WHEREIN LIES "MEANING"?

When you try to convey information to a student, you carefully select words from a usage vocabulary related to the experience you want to relate, a word that you expect to be in the students' recognition vocabulary. When the student hears the word, it is "meaningful" if she/he associates it with a similar experience.

If there is no multisensory real experience with the item or relationship named, the word is meaningless unless it is associated with other words with which the student has real experiences. Obviously, if your understanding of liver is limited to "big", "brown", and "organ", it has a very limited and easily forgotten "meaning."

SENSORY SCALE

The central issue in dissection is that educators and others are equating the educational value of words, pictures, and other abstractions with that of direct multisensory experiences. An analysis of the amount of information conveyed, sense by sense, by various media reveals how impoverished such abstractions are.

For humans, all learning must be input through one of five channels: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and a complex of touch-related senses. You can't teach using stimuli a person cannot perceive. Within each sensory channel you can either experience the full stimuli of the object or process, or you can subtract qualities from the full experience until only a few "pixels" or sound waves are left. Thus seeing a real person is more "meaningful" than seeing a movie of them. . . than a color photo . . than a black-and-white . . than a written description. Now, sometimes we do want a more abstract road map because the topography and vegetation shown in an aerial photo gets in the way of finding streets--but we ultimately realize that the aerial photo has more of reality in it than does the road map. On this scale, written and spoken works are completely abstract, with no correspondence or association with the reality symbolized, except by social agreement: Thus we do not understand foreign languages we have not "learned."

Direct experiences, including dissection, provide the maximum multisensory stimuli and lay down the greatest memory in our understanding of the mechanics and diversity of anatomy. Alternative "experiences," where the students' actual experience is a flat computer screen pattern or a plastic model, lay down less memory and are more easily forgotten.