New Questions, No Answers

I came to the startling realization last week that my thesis has evolved once again. I was hoping it would only make a large change once but it seems to be a beast of its' own. The realization I came to was this: maybe it's not visual thinking but sensory thinking. What I mean by this is that it is about collecting information and processing information through our senses to learn. This seems like a fairly obvious observation but it has a deep impact on my thesis that is making me question what came before it.

This began as a thesis about visual learning. Eventually my research lead me to the realization that it wasn't about learning it was about how we think. Now I have been lead to it being about how we think and learn with our senses (the jury is still out on how many senses will be included). 

Now that I have made the leap to sensory thinking I am beginning to go backwards. Is it still about thinking or is it now more about learning? I'm leaning towards it still being about how we think but the distinction feels a little bit blurry with this new discovery.

If it is about using what I'm terming sensory thinking for the time being, does that mean I am still going to be able to focus on the visual aspect? If I believe, and I do, that each person has a distinct sensory thinking profile (meaning one or several senses are used more predominantly than others in our reception and processing of information) can it still focus on the visual aspect? Do I now have to broaden my original thesis to encompass all the senses and focus more on helping people define their own profiles?

If the answer to that last question is yes does that mean that most of the research I have done up until now has lost a lot of its' value because I had been focusing on just one sense? If however I change it too drastically at this point I may completely lose direction and have to start from the beginning all over again. 

I have found some research that may help me sort some of these things out but I am still trying to find proper sources for them. For now I will state the information I have found and where I found it and continue to search for better sources that might help me find out where the original information came from. The research I found indicates that 75% of our adult knowledge is acquired through seeing, 13% through hearing, and the other 12% through taste, touch and smell.* If indeed these are accurate facts (which I am checking up on) does dealing with visual thinking as the primary focus of my work still seem accurate? Is it then fair to deal with hearing as the next biggest contender and taste touch and smell to be the smallest part of my thesis (with room for a possible sixth sense which I am wrestling with currently)? Does that then make my model of comparing and contrasting visual sensory thinking with auditory sensory thinking the best way of doing things? Does this then render most of my previous research again more valuable?

I think only time will tell with these questions but I am hoping they resolve themselves soon so that I can wrap my head around it and get to work on the actual deliverables.

* Link to source

Sugata Mitra: "Can Kids Teach Themselves?"

This was a really interesting study about self-organizing systems and the education of children living in rural areas.