Category: Psychology

Why unguided learning does not work

While unguided or minimally-guided learning approaches are very popular and intuitively appealing, the point is made that evidence from empirical studies over the past half century consistently indicates…

Not born to read

Let’s begin with a deceptively simple fact that has inspired my work on the reading brain over the last decade and move from there: human beings were never…

Alphabet

By taking this meta-view of the entire history, we can see that what promotes the development of intellectual thought in human history is not the first alphabet or…

To know an object is to act on it

To understand the development of knowledge we must start with an idea which seems central to me – the idea of an operation. Knowledge is not a copy…

Low oedipal energy

Incapable of renewal or overcoming, the stupid subject has low oedipal energy: he has held onto the ideas, the relics and dogmas transmitted in his youth by his…

Double bind

The necessary ingredients for a double bind situation, as we see it, are: 1. Two or more persons. Of these, we designate one, for purposes of our definition,…