The MacArthur Foundation board is putting $1.1 million into an experimental middle- and high school in New York City. The school’s focus shows us how schooling needs to change if it is to again become relevant.

But I think the NPR feature I listened to misses the bulls-eye when it says “The curriculum revolves around teaching kids to make video games.”

Closer here: “The MacArthur Foundation says video games and the dynamic systems they use will be key to information management in the future.”

Dead center: “Parsing… the operating system of the world.” What a great phrase! That’s what schooling should do – teach kids to parse the OS of our planet and its inhabitants.

Yesterday’s NPR feature, Students’ View of Intelligence Can Help Grades is fundamentally important. If you think that’s exaggerated praise, consider what it’s really saying.

As regular readers know, Grow With the Flow presents evidence that intelligence is dynamic, multi-dimensional, and eminently influenceable. Its goal is to help parents see why that is true, and how they can use that knowledge.

Carol Dweck’s research gives us a new sense of how important our influence can be: Teaching kids that their brain can become smarter leads to improvement in their performance – actually helps them become smarter:

By the end of the semester, the group of kids who had been taught that the brain can grow smarter, had significantly better math grades than the other group.

She shows not only that intelligence is influenceable, but that if we teach kids that they can influence their brain’s development – that they can become smarter through effort – their new knowledge leads to better achievement.

I just read a short piece that left my jaw hanging. Fortunately or not, my fingers are still functional. In last Sunday’s USA Weekend, Ann Pleshette Murphy cites a survey where many kids report stress because they have “too much to do,” and then mentions research which finds that boredom “produces brainwaves associated with creativity.” Oh! Boredom is good for my kids’ brainpower! How can I give them the brain benefits of boredom? Here are some selections from her answer:

…enforcing boredom…. Make downtime a scheduled family activity…. When your child says, “There’s nothing to do,” don’t rush to fill the void. Provide art supplies… give older ones a journal or tape recorder to chronicle their thoughts.

Italics are mine. For my careful readers, I have to add: I didn’t forget the ellipsis: There’s nothing between “don’t rush to fill the void.” and “Provide.”

By coincidence, I’ve been reading Bill Bryson’s latest, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid: A Memoir, about his childhood in the fifties:

Because days were so long and so little occurred, you were prepared to invest long periods in just sitting and watching things on the off chance that something diverting might occur…. Other long periods of the day were devoted to just seeing what would happen – what would happen if you….

It isn’t just that USA Weekend gets it so wrong. It’s as though they can’t conceive the setting conditions for true boredom: that a child could have nothing to do, that a parent would not leap to the rescue, that children could be left completely to their own devices. (At my most cynical, I think staring into space, without so much as a tape recorder to chronicle the busy content of the idle moment, was seen to be a distressing consumer behavior, to be extirpated.)

In Grow With the Flow, I use the old phrase “to invite the soul” to talk about the private, apparently empty times in which our minds wander where they will. I suspect kids do this best when they have “nothing to do.”

I wouldn’t want this post to be about The Good Olde Days. You know from GWTF that I’m an activist for action with our kids; the idea that we influence their development is central to the book. But you also know that I bemoan the potential loss of balance in this – the fear-based sense that we must make certain no minute of our child’s formative years goes unmanaged.

Things have changed a bit since 1956. I don’t know what boredom looks like in the midst of bombarding stimulation. (Maybe just the same as always?) I don’t even know that occasional boredom is fruitful, although my intuition says it is. But I do know you don’t help your kids to fruitful boredom by finding something for them to do.

I’ve set up a Coffee Table, What Should Parents Do? in case anyone would like to talk about the appropriate extent of parent involvement in their child’s day-to-day development. Should we sometimes back off? Or is that just a cheap way to avoid responsibility? Has the world changed so much that benign neglect isn’t benign? Or can our level of involvement interfere with basic developmental needs?

By Phone: 1-800-252-3354
By e-mail: eriebook@velocity.net

Last October, Walking Zombies commented on adolescent sleep deprivation, and its effects on schooling, learning, health and safety.

Here’s one solution, reported in the Washington Post: Power Napping which is planned for, supported, and encouraged. It seems like a weak answer compared to getting enough sleep, but it might be easier for many to make a few minutes for a nap than rework a lifestyle.

This continues Mirror Neurons – 1.
and Mirror Neurons – 2,
not to mention Mirror Neurons – 2.5
Again: This series introduces you to one of the most important discoveries about human learning in decades.

Thanks to Matt Maher for pointing me to the very relevant (and way cool) Pink video, Stupid Girls

The Pessimist’s Version of Mirror Neurons

It’s tempting to think of the negative implications of co-experiencing. Lately, I watch the apparent dea[r]th of learning and of thoughtfulness in our worldwide culture and in the institutions that shape and transmit that culture, and I find myself (am I becoming old?) despairing for our lovely little planet. Learning, knowledge, thinking – along with the emotions that power and direct them – these are the most important tools we have. But in my worst moments, I believe the forces opposing learning, knowledge, and thought, crushing our drive and our emotions, threaten to turn us into consuming, reproducing automata – robots who buy stuff and hatch kids who buy stuff.

I haven’t seen anyone suggest it, but it seems to me that mirror neurons may be the primary mechanism that makes us and our children so manipulable. I would speculate that when mass manipulation is effective, it is because of mirror neuron circuits. When someone on TV has fun with a new toy, the child watching the TV coexperiences the fun, and wants it to continue. If the “I want it” response to the advertisement doesn’t respond to your logic, it’s because logic has nothing to do with the wanting. The same is true of what we see in the faces of football fans, mobs, and moviegoers. These responses are coexperiences. The brain is not simply watching. It is participating.

What about this pessimist’s version – all those influences on your child that you wish weren’t there, and which sometimes threaten the most basic values you hope to instill? The thing is, these influences are the flip side of a powerful adaptive mechanism which is the base for our ability to empathize, and the powerhouse for cultural transmission. The same strategies that give us greater positive influence will help us counteract the negative ones. So how do we manage to maximize the good of mirror neurons, and do what we can to control negative influence?

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

Verizon is offering to let you know where your pre-teens are, and fire you a text message if they aren’t where they’re supposed to be.*

Good idea?

Of course there are technical and ethical issues with Chaperone.**

The ethical and technical questions involved aren’t my topic: The goal of Grow With the Flow is to help parents raise kids whose real-world intelligence allows them to thrive. As readers of GWTF know, I see that intelligence as an artful blend of factors, ranging from many ways of being smart through executive functions, to deep motivation to learn. How does this electronic surveillance fit into that goal? The more I think about it, the less sure I am.

Your thoughts?

Discuss this article in the Coffee Shop

* Verizon’s Chaperone will combine cell phone and GPS technologies to tell parents where their kids are, and will also (for an extra fee) send parents a text message when their kids leave a pre-defined boundary area. Sprint launched a similar product in April, Disney plans one next month.

The popular media hasn’t yet really picked up on the story, but the response is expected to be overwhelmingly positive (safety for the child, assurance for the parent). The product is aimed at 5-9 year-olds – you’ll be stunned to learn that teens are expected to object.

** Industry response is positive (sluggish market) but also cautions about the practical limits of the service. There are also Big Brother aspects of the service, both obvious (my parolees would think it looked like an ankle monitor) and less obvious (you aren’t the only one who knows where your child is).

Discuss this article in the Coffee Shop

This analysis, from New York Times Op-Ed columnist, David Brooks, appearing on May 25, 2006, speaks to the goals and philosophy of Grow With the Flow so directly I felt I couldn’t do better than to excerpt a good hunk of it, without commentary – although I did highlight a few golden lines. The original article is subscription-only.

Let me tell you why I, a scientific imbecile, have spent several weeks trying to understand the amygdala and the orbitofrontal cortex.

It all started a few years ago as I was plowing through studies on income inequality….

….a child’s home environment — matters more.

Once you acknowledge that there is a basic tear in the way the market economy is evolving, you begin trying to figure out the causes. In declining order of importance, they seem to be:

First, the generally rising education premium. The economy rewards people who can thrive in meetings and adapt to technical change….

When you look at these causes, you keep coming back to one theme: human capital. The people who do well not only possess skills that can be measured on tests, they have self-discipline (which is twice as important as I.Q. in predicting academic achievement, according to a study by Angela Duckworth and Martin Seligman). They conceive of their lives as following a script, progressing upward through stages. They benefit from inherited cultural traits….

….you discover that while learning is like nutrition (you have to do it every day), earlier is better. That’s because, as James Heckman puts it, learners learn and skill begets skill. Children who’ve developed good brain functions by age 3 have advantages that accumulate through life.

That takes us to where the debate is today. How do we inculcate good brain functions across a wider swath of the 3-year-old population? ….

If there’s one thing that leaps out of all the brain literature, it is that, as Daniel J. Siegel puts it, “emotion serves as a central organizing process within the brain.” Kids learn from people they love. If we want young people to develop the social and self-regulating skills they need to thrive, we need to establish stable long-term relationships between love-hungry children and love-providing adults.

That’s why I’m grappling with these books on psychology and brain function. I started out on this wonk odyssey in the company of economic data, but the closer you get to the core issue, the further you venture into the primitive realm of love.

In a short feature, Keep Math Skills Sharp This Summer, Parents and Kids points out that “According to a study by the Partnership for Learning, an average student can forget 60 percent of the math skills they learned during the school year…”

Read that again: Better than half of the skills we teach for nine months each winter are lost in three months. If you’re mathematically inclined, graph that one: a unit of improvement in nine months, a 60% drop in three months, and reiterate. Seem like a questionable way to turn out top math students?

Anne Collins, Director of Mathematics Programs at Lesley University, offers strategies to keep math skills sharp during summer.

Simple card games can teach and keep multiplication or addition skills fresh; assisting parents with menu planning, or home improvement projects teach and reinforce problem solving; an inexpensive stopwatch can open dozens of doors and questions of time and rate of speed ratios. This summer especially, challenging a child to determine the cost of gasoline for a day or weekend trip can be very instructive - while empowering him or her to find answers to such questions.

Summer is a perfect opportunity for informal education, and helping students practice their math skills in different settings,” Collins said. “It doesn’t have to be a time for math skills review, but instead a time for children to put them to good use.

Grow With the Flow readers know these are just the kind of activities I think are critical to the development of real math ability (as opposed to the acquisition of arithmetic facts). Professor Collins is clearly a dynamite teacher and teacher teacher. I half susupect her of an end run here:

The way we teach math is so deplorable that the majority of the math facts we drill into kids’ heads each year is lost in a few months. So maybe we should teach practical, real-life, empowering, problem-solving, useful math all year long?

It’s a great idea, Professor Collins, and it just might work in Massachusets. But forget it out here in the Wild West – We’re too busy getting our kids ready to take the CSAPs to teach them something useful.

Discuss this article in the Coffee Shop

This continues Mirror Neurons – 1.

Mirror Neurons and Parents
Caution: Rampant Speculation Ahead – Drive Carefully!

Do mirror neurons matter to you as a parent? Without knowing about them can you still help your child grow into a full, effective intelligence? Of course. We’ve been educating our kids fine without knowing about mirror neurons for quite a few million years. (We’ve had Dr. Spock to help us for the last millennium, but we even got along without him for a while.)

We’ve always acted as though we knew these circuits existed – that’s why we show our kids how to do things, and generally go to the trouble of teaching them. But being consciously aware of their existence and influence will help us direct our own efforts more skillfully, and dodge some strategies that come easily but work badly. I think awareness of these circuits changes the valence of many everyday experiences. I’m thinking my way into this as I write – this is brand new stuff – but it seems to me that understanding mirror neurons gives you a compass for much of child rearing.

Start from the potency these newly discovered circuits give to much behavior. Your child’s brain shares in the experiences of others: co-experiences. When she sees someone else do something, it’s not only that her brain observes, analyzes, learns how to do the same thing. Her brain does it. There must be evolutionary value to this response, which is more than a cognitive registering of the experience. These circuits developed because kids with a greater ability to imitate, model, and coexperience had a better chance of surviving and having kids who survived.

Mirror neurons are strong verification of the the philosophy I set out in Grow with the Flow. Here’s the core of the core, from my Credo:

Humans are born to be learners – it’s in our nature….
Kids learn because their brains are deeply structured to want and need to learn.

Grow With the Flow, p. 57
(The illustration on that page shows mirror neurons at work. Coincidence or prescience?)

Mirror neurons are the key to the intensity of human learning. Our brains’ urgent, deep-wired drive to share with others, to coexperience, is the basis for our automatic, prepotent inclination to learn by modeling. It is that wiring which makes cultural transmission possible. ("Cultural transmission” is everything we know that we didn’t have to figure out for ourselves.) Mirror neurons are a Rosetta Stone for much of the uniqueness and complexity of human behavior.

So How Can Mirror Neurons Help Parents?
A Potpourri of Speculations and Strategy Suggestions

• Kids are responding to you – they can hardly help it, the wiring is so strong. (Yes, this even applies to 15-year-olds. It’s just a bit more difficult to see.)

• What you say matters. What you do may matter even more. As I leaf through Grow With the Flow, Part 2: Theory into Practice, I’m finding it (hindsight is 20:20) gratifyingly easy to see mirror neurons everywhere. The common sense advice I give there seems to be strengthened and justified by this new discovery, We act as though mirror neuron circuits were our friends every time we show a child how to do something, explain what we’re doing, think about who he spends time with, model how to think creatively or critically, introduce new concepts or procedures, frame and interpret what she sees or hears.

• It’s critical to understand that mirror neurons generate a full-body response to our experiences. We think about our experiences. Some part of our brain does them. But we also feel them, and we feel our way into their meaning to us. Because of mirror neurons, we coexperience. When we see someone hurt, rejected, passionate, angry, we share in their emotion. When we see a beautiful dance or a home run, our motor circuits share the movement. This automatic, visceral response is a big part of what makes us such good learners. Understanding the body-based nature of responses to others helps us think about how to talk with our child so we’ll be heard well.

• It’s important to communicate with the correct part of the brain. When we are talking with our child about an issue, and we discuss, explain, argue our case, we’re trying to play to our child’s neocortex – appealing, through language, to reason and logic. But if the experience is visceral / emotional, we’re playing to an empty theater: The audience is downstairs in the emotional centers, having an experience. We’ve often described that as emotions clouding or blocking reason. It would be more accurate to say the experience is a holistic response that involves multiple brain systems.

  Take an example as simple as this: Your child has just seen someone on TV playing with a toy. He desperately wants the toy. Remember that he has just coexperienced playing with the toy. It was fun! (I plan to come back, in a third post, to this question of how advertisers and politicians may be able to manipulate us via mirror neuron circuits.)

  It seems likely that the first task is to open rational channels through response to the emotional ones. Help him learn to calm and soothe himself. Respect the emotions, and the wanting. (That doesn’t mean giving in to them. It means respecting his feelings at that moment.) Recognize that he wants the toy badly right now. The time to talk is later.

• Be clear that your child isn’t the only one with mirror neuron circuits. When the two of you talk, you are dancing together. His facial expressions, her tone of voice affect you. And vice versa. So often, kids will say “You yelled at me.” Their parent says “I never yelled at you.” They’re both right: The parent’s voice never rose, but they were frustrated, and the child empathized with the micro-signals of the parent’s frustration, read the underlying tone, vibrated with it, and felt the parent yelling.

  Ever find yourself, in moments of stress, falling back on exactly the strategies your parents used – the ones you promised yourself when you were 12 that you would never, ever use? I suspect mirror neurons have a lot to do with this – we’re having a coexperience with our child – our bodies responding to their signals, theirs to ours, and the whole mess spiraling downward, out of the thinking parts of our brain to the emotional parts and thence to strategies that were embedded when we were kids. We can learn to control those responses, but it isn’t automatic.

• I bet the frequent success of the Fay-Cline Love and Logic approach is because it gives everyone breathing room for the child to get back to rational thinking, and gives parents a way to stay there!

  Similarly, the Greene-Ablon Collaborative Problem Solving approach, the best new tool I’ve been given in years, seems to me to provide a process which exactly models what parents will do if they recognize the importance of mirror neurons.

• Mirror neurons seem likely to contribute to some of the bumpy roads of adolescence. Start from a hypothesis: Kids are likely to look to those who are most important to them for their models. Their mirror neuron circuits seem likely to respond most readily to their core social group. In early childhood, that’s parents, older siblings, and relatives. In adolescence – well, I don’t need to finish that sentence, do I? Ah, yes, and then there are hormones, and a still-developing frontal lobe. (I hope to talk someday about Jay Giedd’s revelatory work and its importance to parents.)

  I think the bumpy road of the teen years is at least partly as it needs to be. The business of adolescence is to move into the larger world as an independent entity – to finally cut the umbilical cord. But it does present us with some new challenges – ooops, new opportunities.

  Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

What a complex post! I think this is a hugely important topic for parents, and I hope this first installment communicates that to you. I’m going to post the first hunk, and see whether I can eventually knead the rest of it into something loaf shaped.

How can I communicate to you that there’s been a huge new discovery – possibly the most important about the human brain in these recent decades of unparalleled discoveries – one that fundamentally advances our understanding of what it is to be human and how it is that we can be human?

Mirror Neurons – A Primer

The idea is deceptively simple; the trick is to see that the simple idea may come closer to the core of what makes us human than anything – even language. And the most astonishing thing is that we’ve just begun to be aware that this function exists – an enormously important class of brain circuitry of which we were completely unaware.

As you know, when we do or think anything, there must be a corresponding pattern of brain activation. With functional neuroimaging we’re able to watch those patterns in real time – portions of the brain “light up” as we act or think. If you lick an ice cream cone, there will be a unique expression of brain activity which corresponds to your actions.

Now imagine that you watch someone else lick an ice cream cone. Your brain lights up as if you were licking the ice cream cone. You don’t make the action. But your brain “goes through the motions.” Or imagine that you see a hand reach out to caress someone, and see the hand rudely repulsed. Your brain lights up as though it had just undergone that rejection. Your brain automatically shares the experiences of others. Shades of sci-fi: We’re talking mind melds.

We know we’re wired to attend to and respond to the behaviors, the examples, the models of others. But this is a big new step: we are also wired to reflect those experiences internally, to live some part of others’ experience inside our brains. We do it automatically. We do it out of awareness. We don’t merely respond cognitively ("He’s licking an ice cream cone.") Our bodies respond to the experiences of others – “we feel it in our gut.” We share the experience by doing in our brain an imitation of what we see being done, and of the emotions that accompany the action. Researchers have posited that mirror neurons may play an essential role in:

• Empathy – understanding others’ feelings; experiencing the social emotions that allow us to co-exist; understanding social meanings. (Mirror neurons may be what’s “broken” in autism.)
• Understanding someone’s intentions – internally predicting what they’re about to do
• Learning by imitation and modeling – likely language, probably all the learning that represents cultural transmission. Translate that: Everything you hope you or others will teach your child – or that you fear your child will learn.
• Our emotional response to violence, visual art, dance, TV sports, music, video games….
• The bond between mother and child (my wild-eyed extension of the finding that babies imitate from the first hour of life)
• The evolution of human culture and the transmission of culture across generations – or, if you prefer, the ability to escape the time scale of biological evolution, whether or not that turns out to have been a good idea.

Sound like something a parent should know about?

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop

If You’d Like To Learn More

A New York Times article from January 10 of this year, by the excellent science writer, Sandra Blakeslee, “Cells That Read Minds,” provides an excellent introduction, and prompted me to get at this post. [Gotta add a caveat here: the article made the McDonnell Foundation’s “Bad Neuro-Journalism” hit list for its homuncular treatment of neurons. It’s a sort of distinction, like being lambasted on “The Daily Show."]

Perhaps the best overall introduction is PBS’s NOVA Science Now – Mirror Neurons. The location includes their original 14-minute broadcast segment, which means you can hear some of the researchers mentioned here, and watch some of the research involved. The best watching in this sequence is to watch yourself: Notice how you react to some of the scenes? Mirror neurons.

A short version, from another excellent science writer, Sharon Begley, writing for The Wall Street Journal, “How ‘mirror neurons’ help us to empathize” and referenced here from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.com site.

Here’s a much-noticed speculative essay by V. S. Ramachandran on the potential significance of mirror neurons. He calls the discovery of mirror neurons “the single most important ‘unreported’ (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.”

From the American Psychological Association’s Monitor on Psychology, here are three short articles on mirror neurons which review Ramachandran’s ideas and offer a variety of research references.

One of the intriguing speculations that has come from this work is that primary characteristics of autism may result from mirror neuron defects. This brief report from Scientific American notes that autistic children show reduced activation of mirror neuron areas when they look at photos of faces, and that, importantly, the degree of activation seems to correlate with the level of a child’s social ability. I’m captivated by a phrase in this abstract from an article. “Imitation, mirror neurons and autism,” which appeared in Neuroscience and Biobehavioural Review: “These neurons show activity in relation both to specific actions performed by self and matching actions performed by others, providing a potential bridge between minds” (my emphasis).

Discuss Mirror Neurons in the Coffee Shop