Author Archives: Rebecca Gotlieb

Humans are driven to create and innovate. In fact, this drive is what fuels our success as a species. Anthony Brandt, a musical composer, and David Eagleman, a neuroscientist, partnered to co-author The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World. In it, they argue that it is human to engage in “what-if” thinking. The show that creativity is shaped by culture and time period. Across domains—the arts, business, science—we innovate by breaking, bending, and blending what already exists, taking risks, engaging in the social side of creativity, and generating lots of ideas, even if many ultimately are discarded. Finally, they suggests applications of these principles of creativity to the boardroom and the classroom.

Familiarity can feel comfortable, but too much of it leads to boredom. The challenge is that newness becomes normalized. Indeed, our brains show suppressed activation to stimuli upon repeated exposure. As such, we are constantly driven to innovate, to find the next new idea to stimulate us. The process of innovating requires a balancing act. We balance exploring new ideas with exploiting strategies that we already know work. We balance using what already exists with making improvements to it. We balance desirable novelty with outlandish novelty.

Brandt and Eagleman argue that most innovation occurs through breaking, bending, or blending. Breaking describes the process of taking apart something formerly whole and assembling the pieces in a new way. We engage in breaking every time we use abbreviations, acronyms, or synecdoches. Innovation can arise from bending—making a variation on a common theme, or reinventing a classic work. Blending occurs when we weave together disparate knowledge to create something new in this mixture. The extent to which any of these modes of innovation are seen as creativity is shaped by one’s cultural milieu. Because creativity depends so much on public reception, artists are rarely lonely, isolated figures, even though they are depicted as such in media. Innovators take great risks to depart from the norm. In order to gauge the success of those risks, they need feedback. As such, creators are social by necessity. Another myth about the creative process is that it happens after a flash of insight causes one to perceive a new idea. In reality, creativity comes from generating a myriad of ideas, each of which is a variation or combination of ideas that preceded it.

As our economy evolves, especially with increased atomization and emerging technologies, creativity and cognitive flexibility will become increasingly critical. Schools and companies can be the perfect environment for fostering individual’s creativity and capitalizing on the benefits thereof. Too often, however, they stifle creativity. Companies, Brandt and Eagleman advise, should be versatile and diversified in the ideas and projects they support. While the means to enhanced creativity in the workforce will continue to change (e.g., open-office plans are not a panacea), building a corporate culture that flexibly changes routines and incentivizes new ideas may be the best recipe for innovation. Similarly, schools should create assignments in which students need to generate a variety of solutions to real-world problems and determine new ways to find solutions. Schools should motivate students to stick with challenging problems, praise their effort rather than results, and invest in arts education. Brandt and Eagleman emphasize that we all have enormous potential to be creative, and thus we need to invest in everyone’s development, and not discriminate based on assumptions about which gender or other identity group is most likely to contribute.

With illuminative examples of creativity across fields, Brandt and Eagleman, effectively explain why creativity is so important to human success and advancement, how we make creative products, and what practices we can implement to enhance creativity. To read additional works by Eagleman read our review of his book The Brain: The Story of You.

 

Brandt, A., & Eagleman, D., (2017). The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World. New York, NY: Catapult.

How can educators prepare students for an uncertain future? A.J. Juliani, a former middle and high school teacher, education consultant, author, and the current director of technology and innovation for Centennial School District, tackles this question by offering practical and digestible advice to help educators implement innovative practices and support their students in becoming innovators. Intentional Innovation: How to Guide Risk-Taking, Build Creative Capacity, and Lead Change argues that we can create innovative classrooms and prepare students for tomorrow by understanding how they learn, while valuing relationships first and foremost, creating student-center learning environments, providing opportunities to create, fostering a safe space to take risks and fail, and recognizing that any person with passion can be an innovator. Juliani suggests that the acronym PLASMA—Praise, Look for, Assess, Support differences, Make time for creative work, and Allow for the new and unknown—is a useful self-assessment, planning, and observation tool to bring about innovation.

Learning, Juliani states, is a process of experimentation. We need to constantly learn, unlearn, and relearn information, especially given the current rapid pace at which information develops. Interest and necessity motivate people to learn. Attention to the to-be-learned material allows for it to be properly encoded, stored in memory, and ultimately retrieved.

Equipped with an understanding of how people learn, it is possible to understand how to support them in innovating. Some of the steps educators can take to help students become more innovative include: modeling how to learn, providing opportunities for collaboration and relationship building, embracing technology, measuring learning in creative ways, making classrooms enjoyable, and propagating the idea that we can all be innovators, especially if we focus greater energy on creating. Juliani allows his students to try their hand at innovating by using the “20% rule.” The students spend 20% of their class time pursuing an innovative project of their choice. He supports them in their work but gives them tremendous freedom. Juliani offers other ways to spur innovation, such as creating opportunities for students to learn outside of school in the community, encouraging students to teach what they know (e.g., through YouTube tutorial videos), giving students a voice in the assessment process, and having students debate one another.

Students are more likely to demonstrate creativity when they feel supported, understand the importance of effort, develop productive habits, are allowed to follow their own interests, and can engage in authentic work. Educators should bear in mind that allowing for creativity in students will take time and can feel slower than directing students more explicitly. Juliani refers to Jessica Lahey’s The Gift of Failure (reviewed here at Learning and the Brain) to remind educators that students learn and develop self-control and creative abilities when they are allowed to fail and pick themselves back up. This is especially true in a culture in which failure is not embarrassing but rather a sign of learning.

A book about innovation in education would not be complete without a discussion of technology. Juliani argues that although few modern technologies were specifically designed for education and none has proven to be an elixir for improving education, technology has changed the experience of students and teachers in many ways. We no longer need to store vast amounts of information to be considered intelligent; rather, what is most important, according to Juliani, is to be able to find and create with information. Educators should use technologies like social media platforms to engage students in the arenas in which they are already engaged. While technology inevitably changes what happens in education, the key ingredient—supportive relationships—will always remain the same. Teachers should challenge students, provide opportunities for inquiry, solve problems collaboratively, and get to know students personally. Similarly, teachers can improve their own practice by cultivating strong relations with other teachers.

Innovative educational practices and support of students in developing skills as innovators are both valuable and necessary components of education. As educators innovate, it is incumbent upon them to remember that innovation is not primarily about novelty; it is about service to others and impact upon them. Indeed, Juliani has demonstrated his innovativeness with this book that is likely to spur many ideas for educators about how to innovate.

 

Juliani, A. J. (2017). Intentional Innovation: How to Guide Risk-Taking, Build Creative Capacity, and Lead Change. New York, NY: Routledge.

 

Parents—a noun, something an individual may be—have existed for as long as there have been children. The idea of “parenting” as a verb, something one does, is a new, odd, and problematic cultural change for parents and children alike. Alison Gopnik, a self-described “bubbe at Berkeley” or mother and grandmother, and University of California, Berkeley professor of psychology and philosophy, argues that parents can aspire to love their children better without thinking of their role as making their child into a certain kind of adult. Her most recent book, The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us about the Relationship Between Parents and Children, references the idea that parents should act like a gardener, providing a rich and safe environment in which flowers (or people) can grow into the best version of themselves and thrive. Gopnik advises that Parents should not mold children into a particular and unchanging kind of being the way a carpenter molds furniture into its specific form. tThroughout the book Gopnik explores parenting paradoxes and the implications for how to support children. These paradoxes include the fact that children must transform from complete dependence to complete autonomy; children must transform from people who mostly play to people who mostly work; parents need both to pass on knowledge and traditions and to allow kids to innovate and differentiate; and parents’ love is specific to their individual children, which can conflict with the job of supporting positive development for a community’s children.

The verb of “parenting” only emerged towards the end of the 1950s and then spiked in popular usage in the 1970s. Rather than parenting, we need to let kids learn and grow by providing them a safe and protected period to do so. Tragically, even though the U.S. is the richest nation, we do not do a good job as a society of protecting children (e.g., 1 out of 5 kids lives in poverty, we do not have guaranteed paid leave for parents to care for kids).

Gopnik argues that an evolutionary perspective on the parent-child relationship can help us understand how to be parents today. We are unique among species in our long period of childhood, and across species longer average childhoods are associated with greater parental involvement, fewer children per mother, longer lives of offspring, higher survival rates of offspring, more intelligence, and larger brains. The tendency of our species to form long-term bonds with a co-parent, invest significantly in raising children, live long enough to become grandparents, and rely on other adults to assist with child care have all contributed to our longer childhoods.

Our longer childhoods provide a protected period of observation, learning, and play, which contributes to our ability to become flexible, innovative adults. Children learn from observing actions and intentions of other people, especially individuals similar to them, who have proven themselves to be good teachers, and who convey confidence. Apprenticeships, in which students see skills modeled and in which their learning process and production of products are entwined, is an effective way to learn. Children learn from what adults say and from answers to the questions children ask adults. Play helps kids engage in counterfactual thinking, develop theory of mind, and develop cognitive flexibility, but kids must feel safe to engage in play. We do not need to formally instruct in order to support young children in learning; rather, we should involve them in the activities of our daily lives and make them feel secure. Gopnik argues that wealthy children often have overly scheduled and controlled environments, while poor children often have chaotic lives in which they are neglected. Few children have the ideal environment that feels both safe and free.

Very young children show tremendous versatility in their learning and plasticity in their brain. By about school age kids become a bit less flexible but more efficient, both in how they learn and in how their brain is connected within itself. Adolescence brings a reemergence of neural plasticity and a desire to innovate. During this period of innovation, parents serve as a bridge to the past as they watch their teens enter into the future.

Parents who are turned off by the pressure to prepare kids for the Ivy League before they have started Little League, educators who are concerned by a school culture or the broader culture of overly involved parenting, policy makers interested in creating scientifically informed policies to support the next generation’s development, and anyone interested in how the relationship between parents and children make us uniquely human will find Gopnik’s book informative and compelling.

Gopnik, A. (2016). The Gardener and the Carpenter: What the New Science of Child Development Tells Us About the Relationship Between Parents and Children. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Macmillan.

“Empathy can motivate kindness to individuals that makes the world better.” Paul Bloom, the Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology at Yale University, asserts this emphatically. Yet, Bloom makes a compelling case for reducing our reliance on empathy in order to achieve fairness and kindness. Bloom’s Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion will be of interest to those seeking to develop their own moral muscles and to those interested in helping others cultivate the social emotional skills they need to foster a kinder world. Bloom argues that empathy, or feeling or experiencing what another person feels or experiences, on the whole makes us less caring and just, and more parochial, short-sighted, and insensitive to the scope of human suffering. Deliberative decision-making is the best path forward for cultivating a more compassionate world.

Bloom is clear to state that he is not against goodness and kindness. In fact, he is interested in bringing about more of these qualities through less empathy. He argues that like a spotlight directing our visual attention to one area at the near exclusion of others, empathy directs our emotional attention to an issue while reducing our ability to discern who needs help the most and what the consequences of our attempts to help may be. Our empathic capacities are limited; we can only empathize with a few people at a time, and we are more likely to empathize with those similar to us. Too much empathy can paralyze one from acting to change the circumstances of the object of empathy.

Bloom provides several examples of empathy-motivated actions that were illogical or counter-productive, e.g., after the mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, the city received so many toy donations (often from people less affluent than the residents of Newtown) that storing all the toys became burdensome. On a smaller scale, if parents were to feel all the time what their children felt they would be less motivated to get their children to do things that are good for them in the long-run but unpleasant in the short-term, such as receiving medical shots. He argues that understanding what others think or feel can be valuable, but actually experiencing those feelings is rarely beneficial, or at a minimum not as beneficial as being able to demonstrate compassion, self-control, and reason. On a neural level, feeling empathy has been associated with activity in some of the same brain areas as those involved in experiencing a given emotional state for oneself. For example, the anterior insula activates when a person experiences pain and disgust and when the person experiences empathy for another person’s pain and disgust. Although the magnitude of activation is larger for one’s own experience than an empathic experience, Bloom argues that it would be better not to have the empathic experience in the first place.

Individuals vary in their levels of empathic ability, and different circumstances will lead individuals to exercise empathic skills to varying degrees. Regardless of one’s ability or propensity for empathizing, empathy will only make another person’s experience salient; it will not make an individual more moral. For example, people induced to empathize with a sick child were more likely than those not induced to do so to decide to give that child preferential treatment at the expense of sicker children—an unfair decision. Empathy can even motivate violence and cruelty, when for example, a group goes to war to avenge the wrong inflicted upon someone with whom the group empathizes. Empathy is not what motivates our care for others; rather our concern for others stems from an abstract, reasoned recognition that regardless of how we feel about those others, their lives have value. Bloom argues, “it’s only when we escape from empathy and rely instead on the application of rules and principles or a calculation of costs and benefits that we can, to at least some extent, become fair and impartial.”

While this call for rational compassion might promote justice and morality overall, many might suspect that within the context of intimate relationships empathy is still valuable. Indeed, Bloom acknowledges that before he was completely “against empathy”, he believed it had value in one-on-one relationships. Now, however, he argues that even in intimate relationships empathy is not beneficial. If one has too much of it, one can get overly involved in the lives of his loved ones, which ultimately hurts both parties and damages the relationship. Compassion, not empathy, makes us better partners, parents, and friends.

All in all, Bloom concludes that the negatives of empathy outweigh its positives and that while reason is not sufficient for being a good and moral person, in general, the more reasoned, rational, and self-regulated one is the better.

 

Bloom, P. (2016). Against empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion. New York, NY: Harper-Collins.

 

 

 

How can creativity and innovation give rise to positive changes in ourselves and the world around us? Wilma Koutstaal, University of Minnesota Professor of Psychology, and Jonathan Binks, who runs the organization InnovatingMinds4Change, tackle this challenging question in their book Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change. They offer a framework of five key questions to consider in undertaking endeavors that call for creativity. First, we should identify the ideas that capture our attention and consider how we shape those ideas. To see a problem differently, we should consider changing the level of abstraction with which we think about it. We should allow spontaneity and deliberateness to be part of the creative process. The authors encourage us to recognize the role of emotions, motivations, and perceptions in our creative endeavors. Finally, we should consider how our physical, symbolic, and social spaces and tools impact our ability to demonstrate creativity. Koutstaal and Binks conclude each chapter with stimulating questions to challenge their readers to think about how their habits impact their creativity. This book will provide help to the creative individual seeking to accelerate her work, as well as to the leader of an organization wishing to bring about change.

Our ideas come about from cyclical interactions among our minds, brains, and environments. Thinking occurs in our minds, supported by our brains. Our brains integrate signals from our bodies, and our bodies are continually exploring our environment. Depending on these interactions, different ideas can come to mind with differing levels of ease or challenge. To generate new and creative ideas it can be helpful to allow our thinking to oscillate between “zooming in” and “zooming out.” Changing levels of abstraction can help us reason by analogy, reduce our working memory load to create more space to think openly, and diminish our tendency to see objects in terms of only their intended use rather than in terms of all their possible uses.

Several distributed networks in the brain work together to orchestrate our creative thinking. The executive control network helps us plan, pay attention, and monitor progress towards a goal. The default mode network is important for imagining, thinking about the future, and taking others’ perspectives. The salience network helps us detect information in our environment, integrate information that is important to us, and switch between the utilization of other networks in the brain. Koutstaal and Binks explain that the brain’s prefrontal cortex is important for abstract thinking. They also explain the role of dopamine, a neurochemical, in producing cognitive stability and flexibility and in seeking new experiences, which can prompt creativity.

Either by our own violation or because of factors in our environment, our focus can shift from being pointed and deliberate to being expansive and free-flowing. The creative process necessitates both deliberate and spontaneous thoughts. Reducing our intense, pointed attention or allowing our minds to wander can foster creativity by making space for a greater variety of stimuli in the environment to enter our awareness. This, in turn, can shape the way we think about a challenge and impact our ability to notice opportunities to fill a need. On the other hand, intense focus and control allow us to persist through obstacles to achieve a creative goal.

The authors identify several factors that can boost creativity. A few of the examples the authors offer include: instructing people to think differently, having practiced and prepared for the demands of a creative task, explaining creative ideas to others to prompt shifting levels of abstraction, minimizing distractions to allow for a state of flow, adding and removing constraints within a creative problem, improvising, and thinking about the future without losing sight of the present.

Change begets change. More experience can foster more creativity. When teams or organizations seek to change or innovate, both the individual members of the group and the group as a whole impact the group’s adaptability. Teams that are more receptive to novelty, more emotionally stable, and more reflective about their practices are better able to change. Optimism is beneficial in promoting creativity, but it must be paired also with the ability to critique and be skeptical from time to time.

Ultimately, Koutstaal and Binks suggest identifying meaningful goals, finding synergy among one’s goals, being driven by one’s goals while remaining open to change in light of new information, modulating the extent to which our goals come to mind when we need them, and modifying our goals when needed. Because of the insights in this book into the innovation process and the examples of successful creative individuals and teams, Innovating Minds is likely to advance the way any reader thinks about the creative change process.

 

Koutstaal, W., & Binks, J. (2015). Innovating Minds: Rethinking Creativity to Inspire Change. New York: Oxford University Press.

 

Humans are capable of horrifying aggression, dehumanization, destruction, and violence and at the same time inspirational altruism, compassion, and forgiveness. Drawing on an astounding array of evidence from across subfields within biology, neuroscience, psychology, and anthropology, Robert M. Sapolsky explains how people come to display these behaviors. Sapolsky, a Stanford University professor of biology and neurology, has recently written Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and our Worst. The book traces behaviors to occurrences in the brain, body, environment, and culture preceding an action on timescales ranging from seconds to thousands of years. Although long and intricate, the arguments are easy to follow because of the captivating integration of interdisciplinary research, the use of an informal, engaging tone, and appendices that aid in understanding basics of neuroscience, endocrinology, and proteins. This book is an excellent choice for those looking for a non-fiction book recommendation and for those committed to understanding how to harness the best of human behavior.

Although our best and worst behaviors do not begin in the brain, in the seconds before we act the factors that enable our actions converge in the brain. Sapolsky describes how our nervous system and particularly certain parts of the brain (e.g., the amygdala) contribute to our aggressive behaviors and how other parts (e.g., the frontal cortex) contribute to difficult but appropriate behaviors. Immediately preceding a behavior there are also cues in the environment that impact the decisions we make. These cues may be subliminal, verbal, visual, or from our body. Hormones such as testosterone and oxytocin impact the way we behave on a protracted timescale and as a function of their ratios relative to one another. Although the interaction between our genes and environment shapes our behavior, our genes influence our behavior to a lesser extent than most think, Sapolsky argues. Nonetheless, he offers an evolutionary perspective on how we have evolved to cooperate (or not).

A human development perspective is helpful in understanding how people behave the way they do. For example, Sapolsky reviews the fact that adolescence is a time during which individuals across cultures (and even species) engage in greater risk-taking, exploration, peer affiliation, and emotional reactivity. The brain’s frontal cortex, which supports engaging in self-regulation, is not yet able to operate at maximal efficiency. This contributes to adolescents exhibiting some aberrant behaviors. However, well before adolescence, during infancy and childhood, people are developing social and moral skills such as empathy, perspective-taking, and the delay of gratification that will contribute to their propensity to act in certain ways as adults. A child’s environment, including the parenting practices, culture, and socio-economic status to which they are exposed, affects their development on both biological and psychological levels. Sapolsky is careful to caution, however, that it is unlikely that childhood experiences will definitively lead to a specific adult behavior.

Sapolsky reviews cornerstone social and affective psychological research about how we identify with others, rank members of our groups, obey authority, act morally, and understand and alleviate other’s suffering. We naturally tend to form groups of “us” and “them,” and we tend to think of “them” more negatively than “us.” We form hierarchies that formalize unequal access to resources, although humans are unique among species in that sometimes those at the top of hierarchies try to serve the common good, and not only their own. All societies have rules about moral and ethical behavior, although there are cultural differences in morality. Religion likely evolved to help us do right, and belief in a judgmental god facilitates strangers interacting cooperatively.  While empathy can help us understand how others feel, it is actually an emotionally distant stance that helps us act more compassionately. Social neuroscientists have made sweeping claims about the role of “mirror neurons”—neurons that activate both when we perform an action and when we see someone else perform that action—in feeling and understanding other’s pain. Sapolsky cautions that the importance of mirror neurons in understanding and mimicking others’ behavior and taking their perspective has likely been oversold.

Sapolsky concludes by expressing his concern about flagrant injustices in the criminal justice system. Although he calls for major revision to the system and to how we treat those found guilty of crimes, on the whole he ends on a hopeful note. Overall, there is a trend towards the worst of human behavior declining (e.g., fewer murders, less denial of rights) and example after example of remarkably inspiring behavior occurring even in the most unlikely of circumstances. People are on average more generous with others than it is logical for them to be. Moreover, we have reason to be hopeful because, as Sapolsky demonstrates, we have an ever-growing body of knowledge about how to inspire the best of human behavior.

Sapolsky, R. M. (2017). Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst. New York, NY: Penguin Press.

 

Today’s learners have different needs than those of yesterday. Educators and policy makers, therefore, need to rethink optimal learning environments. Heidi Hayes Jacobs, founder and president of Curriculum Designers, and Marie Hubley Alcock, president of the education consulting company Learning System Associates, help educators and policy makers contemporize education spaces, curriculum, and pedagogical practices with their new book Bold Moves for Schools: How We Create Remarkable Learning Environments.

The authors argue for the need for updated learning principles, enumerate and explain skills of the effective contemporary teacher, and explain options that have emerged recently for expanding learning environments. Jacobs and Alcock offer guidance about selecting and updating curricula and assessments, especially in light of the significant problems associated with current standardized assessments. They advocate for the benefits of more shared leadership in educational settings. Jacobs and Alcock offer a realistic and progressive vision for how the skilled educators of today can push education practice forward to help prepare students for tomorrow. They urge educators to learn and develop themselves always. With the recommended readings and study guide questions in Bold Moves for Schools, this book can help educators do exactly that.

The authors argue that reformers can begin to affect change by considering education practices that are antiquated and should be eliminated, classical and ought to be preserved, and contemporary and ought to be formulated and expanded. For example, while we should discontinue thinking of students as empty vessels and teachers as disseminators of knowledge, we should think of students as budding creative and critical thinkers whom teachers are responsible for nurturing. Today’s learners need to develop skill in directing their own learning process, building social contracts, critiquing and producing media, innovating, and acting as global citizens. Teachers need to model these skills for their students and advocate for effective, contemporary learning practices. The authors offer bulleted lists of action steps to help teachers develop each of these skills.

In addition to changes in the teaching profession, there must be changes made also to the content taught. Experimental learning, learning that takes place outside the classroom, and learning that is organized around a topic or issue rather than an academic subject can help energize students’ learning by allowing them to feel a sense of ownership and offering opportunities for personalization based on students’ needs.

Schools can update the way they think about learning space, teaching time, the grouping of learners, and the group of teachers to improve learning. For example, rather than grouping students based on age, students could be grouped by interest. Similarly, rather than grouping teachers based on the subjects they teach, groupings ought to be more dynamic, multi-dimensional, and collegial. The benefits of strong professional learning communities should be stressed to teachers. A lateral, collaborative leadership structure within schools and the education system might help make it possible for more innovation. Making major changes in schools can be difficult. Jacobs and Alcock suggest setting up planning teams to help with changes, clarifying a school’s mission, and seeking feedback at multiple levels, including from students before implementing changes.

According to the authors one major issue that has stymied learning in a major way is our accountability system. The exaggerated focus on high stakes tests makes teachers feel a lack of trust and respect, diminishes the appeal of the teaching profession, and discourages collaboration among teachers. It leads to untested, but valuable, subjects being eliminated or whittled down, and it stifles creative and critical thinking. Testing and accountability matter, but we need a radical shift in what assessments look like. They should be authentic, based in performance of real-world tasks and skills, based on measuring innovation and student growth and development, take place over an extended period of time, and include input from students.

We are departing from the industrial age for the information age. Learning environments need to change to keep up. With the help of Bold Moves for Schools Educators and policy makers can use the objective of improving learning as the starting point for the modernization of learning environments.

 

Jacobs, H. H., & Alcock, M. H. (2017). Bold Moves for Schools: How We Create Remarkable Learning Environments. Alexandria, VA: ASCD.

Reading is a complex cognitive task. How is it that our minds are able to read? Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia and acclaimed author, tackles that question in his book The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. He builds a cognitive model of reading to explain how people understand letters, words, sentences, paragraphs, and full texts. He discusses the critical role of motivation to read in gaining skill in reading. By concluding each chapter with bullet point summaries, implications, and discussion questions, The Reading Mind is easy-to-read. It provides good fodder for teachers, parents, education practioners, and policy-makers interested in thinking deeply about how we read and how we support people in reading more and with greater understanding.

Reading is important for individuals and societies because by writing ideas down we create permanent records of information and help ourselves expand what we are able to remember. While the advantages of reading and writing may be obvious, the process by which we read is less so. First, we must understand that letters correspond to speech sounds called phonemes. Being able to distinguish different sounds of speech is associated with success in reading. Unfortunately, distinguishing these sounds is difficult because people pronounce sounds differently, and the sounds can change depending on the other sounds that occur before or after. English has poor matching between letters and sounds. This slows down the process of learning to read English compared to languages with better matching.

Together letters make words. We do not typically read words letter-by-letter. Rather, we read words in letter clumps. Nearly every word has an associated sound, spelling, and meaning, each of which affects how we read. For example: (1) we read tongue twisters silently to ourselves more slowly than equivalent phrases with dissimilar sounding words; (2) instruction in spelling improves reading abilities; and (3) we are more ready to read words with meanings associate with the words we just read than words that are typically not related. Because students encounter about 85,000 unique words in school texts, vocabulary size matters for reading comprehension. Additionally, understanding deeply how words relate to one another and how to use them flexibly is valuable for developing skill in reading.

Willingham explains that an understanding of sentences requires an understanding of how one sentence relates to the next. As we read sentences we build a web of ideas. If readers cannot connect the ideas in sentences, then it is difficult to build such a web. Reading and understanding sentences is also aided by a rich understanding of knowledge about the world. A knowledgeable reader can fill in details a writer omits. Indeed, reading comprehension is much better the more background knowledge a reader has about the topic of the written material.

Beyond being able to read, Willingham argues that having the emotional motivation to do so is important. There is a virtuous cycle in which the more a person reads the better a reader he becomes. The better a reader he becomes the more he enjoys reading. The more he enjoys reading the more he reads. An individual’s past experiences in reading, her sense of herself as a reader, how valuable (e.g., enjoyable, informative) she expects reading to be, and the value of reading relative to other possible activities all impact the likelihood that an individual will read. Making reading materials easily accessible can help people read more. Although many well-meaning teachers and parents try to incentivize reading with rewards, Willingham warns that when the reward is removed the student may actually read even less than before the reward was introduced.

Willingham concludes with a timely discussion of the relationship between technology and the reading mind. He argues that more research is needed to parse out the particular feature of technological interventions that have the power to improve reading. Although there is much concern about technology making youth more distractible, Willingham argues that this concern is not well-supported. It may be the case, however, that students are less willing to tolerate boredom. While teens’ time spent with new technologies has not displaced time spent reading, Willingham still recommends limiting the amount of time youth spend on screens. Doing so may help make spending time reading a more appealing option.

As Willingham notes, it is difficult to translate science research about reading into recommendations for policy or practice. While being careful not to over-interpret research findings, The Reading Mind offers useful suggestions for how policy-makers and practioners can use cognitive psychological literature to inform their work. For additional insightful work by Willingham, see our review of his book Raising Kids Who Read.

 

Willingham, D.T. (2017). The Reading Mind: A Cognitive Approach to Understanding How the Mind Reads. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

As an easy-to-read and engaging textbook or as a scientifically accurate and detailed popular psychology book, David Eagleman’s The Brain: The Story of You is an ideal book for people seeking to teach themselves an introduction to cognitive neuroscience and psychology. Eagleman, a neuroscientist, New York Times best-selling author and an adjunct professor at Stanford, frames each chapter of the book with lofty, existential questions such as “Who am I?” and “Who will we be?” In this book, Eagleman reviews how the human brain develops, how our senses and ability to perceive the world develop, how external factors influence our actions and decision-making, why we are such social creatures, and how technology might augment and extend our lives.

The human brain undergoes substantial development throughout our lives, particularly from birth through adolescence. Indeed, it must undergo more development after birth than does the brain of nearly any other species. Our brains are shaped substantially by the context in which they develop. They need all kinds of stimulation and social support to develop optimally. We are very social creatures. For example, we see social relationships even in inanimate objects; babies can demonstrate a preference for characters who are nice as compared to ones who are mean; and we act like the people around us.

As an incredibly calorically expensive organ, we depend on our brains for a lot of what we do. For example, while we colloquially say that we see through our eyes and smell through our noses, really we perceive the world through our brains’ interpretation of the information received through other organs. This interpretation means that we are not necessarily experiencing an objective relative. Rather, we experience what we expect to sense. Eagleman explains how our brain supports us in experiencing each of our senses. Even seemingly simple and mundane tasks such as walking or sipping a beverage requires a significant amount of coordination across our senses, which our brain orchestrates.

Eagleman explores how we make decisions and how we choose to act. He argues that there are numerous unconscious influences on our actions. While our brains lead us to believe that we consciously make choices, evidence from many sources suggests that we often choose unconsciously, and only generate a justification consciously. Physiological signals can also influence our actions and steer our decision-making. Brain systems compete for the ability to guide our actions and decisions. This has been demonstrated with patients who have had the two hemispheres of their brains severed from one another. In these people we see one hemisphere will lead the person to perform an action that contradicts the action the other hemisphere wishes to perform. Deeply troubled by humans’ evil actions against others, Eagleman reviews work about how on micro and macro scales we decide to mistreat others. He argues ceasing to see others as people (i.e., dehumanizing them) and instead seeing them as objects is a primary mechanism by which we choose to mistreat others.

Our brains are driven both to seek rewards and to plan for the future. People often establish a contract between their current self and their future self to help resist present temptations and increase the likelihood of performing adaptive behaviors for the future. For example, as someone tries to quit smoking, she might give a friend a large check made out to an organization she despises and tell the friend to mail the check if she smokes again. Eagleman reviewed work that he has led in which he attempts to use neurofeedback (i.e., providing people with information about the relative activity of a part of the brain that is involved in seeking rewards versus a part involved in thinking about the more distant future) to help people addicted to drugs regulate their cravings, thereby resisting current rewards to live a healthier life.

Eagleman concludes with a fascinating exploration of the way in which we might use technology to enhance our bodies and lengthen our lives. While it may not be apparent to us, we have already begun to use technology to enhance what our bodies can do. For example, cochlear implants, which provide those who are deaf with a sense of hearing, are a way in which we have shown that our brains and technology can work together. While the human brain cannot be explained entirely by a computer model, Eagleman explores how human-like robots, brain simulations, and attempts to “upload” our brains may all contribute to an understanding of the brain, and of how we can use technology to preserve ourselves for a long time.

The Brain: The Story of You will be of great interest for those seeking to understanding the human brain and how it makes us who we are.

 

 

 

Eagleman, D. (2015). The Brain: The story of you. Pantheon.