Gerardo Lazaro is hyperthinking...

It has been a great ride since I started using technology in teaching in 2008. After a few months, I introduced myself to the universe of technology and its potentisal uses for education, communications and life in general.
However, something that I didn't realize until a few months ago, is that while I speak to friends and people in general, one of those moments that usually happen in your living room, and we're discussing about any topic, I constantly have hyperthoughts. What is hyperthinking? I'm not sure that's a valid word, but it's the best I can use to explain that everytime I'm thinking I'm having a series of hyperlink activity in my brain. I hear something about Peru, and I imagine the latest YouTube video about it. If I hear about psychology, then I share that there's a great course in iTunes that is free and available to anybody, and so on, and so on.
Is that a consequence? Or, is it part of the phenomenon that prompted me to use media and internet resources in general?
Is our brain getting used to think in terms of hyperlinks?
help me answer these questions and let me know if you go thorugh the same process, or is it about time to call the nearest psychiatrist?

New approach to technology for children

I was very fortunate to participate in yesterday's VII International Seminary "Digital Brain". It happened in Lima, Peru and it was organized by Cerebrum (Neuroscience, Education and Human Development) a very active and renowned organization in charge of spreading knowledge and best educational practices based on neuroscience, pedagogy and psychology investigations. There were two speakers, Anna Lucia Campos and Gary Small, MD (www.drgarysmall.com), a world renowned neuroscientist with lots of publications on topics such as: nuerology, psychiatry, memory, brain and Alzheimer Disease.

During their presentations lots of interesting facts, investigations and proposals were considered. the best of all is that it changed the way I think about exposing young children to technology and the newest gadgets. For some of the comments from the presentations follow the hashtags: #CerebroDigital and #DigitalBrain in Twitter, or go to Cerebrum's twitter account: http://twitter.com/cerebrumdigital.

Even more by the fact that I saw some of Sugata Mitra's videos and investigations to ask myself a question: Should we radically change the way we teach and expose children to technology?

Take a few minutes by watching these videos, and help me answer that question:

Sugata Mitra shows how kids teach themselves





Sugata Mitra: The child-driven education




http://goo.gl/THJYL

Fertility - July 7th, 2008

Fertility has been an issue since the beginning of human societies. According to its definiton, it is the capacity to conceive and generate offspring. In many ways, fertility is one of nature's selective methods to allow only the fittest to continue the life journey along time.

Plants have great resources for reproduction: wind, water, animal-assistance, etc. Some animals also use some of those resources. However, the more complex the animal, the more complex the reproductive method, and the least successful. Sexual reproduction in complex animals such as humans has been a major advance, but also a major restriction. Why? Humans as animals, cannot survive purely by themselves until late infancy. Which means that humans need a lot of support, energy and guidance. And who is going to provide that but the mother.

Humans need extra energy and time, because they need to mature a series of complex structures (organs and systems) that will help accomplish life's exigencies.

Most of these requirements are guided toward the maturation of the nervous system, mainly the growth of the brain and its annex structures. That is human's trade off. It has been a sacrifice to invest in a longer period of gestation and rearing to obtain a highly-complex, multi-tasking animal capable of interacting with its envioronment not only sensorially but also at a very important level, socioculturally.

So fertility problems, or difficulties to conceive or produce an offspring is just another way nature has used to select us as living things.

But as any other problem, we gçfound a way around to solve it. Infertility treatments started decades ago with trial and error as the main technique, and it wasn't until the late 60's that artificial insemination really started working. And only in 1978, Louise Joy Browne, the first baby conceived by InVitro Fertilization was born in England after Robert Edwards, PhD and Patrick Steptoe, MD performed hundreds of experimental procedures trying to overcome the blocking of fallopian tubes. Decades have past since that first success, and many other procedures have been implemented in the fertility lab, such as: GIFT and ZIFT, SUZI, ICSI, Oocyte maturation, sperm-retrieval procedures and lately, PGD, and lately IMSI.

The question here is, what is the limit? I just read a news report that indicates that a 70 year old woman has delivered twins. Even though I support the assisted reproductive techniques, I think it must be limited to people under a certain range of age. Because, as a father, I can testify that raising kids takes a lot of physical and mental effort, but overall the main ingredient nowadays, is to be able to give them our TIME.