A hook - a dramatic example of how much trouble can come from breakdown of visual thinking - this might be a medical thing (e.g. from Sacks, Ramachandran, etc.)

We need to look in Damasio: The Feeling of What Happens, Descartes Error, even Looking for Spinoza for a description of someone who has lost brain function, or memory, but can still retain a measure of control when they perform skills that they had mastered. I am thinking of the music conductor/pianist with severe hippocampal damage resulting in loss of all long-term memory—his life became a nightmare of continually thinking that he had just awakened. The only relief was when he was performing music. This is (or is it?) procedural memory. He still maintained his full procedural intelligence for music.

So what is the nature of procedural memory? We tend to associate it with the mundane, like being able to drive but could it not be integral to mastery? This is intelligence that goes into “automatic” level to free up the conscious brain for more activity. How can we break that out – studies on expertise? We need to make a case for how the parts of the brain work in concert with each other to maximize conceptual thinking. There was the case of the man who couldn’t identify objects but could draw them laboriously and cases where people can’t identify object by sight but can do so by touch. We need to focus on the integrated nature of sensory inputs that we take for granted. What happens when those get “trained” to a high degree?

And also in Damasio – what we scorn as emotional turns out to be a huge component of decision-making,

The other place we need to look is in Frank Wilson’s, The Hand: How it shapes the brain, Language, and Human Culture.

The entire body of perception, is perceptive, therefore intelligent - the distributed brain; it's not all between our ears

Because we share a cultural illusion splitting mind from body we address our collective teaching efforts at "mind" stuff, pretty much everything but PE, the shop and the kitchen. We are wasting a pedagogical opportunity, all because we took the wrong epistemological train.

One of the seven habits of successful and/or creative people is surely that they are of keen perceptual intelligence - need fascinating, dramatic examples (Karl Rove?) A teacher who could draw on the fruits of pedagogical and related research in perceptual intelligence would produce more successful students. - need interviews with teachers? draw on the material on tape from the brown bags?

The research needs to be done - the scattered studies and experiments synthesized, perhaps as a new discipline - continued, coherent programs of research are needed

The possibilities - our vision