THE GROWING MIND BY DR. KAREN SUMNER
David DiSalvo, the author of What Makes Your
Brain Happy and Why You Should Do The Opposite, talks to The Country Day School about the brain quirks that lead us forward and astray in our thinking and behaviours.
THE HAPPY BRAIN Understanding what makes your brain “happy” provides insight into what makes you – and your kids – tick.
Q. How do we reconcile a brain that loves stability and consistency with a new learning situation or an open-ended learning task?
David DiSalvo, author of What Makes Your Brain Happy, is a science writer and public education specialist who writes about science, technology and culture.
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I think there’s value in preparing children to accept ambiguity in new learning tasks, with the caveat that they need to be given the right thinking tools to handle it. Structure is especially important in formative learning, but I believe it’s possible to teach children to think more broadly and in open-ended ways within a structural context. In other words, we need to teach kids how to navigate the river rapids of learning but give them the right equipment and skill building to do so effectively.
The reasons for this aren’t entirely clear, but I think it has much to do with our penchant for immediacy. Our brains are not inherently very good at envisioning future situations or our reactions to future situations. We are much better at envisioning immediate situations, so it’s reasonable to assume that we’ll envision our reaction to immediate feedback much more clearly than far-off feedback. That visceral feeling we get from envisioning bad immediate feedback seems to kick start our performance to avoid having to face a negative outcome.
Q. You summarize some interesting studies on student performance and the timing of the teacher’s feedback.
Q. You say that the first instinct of the brain is toward idleness, because we are built to conserve energy. But you also say that we are happier when we are busy and productive. Can you explain this contradiction?
What these studies indicate is that when we think we’ll receive immediate feedback, our performance improves. When we think the feedback is a long way off, we don’t perform as well.
This is one of the brain’s many paradoxes that all of us are trying to figure out every day, even though we might not be overtly thinking about it. The research is consistently clear that we feel more
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fulfilled when we’re being productive – when we can see that the work we’re doing is “going somewhere”– even if it’s exhausting. On the other hand, our instinct is toward idleness, so we’re always in a dynamic tension between the two. It’s less a contradiction and more of an ironic reality. Of course, we can’t ignore either inclination, which is what makes using vacation time as true vacation time so important. If your vacations turn into out-of-office work sessions, you aren’t doing yourself any favours and your brain will eventually make sure you know it with a stout dose of burnout.
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The research is clear that we feel more fulfilled when we’re being productive… even if it’s exhausting.
Q. You talk about the ways in which “immersive e-media” can tap into a malfunctioning reward centre and become a compulsive behaviour. What do you mean?
What I mean by immersive e-media is the relatively new forms of electronic media that are more engulfing, that are designed to provide a more holistic escape from what’s going on around us. To be clear, I see nothing inherently wrong in this form of e-media, and in some cases I think it’s actually useful (there’s a burgeoning research literature on the psychological benefits of some (continued on page 14) THE LINK SPRING 2014
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THE GROWING MIND
Students require open-ended tasks that develop critical thinking, but at the same time need dependable tools to support their learning.
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It’s useful to remember that kids aren’t consciously trying to make their parents’ lives harder – they are doing what is quite natural, to slowly individuate themselves, which requires taking on more and more self-owning thought and behaviour.
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(continued from page 13) video games, for instance). Having said that, we have to face the fact that we’re not natively very good at controlling impulse, and the impulse to spend more and more time in the new media environments is very strong. As with anything, the more time we spend engaged in the activity, the more our adaptive brain will change to suit the contours and confines of that activity. My fear is that hours a day in immersive e-media may be triggering adaptive responses that are actually maladaptive outside of the media environment.
tremely healthy. The “problematic” part is an issue of balance. Again, the impulse to take the path of least resistance is very strong in all of us, so if you have a lot of social anxiety and there’s this huge electronic world out there that you can spend most of your time in, the impulse to do exactly that is hard to resist. That’s when people start spending eight hours a day online and have very little non-online interaction to provide a healthy balance.
Q. You also argue that social anxiety leads to problematic Internet use.
Q. Switching topics, you discuss battles for control in your book. How can we balance a parent’s need to feel in control with a child’s similar need?
What the research on this topic suggests is that people who are inclined to avoid social interaction in their daily lives will still seek it out in other ways. The Internet, of course, is the most powerful, broad-reaching socially interactive technology ever invented, so it provides the perfect venue for those people to find ways to interact. There’s nothing wrong with this at all, and in fact I think there’s ample research to suggest that for many people it’s ex-
The epic power struggle between parental control and the child’s need to feel more in control of their lives (a need that progresses and seems to explode in adolescence) isn’t one any parent is likely to avoid, but I think that it’s incumbent on parents to see beyond the child’s emotional, impulsive reactions into the real reasons for their behaviour. Parents who can’t see past the emotional eruptions are more apt to slam their
fists down to assert dominance, while parents who can assume a more detached perspective will more readily find common ground with their kids to negotiate the power struggle. It’s useful to remember that kids aren’t consciously trying to make their parents’ lives harder—they are doing what is quite natural, to slowly individuate themselves, which requires taking on more and more self-owning thought and behaviour. Q. In your section on regret, you argue that “the power of wanting trumps the satisfaction of getting.” Can you explain what this means?
This is a tough one for everyone because Western societies, especially, are built on stoking the fires of wanting. Most marketing and advertising is about making people feel that “want” more acutely and motivate their behaviour to spend money. But what the research on this topic shows, very consistently, is that we’re almost always less satisfied with the “getting” once we’ve experienced the exhilaration of wanting. I think parents should be aware of this and actively coach their kids about the dynamic. Another way to say the same thing is that parents need to teach their kids to be more media savvy. We’re inundated with marketing messages potently targeting our “want,” and the more clearly children can see these messages for what they are, the less likely they’ll fall into patterns that are wholly motivated by wanting. As a parent, I think of it this way: I don’t want my kids to grow into roles as “good consumers.” I want them to be critical thinkers who can tell the difference between self-motivated desire and artificially stoked desire. David, we really appreciate you taking some time to talk to us about some fascinating topics. It’s been my pleasure.
STARTING A CONVERSATION… David DiSalvo’s What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite Science writer David DiSalvo argues that what our brains want is not necessarily in our best interests. In fact, what makes our brains “happy” can lead to all kinds of difficulties, errors, and delusions. Why is this and what are we to do?
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ave you ever gotten into an extended argument and asserted your position powerfully, and yet wondered at some deep and murky level if you really are getting it right? We do this because we need to feel right, says David DiSalvo, whether we are or not. Our brains experience feeling wrong as a threat to our survival. In the regions of our brains that process risks, we don’t distinguish between emotional and physical threats: a person questioning our beliefs or hurting our feelings produces the same response as a menacing tiger: fight or flee. DiSalvo explains that the greatest desires of our brains are stability, certainty, and consistency. Humans are prediction and pattern-detection machines: we process information in order to determine what’s coming next. We can’t help doing it, and it allows us to order our lives and feel in control. But to predict accurately, we need to be certain of what we know now. Hence, we are certainty addicts. We not only crave being right, but we convince ourselves that whatever information we have at hand is the right information. Here are a few of the mental tricks DiSalvo says we perform in order to increase our certainty and decrease our sense of loss and threat: • Certainty Bias: our brains tell us we are right, whether or not we have all the information required to form an opinion, because we fear unanswered questions. • We assign meaning to coincidence and random data to create the pattern and order we need to anticipate the future. • Selectivity Bias: we process information from only one part of our environment to the exclusion of other parts, no matter how obvious the alternatives are. • In acquiring new material goods, the power of wanting exceeds the satisfaction of getting. Anticipation carries within it a stronger reward than the acquisition of the thing itself. In the contexts of schooling and parenting, DiSalvo offers some rich food for thought. For example, why might a student fear a new learning task? If open-ended, it may threaten a need for certainty. Or why do parents and teenagers often see safety issues so differently? A selectivity bias may lead a teen to exclude data from one aspect of her experience in order to assert another. What Makes Your Brain Happy is an engaging collection of findings from psychology and cognitive science offered in a mix of compelling stories and practical advice. DiSalvo helps us to see and correct for deep-seated tendencies that can close the door on new challenges and keep us behind the barricade of certainty. With awareness and practice, we can learn to flourish with the tiger in our midst.
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