Gestalt and the brain's intolerance of non-sense Many thanks to Clare and Mary for their stimuli this afternoon!

For all the jokes, Clare gave us a thoughtful piece, which will be filled out next week when we discuss the nature of "intelligence".

There was a lot of material in Mary's contribution which deserves more detailed attention than she was able to give it in the time. Go to http://www.brainsource.com/amazing%20brain.htm for an accessible introduction to it.

Cognitive Theories

For general links see:

• http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/cognitiv.htm
• http://www.doceo.co.uk/academic/learning_links.htm#Cognitive

Gestalt

• http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/gestalt.htm and
• http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/learning_curve.htm which includes a summary of the Reynolds' model http://www.doceo.co.uk/academic/learning_links.htm#Gestalt

A number of the slides were concerned with visual illusions; R L Gregory is the chief authority on them, and some can be seen in video format here (including the mask illusion);

• http://www.richardgregory.org/experiments/index.htm and
• http://www.richardgregory.org/papers/brainmodels/illusions-and-brain-models_p1.htm
• See Gregory R L (1997) Eye and Brain; the psychology of seeing (5th edn.) Oxford; Oxford U.P.
• there is an excellent article which goes into much more detail about several illusions and their neuropsychology at http://nba.uth.tmc.edu/homepage/eagleman/papers/Eagleman.NatureRevNeuro.Illusions.pdf
• and lots more examples at; http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/index.html

The movies on Betty the Crow's use of tools can be found at http://users.ox.ac.uk/~kgroup/tools/movies.shtml and a write-up at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2178920.stm

• My apologies for misleading information; I had located "New Caledonia" as the Eastern seaboard of Canada. In fact it is a group of islands in the Pacific 1,200 km east of Australia. (I wasn't far out!)

On chimps' sophisticated use of tools; http://www.world-science.net/othernews/041108_chimptoolfrm.htm

On Piaget's mechanisms of adaptation; assimilation and accommodation, see http://www.learningandteaching.info/learning/assimacc.htm

Some people asked for copies of the mind-maps from the presentation; since the presentation itself is quite fun, I have up-loaded (almost) the whole thing to http://www.esnips.com/web/mod2tlp/ where it is on general access (sorry, I have had to re-save some of the images in a more compressed format to save space). I could have saved it to BREO, of course, but as I mentioned earlier, I am looking at DIY VLEs; more on them in a week or two.

Looking forward to stimuli next week from;

• Jess; on basic ed. tech.
• Kevin; Is ICT cost effective?
• Neil; What is a "plenary"?

Have a good week!  19:19