New senses can be difficult to control. Consider developing perfect pronunciation in a foreign language, or overcoming a speech impediment. We think that we're aware and in control, but these familiar examples show things are not so simple. Feedback plays an essential role.
The prospect of learning new cognitive skills begs the question of what cognitive skills we have to begin with.
7 - Cognition
I laugh when I think of how little I know about myself. Certainly I'm busy talking to myself about myself, and about what's going on around me, but what are the elements of which I'm made? The elements of cognition are not what we recognize as our character, and that is because raw aptitude has no personality.
What mechanisms would we see if we opened up our heads and "looked under the hood?" It should come as no surprise that we are made from simple, basic things; things we all share but rarely study. We don't consciously look for these things, but we would immediately notice their absence. Among other things they include:
Certitude: the degree to which you recognize and hold a point of view, and your degree of comfort in dealing with unfamiliar things.
Coordination: you can bring a spoon to your mouth, but can you dance in pitch darkness?
Equanimity: both your inclination toward being calm or anxious, as well as your sensitivity to calming and anxiety producing influences.
Focus: how quickly and completely you attend to the events around you.
Locality: the sense of boundary that you maintain between yourself and others, your sense of position in space, your moral boundaries.
Organization: your inclination to order, rank, quantify, and manage. The way you organize events around you.
Prosody: our ability to imbue speech with meaningful tonality and to extract meaning from the tonal quality of speech. Prosody is the tonality of emotion.
Recall: the strength to which memories play a role in your thinking, and the degree to which you recall memories of various sorts.
Recognition: visual, verbal, spatial, and conceptual. Are you good at identifying what things are made of? How facile are you at seeing a new whole when ideas are put together?
Temperament: when do you switch between diligence and frustration? What is the purpose and limitation of each? Does you ability in modulating your temperament improve with knowledge or practice?
Tempo: the natural pace of events that you find most comfortable and at which you naturally find yourself engaged.
We equate many of these qualities with innate intelligence, and intelligence is seen as immutable. But intelligence is a slippery topic to which absolutes rarely apply. Neurofeedback techniques are facilitating changes in these areas, as I'll describe below.
