How will ISD handle "Neural Buddhism"?

(shout out to Jerry Michalski for twittering this one - NY Times link)

Today David Brooks wrote a column about how scientific advances can cause massive cultural changes. An understatement right? The central figure in this article however is religion. Brooks argues the literature which is beginning to combine science and spirituality (not religion per se) in new ways, will lead to a kind of "neural Buddhism" defined by the following elements:

"First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is."

Aside from how interesting that is, what struck me is when Brooks describes a general sense of the more recent thoughts on how the brain works, he argues that:

"Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings. Those squishy things called emotions play a gigantic role in all forms of thinking. Love is vital to brain development."

I was just struck by how understandings like this really reveal a gap between the mechanistic production models of instruction that we use versus how the brain may really and truly operate. These differences were a bit more hidden when we believed th brain operated like a computer but the further we drift from that model the more wrong-headed our design models appear.