OPPENHEIMER

Have you ever stopped to think what spatial and form processing facilities you are born with?

“Typology is a study of those relationships that do not have to do with measure and size, but with shape and arrangement.  Let me digress.  We had here this year a French/Swiss psychologist, he is almost a philosopher, called Piaget whose work has been on the way that children learn to think.  How they learn the notions of cause, notions of time, notions of necessity, notions of number.  All the things that we thought we were born with.  Well, we are not born with them, we learn them. He made one discovery, which is not surprising, but a little odd.  He found out that those things that in normal mathematical instruction are the most highbrow, are the things that children know first. Children know first whether objects are inside themselves or separate, whether they can be deformed into each other, and these are the notions that typology deals with. They learn later the length of a line is so or that a figure has seven sides and not six.  All the things that deal with number come later.  But the things that have to do with relatedness, the fact that a dougnut cannot be turned into a sphere without tearing it…these things a child knows.”  1.

This is J. Robert Oppenheimer discussing typology, which was part of the work of the psychologist Piaget at the Institute for Advanced Study.  Oppenheimer was the director of the Institue at the time, and my transcript is from the Edward R. Murrow interview as part of the “See it now” television series, Season 4, Episode 18.  This was originally aired in 1955.

The critical concept here is human’s innate spatial processing capabilities, right out of the box.  And they are saying that these early spatial abilities are very powerful and very sophisticated.  Way before we learn to talk, we can make significant form and space associations.  This certainly is consonant with the thoughts of others meta thinkers, such as John Berger.  We are primarily visual. See  child’s view and stones in your pocket, for example.

Children understand form and relatedness completely separate from language.  And they understand these highly complex spatial elements before they know how to do arithmetic.  Children employ visual facts, such as the fact, as Oppenheimer relates, that a dougnut cannot be turned into a sphere without tearing it.  And they know this well before they know the word doughnut.

So we are born with this immense spatial computational mindset.  And then we spend the vast majority of our education developing, instead, our lingual computational abilities.

As has been said many times in these pages, if visual spatial processing is so fundamental to us as humans, why is the SAT test, for example, structured the way it is?  As we saw in the photo of children sketching on the sidewalk in Ottawa, that should be the primary educational icon.

Shape.  Arrangement.  Relatedness.  Innate.

1.  Zachamable.  “Interview with J. Robert Oppenheimer.”  Online video clip.  Youtube.  10 April 2013.  Web.  5 June 2017.  Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVCL3Rnr8xE&t=269s