Conceptual Reasoning 1: and its application

Conceptual Reasoning

This blog post is for our students (the focus audience); all others

 may feel free to listen in.  

Hey guys,

You've completed your first major writing assignment and soon face end-of-term projects and exams.  A sufficient context exists to explain conceptual reasoning and its application to (1) reading course materials and (2) writing as a scholar/professional.  In this post, I want to describe how the brain processes sensory data into percepts (i.e., meaningful perceptual representations of the world), experiences and concepts arising from experience.  I'll emphasize the following critical insight:

Experiences informs your gut feelings (i.e., intuition), but your experience-based conceptual understanding of the world (i.e., knowledge based on one lifetime) remains opinion and inadequate to call yourself a professional.  You need to ground your thinking in established bodies of knowledge (e.g., marketing, finance, Org. Leadership, etc.); you do not get to make the world up from scratch.

 Goethe put it this way, "He who cannot draw on three thousand of years human 

history lives from hand to mouth." ...a subsistence existence.

Here goes. All sensory data (except olfactory) enters the brain through the thalamus and is channeled to primary sensory cortices (V1 for vision). V1 neurons process the same minute details of any visual stimuli: they code for orientation at a point in space and spatial frequency of stimuli at that location. No meaningful, big-picture pixelated representation of the world exists.

These data advance along the ventral visual pathway to the Inferior Temporal Cortex (ITC), where percepts (meaningful visual representations) are recognized and stored. This is where you recognize people (including specific individuals), places and things.  These data undergo additional processing in an associative hierarchy and are integrated into meaningful experiences in the hippocampus; you remember emotion-laden events that trace the important moment in your life.

The hippocampus is also recognized as the nexus between percepts and concepts. For instance, learned associations between stimuli arise from statistical regularities in your environment (e.g., person + place = barista), and these regularities prove beneficial for predicting and interpreting future sensory data.  Try this: think about a rugby field and picture the things you would expect to see: white lines, goals, players, bleachers and fans.  You see these things, infer, "rugby," and adjust your behavior accordingly. This kind of experience-based learning is essential, but only carries you so far.

Leadership, justice and trust comprise the three (multidimensional) concepts (the focus) of Julia Richardson's Organizational Leadership course.  Now, based on your experience, you may somewhat grasp the meaning of these higher-order concepts.  Maybe you've known someone who demonstrated leadership, but any experience-based reasoning remains hand-to-mouth and inadequate for our MBA education.  We encourage you to share experiences in the classroom, but you should remember, experience-based reasoning is:

1. based on a small N sample (N = one).
2. essentially arguing from opinion (bad, very bad, wrong).
3. with very limited generalizability (change the context and your experience loses value).    

We ask you to:

1. abstract away from complex business problems.
2. ground your thinking in established bodies of knowledge (course materials).
3. define key concepts (from course materials) as a foundation for constructing logical arguments.
4. Use course materials for in class discussions, written assignments and exams.
5. And, appropriately reference your sources.

I know, my explanation of the brain is abbreviated and crude but, if you want a
more thorough explanation, you'll need to ask me nicely.

Cheers,  David