Descriptive Natural Laws in the Human Context:
Working Toward Comprehensive General Understanding

You know of Psychology's Prime Law or Law of Effect - that you get more of what you reinforce. You may have noticed that this law holds true not only for humankind and animal behavior but for vegetation and indeed for all of lifekind. Those of you who are into interference pattern physics and Mandelbrot Set fractiles or Chaos Systems Theory (note: all feedbacks are reinforcement!), also appreciate that this same "first law" also defines the physics of how the universe has organized itself into its incredible architectures and articulations. --Even what that, in turn, says back to us as living human beings and how we might find our way into better times and situations! (Readers new to this area of inquiry, please regard this brief as Prologue to the other papers following in this brief volume. Once you read these, look again at the above. For now, though:)

Relationships between the "prime laws" of different fields are of interest. Here we highlight the relationship between psychology's prime law, as above, and the two prime laws of development for the brain and nervous system. As it turns out, on inspection the two prime laws of brain and neural development derive from or are particular cases in the more general behavioral prime law. When we take these three prime laws together in the same context, suddenly we are directed to see some surprisingly obvious ways to improve normal and high level human performance and capability in all fields. We are also directed thereby to ways to remedy virtually every case of retardation and brain damage, from mild to profound to even the long-term comatose. No one need be left behind.

1st Prime Law of Development of Brain and Nervous System: First find what is working. Go to the boundaries of what's working and practice there toward more and more refined responses. If you can barely tell by touch two different grades of sandpaper, practice there progressively toward the point where you can distinguish by touch heads from tails or even read the date on a coin. (In the extreme case of long-term comatose: even if the response is so tiny only biosensory equipment can detect it - or if that response has to be elicited by stimuli and pattern interrupts - reinforce those responses, selectively in the direction of response which calls more and more of the person back onto line.)

2nd Prime Law of Development of Brain and Nervous System: Feeling before action. First get perception into a situation, then you can act upon it. --As in getting feeling back into a leg which had "gone to sleep" on you, before you can use it with normal skill. This becomes a matter of how to create or refine any sensory function (so that you receive the relevant feedbacks, so that your behavioral "prime law" feedbacks "work " in that context), in order to exert effects through and in relation to that area of perception.

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Are ALL phenomena in all fields ordered by a few interrelated simple patterns or "laws," concepts easily recognized and understood? What can we do once we "get more perception into these?" Just the three laws cited above, taken together, are the core of a system now in design to meaningfully convey, in just a few pleasant hours, the first 12 years or so of school math to pre schoolers. --Better than those 12 years because at the core will be build up a direct sense of quantity, numbers and of relationships instead of rote operations. --And of another system being designed, to effectively build Mozart-level musical skills in preschoolers. As these systems develop, it's become increasingly apparent that virtually all skill and performance areas of human activity may readily be similarly addressed. And that is just from focusing on those three interrelated laws!

On the sociological level, the "Win/Win-Finder" turns out to be an expression of the First Behavioral Law or psychology's prime law working in terms of societal systems. To change those complexly homeostatic systems (thereby solving the major problems which persist as such systems), identify and intercept the feedbacks through which such systems self-maintain. A LOT less costly than trying to override those reflexive feedbacks.

(Sociology, broadly defined, also contains other absolutely fundamental laws, not widely learned in American schools however essential, which bear profoundly on how we view and treat one another. Example: the whole context of 0-sum and non-0-sum games. Example: the distinction between the roles we play and the people who are playing those roles. On closer inspection, will these recognized patterns collapse back into the above same fundamental laws?)

Range in a continuum, left to right, these forms of energy: political power; material wealth; heat energy; body or life energy/chi/pranha; "spiritual" energy; information. ALL points along that continuum are governed by two well-recognized but distinct sets of "natural law:" the laws of scarcity, and the laws of abundance. Why is it we don't have to tell you at which end of the continuum the laws of scarcity predominate and at which end the laws of abundance predominate? What are each of those two sets of natural law? What will happen to people who assume only the one set of such laws is present? Can in some way these patterns or "laws," in turn, be collapsed back upon the above core laws the same way that all of biology, evolution and systems theory do, standing revealed as but one single order of phenomena, a universe, and not as many separate "fields?"

Our very series of annual Double-Festivals (1st, 2nd or 3rd weekend each November in the Washington, D.C. area--our Sixth Annual such Double-Festival Conference is this Oct. 31-Nov. 2 weekend, see "events" at http://www.winwenger.com) is but one application of one such simple convergence. Six years ago we determined that "learning" and "creativity" are essentially the same field, the same set of phenomena. --Even though to this very day most people involved in learning methods are wholly unaware of systematic creative methods and most people involved in creative method are wholly unaware that virtually everything they do there can be used to profoundly improve and radically accelerate learning.

"All knowledge is my province" - Francis Bacon. Has modern specialization, leaving our best people vulnerable to changes in the economy and playing to the stakes of their narrowly specialized knowledge, resulted from a true explosion of knowledge or a splintering of knowledge? --Splintered by the difficulty of assimilating one-another's strained explanations of things? --Strained because we don't take into account what's obvious from nearby-but-different perspectives? Can the universe indeed be comprehended by "ordinary" human beings? (--and thereby, by the 2nd law of brain development, can we then take charge of our own lives, our own destiny? --Or would you rather continue to trust the course of our lives, and those of our children and those of all we hold dear, to our political leaders our highest representatives of whom currently are Clinton, Gingrich and Perot?!?) --Another "natural law:" - "nature abhors a vacuum." And, dear friend, not just our schools but we ourselves, what a vacuum we've left for such to fill!

To reach Win Wenger, please visit his website at Project Renaissance.

New information on the latest Double Festival is available here.

This version originally published on Anakin's Brain (now Genius By Design)