Approaches Toward Our Feed-theLoop Model

and Theory of Human Development, Learning, Creativity and Genius

by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
Gorgeous, beautiful Mandelbrot sets, such as you and I, have as part of
our definition that we take in some part of our feedback into our ongoing
evolution. Yet we're still stable, still recognizably the same system, but
evolving. You and I are fractals, but we are standing in a landscape not
mathematically dense and so not actualizing in fine-grain detail all the
different possibilities. We are outcroppings of the possibilities matrix:
we choose, and the resulting difference is real.
In a changing world, living systems of any complexity, to survive for long,
always have had to monitor and respond to how their surroundings are
reacting to them and to their actions. Thus, all such surviving systems
become and are susceptible to feedback as behavioral
reinforcement, known in psychology as the famous universal natural Law
of Effect: You get more of what you reinforce.
As organisms become more complex, more intelligent, one more and
more has to monitor one's own output behavior, to coordinate better
between goals or intentions and outcomes.
The more intelligent a system, the more complex are its actions which
must be coordinated with its (often likewise complex) intentions. This
feedback-directly-from-output becomes ever more important.
In humans, this dimension appeared to reach critical mass about three
million years ago, in developments of speech, of hands with opposable
thumbs, of cross-torso lateral musculature (which allows dance), and
eventually of the phenomenal human brain. In just speech alone: tonality,
nuance, phraseology, sequence, timing, gesture, context, and subtle
marginally conscious side-associations became a rich tapestry way
beyond any formal analysis. And one offshoot of speech music
holds incredible and otherwise inexplicable power for us.
Environment is only a small, though essential, part of the feedback which
reaches us and shapes us. Nearly all of our feedback is from our own
outputs, to the point where, contrasted to the usual models of teaching

and learning, the reality is that such learning as does happen has to ride
in on the output-feedback loop almost as on a carrier wave, rather than as
a meaningful input in its own right.
Everything does still get in, but outside the focus of attention, and nearly
always goes to the unconscious. It usually takes some sort of
engagement with the loop before the datum gets attended to or
consciously learned.
Even without the clear and cogent findings to the same effect throughout
the last century by Maria Montessori, Santiago Ramon y Cajal, Omar K.
Moore and Marion Diamond and even without what was earlier so
dramatically demonstrated to us by the Socratics we are led
inescapably toward the Feed-the-Loop model, in which:

All complex systems in a changing world require feedback in order

to survive.
The more intelligent a system is, the more that feedback directly
from its own outputs becomes more important than even its
feedback from the environment.
Nearly all learning and growth occur at that point in the loop where
we are taking back in some of that feedback some portion of
what we've been putting out.
Such exterior-derived learning as occurs has to ride in through that
point on the loop as on a carrier wave modulating that feedback,
rather than directly in its own right.

Why have we needed such a model before we, as a society, begin finally
to see that what's taught in schools doesn't matter a bit; it's what' s
learned in schools (and/or elsewhere) that matters!
We clearly have not learned as a society, or as educators, that our
business is not really that of accounting for what's taught in a politically
and bureaucratically determined curriculum; that, instead, we must indeed
be accountable for what's learned across such a curriculum. So little have
we learned that when our students fall unacceptably short on
standardized tests relating to that curriculum, we've moved even farther
away from engaging the student's learning by trying to teach the tests,
stripped even of any pretense of conveying the larger context of meaning,
civilization, culture or career.

Minimum requirement for survival in a changing world:

feedback from the environment.
Our schools are in the position of assuming that if the kid doesn't get what
we are throwing at him so didactically, it's his fault and not the school's.
Or if that seems too harsh, we spread the blame among parents,
television, peer pressure, and environmental conditions. And budgets.
Always budgets.
What we teach the student doesn't matter. What the student learns, does.
Until WE learn that, we are going to continue to lose our children to
unacceptable failure rates.
Complexity theory shows a defining condition of Mandelbrot sets and
fractals of all kinds to be that of an evolving system which incorporates a
portion of its own feedback into its evolvement. It is this adaptability which
makes it possible for us to survive and to evolve, while conserving our
unique identities. Simply put, nothing less will do.
More about this rich loop model:
Make friends with this loop. It's not only a generalization about learning.
It's what enables YOU to survive. At the very least, notice that you can't
even sit in a chair without feedback telling you up and down and where
your body parts are. That is how universal this model and physical law
are, even if until now we had not conceptualized it.
Most current teaching assumes teachers should put information directly
in. But virtually none of that teaching can become learning unless it

rides in on the feedback of the learner's own actions as on a carrier

wave.
Until now most human development models, and most therapies, have
seen matters in terms of putting in stimulus and interventions just as
teachers have seen matters as putting in information, in what can now be
seen as a hopelessly static model of the learner, patient, person. Instead:
Touch the flow. Build the flow. Feed the flow.
Build what's coming back in through the Action Point: Nearly all learning
and growth occur at that singular point in this loop model where one is
taking in and processing the feedback on what s/he has put out.
Nearly all actual learning and growth have been only incidental, because
we hadn't conceptualized this model and learned to feed the flow.
What can we do now, directly, to build the flow of learning and growth
coming through the Action Point as feedback?
Consider: like with many other circuits, when you improve or inhibit this
circuit at any point, you improve or inhibit that whole circuit, including the
flow of what's reaching that crucial point of action for learning and growth.
So.....

With complexity and intelligence, coordinating through

feedback from one's own output
becomes much more important...

...to the point where environment is only a small but

essential part of what's going on. Any external learning
has to ride in as on a carrier wave.

It's necessary for best results that these outputs be externalized into
some sort of definite action. Our immediate external sensory feedbacks
are much more immediate than our internal feedbacks, and force a much
closer relationship between the respective parts of the brain involved.
Once you see this whole Feed-the-Loop model, you can begin to ask
some useful questions of it and get some useful answers answers
which may be truly surprising in terms of how greatly can be improved the
quantity and quality of flow through that point of action. With this model
before us, we can now usefully ask:
1. What are some ways to improve the learner's OUTput along
that flow? And get a hundred answers, ANY ONE of which can
improve by several times what's coming back to that crucial point of
action...one simple example of which is use ofDynamic Format in
the CPS Techniques section of this website.
2. What are some ways to improve the feedback from the
environment? And get back a hundred answers, ANY ONE of
which can improve by several times what's coming back to that
crucial growth/learning-point. (Examples: Omar K. Moore and Maria
Montessori....)
3. What are some ways to improve the feedback coming directly
from the output as such? And get many answers, ANY ONE of
which can improve by several times what's coming back to that
crucial point of action, growth and learning. One of many, many
possible starting points is the "Mutual Lives" article, Winsights No.
33. Another is a 1954 article by R.W. Peters, "The Effects of
Changes in Side-Tone Delay and Level upon the Rate of Oral
Reading of Normal Speakers," inJournal of Speech and Hearing
Disorders, XIX.
4. What are some ways to improve the characteristics of the flow
itself? And get many, many answers, ANY ONE of which can
improve by several times what's coming back to that crucial
learning-and-growth point of action?

You can start with Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi's Flow: the Psychology of

Optimal Experience; or with rapid-flow processing and Project
Renaissance's torrential-description methods; or with Project
Renaissance's current efforts to assemble a science
of Intermodulation in the Mindfield section of this website.
5. What are some ways to improve how one takes feedback in
and re-integrates it into his or her own ongoing perception and
subsequent outputs? And get back many answers, ANY ONE of
which can several times improve what's coming around the flow.
(Found, among other places, in Brain-Gym, in Psychegenics, in
NLP, and in various Project Renaissance strategies....)
Putting together from the five questions
these many answers
If each of these hundreds of apparently useful answers is factored
together....
The development of these useful answers renders feasible a rather
substantial improvement or increase in learning and in personal growth.
This Feed-the-Loop model itself is new, and nearly all of its development
and application still lie ahead of it. Retrofitting the model with some
existing practices may also result in some improvement of results of those
practices. Let's to it!