The Road to Avalon II: Cultivating Spirituality in the Classroom


Chapter Four: Supersensibility

As the seeds for transformational learning are planted deep within a multisensory garden where each of our senses contributes to the formation of our worldly perceptions, the fusion of those senses begins to create conditions for brain synchronization, superlearning and the expanded experience. This convergence of senses is called synaesthesia, a word derived from the language of Greece: syn (together) and aisthanesthai (to perceive) which combined means the dynamic participation of various sensory systems.

Synaesthesia can be found in the realms of art and science, where artists have applied it through multiple associations of color, musical tones and the vast sensorium of nature for inspired work and neuroscientists have experimented with increased sensorium to dramatically affect geriatric patients ability to perceive and remember the full range of their environments. Based on recent clinical trials in neuroscience, some of the advantages of increased synaesthesia include the improvement of short and long-term memory and an increased ability in processing new information.

Additional perks to synaesthesia include our ability to experience peak performance, or flow described by the noted psychologist, Mihaly Czikszentmilaly. Flow, generated inside of the brain-mind intelligence and triggered by meaningful experience, offers a profound connection to the universe where patterns, meaning and information present an ordering effect on the mind. These concepts of universal intelligence have been shared by Rudolf Steiner, the Taoists and now contemporary psychoneuroimmunologists.

For instance, over the past decade Candace Pert, Ph.D. and a team of scientists at the National Institutes of Health in Washington discovered that neuropeptides, known as information molecules, are found throughout the body, not just in the brain. The mind, or universal intelligence, has a physical substrate in the body and brain and a non-material substrate involved in the flow of information and that this innate, non-localized intelligence affects all human systems and behavior. In other words, intelligence is not only in the brain, but everywhere in the body!

What we begin to see is a pattern of similarities in thinking of matters of intelligence, healing and consciousness. If we come to accept the premise that consciousness and intelligence is shaped through multisensory experience and expansion, then it becomes very, very clear that our environments are critical to this process. As the renowned neurologist, Vernon Mark, M.D. says in his book, Brain Power..." the body, brain and environment are so continuously linked and intertwined that they are considered inseparable." This interconnection and interdependency of all living things with their environments are the principles from which all physical environments must be approached and none is more relevant than the classroom. By designing schools based on the neuroscientific and environmental research available in the 21st century, our classrooms become the living symbols of our intelligence, humanity and level of caring.