Chapter 2 Now You See It

Summary:
This chapter is about the biology of our brain when we are learning something. It talks about how we have patterns of attention. It says that neurons are the most basic cells in our nervous system. She also says in this chapter about how just about everything we do requires multitasking. Most of the time we don't even realize this. She gave the example about driving a vehicle. We don't think, "that's a red light, I'm going to take my foot off the gas and put it on the brake so that I can stop". We think, "I see the red light, I'm going to stop". We don't think about all the steps as we do them; we just do them. Cathy also mentions the Hebbian principle: Neurons that fire together, wire together. She also talks about how we have to unlearn things in order to learn new things.

Critical Commentary:
In this chapter, Cathy uses a lot of logos. She provides a lot of facts and scientific information to help prove her argument. When she talks about the biology of our brain when we learn, this makes her argument more convincing by making it more believable because it has scientific evidence to back it up. When she uses the infant example, like she did in the previous chapter, it gives a simple way to understand what she is saying. When Cathy talks about how walking is a simple task that requires almost no thinking for us, but for a young baby just learning to walk it is very complex. This proves that we must unlearn things, because once the child is a little older and walking all of the time, they must unlearn to think about what they are doing when they walk and learn to not think about it and just do it. Cathy does a pretty good job or proving her point in this chapter, as well as the previous. She gives many examples to help you understand.