Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School (27 page)

There may have been strong evolutionary pressure for maintaining these strategies. Problem-solving was greatly favored in the unstable environment of the Serengeti. But not just any kind of problem-solving. When we came down from the trees to the savannah, we did not say to ourselves, “Good lord, give me a book and a lecture and a board of directors so I can spend 10 years learning how to survive in this place.” Our survival did not depend upon exposing ourselves to organized, pre-planned packets of information. Our survival depended upon chaotic, reactive information-gathering experiences. That’s why one of our best attributes is the ability to learn through a series of increasingly self-corrected ideas. “The red snake with the white stripe bit me yesterday, and I almost died,” is an observation we readily made. Then we went a step further: “I hypothesize that if I encounter the same snake, the same thing will happen!” It is a scientific learning style we have explored literally for millions of years. It is not possible to outgrow it in the whisper-short seven to eight decades we have on the planet.

Researchers have shown that some regions of the adult brain stay as malleable as a baby’s brain, so we can grow new connections, strengthen existing connections, and even create new neurons, allowing all of us to be lifelong learners. We didn’t always think that. Until five or six years ago, the prevailing notion was that we were born with all of the brain cells we were ever going to get, and they steadily eroded in a depressing journey through adulthood to old age. We do lose synaptic connections with age (some estimates of neural loss alone are close to 30,000 neurons per day). But the adult brain also continues creating neurons within the regions normally involved in learning. These new neurons show the same plasticity as those of newborns. The adult brain throughout life retains the ability to change its structure and function in response to experience.

Can we continue to explore our world as we age? I can almost hear Krebs and Fischer saying, “Well, duh. Next question.” Of course, we don’t always find ourselves in environments that encourage such curiosity as we grow older. I’ve been fortunate to have a career that allowed me the freedom to pick my own projects. Before that, I was lucky to have my mother.

from dinosaurs to atheism

I remember, when I was 3 years old, obtaining a sudden interest in dinosaurs. I had no idea that my mother had been waiting for it. That very day, the house began its transformation into all things Jurassic. And Triassic. And Cretaceous. Pictures of dinosaurs would go up on the wall. I would begin to find books about dinosaurs strewn on the floor and sofas. Mom would even couch dinner as “dinosaur food,” and we would spend hours laughing our heads off trying to make dinosaur sounds.

And then, suddenly, I would lose interest in dinosaurs, because some friend at school acquired an interest in spaceships and rockets and galaxies. Extraordinarily, my mother was waiting. Just as quickly as my whim changed, the house would begin its transformation from big dinosaurs to Big Bang.

The reptilian posters came down, and in their places, planets would begin to hang from the walls. I would find little pictures of satellites in the bathroom. Mom even got “space coins” from bags of potato chips, and I eventually gathered all of them into a collector’s book.

This happened over and over again in my childhood. I got an interest in Greek mythology, and she transformed the house into Mount Olympus. My interests careened into geometry, and the house became Euclidean, then cubist. Rocks, airplanes. By the time I was 8 or 9, I was creating my own house transformations.

One day, around age 14, I declared to my mother that I was an atheist. She was a devoutly religious person, and I thought this announcement would crush her. Instead, she said something like “That’s nice, dear,” as if I had just declared I no longer liked nachos. The next day, she sat me down by the kitchen table, a wrapped package in her lap. She said calmly, “So, I hear you are now an atheist. Is that true?” I nodded yes, and she smiled. She placed the package in my hands. “The man’s name is Friedrich Nietzsche, and the book is called
Twilight of the Idols
,” she said. “If you are going to be an atheist, be the best one out there.
Bon appetit
!”

I was stunned. But I understood a powerful message: Curiosity itself was the most important thing. And what I was interested in
mattered
. I have never been able to turn off this fire hose of curiosity.

Most developmental psychologists believe that a child’s need to know is a drive as pure as a diamond and as distracting as chocolate. Even though there is no agreed-upon definition of curiosity in cognitive neuroscience, I couldn’t agree more. I firmly believe that if children are allowed to remain curious, they will continue to deploy their natural tendencies to discover and explore until they are 101. This is something my mother seemed to know instinctively.

For little ones, discovery brings joy. Like an addictive drug, exploration creates the need for more discovery so that more joy can be experienced. It is a straight-up reward system that, if allowed to flourish, will continue into the school years. As children get older, they find that learning not only brings them joy, but it also brings them mastery. Expertise in specific subjects breeds the confidence to take intellectual risks. If these kids don’t end up in the emergency room, they may end up with a Nobel Prize.

I believe it is possible to break this cycle, anesthetizing both the process and the child. By first grade, for example, children learn that education means an A. They begin to understand that they can acquire knowledge not because it is interesting, but because it can get them something. Fascination can become secondary to “What do I need to know to get the grade?” But I also believe the curiosity instinct is so powerful that some people overcome society’s message to go to sleep intellectually, and they flourish anyway.

My grandfather was one of those people. He was born in 1892 and lived to be 101 years old. He spoke eight languages, went through several fortunes, and remained in his own house (mowing his own lawn) until the age of 100, lively as a firecracker to the end. At a party celebrating his centenary, he took me aside. “You know,
Juanito
,” he said, clearing his throat, “sixty-six years separate the Wright brothers’ airplane from Neil Armstrong and the moon.” He shook his head, marveling. “I was born with the horse and buggy. I die with the space shuttle. What kind of thing is that?” His eyes twinkled. “I live the good life!”

He died a year later.

I think of him a lot when I think of exploration. I think of my mother and her magically transforming rooms. I think of my youngest son experimenting with his tongue, and my oldest son’s overwhelming urge to take on a bee sting. And I think that we must do a better job of encouraging lifelong curiosity, in our workplaces and especially in our schools.

ideas

Google takes to heart the power of exploration. For 20 percent of their time, employees may go where their mind asks them to go. The proof is in the bottom line: Fully 50 percent of new products, including Gmail and Google News, came from “20 percent time.” How would we implement such freedom in classrooms? Some people have tried to harness our natural exploratory tendencies by using “problem-based” or “discovery-based” learning models. These models have both strong advocates and strong detractors. Most agree that these debates are missing hard-nosed empirical results that show the long-term effects of these styles. I would go further and argue that what is missing is a real live laboratory in which brain scientists and education scientists could carry out investigations on a routine, long-term basis. I would like to describe the place for such research.

Analyze the success of medical schools

In the early 20
^th
century, John Dewey created a laboratory school at the University of Chicago, in part because he thought that learning should be tested in real-world situations. Though such schools fell out of favor in the mid-’60s, perhaps with good reason, a 21
^st
-century version might look to one of the most successful educational models out there, a medical school. As William H. Payne, a colleague of Dewey’s, said, “Psychology, in fact, stands in the same relation to teaching that anatomy does to medicine.” It still does, though I would replace “psychology” with “brain science.”

The best medical-school model has three components: a teaching hospital; faculty who work in the field as well as teach; and research laboratories. It is a surprisingly successful way of treating people. It is also a surprisingly successful way to transfer complex information from one brain to another. I often have watched bright non-science majors become accepted into a medical-school program and then, within four years, transform into gifted healers and terrific scientists.

Why do you get good health and good training at the same time? I am convinced that it is the structure.

1) Consistent exposure to the real world

By combining traditional book-learning and a teaching hospital, the student gets an unobstructed view of what they are getting into
while they are going through it.
Most medical students stroll through a working hospital on their way to class every day of their training lives. They confront on a regular basis the very reason they chose medical school in the first place. By the third year, most students are in class only half of the time. They spend the other half learning on the job in the teaching hospital or a clinic associated with it. Residencies come next for more real-world experience.

2) Consistent exposure to people who operate in the real world

Medical students are taught by people who actually do what they teach as their “day job.” In more recent years, these people are not only practicing medical doctors, but practicing medical researchers involved in cutting-edge projects with powerful clinical implications. Medical students are asked to participate.

3) Consistent exposure to practical research programs

Here’s a typical experience: The clinician-professor is lecturing in a traditional classroom setting and brings in a patient to illustrate some of his points. The professor announces: “Here is the patient. Notice that he has disease X with symptoms A, B, C, and D.” He then begins to lecture on the biology of disease X. While everybody is taking notes, a smart medical student raises her hand and says, “I see symptoms A, B, and C. What about symptoms E, F, and G?” The professor looks a bit chagrined (or excited) and responds, “We don’t know about symptoms E, F, and G.” You can hear a pin drop at those moments, and the impatient voices whispering inside the students’ heads are almost audible: “Well, let’s find out!” These are the opening words of most of the great research ideas in human medicine.

That’s true exploratory magic. By simple juxtaposition of real-world needs with traditional book learning, a research program is born. The tendency is so strong that you have to deliberately cut off the discussions to keep the ideas from forming. Most programs have chosen not to cut off such discussions. As a result, most American medical schools possess powerful research wings.

This model gives students a rich view of the field of medicine. Not only are they taught by people who are involved in the day-to-day aspect of healing, but they are exposed to people who are trained to think about the future of medicine. These scientists represent the brightest minds in the country. And this model provides the single most natural harness for the exploratory instincts of the human species I have ever encountered.

Create a college of education that studies the brain

I envision a college of education where the program is all about brain development. It is divided into three parts, like a medical school. It has traditional classrooms. It is a community school staffed and run by three types of faculty: traditional education faculty, certified teachers who teach the little ones, and brain scientists. This last group teaches in research labs devoted to a single purpose: investigating how the human brain learns in teaching environments, then actively testing hypothesized ideas in real-world classroom situations.

Students would get a Bachelor of
Science
in education. The future educator is infused with deep knowledge about how the human brain acquires information. Topics range from structural brain anatomy to psychology, from molecular biology to the latest in cognitive neuroscience. But the coursework is only the beginning. After their first year of study, students would start actively participating in the life of the onsite school.

One semester might be devoted to understanding the development of the teenage brain. The internship would involve assisting in a junior high and high school. Another semester might be devoted to behavioral pathologies such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and students would assist in a special-education class. Still another course would be devoted to the effects of family life on human learning, with students attending parent association meetings and observing parent-teacher conferences. In this two-way interaction, the insights of researchers and the insights of practitioners have a chance to marinate in a single ongoing intellectual environment. The model creates a vigorous, use
-
driven strategic research-and-development program. The practitioner is elevated to the role of colleague, an active partner in helping shape the research direction, even as the researcher helps the practitioner form the specifics of the effort.