Category Archives: Book Reviews

“We should simply try to make the world as happy as possible” (P.333). That this principle might serve as a universal moral philosophy is one of the central claims in Joshua Greene’s book, Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap Between Us and Them. Greene, professor of psychology and director of the moral cognition lab at Harvard University, explains what morality is, why we develop it, how our brains support our moral decision making, why we sometimes fail to optimize universal happiness, and how a deeply pragmatic, universally-acceptable moral philosophy might help us achieve peace and flourish. Specifically, Greene argues that we developed morality because it promotes cooperation within a group—it allows people to favor “Us” over “Me.” Because we are more connected than ever before, many of today’s social problems arise because of a tension between moral tribes, or a tension between “Us” and “Them.” While the brain’s automatic moral reasoning makes us very efficient at solving “Us versus Me” problems, we must rely upon our more effortful and inefficient moral manual mode to address problems of “Us versus Them.” Utilitarianism, a moral philosophy that suggests that our actions should be guided by the pursuit of the best outcomes for all involved in a situation, may be our optimal moral guide.

Greene distinguishes two types of moral dilemmas. The first is the well-known “tragedy of the commons” in which, if each individual pursues his own best interest (e.g., acquires more cattle to graze on the commons), doing so will undermine the collective good (e.g., the commons will be over-grazed). Cooperation within a group helps us avoid this problem and supports our group’s survival. We evolved a moral compass because it helps us cooperate. The second moral dilemma is the “tragedy of commonsense morality” in which the morality one tribe has developed to deal with the “tragedy of the commons” conflicts with the moral common sense of another tribe.

Greene explains research his and other research teams have conducted about the factors that shape moral decision-making and the brain systems that support it. The research uses variants of the following hypothetical scenario: five people are facing an impending death and an action the research participant takes could save the lives of those five people while costing one person to lose her life. All else being equal sacrificing one life to save five is desirable. Under certain conditions, however (e.g., if one must actively inflict force), people do not report that they would save the five lives.

Different regions within our prefrontal cortex (PFC) (i.e., the ventromedial and the dorsolateral PFC) are especially active when reasoning about different scenarios and the PFC is involved in planning the actions necessary to achieve the desired moral outcome. The anterior cingulate cortex is implicated in recognizing and managing conflicting moral outcomes and sends a signal to the dorsolateral PFC to help adjudicate.

To be moral individuals we need an evolutionarily and culturally shaped automatic intuition about moral behaviors, especially for Me versus Us problems. We need the discipline to reason about difficult moral situations such as Us versus Them situations. Finally, we need the meta-awareness to know when to trust our instincts versus when to reason more deeply about the situation. If different groups have different opinions about whether a moral transgression occurred, the moral quandary is likely an Us versus Them problem; if there is no controversy, the issue is likely a Me versus Us problem.

Utilitarianism, a flexible and pragmatic philosophy which attempts to maximize the overall quality of peoples’ experience in the long run for all relevant parties, may be the best way for everyone to address difficult moral quandaries. Some criticize utilitarianism for expecting too much of people. Greene reminds us that expecting people to be perfectly selfless would undermine their own happiness and thus is inconsistent with utilitarianism. Utilitarianism simply asks us to be marginally less selfish. Conversely, some misunderstand the term “happiness” and criticize utilitarianism’s pursuit of happiness as frivolous and hedonistic. Utilitarians intend to encompass all the qualities that facilitate living a long, productive, and fulfilling life within the term “happiness” not just fleeting pleasures.

Greene concludes by offering advice for transcending our moral tribalism and acting in more universally moral ways. We must seek to reason about complex moral issues rather than rationalize our positions. Acknowledging our own ignorance may moderate our moral opinions. We should recognize—but be weary of—our moral instincts when confronting complex Us versus Them issues. Appeals to “rights” and “duties” are often counterproductive, as they silence debate rather than facilitate discussion. Finally, we can all afford to give more to “make the world as happy as possible.”

Greene, J. (2013) Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason, and the Gap between Us and Them. New York: Penguin Press.


Educators have long known that students’ emotional experiences greatly impact their learning. Dr. Mary Helen Immordino-Yang offers a neurobiological account of why this may be the case. In Emotions, Learning, and the Brain: Exploring the Educational Implications of Affective Neuroscience, Immordino-Yang explains in a series of essays that the brain constructs complex emotional experiences that help us learn, socialize, and act morally by coopting the same brain regions that help us regulate our viscera and basic survival-related mechanisms. She argues that, contrary to centuries old theory that emotions interfere with rational thinking, our “emotional rudders” steer our rational actions and ability to learn. Learning occur through a complex interplay of our biological beings, psychological selves, and cultural contexts.

Immordino-Yang is uniquely positioned to offer insights from affective neuroscience for education because of her interdisciplinary background and experiences; she was a junior high school science teacher and currently is a human development and affective neuroscience researcher, an associate professor of education, psychology, and neuroscience at the University of Southern California, and the rising president of the International Mind Brain and Education Society. She encourages educators to join with her in a critical conversation about how to build bridges between an understanding of the complex process of students’ learning and feelings in real-world classroom settings and the lab-based neuroscientific research about the brain’s construction of emotion.

Immordino-Yang argues then that our ability to learn is contingent upon our ability to feel emotions. For example, individuals who suffered brain damage in a part of the frontal lobe that impacted their social and emotional behavior (but not IQ) were subsequently unable to develop intuitions in new learning situations to guide rational thought or action. Students benefit when emotions, such as interest and inspiration, are harnessed in the classroom and when educators respect students’ emotional intuitions. It is not surprising that these social emotional experiences matter so deeply for learning and creativity when we consider that our ability to feel these emotions is evolutionarily entwined with our ability to regulate our basic life-supporting physiological functioning (e.g., breathing).

In an fMRI experiment Immordino-Yang found that feeling admiration or compassion for other people activated brain networks associated with inwardly-directed thoughts rather than thoughts about the outside world. As such, she constructs a compelling argument that supporting students in developing their ability to reason complexly about the future and about social, emotional, and moral quandaries may necessitate giving students time to reflect and direct their thoughts inward.

Immordino-Yang offers a fascinating case-study about the affective skill, emotional prosody, and general functioning of two boys—Nico and Brooke—who have each had one hemisphere of their brains removed. These boys are both remarkably successful and even show a good deal of proficiency with tasks typically thought to be governed by the hemisphere that they have lost. For neurologically typical students these boys’ ability suggests the power of capitalizing on one’s unique strengths and the importance of reframing problems such that they are solvable given the skills that one possess. Immordino-Yang suggests also that these boys show that our emotional experiences affect us throughout the learning processes—even in the way we come to gather information when learning. Drawing on her work with Nico and Brooke as well as recent advances in our understanding of the brain’s mirror neuron areas, which maps both one’s own actions and the observation of another’s’ actions, Immordino-Yang argues that our interpretation of actions is culturally situated. Students must understand a teacher’s goals and intentions and develop an appropriate plan for their own actions.

Immordino-Yang concludes with a timely discussion about the way in which social and affective neuroscience can help us understand how to facilitate interactions with digital devices. The more the human-computer interaction is like an authentic social interaction—in which goals are transparent and each party has a role in shaping the exchange—the more satisfied people are likely to be with the design of the technology.

Howard Gardner aptly summarized Immordino-Yang’s strength in the foreword of this fascinating book: “Mary Helen stands out for the way in which she has drawn on the findings and perspectives of [multi-disciplinary] scholars, initiated important lines of research in these areas, brought together her work with those of other innovative scholars into original powerful syntheses, and articulated the educational implications of cutting edge work in psychology, neurology, and other strands of the cognitive sciences.”

Immordino-Yang, M.H. (2015) Emotions, Learning and the Brain: Exploring the educational implications of affective neuroscience. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.

Happiness, comfort, and mindful attentiveness to one’s surroundings seem like states we should all desire. Yet, Todd Kashdan and Robert Biswas-Diener warn that these psychological states alone are unlikely to lead to professional achievement and personal satisfaction. Rather, we should seek emotional agility and wholeness. In their 2014 book The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self—Not Just Your “Good” Self—Drives Success and Fulfillment, Kashdan and Biswas-Diener argue that our current cultural obsession with comfort and positivity and our quest for happiness has made us less resilient, more anxious, and less happy. Negative emotions (e.g., anger and guilt) and seemingly undesirable traits like Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy are underappreciated and underutilized. When we accept and integrate all parts of our personality, including the seemingly dark ones, and seek to be whole, we will be closest to living a healthy, joyful, and meaningful life. Biswas-Diener, a lauded positive psychology expert, and Kashdan, a psychology professor and senior scientist at the Center for the Advancement of Well-Being at George Mason University have written this refreshing ode to our dark side to appeal to anyone who just cannot read yet another “how to get happy” book and yet seek more personal growth and fulfillment.

Universally, people have a strong desire to experience happiness. Indeed being happy is associated with better health and well-being. However, pursuing happiness directly won’t lead to it; rather an understanding of the advantages of varied emotional experiences and emotional, social, and mental agility might. Kashdan and Biswas-Diener argue that since the 1990s Americans have developed an insatiable addiction to creature comforts. We have come to believe that comfort can be found in the external world and in material goods. This addiction has weakened our ability to use our psychological tools to ease discomfort, made us impatient, and led to the rise of helicopter parenting. Examining the way in which other cultures tolerate unpleasant feelings suggests that we too can learn greater emotional resilience when we break our addiction to comfortableness and move away from seeing happiness as a moral imperative.

Nearly every “negative” emotion can actually be quite useful in guiding our actions in positive ways. For example, anger, especially when carefully regulated, is actually associated with optimism, risk taking, skillful negotiation, and creativity. Guilt can make us behave more ethically and with the interest of the collective in mind, even when no one is watching. Anxiety helps us focus especially during dangerous times. Conversely, positive emotions can hurt us. Happy people are less attuned to details, worse at detecting lies, and more reliant on stereotypes in stressful situations. Unfortunately, our culture can at times be oppressively and disingenuously happy.

Recently, mindfulness, or gently observing one’s surrounding, has received much praise for its role in promoting happiness and meaning. Yet, Kashdan and Biswas-Diener argue that mindlessness is equally valuable and a huge part of our mental life. For example, when we tune-out and operate on “auto-pilot,” we are better at rapidly discerning how much to trust someone. When we mind-wander, we consolidate information and are more likely to remember it. Mind-wandering also facilitates combining ideas in novel ways such that we are more likely to become inspired. When we speak impulsively, without concern for saying the right thing, we actually convey our message in a more sincere, understandable, and helpful manner. Ultimately, mindful and mindless experiences each have their place and ought to be used in tandem.

Machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy compose what psychologists typically call the “dark triad.” Kashdan and Biswas-Diener rename this collection of seemingly wicked attributes the “Teddy Effect.” Teddy Roosevelt is illustrative of the way in which these “negative” personality qualities can be harnessed to great effect. We all manipulate others. Roosevelt, who was quite Machiavellian, was a master manipulator, which contributed to his success as a leader. He had a grandiose sense of himself and felt entitled, but this helped him navigate uncertain situations with confidence and think creatively about how to overcome challenges. While psychopathy is associated with callousness and lack of empathy in the common perception, psychopaths in anxiety-inducing situations are actually more likely than others to act altruistically when there is a potential to be glorified for doing so.

We should seek balance between experiences that are pleasurable in the short-term and meaningful in the long-run. We need experiences that are novel and exciting balanced with experiences that are comfortable and familiar. We should seek to understand, identify, and harness all our emotional experiences. When we are whole—good and bad—we will be best.

Kashdan, T., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2014). The Upside of Your Dark Side: Why Being Your Whole Self–Not Just Your “Good” Self–Drives Success and Fulfillment. New York: Penguin.

“Contradict yourself!” Scott Barry Kaufman, scientific director of the Imagination Institute at the University of Pennsylvania, and Carolyn Gregoire, senior writer at the Huffington Post, offer that valuable piece of advice to those seeking to be creative. Their new book Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind provides a compelling description of ten habits, skills, and personality dimensions of the creative person. This book, inspired by a widely popular article by Gregoire, is sure to resonate with any individual who feels the urge to create and will be informative for educators who seek to inspire habits of creativity in others.

The stages of creativity have traditionally been defined as progressing from a period of knowledge gathering and preparation for insight, to an incubation period in which ideas form out of conscious awareness, to illumination in which there is a creative breakthrough, and finally to verification in which the idea is tested. Kaufman and Gregoire argue that this model describes the messy creative process too cleanly. The creative process requires disciplined switching between rational and imaginative thinking, each of which is supported by distinct networks in the brain. The creative person harbors paradoxes, prefers complexity, extracts order from disorders, takes risks, perseveres, and feels passion.

Kaufman and Gregoire assert that a drive for exploration and an openness to new experiences may be the most essential force for enabling creative achievement. Dopamine, which the authors dub “the mother of human invention” is the neurotransmitter that urges us to explore. Creative people explore by enjoying artistic and imaginative hobbies outside of their domain of expertise and engaging in intellectual “cross-training”—learning ideas from across disciplines. Creativity is enhanced when we have novel experiences, whether those experiences are cross-cultural exchanges or simply driving home from work using an unusual route.

Creative people do not think of work and play as divorced; they do not pit effort and inspiration against one another. Playful adults are less stressed and more successful. For children imaginative play enhances creativity, but youth today have too little time for free, uninstructed play. Like play, experiencing passion is important. Passionate children are more likely to grow into creative adults, especially if they pursued a “harmonious passion” out of a deep curiosity and love of the activity. Inevitably, creative pursuits will present hurdles, but possessing an image of oneself as someone who will overcome any obstacle to achieve her creative dream can help one realize that dream.

Day dreaming is typically characterized as a costly distraction from important learning and instruction. Kaufman and Gregoire argue that in its positive constructive form day dreaming is valuable for planning one’s future, engaging in self-reflection, and even feeling compassion for others. They praise the uninterrupted sick-in-bed day, the long hot shower, or the leisurely walk in nature, all of which are known to have spurred creative insights. The advantage these activities confer may be in part because they are solitary. As many artists know, alone time is critical for developing emotional maturity and a sense of oneself. Indeed, it is when we are alone that the brain network that enables creativity is most likely to be active. Aloneness can help us hear more clearly our inner intuitions and gut feelings, which are valuable guides.

In the vein of the contradictory creative process, as valuable as day dreaming is, the opposite, mindfulness, facilitates creativity also. When we are mindful, we experience more of life by focusing on what we observe. Indeed mindfulness has been shown to increase activation in the brain network that supports imagination. Just a few minutes of meditation before a test can boost performance. One step we can take towards increasing mindfulness is to put our smartphones down and spend less time “grazing” on social media.

Creative people are typically more sensitive. They respond strongly to emotional, cognitive, and physical stimuli. Sensitivity allows the creative person to make herself vulnerable, which can help produce creative achievements. Sensitive individuals who are reared in harsh conditions, may experience that upbringing as even harsher than less sensitive others would. The suffering artist is a common trope; it is true that people who have experienced adversity are inclined to express themselves creatively as this can be a way of coping with and making meaning of that adversity.

Being a creative person in our society takes tremendous courage and perseverance. It means breaking from the crowd, contradicting norms, and taking risks. Often the external reward for doing so, if it ever comes, is delayed. Nonetheless, as Kaufman and Gregoire show, we all benefit when we laud creativity in all its messy, contradictory beauty.

Kaufman, S.B. & Gregoire, C. (2015). Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind. NY, NY: Perigee, Penguin Random House LLC.

To better serve more students and encourage creativity, inquiry, a diversity of skills, and the ability to live a fulfilling life, we need teachers, principals, and policy makers to charge forward with the revolutionary idea of personalized and holistic learning. Authors Sir Ken Robinson, who delivered a TED talk about creativity and schools that has been viewed more times than any other TED talk, and Lou Aronica make these claims in their new book, Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. After explaining clearly the shortcomings of our current education reform narrative, Robinson and Aronica offer a compelling vision for a new educational system and a theory of change that can be implemented either from outside of or within school systems.

Robinson opines that, since the introduction of the No Child Left Behind legislation, the federal government’s role in education has increased significantly. The current focus, however, on raising standards and accountability is misplaced because the problems can be addressed only by larger scale changes in the type of learning experience we provide to students. The increased amount of standardized testing that accountability measures require of students, for example, is exacerbating our problem of teaching to too narrow a skill set, killing creativity and entrepreneurialism, and leading to the deprofessionalization of the teaching profession.

Robinson urges that, as we think about educating students for the future, we need to face several concerning trends: the decreasing monetary value of a college degree and the rising cost of earning one; a bifurcated academic and vocational class system contributing to rising income inequality; the social and financial drain of having nearly 1.5 million students (who are disproportionately racial minorities) drop out of high school each year; and the boredom and demoralization of those who remain in school.

One way to address these issues, according to Robinson and Aronica, is by shifting our educational system from one modeled after industrial revolution era manufacturing practices to one more analogous to mass farming practices. Doing so would better serve the economic, cultural, social, and personal purposes of education. Our current model has a pyramidal structure in which only a select few students—those who have most successfully conformed to the “student mold”—make it all the way through the educational system to earn advanced degrees. To keep pace with changing economic demands and to foster a wise citizenry that can support a healthy democracy, schools need to: serve the whole student (not just the student-reader, writer, or mathematician) and cultivate his multiple intelligences; recognize the interdependence between students and their community and allow them to pursue their interests in an authentic, self-paced, and playful way; and serve all of its members regardless of their home or financial circumstance.

Robinson and Aronica offer advice for teachers and principals about how they can effect change within the educational system. The core objective of the art of teaching is to facilitate learning, and yet teachers get bogged down in so many extraneous responsibilities. The authors urge teachers to focus on building strong relationships in which they engage their students, enable their students’ curiosity and help them find their passion, maintain high expectations, and empower their students. Principals can help by giving equal weight in the curriculum and culture to subjects like art and physical education, offering opportunities for interdisciplinary learning, and letting students have a voice in decisions about curriculum content while also ensuring that the ideas presented in the curriculum are diverse and taught with depth and dynamism. The strongest leader has a vision and a plan of implementation, but also empowers all members of her community to be innovators who generate ideas for improvement. The authors provide an alliteration of the 8 skills schools should try to promote: curiosity, creativity, criticism, communication, collaboration, compassion, composure, and citizenship.

The authors note also that supporting student learning is not the responsibility solely of the school; it occurs through an interactive partnership among the school, family, and community. Parents, for example, should take a keen interest in their children’s learning while resisting the urge to become overbearing and controlling about school work.

Robinson and Aronica conclude that, even among individuals with good intentions to support educational reform, combatting entrenched thinking about standardization and conformity rather than personalization and creativity is a challenge. They urge reforms to keep students’ enthusiasm for learning at the forefront of their efforts. With a vision for the future, the belief that change is possible, an understanding of why change is good, the resources necessary to catalyze reform, and an action plan, the revolution for which this book cries is eminently possible.

Robinson, K., & Aronica, L. (2015). Creative Schools: The Grassroots Revolution That’s Transforming Education. New York, NY: Viking Penguin.