Connections and Synthesis
“As we develop, the brain connects lessons learned differently.”
A recent neuropsychological study provides one possible clue to the development of prowess in synthesizing.
By my definition, a synthesizing mind is one filled with disparate information. Armed with an overarching goal or purpose, along with a method, aspiring synthesizers put together a compelling presentation. In a successful synthesis (see the portrait of such individuals elsewhere on this blog), the disparate information is well configured— the culminating synthesis fulfills the conceptual goals of the synthesizer while also making sense to other persons.
We know that most children pick up all kinds of information effortlessly—consider the knowledge displayed by youngsters of baseball scores, song lyrics, commercial jingles, kinds of clothing, toys, and the like. The research reported by Airhart and colleagues (link here) documents that, in children, this information is stored quite freely and disparately; it’s not strongly connected to one overarching category, as compared to another.
In contrast, adults readily categorize information as belonging to one category, rather than another, making it easier to recall when the designated category is activated, more difficult when another kind of categorization (or re-categorization) is called for. And, not surprisingly, teenagers are right in the middle—with traces of the initial categorization but no robust classification.
In a sense, we have long known this—that’s why most five-year-olds can beat their parents or grandparents at the game of Concentration. But the researchers go beyond this “common sense” knowledge by placing subjects in an fMRI scanner, and noting small changes in blood flow. Blood flow data indicate only older subjects are able readily to link to one another members of the same overarching category.
How does this relate to synthesizing? In the best of both worlds, while young, we accumulate vast amounts of information, on which we can draw for decades. With age, we also become able to think of specific data as belonging primarily to one overarching category. By my argument, the optimal synthesizers retain the best of both worlds: recognizing the usual categorization of an element of information, yet remaining flexible enough to link that information to other superordinate categories, when such linkage proves appropriate for the task at hand.
Here it seems apt to allude to those individuals who are particularly creative. Such individuals are said to exhibit neoteny: that is, while in many ways mature adults, they somehow manage to maintain the cognitive flexibility that we associate with young persons. Perhaps this is also a clue to those who become and remain deft synthesizers.
References
Airhart, M. (2021). As We Develop, the Brain Connects Lessons Learned Differently - Neuroscience News. Neuroscience News. Retrieved 24 January 2022, from https://neurosciencenews.com/memory-inferences-19657/.
Schlichting, M.L., Guarino, K.F., Roome, H.E. et al. (2021). Developmental differences in memory reactivation relate to encoding and inference in the human brain. Nature Human Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01206-5