Nonrational, Nonretentive 

Cognitive Style (NNCS)



John L. Waters



February 22, 2002



© Copyright 2002 by John L. Waters. All Rights

Reserved



-------------------------------------------------------



What is NNCS?  NNCS stands for nonretentive,

nonrational cognitive style.  While functioning in

this cognitive style, a person isn't able to argue in

defense of his or her behavior, feelings, or idea. 

This is because the NNCS cognitive style is

irrational.



Moreover, when a person is functioning in the

nonretentive nonrational cognitive style the emotion,

thought, or activity just comes spontaneously and

automatically as in a dream or in a hypnogogic or

hypnopompic image, or the process is presented by an

internalized so-called spirit guide, god or goddess

figure or the idea just comes by sitting and drawing

it out or writing it out.  It's just that certain

persons develop a nonrational nonretentive cognitive

style.  In school, however, the retentive rational

cognitive style RRCS is emphasized.  In our society 

almost everyone is almost always functioning in the

RRCS.  RRCS is the normal and respectable way to be.



Here are a few examples of adults who often functioned

in the nonretentive, nonrational cognitive style:



A. Socrates.  A recognized genius of antiquity.  An

inner voice sometimes guides him.  Plato states this

in the "Apology."(1)



B. Srinivasa Ramanujan.  Recognized Hindu mathematical

genius.  A sacred image repeatedly inspires him.  The

family goddess  Namagiri appears when he is about to

envision a new mathematical formula.(2)



C. August Kekule.  Pioneer German organic chemist.  He

visiaulises atoms and watches his visions to get ideas

he applies in his scientific theorizing and

experiements.  Visions lead him on.  Quote and

reference.(3)



D. Leonardo da Vinci.  Famous artist and scientist of

the early Renaissance.  Often Leonardo often went to

look at a certain stone wall and saw images in the

wall which gave him ideas of something to draw or

paint.(4)



E. Albert Einstein.  Famous modern mathematical

physicist.  Like a cat stalking a bird or a mouse,

this man felt an excitement in his muscles when he was

on the track of an important new idea.(5)



F.  Ezra Pound, and other famous poets.  The massive

revisions come after the soul's effusive and sometimes

barely sensible outpouring.  In Pound's case, revision

was optional and sporadic.  (6)



These are examples from famous people.  Here is an

example from a recent guestbook entry posted at the

website



http://www.chovil.com/guestbook/guestbook.html



The daughter Aurelia is afraid that her mother has

schizophrenia:



     "What a moving story you have.  It helps me to

understand this disease since I believe my mother has

schizophrenia.  She believes that aliens contacted her

several years ago to use her to gather information

about humans.  She also believes that a spirit guide

in a form of a buddhist monk visits here and gives her

directions and advice in her life.  I have grown up

with these beliefs and adopted them as my own until

just recently when I realized her stories no longer

made sense to me.  What I'm not sure of though, is

that she functions normally in lifeshe is an owner of

a very respectable business firm.  She has always been

big about keeping her private life separate from her

business.  She doesn't necessarily seem to get worse. 

I'm wondering if her daily use of marijuana helps keep

her in checkeven though she maintains she gets

messages from aliens and her spirit guide.  Is it

possible for her to actually function so normally

while maintaining such complex delusions, or in some

way, is she not schizophrenic at all?  Please help a

very confused and saddened daughter.  Thanks,"



Aurelia



McKinleyville, CA Canada- (7)



Note that from kindergarten on you and I were educated

in using the rational retentive cognitive style RRCS. 

As working adults  most of us went to school for

twelve years or more, and in school children are

taught to retain information and to reason out answers

from facts.  Most everyone is trained to think in that

way.  The problem is that humans are liable to this

error:  We assume that when we follow a certain

process in our brains, that everyone can do the same

thing in their own brains.  Like a baby in its cradle

we feel central, and we like to believe that our own

ability is standard, usual, typical, normal and  the

right way to be.  I might even say the way nature or

"God" intended a human to be!



Filled with the hubris and the personal pride of all

such normal people, we just can't crawl out of our

little wooden world.  The truth is that there are many

special human talents, like playing the piano by ear. 

Some people can do this, but many people can't. 

Another special talent is having a god or a goddess

give you ideas.... well, that's helped some amazing

people.  For example, Socrates and Ramanujan.  But how

did they practice their skill and get so good at it,

without being identified as crazy by all the

self-righteous normal people?  And is it desirable for

society to nip in the bud most all the little creative

geniuses that sit in elementary school?



Perhaps it is valid to picture schizophrenia as the

tip of an iceberg and many adult schizophrenics were

nipped in the bud as children but as mature people

their brains are trying to repair the damage society

unwittingly did to them.  Think of the modern mentally

ill person as someone who as a boy or girl had a

dominant NNCS and got it nipped in the bud or blocked

so his or her little brain couldn't develop as well as

it might have in a more nurturing society.  Hence our

society is making lots of little blocked Socrateses

and little blocked Einsteins as it were.  Think of the

schizophrenics and the bipolars as NNCS swans in a

lake full of RRCS "ducky" people.  Quack Quack.  Have

you ever watched a duck attack another bird that it

thinks doesn't belong?  Go to a big school and see how

the normal children attack the atypical ones.



Now for example, take Jiddu Krishnamurti.  Lots of

folks called him K.  K was a very poor student and K

did poorly as an RRCS person.  Instead, he developed

into an NNCS person.  He called this NNCS his

meditation: the empty mind.  K was a natural

meditator.  He didn't learn any traditional method of

meditation.  Nevertheless, K gave long talks which

intrigued and inspired many people so they came back

and brought their friends.  K was recognized as a

"spiritual" teacher, but people accustomed  to RRCS

had difficulty understanding K and some academics

dismiss his writing as vacant or meaningless.  For

example, in the July/August, 2000 issue of Skeptical

Inquirer Magazine, Martin Gardner writes:



"I have done my best to try to read some of these

books without falling asleep.  It is hard to

understand how the author of such vapid ideas could

have mesmerized listeners, most of them women, when he

lectured, and to have captured the admiration of a

great physicist.[David Bohm]"(8)



After studying the life and works of J. Krishnamurti,

many working psychiatrists would diagnose K as having

a disorder.  These same experts would even diagnose a

disorder in other spiritual persons recognized as

inspired by millions of people.  In fact, the moral

code many Westerners still try to follow was coined by

a person who experienced both visual and auditory

hallucinations.  Indeed, Moses saw a bush appear to

burn, and a voice spoke to Moses out of the bush. 

Martin Luther threw his inkpot at a visual

hallucination he said was the devil.  So what superior

ethical system can the rational retentive academics

and the psychiatrist-experts in whom they trust

provide, and what is their evidence that  this new

moral system is better?  Huh??  Many shrinks and other

hubris-ridden humanist-intellectuals have never

thought this matter through.  Furthermore, unlike the

writins of Moses, the modern humanists write in a way

scarcely anyone who hasn't a Ph.D. can understand. 

They are ultra-exclusive.  The wise teacher is not.



It's easy and natural for a gifted RRCS person to

assume that other people can and should do what he or

she does.  It's difficult and unnatural for a gifted

RRCS person to remain aloof and circumspect so that he

or she realizes that there are indeed many different

gifts of mind and not all of these gifts of mind fall

under the category of RRCS.  But gifted academics and

medical doctors (who all were gifted enough

academically to receive MD degrees) tend to be blinded

by the natural hubris previously mentioned.  Even a

child has this hubris when he or she assumes that all

the other children see and hear what he or she sees

and hears.  Nevertheless, some children sense more,

and others sense less.  Different persons notice

different things.



Another example is music.  One can be very gifted in

music but not be able to read music.  Example:  Stevie

Wonder.  There are just people who have an

extra-special talent.  But in many cases, the

educators expect every student to be smart in the same

way they are, ... and they know nothing about the many

other ways of being smart.  There's that old bugger

hubris again.



Some children just have a special habit or facility

with NNCS...like Ramanujan, like Socrates, like Jesus,

Moses, and a slew of others, including so many

atypical children who become  diagnosed as psychotic

after they have gotten the idea that God, or the

fridge, or the TV is giving them ideas.  Sure, they

get some wrong ideas.  So did you when you were first

learning history, Latin, algebra, and when you were

first learning to ride a bike.  Perhaps many mental

patients are persons who as children were punished for

using their abilities in the way most natural and most

productive for them.  Was it really important for

Einstein to be able to quote whole paragraphs out of

books and do arithmetic in his head?



Now imagine a new society with a new school in which

the little Einsteins don't become the butt of jokes,

and the little Krishnamurtis don't get beaten every

day because they are so slow in the RRCS way.  The

young Einstein did make children laugh and the young

Krishnamurti was beaten with a cane every day because

he was considered stupid.  Can you imagine a new

school in which each and every talented child is

recognized, encouraged, and meaningfully taught?  We

have met the enemy and he is us, dressed up in our

caps and gowns and clutching our advanced degrees.



To understand this new teaching you need to learn more

about NNCS.  But you can't learn NNCS from the modern

educators, educational psychologists and psychiatrists

because they consider the NNCS person to be mentally

disturbed.  To the modern experts, the NNCS person

needs to be "corrected."  There is this natural hubris

in children and in adults who have gone to schools in

which this hubris is reinforced.  Talents differ.  If

most people are mainly talented in the RRCS way, quite

a few children are more talented in the NNCS way.  In

addition to the few prominent persons already briefly

discussed, many other existing records reinforce this

view.



To review the existing records, study the lives and

works of those few recognized geniuses who managed to

keep their gods a secret and become accepted at least

by a small subculture in the mass of RRCS people. Most

such NNCS people, however, aren't able to keep their

gods a secret and integrate well into the culture of

RRCS people.  They need special help in a special

community whose educators are unusually adept and

wise.  With the help of these adepts, many persons

with a chronic mental disorder or predisposed to a

mental disorder will become more creative and less

destructive... without needing to be medicated.  This

claim needs to be tested.



Can this idea be tested scientifically?  Certainly. 

There are different tests.



One test is to take two hundred young children and

randomly select one hundred of these children to go to

a special school in which all the children spend about

three hours a day with teachers in RRCS activity and

an equal amount of time with teachers of NNCS

activity.  The other children will be controls.  They

will just go to an ordinary school.



Each child in this group of two hundred children will

be examined regularly and all samples of the child's

work will be kept.  The children who go to the special

school won't be forsaken after graduation, because in

mainstream culture presided over by certified

psychologists and psychiatrists all the emphasis is on

being "normal" and that just means to be primarily a

RRCS person.  Note how concerned Aurelia is over her

mother just because her thought process isn't always

RRCS!  Think of the other family members who are

concerned because one of their members is just gifted

in a way that the experts can't even begin to fathom.



Note:  This testing will create a scientifically

legitimized new subculture in whichever local county

or district is the first to run the test.  Note also

that not all science is inexpensive, easy, and

perfectly safe.  Also, the results of new science

aren't guaranteed, and mental disorder is a complex

issue.  But hey.  This integration of RRCS with NNCS

is indeed the science of inspiration, and the science

of soul, which puts each

"Messiah-Christ-schizophrenic" on the same level with

you and me, as the hubris that was in us even when we

were little gets slowly dissolved away by the

universal solvent of science  as science marches on.



References:



1. Socrates: Go to the website

http://www.wsu.edu/tildedee/GREECE/APOLOGY.HTM

accessed 2/4/02 at 11:42AM



2. Ramanujan: Go to the website

http://www.millersville.edu/tildedeidam/m301/raman.htm

accessed 2/4/02 at 12:02PM



3. Kekule:  I've still got to find the book or the

website where this is described.



4. Leonardo: Go to the website

http://www.perceptionweb.com/perc0101/editorial.pdf

page 5 accessed 2/04/02 at 12:16PM



5. Einstein:  I read this in a book but I'm not sure

which one.



6. Ezra Pound:  Just read one of his books of poetry. 



7. http://www.chovil.com/guestbook/guestbook.html (See

page 4 of 14.)  accessed on February 2, 2002



8. Martin Gardner, Skeptical Inquirer Magazine

July/August 2000 Volume 24, No 4



4:10PM Sunday, February 3, 2002



10:30PM Monday, February 11, 2002



8:00PM Thursday, February 21, 2002



John L. Waters





The information on this page represents that of John Waters and not 

necessarily that of Humboldt State University. John Waters takes full 

responsibility for the information presented.





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