the words are used to describe," learning," which is not the same at each level. For example,

• the learning which discovered the problem that caused the bad feelings
• may be different than the learning which discovered the behavior that caused the problem, and
• may be different than the learning which discovered the thinking that caused the behavior,

.

.

.

If you can keep track of:

• the consistency of the definitions,
• the function of each level, and
• the dependence of a level on all preceding levels,

you are ready to think about the nurturing of temporal sight.

Chapter 11. Nurturing temporal thinking

What is the difference between the learning models "we have" and the learning model "we want?" The temporal learning model we seek must be like the Rube Goldberg contraption in that it should allow us to visualize how changes in a person’s learning environment (beginning at infancy) develop a temporally sighted, rather than a temporally blind, adult.