Ran·dom: /ˈrandəm / adjective / made, done, or
chosen without conscious decision (e.g. a random
sample of 100 households)

Thought: / THôt / noun / an idea or opinion produced by thinking
(e.g. Maggie had a sudden thought)

Ox·y·mo·ron: /ˌäksəˈmôrˌän / noun /a figure of speech in which apparently
contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. random thoughts)

One of my favorite columnists in our daily paper, The Baltimore Sun, is Dan Rodricks.  He is among the few local columnists left on the paper, and it is clear from his writing that he and I share some similar values, see our adopted hometown through a similar lens, and are committed to making at least our small corner of the world a little better place to live.  I mention Dan because every now and then, he writes a column that should probably be titled “nobody asked me, but…” in which he tackles a mishmash of topics in the same column, ranging from the trivial to the essential, and he begins each paragraph in those columns with “nobody asked me, but….”

Well, in a similar vein, this posting has no central theme, no target, no motive.  It simply is a collection of thoughts I’ve been having recently about a variety of topics in education, not least of which has been what my regular readers will know are my intense feelings toward technology in general.  We have a new policy at my school this year to collect all cell phones in a bin at the start of class, and because of my background in neuroscience, I was recently asked by my administration to demonstrate during a faculty meeting the practical value for doing so. I had my colleagues perform the same experiment I now do with my anatomy class, and the results were equally dramatic with my adult audience as they are with my students.  When asked by our Dean of Students what I thought our school policy should be, I looked him directly in the eye and replied, “I would make it illegal for anyone under the age of 21 to possess a cell phone.”

And apparently, I am not alone.  A recent study in the United Kingdom looked at the impact of removing cell phones for the entire school day, and the results were dramatic and statistically significant.  Both mental and physical health as well as grades improved across the board, and now teachers in the UK are apparently getting ready to ban cell phone use of any kind from the time students enter the building to the moment they exit at day’s end.  As for any parent pushback about needing access to their child, administrations have basically replied that parents successfully called school offices for nearly a century to contact their child; they can do so again.

However, one element of digital technology that is clearly not going back into Pandora’s Box is AI, and I mention this for the second time in two postings only because of a conversation this past week with our computer science department chair.  Ever since the arrival of ChatGPT last fall, he has spoken contemptuously about any alarmism or concerns about the impact of AI on education and society, basically arguing that all the hype is just that and that like any “latest thing” in technology, this one, too, would plateau.  But after returning from a conference earlier this month on AI and education, he has now joined the concerned—especially when it comes to education—and when I joked with him about Skynet, he did not laugh.  Instead, he deliberately looked back at me with an expression of caution creasing his eyes, and I actually fought the urge to gulp:  if he’s worried, the rest of us should be [expletive deleted] terrified!

Of course, there are those who not only embrace the changes digital technologies have wrought on our world; they actively promote and extol them.  Apparently, I missed the news two months ago that Elon Musk’s Neuralink company had won FDA approval for implanting a new type of computer chip directly into human brains and is now actively recruiting human volunteers to test the efficacy and safety of this surgical procedure. The chip is intended to help those with neurological damage recover their function through a direct brain-robot interface. But the man who brought us self-driving Teslas may soon have us driving our own automobiles hands-free, and once we have brains that can directly guide our cars, we have brains that can communicate directly with anything electronic.  Why waste time texting you, when I can “thinking” you instead? Or more to the point for what I do for a living, why learn anything when you can download it directly to your brain?

Maybe, though, that’s what all the education pundits mean when they keep talking about how we need to reimagine and re-envision our methods for teaching the digital natives now arriving in our classrooms.  I recently read one of the latest arguments in this discussion, and while I strongly affirm that the topic is a relevant one—authentically engaged educators already think all the time about how to adapt their teaching and learning to new populations of children—what I always find missing from the proselytizing for this kind of educational change is any basic understanding of how the brain actually works.  You can argue all you want about the need to teach creativity and critical thinking over teaching content to prepare students for the careers of the future.  But the simple biological limitation of that pesky brain of ours is that it can only think creatively and critically about the content that’s already in its long-term memory, and the only way to get the content into LTM is through repetitious exposure until the brain’s gatekeeper, the hippocampus, deems said content worthy of permanent storage.

Unless, of course, you can have a chip embedded in it with access to the Internet of Everything.  So perhaps I’m not preparing my students for the careers of the future after all.

Oh well, at least the autumn colors have been especially brilliant here in Maryland this year.  I do not know if it is the result of our below normal rainfall this growing season (parts of the state are in an actual drought) or if it was the smoke-filled skies from the Canadian fires during leaf bolting.  But the yellows, reds, and oranges have been more vibrant than any I can recall from recent memory, and it has made my walk to and from school each day an aesthetic experience that has set a positive tone for all the hours in between.  My students are at least getting a teacher who is feeling mentally fit and able to focus on them—even if he’s not preparing them for a world where they can argue directly with the AI that’s in their heads over who is really in charge.

At least it may be a world where anti-progressive groups like Moms for Liberty have been marginalized once more.  I was excited to learn that through grassroot campaigns around the country, liberal and progressive citizens in their communities have started to take back their school boards and other local offices from the right-wing, neofascists who have been trying to impose their white-privileged, heteronormative beliefs on the children of our society.  Apparently, there are still compassionate, thoughtful, and reality-based individuals in this country who support their children knowing that slavery was bad, that gender can be fluid, and that books open the mind. And apparently there are still enough of them to make a difference for positive change.

But that brings me to what I think was the impetus to write all these random(?) thoughts down for sharing.  George Lakey (who I had never heard of but whom is apparently quite the renowned Quaker activist, with a recent documentary about him) came and gave a talk this past week at my school, and during it, he shared an insight he had learned from his research as a sociologist about periods of intense political polarization.  In his work to identify the times when societies had successfully produced the most liberal change and progress, he kept finding what felt like a paradox to him.  The 1930s and the New Deal? A period of hyper polarization.  The 1960s and the Great Society? A period of hyper polarization.  The rise of the Scandinavian Socialist Democracies? A period of hyper polarization.  Again and again, he found that when societies made the most progress toward liberal values and rights was always a time of intense and pervasive social and political polarization, with entire constituencies of a society practically at each other’s throats.

He then went on to share a story of a time he had visited a friend who was an artist who worked with metal.  He told us how struck he had been by the delicate twists and curves and almost airy quality of his friend’s work and that he had inquired as to how rigid metal could be made to take such intricate shapes.  He shared that his friend had taken him into his studio and showed him the forge where he heated and bent the metal to his will.  And it was seeing that forge, George Lakey told us, that gave him the metaphor for what he was seeing in his research.  Times of hyper polarization in a society are like a forge, he suggested, softening the existing social structures in ways that allow for the possibility of dramatic social change, and he contended that understanding a period of hyper polarization in a society in this fashion was far more productive than simply assuming that such polarization is an inherently harmful evil, merely to be done away with.

He did point out that forges are by definition neutral.  They are simply the force that makes change possible and that 1930s Germany went in a very different direction than 1930s America in response to Germany’s hyper polarization.  But his message to our students was to encourage them to think of our own current era of widespread and deeply divisive political and social polarization as the opportunity to achieve a more just, equitable, and inclusive society—the chance to create the kind of world they want to inhabit and share with others.

A forge.  I find it a powerful metaphor for understanding times of change, and it got me to thinking about how the brain, too, can be thought of as a kind of forge, its neural plasticity enabling it to take our experience of change and bend the mind’s cognitive structures into new meaning about the world.  Furthermore, just as a real forge is neutral, so too can the brain generate both what is positive and constructive and what is negative and destructive in response to any change we experience—making the kinds of educational experiences we provide to children all the more critical and significant.

It’s why I think my concept of authentic engagement explored in this on-line project is so important and why I keep cranking out these additional essays examining education in our society.  How we help children forge their minds matters because it is not hyperbole to state that the fate of our collective future depends on it.  And as it always has, the clock on that future is ticking.

Coda

Since I first started writing this post, we have experienced a massive storm front come through central Maryland, and on my morning run today, it was impossible not to notice all the barren trees, stripped of their leaves and the damp pavement coated with their remains. All that beauty I spoke of earlier gone in a twelve-hour period. 

Of course, it will come back with the arrival of spring, and winter has its own beauty as well.  But the experience reminded me of how rapidly in a period of dramatic change (such as autumn) that a single powerful storm can utterly transform the entire world.  We live in a time of such storms in our social realm, and I cannot help but wonder what the “trees” are going to look like on the other side. 

As singer Don Henley once wrote, “in a New York Minute, everything can change.”

References

Alphonso, G. (Nov. 2, 2023) Educating Digital Natives: Reshaping Educational Models for Future Generations.  Forbes https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbestechcouncil/2023/11/02/educating-digital-natives-reshaping-educational-models-for-future-generations/?sh=3c3bb6832e47.

Mahnken, K. (Oct. 11, 2023) Banning Smartphones at Schools: Research Points to Higher Test Scores, Less Anxiety, More Exercise. https://www.the74million.org/article/banning-smartphones-at-schools-research-points-to-higher-test-scores-less-anxiety-more-exercise/.

Neuralink.com (Sept. 19, 2023) Neuralink’s First-in-Human Clinical Trial is Open for Recruitment.  Neuralink Blog.  https://neuralink.com/blog/first-clinical-trial-open-for-recruitment/.

NPR (Nov. 18, 2023) The Waning Influence of Moms for Liberty.  Weekend Edition. https://www.npr.org/2023/11/18/1213967448/the-waning-influence-of-moms-for-liberty.

But Mary treasured up all these things
and pondered them in her heart.
—Luke 2:19

Pon·der: / pändər / verb / to think deeply (about); deliberate

Anyone who has known me even briefly notices that I am a voracious thinker. And if you’ve been following this project of mine, you know just how voracious.  I think about everything. If it enters my neural networks, it will get shifted for unseen (and sometimes unusual) patterns, examined, analyzing the what, where, when, how, and why of the intellectual landscape, thinking, ever thinking.  In a word, I ponder.  I ponder a lot!

What’s more, like my pal, Mike Montaigne, no topic is unworthy of attention.  That man pondered everything from farts and fear to death and the human condition, and then he wrote about it.  He essayed.  In fact, he invented the form, and every high schooler ever since who has had to master the 5-paragraph essay has—at one time or another—cursed his name, even if they didn’t know it.  Even those of us who developed a passion for authorship and the written word have cursed him because we didn’t always have control over what we had been assigned to essay about!

Well, I’ve been at it again, pondering, and what I have been pondering about are two things that at first glance may appear to have nothing to do with one another:  Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Thwaites Glacier.  But if you bear with me, I will essay and reveal the hidden connection, including the unusual ethical conundrum it has evoked for me as an educator. 

The topic of AI, of course, is nothing new to my pondering.  Regular readers know that I have discussed everything from its potential impact on education to its danger to the very concept of truth.  In fact, my very first post for the LoC project was about catechism and AI as a tool for learning.  But what’s got me pondering AI yet again is a recent article in the September 2023 issue of Scientific American about how AI models are demonstrating knowledge about things no one has told them. They are effectively learning on their own, and the very people who invented them are—and I quote—“baffled as to why.”  In fact, “a growing number of tests suggest these AI systems develop internal models of the real world, much as our own brain does” and “that GPT and other AI systems perform tasks they were not trained to do, giving them ‘emergent abilities’ ” (such as the ability to execute code they have written for themselves independent of the original human who created them!).  Indeed, “researchers are finding that these systems seem to achieve genuine understanding of what they have learned.”

So as theologian, Nadia Bolz-Weber put it (after discovering her own books were being used to train an AI), “have we created WALL-E or HAL? Likely both. Why? Because we are both.”  The bottom line is that what it means to be human is complex, and therefore, anything we create that resembles being human will also be complex.  But that’s why MIT physicist, Max Tegmark, has authored an open letter (which I encourage everyone to read) calling for a six month moratorium on all AI instruction so that we might decide how best to regulate this exploding field before we risk Skynet (of The Terminator movies franchise fame) from becoming a reality and generating actual explosions.  However, Tegmark is extremely pessimistic, sharing with The Guardian that he believes the economic competition is too intense for tech executives to pause AI development to consider their potential risks.  As the title to the piece suggests, he thinks we are in a “race to the bottom” and that this djinn is not going back into its bottle. 

And that’s what brings me to the Thwaites Glacier: because a similar “race to the bottom” is happening there, courtesy of climate change.

For those unfamiliar with the Thwaites Glacier, it is located in Antarctica (see map), and like much of the large ice bodies on this planet, it is actively melting faster than originally anticipated due to rising atmospheric temperatures. 

However, what makes this particular large chunk of ice more significant—and has earned it the nickname, the “Doomsday Glacier”—is that its melting is increasing exponentially and threatens a potential full collapse in the very near future.  If that happens, the most immediate consequence is a 65 cm rise in sea levels (a little over two feet) taking place within a matter of years, not decades—Goodbye Miami Beach and nearly every island nation in the world—and even more terrifying is that the Thwaites Glacier presently holds back the West Antarctic Ice Sheet from entering the sea. With Thwaites gone, an ice mass roughly the size of India will melt into the water over the next century, resulting in a sea level rise of 3.3 meters (nearly 11 feet)—Goodbye Florida!

By now, how AI and the Thwaites Glacier managed to merge in my pondering may be becoming clearer.  Both situations currently represent ways in which humans seem to be actively working to crash and burn as a species, and our present mishandling of both poses a real existential threat to our well-being. But what finally linked them in my mind was when I read the review of Elizabeth Rush’s The Quickening.  My mother had brought this book to my original attention (full disclosure: I have not seen a page yet), and she had shared how it is the story of the most recent research expedition to Thwaites (the source of the sea-level data I’ve been sharing—don’t read the full report if you want to sleep in the near future). Well, when I read the review, what interested me most was learning that much of the narrative of the book involves Rush’s exploration of her desire and uncertainty about potentially becoming a parent.  Specifically (as is true of many couples these days), she spends time pondering whether it is ethical to bring a child into a world so threatened by the current “race to the bottom” documented by the expedition–and which, I would argue, is happening in both our social and ecological worlds.

Bringing me to what triggered my unexpected conundrum: given my own professional relationship with children, it occurred to me to wonder whether what I do for a living is ethical anymore.  Is it ethical to work to prepare children for a future that simply may not be? I want to say the answer is “yes,” and having had at least four of my former students that I know of die already, I am aware that all my work and that of every other educator can be cut short by tragedy.  But what if all that we are looking at is nothing but tragedy?

I’m too much the historian not to know that societies and civilizations come and go—with a variety of different size and scale dark-ages in between—and I’m too much the biologist not to know that life has managed to persevere through every mass extinction that has ever happened on this planet (and that the one we are currently causing is nowhere near the scale of the Permian event that wiped out 90% of all life at the time).  Hence, I know that some manner of complex life—and maybe even society—will make it through the evolutionary bottleneck in which we find ourselves.

But that still leaves me wondering whether what I do for a living is ethical.  Or more precisely, it leaves me wondering whether how I am preparing children to live in their futures is ethical.  Should I be preparing them to correct their elders’ errors, or should I be preparing them to be a remnant people in an apocalyptic landscape? Should I be preparing them to fix a broken world, or should I be preparing them simply to survive in the brokenness? It’s like the cartoon I used in my recent post:  should I be teaching them to program space robots or how to sharpen a stick with a stone? Which teaching will enable them not simply to survive but survive with some degree of positive meaning in their lives?

I wish I had a clear and obvious answer, but I don’t.  I suspect it is probably a “both/and” rather than an “either/or” situation. But for now, all I can do is keep muddling through and, like Luke’s Mary—who was dealing with all manner of craziness in that barn that night!—keep pondering these things in my heart.  Because it is only out of the heart, out of the love I have for my students, that I know that I can find a resolution to my conundrum that is my best for them.  As Luther said at the conclusion of his ecclesiastical trial, “Hier bleib ich; ich kann nicht anders.” Here I stand; I can do no other.

References

Bolz-Weber, N. (Oct. 22, 2023) My Robot, My Self: On AI, Religion, and “What It is to be Human.”  The Corners.  https://thecorners.substack.com/p/my-robot-my-self?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=2y0by&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email.

Kolbert, E. (2014) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.  New York: Picador.

Milmo, D. (Sept. 21, 2023) AI-focused Tech Firms Locked in ‘Race to the Bottom’ Warns MIT Professor.  The Guardian.  https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/sep/21/ai-focused-tech-firms-locked-race-bottom-warns-mit-professor-max-tegmark.

Musser, G. (Sept. 2023) An AI Mystery.  Scientific American.  Pp. 58-61.

Rush, E. (2023) The Quickening: Creation and Community at the Ends of the Earth.  Minneapolis: Milkweed.

Who looks outside, dreams.
Who looks inside, awakens.
—C. J. Jung

For those of you just joining this particular conversation, I have recently been exploring the general nature of adolescence and the evolution of the teenage brain, with the expressed aim of investigating how adult stakeholders might help the children in their lives successfully navigate this tumultuous and sometimes dangerous maturation period.  We have finally reached the point where we are now ready to discuss that “how,” and it turns out that the key to managing a Pliocene brain in the modern world is a set of processes the brain performs known collectively as “Executive Function.”  These processes include response inhibition, cognitive flexibility, attending (also known as working or short-term memory), and emotional regulation. They occur almost exclusively in the prefrontal cortex and its neural pathways to the amygdala and hippocampus—which, you may recall, are the parts of the brain basically in combat during the teenage years with the then more mature limbic system; indeed, elements of this combat actually mature the prefrontal cortex and its eventual regulation of the limbic centers.

But in the in-between, how can teachers, parents, and other caregivers aid the development and maturation of executive function in their adolescent charges? Interestingly enough, there is a “low-hanging fruit” for starters that is so ridiculously easy that any of us could do it tomorrow:  increase a teenager’s daily amount of exercise.  Simply requiring adolescents to get off the couch and move improves their prefrontal cortices’ wiring and function, and a huge study in the United Kingdom has shown that for every 15 minutes of additional daily exercise, student academic performance—a reliable measure of executive function—improved the equivalent of a full quarter of a grade.  In fact, regular daily exercise can increase the size of the hippocampus (the seat of working memory) by as much as 2%, and thus “the difference between a B and an A depended on little more than teens closing books in a class and opening lungs in a gym” (p. 137)[i]. 

Furthermore, when daily training in mindfulness is added to all this exercise, all kinds of functional connectivity in the brain starts to change, all promoting executive function.  “We know, for example, that the amygdalae, those almond-shaped structures that supervise experiences like fear, start to lose weight (they actually shrink) [which] in turn weakens many of their functional connections to other regions of the brain” (p.192).  In addition, the prefrontal cortex gets thicker (i.e. grows more synaptic connections) while simultaneously uncoupling from the part of the brain responsible for the subjective elements of feeling pain.  Thus:

Taken together, a remarkably detailed neurological picture is emerging about why mindfulness can be so powerful.  It’s changing the way the brain looks at fear and pain while at the same time strengthening regions associated with controlling them.  The neural substrates that mediate executive function are being rewired, all because you’ve decided to concentrate on the lovely contours of your earlobe (p. 193).

Therefore, what seems to be the bottom line for promoting adolescent executive function is to buy them a good pair of sneakers and a meditation app. But of course, the situation cannot be dealt with quite that blithely, and I write that oversimplification partly in jest and partly because another way we actually do—or do not—help the teenagers in our lives mature their executive functioning is much more challenging:  we must examine what kind of relationships we are having with them. 

And we must do so because as a social species, our very survival has depended on having positive relationships with other humans.  Thus, it should come as no surprise that the formation of executive function in the brain—as well as its overall strength!—directly depends on the quality of our caregiver interactions with children.  Indeed, courtesy of the pandemic, we have already seen the dark side of this fact from the negative impact on student learning of the numerous school closures, and in fact, “modern cognitive neuroscience reveals that subtracting this critical interpersonal ingredient is done at the students’ peril” (p. 84).  Furthermore, “since children’s survival is dependent for years on adult caregivers, it’s in the child’s interest to constantly monitor how the adults are doing” (p. 84), and that is why divorce can have such a negative impact on the development of executive function.

What is needed, then, is for caregivers to form the kind of healthy and functionally effective relationships with their teenagers that famed developmental psychologist Diana Baumrind calls “authoritative parenting” and which educator Zaretta Hammond calls “warm demanders.”  And note that the term is “authoritative,” not “authoritarian.”  Because what distinguishes the former from the latter—a parenting style that sadly does exist—is that authoritative parents balance a demandingness where behavioral rules are maintained (even at the risk of angering their children) with a consistent engagement in verbal consultation that explains the “why” of any particular rule, along with an openness to negotiating more autonomy as a child matures. 

Basically, authoritative parents:

Preserve the best elements of parental responsiveness, remaining accessible to their children always, and listening with warmth and acceptance (different than approval).  They seem to realize that, regardless of teen reactions, what they do as parents absolutely matters.  And what matters most is that the kids know they feel loved—and safe.  They are regularly willing to risk their relationship with their teens in the service of a higher behavioral goal.  It’s the only Darwinian thing to do, after all (p. 97).

Similarly, Hammond’s “warm demanders” are teachers with clearly articulated high expectations—both behavioral and academic—who maintain what I have described and explored elsewhere as appropriately intimate rapport and who “possess one of the hardest perspectives for adults to achieve with teens:  a growing respect for their autonomy” (p. 110).  Warm demanders ask much of their students, achieving just the right balance of stretch with support (see Chapter 3), and the decades of research data about such classrooms is clear: impulse control and attentional states (two critical features of executive function) improve and student IQs actually go up.  However, the research is equally clear that a teacher’s negative view of their students can flip that same IQ “off” like a light switch, and so whose classroom a teenager inhabits has enormous implications for that child’s brain’s capacity for executive functioning and the corresponding academic success.

Which brings me to the intersection between parents and teachers.  Part of being a warm demander as an educator is maintaining a safe learning environment.  Yet safety starts at home, and therefore the “who” who arrives in my classroom depends entirely on the parent delivering their child to me.  Wounded children are all too common in our society, and the consequent impact on their executive functioning places an enormous impact on their learning.  The reason why is because without social-emotional well-being, the adolescent brain struggles to learn empathy, and empathy, it turns out:

[Forces] students to think critically about “other perspectives.”  This “otherness” translates not just to friendships outside one’s own experience, but to concepts outside one’s own experience.  It promotes cognitive flexibility, which in turn leads to more elaborately conceived—and often quite unique—problem-solving abilities.  Reasoning, it seems, involves taking other perspectives (pp. 161-162).

Thus, without a capacity for empathy, teenagers risk failing to develop and mature one of executive functioning’s most critical processes: the ability to be cognitively flexible.  Yet, empathy is something the research of Sherry Turkle and others suggests our younger generations are losing, and therefore, the final way I will share that we could all be helping our adolescents grow their executive functioning to thrive as adults is to develop social-emotional learning programs in our schools.  Doing so is a way that the educator side of the equation could be addressing this empathy issue, and school stakeholders providing the necessary funding for such programs is the other.  Together, we can help every teen become the best adult version of themselves.

We just have to remember that we must be the best adult version of ourselves in order to do it.

References

Baumrind, D. (1995) Child Maltreatment and Optimal Caregiving in Social Contexts.  Oxford: Routledge.

Baumrind, D., et al. (2008) Parenting for Character: Five Experts, Five Practices.  Arlington, VA: ASCD Books.

Hammond, Z. (2014) Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students.  Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press.

Medina, J. (2018) Attack of the Teenage Brain. Arlington, VA: ASCD Books.

Rosenthal, R. & Jacobson, L. (2003) Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectation and Pupils’ Intellectual Development.  Bethel, CT: Crown House.

Turkle, S. (2017) Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other, 3^rd Edition.  New York:  Basic Books.

---

[i] All quoted material for this essay is from Medina’s Attack of the Teenage Brain.

The brain is not interested in learning.
Period.
What the brain is interested in is surviving.
—John Medina

Anyone familiar with my concept of “authentic engagement” knows that I believe one of the pillars of effective teaching (and parenting) is a thorough working knowledge of the neuroscience about the brain, and that absolutely foundational to this knowledge is the reality that the structures and functions of the human brain did NOT evolve in the environment we now currently inhabit as a species.  Indeed, it is to the peril of educator and parent alike to forget that our brains evolved under very different circumstances—the Pliocene of East Africa—and that we, correspondingly, have a brain totally fine-tuned for survival in that world, not this one.

Moreover, nowhere is this peril greater than when working with the teenage brain. As I mentioned in my previous essay, adolescents today are fundamentally no different than adolescents at the start of my career (or millennia ago for that matter), and that is why one of my critical tasks as their teacher has been to help my students navigate the massive upheaval going on inside their heads and why I suggested that there are ways to address this need successfully in our always changing world.  However, I want to argue that first we must understand what’s actually going on in the adolescent brain and why it evolved to generate the kinds of behaviors we typically associate with teenagers. Only then, I think, can we figure out how to help a teenage Pliocene brain traverse the modern challenges of our digital age.

So let’s get started.

To begin with, we require a short primer on brain development in general.  First, from conception to roughly age five, you grow as many possible neurons in as many regions of your brain as your environment demands (which is why Olympic level athletes nearly always start at this age—the brain grows lots of extra motor cortex neurons in response to the demand—and it is also why Head Start programs are so important to future academic success).  Then, between roughly age 5 and the onset of puberty, all those new neurons reach out and grow billions of extra synaptic connections, again as your environment demands (which is why learning to read by 3^rd grade is so critical).

Next comes puberty and adolescence when some time (usually!) between the ages of 10 and 13, your hypothalamus starts cranking out a hormone called kisspeptin that, to borrow a phrase, “make all hell done break loose!” It initiates the massive upheaval of changes that transform a child into a reproducible adult, and no where does this upheaval have greater impact than in the brain.  Massive increases in myelination speed up neural communication rates 3,000-fold while all those earlier extra synaptic links are careful and meticulously pruned—all, as always, dependent on what the environment is telling the brain is important (and which is the neurological justification for a liberal arts education). Indeed, at no other time in our lives does the brain undergo such enormous physical change, continuing well into our early 20s.

Adding fuel to all this fire is the fact that:

Although these changes happen in all teenage brains, there’s no wholesale neurological goose-stepping.  Teens go through this at their own individual paces, as diverse as political points of view.  To make matters worse, even specific regions inside a single brain go through maturation process on differing schedules. (Medina, p. 63 original emphasis)

The limbic system, for example, reaches its adult form around age 15, with a 7% larger amygdala with all its pesky primary emotions (fear, want, anger, & lust); while meanwhile, the prefrontal cortex with its complex judgment and decision making centers doesn’t’ reach its adult form until as late as age 25.  Hence, “teen-brain reward centers are more active than children’s or adult’s, making them experience rewards (and other feelings) more intensely than any other time.  When they yell out, ‘I’ve never been so stoked in my life!’ they may be literally telling the truth” (Medina, p. 69).

What, then, are the implications for our understanding of teenage behavior? First, on the mundane level, it explains their incessant appetites for food and why they are always sleepy when they don’t get the 9 or more hours of snoozing they actually need each night.  The mature brain is already one of the great energy drains on the body’s resources, accounting for only 2% of our total mass but consuming at least 20% of our caloric intake, and here we have brains under construction demands that makes building the Burj Khalifa tower in Dubai look like an assembly of matchsticks.

Second, on the less mundane, the disconnect in maturation rates between limbic and prefrontal cortex accounts for the general swings in mood and frequent risk-taking teenagers experience.  A less-than-fully regulated amygdala and other limbic structures are going to have the potential to generate behaviors resembling those of the “lizard brain” for which this region is often analogized, and while it is actually the struggle to control this part of the brain that directly causes part of the prefrontal cortex maturation, some limbic decisions have resulted in their owner paying a heavy cost…sometimes, regretably, even death.

Third, and finally—and most definitely NOT mundane—the price of all this colossal change taking place in the teenage brain is that adolescence is the peak onset of mental health disorders, with 50% of diagnosable illness occurring by age 14 and 75% by age 24.  The simple reality is that with so many “moving parts,” there are so many more potentail ways to have things break, just as they would with an actual mechanical machine, and that leaves the teenage brain at greatest risk for malfunctioning before it even has the chance to transform itself into a healthy fully adult brain.

Which brings me back to the evolution question:  why on earth would the human brain evolve to go through what looks like from today’s vantage such a potentially dangerous developmental stage? The answer is two-fold:  gene shuffling & energy.  Early humans lived in small, hunter-gatherer groups where the potential threat for incest and all its accompanying genetic dangers—especially from a species perspective—was a very real problem.  What better way to drive you to separate from your family right about the time you are biologically ready to reproduce and to make the dangerous trek to another tribe than to make you engage in obnoxious and annoying behaviors toward your elders and to employ a brain “cognitively anesthetized” toward taking risks? Furthermore, in a world of small, hunter-gatherer groups, energy would be very hard to come by—especially the excess energy needed to reproduce and rear young—and so what better way to conserve the need for energy than speeding up and pruning huge sections of the most energy intensive organ in the body in as short a time span as possible? Even if that meant that some individuals would not survive that cognitive rearrangement mentally intact.

Hence, what adolescence evolved to do was to ensure the necessary genetic diversity within the human species needed to adapt to an every-changing environment as well as the energy conservation in adulthood needed for individual members of the species to reproduce in a world where daily hunger was the norm.  As John Medina puts it, “all of a sudden, you have a seriously powerful label for puberty: species savior” (p. 78); we literally wouldn’t be here today without the teenage brain.

Of course, today, we do not live in the Pliocene.  There is more potential gene shuffling in a single American high school than existed on the entire Serengeti plain, and we actually have an obesity crisis in this country because of how much excess energy is available to us.  Hence, the challenge for us as educators (and parents) today is how to manage a Pliocene brain in an industrialized digital world.  Knowing how that Pliocene brain works, though, can give us clues.

More on that next time.

References

Gazzaley, A. & Rosen, L. D.  (2016) The Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World.  Cambridge:  The MIT Press.

McKie, R. (1996) African Exodus: The Origins of Modern Humanity.  New York:  Henry Holt and Company.

Medina, J. (2018) Attack of the Teenage Brain. Arlington, Va:  ASCD Books.

When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant
I could hardly stand to have the old man around.
But when I got to be 21, I was astonished
at how much the old man had learned in seven years.
—Mark Twain

Orion is once more in the early morning sky (though a little harder to see with all the light-pollution).  A few of the leaves have started to change color on my morning commute (despite a hundred-degree heat wave in September).  And two weeks ago, I started my 35^th year in the classroom (surrounded by colleagues, the majority of whom I could have taught).

In all that time, I have witnessed amazing and significant change.  For example, when I started that fall of 1989, class handouts had to be produced using a hand-cranked mimeograph machine that left paper slightly damp from the evaporating acetone as the ink dried; today, I send a PDF file via a wi-fi signal to the many-times descendent of the Xerox-machine that prints, staples, and 3-hole-punches two-sided handouts that I pick up at my convenience.  Back then, I wrote those handouts on a computer the size of a toaster oven (with a separately attached monitor) that required me to remember to save my work regularly on a 3.5-inch floppy disk that could store up to 1.44 MB of data (i.e. millions); today, I compose on a computer actually named after its size (tablet) that immediately autosaves any work I do to “the cloud” (computer servers that could be on the other side of the planet) and I currently have 4 terabytes of storage (i.e. trillions) but could pay for even more.

In addition, my students in 1989 had to do any research I assigned them in a library with limited hours and a finite number of books and periodicals; today, they carry pretty much all human knowledge ever generated in the palm of their hand with 24/7 access.  Back then, when I gave them a group project to complete, they had to organize a gathering time and space to work on it, and they had to physically assemble the final materials for submission; now, they use group-chats to communicate anytime they wish and share on-line documents which they can work on simultaneously from anywhere in the world.

So, change.  Dramatic change.  And lots of it.  In fact, I could go on ad nauseum with the change I have seen, and I obviously haven’t even touched on the social, cultural, and environmental differences of the past 34 years that impacts teaching and learning from outside the classroom.

Yet, I have passed out paper handouts every single one of those years, regardless of how they got manufactured.  And my students still research topics about the natural world, and they still complete group projects for me where they have to cooperate successfully to create their final product.  And that 3.5-inch floppy disk? A visual image of it is the “save file” icon on the screen of every software program on every computer on this planet.

I share all this because what I have been noticing most this particular fall is not the changes in my students over the years but rather their continuity.  Watching the 14- and 15-year-olds in my 9^th grade biology class, I see the same struggles with executive function and materials management that I did in 1989.  I see the same awkward anxiousness when answering a question, the same tentative hand in the air when asked to respond to a query, the same timidity when assigned groups for an activity.  Likewise with my seniors, I see how the four years have matured them, how the anxiety of learning has been tamed, the executive functioning refined, and I see a different tentativeness as they prepare for college admissions and the next chapter of their lives. I see 18-year-olds on the cusp of early adulthood.

But most of all, what I have realized I have been seeing at the start of this new school year is the adolescent brain doing what eons of evolution have hard-wired it to do:  feel deep emotions; prune unused synapses; take risks; myelinate the prefrontal cortex; lay down new neural pathways; prepare for reproduction…in a word: be adolescent.  And being adolescent hasn’t changed in my 35 years of working with them.  It won’t in any future years I remain in this career—evolutionary change in something as complex as the brain doesn’t work on that brief a time scale.  Hence, the children entering my classes today are fundamentally no different than the ones I taught over three decades ago; they are adolescents being adolescents.

However, the students in my classes this fall do live in a radically different world than the ones I taught in 1989, and because any good geneticist knows that we are all products of nature AND nurture, the changes of the past 34 years do matter.  They have a direct impact on how adolescent brains experience their adolescence (as has been documented by the significant changes in teenage mental health over the course of my career). 

The blunt truth is that the world my students live in today is radically different and radically changing—both all the time and at a pace undreamed of in 1989—and I have to account for that as the person responsible for creating the classroom environment they experience. But I also need to remember that I’m fundamentally working with the same adolescent brain I was working with 34 years ago and that “if adolescents seem imperfect, it’s only because most of the obstacles their brains were wired to traverse no longer exist, and we haven’t sojourned long enough in organized society for adolescent brains to get the memo” (Medina, p. 4).  Therefore, I’m still responsible as their teacher for helping them to navigate the deep emotions, risk taking, synapse pruning, and myelinating their brains are experiencing.

How I and others might do so in our ever changing world is what I will address next.

References

Medina, J. (2018) Attack of the Teenage Brain. Arlington, Va:  ASCD Books.

U.S. Surgeon General Advisory (2023) Social Media and Youth Mental Health.  The Department of Health and Human Services. https://www.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/sg-youth-mental-health-social-media-advisory.pdf.

Liberal science has relegated violent creed wars to the history books.
—Jonathon Rauch

We may have just handed a four-year-old a loaded weapon.
That’s what I think we actually did.
—Chris Wetherell, Inventor of Twitter’s “Retweet” Function

What do you do when a truth takes six times as long as its corresponding falsehood to reach the intended audience and the falsehood is 70% more likely to be reshared?

Those were the findings of a 2018 study by researchers at the MIT Media lab, and they are at the heart of why—as I shared in Part 1 of this essay—Jonathan Rauch contends that the Constitution of Knowledge, with its reality-based community and epistemic principles of fallibilism and empiricism is under attack.  The rise of social media and its consequent ability to spread misinformation, calculated disinformation, and “shock & awe” levels of psychological assault nearly instantaneously has enabled those who are antagonistic to the notion of objective truth-seeking—for whatever reasons—to undermine the work of those who engage in it, and even worse, to directly attack those individuals and institutions involved in this work. 

For example, Rauch points out, fear of being publicly bullied, stalked, and ostracized on-line for simply stating an opinion or offering a critique—no matter how well-intended—has reached such epic proportions on today’s college and university campuses that 70% of professors report feeling at least some concern (and 40% extremely so) “that having an open class conversation on [controversial] topics could result in their being reported to the authorities, receiving bad course evaluations, suffering damage to their reputations and careers, and being shunned by their colleagues” (p. 221).  Meanwhile two-thirds of students claim that “their campus climate precluded students from expressing their true opinions because their classmates might find them offensive” (p. 222), and thus, Rauch argues, one of the pillars of the reality-based community risks finding itself silenced and censored—cancelled—by the ability of social media to make life a living hell for anyone who dares to submit a proposition for critique and potential falsification that is preordained as harmful or oppressive by some group or another.

Yet, if the history of the Constitution of Knowledge teaches us nothing, Rauch continues, it is that a diversity of ideas—of propositions to test for fallibility—is essential to the pursuit and expansion of objective empirical knowledge, and therefore, a diversity of voices is equally so.  Without them, our own individual biases keep us from even entertaining certain hypotheses, and so potential truths about the world don’t ever become knowledge because the questions leading to that knowledge never get asked.  As Rauch puts it:

The problem arises when other groups and other ideas are absent or silent or fail to organize.  To say it the [John Stuart] Millian Way: the problem arises where lack of contestation hardens even true opinions into dogmas.  To say it the [James] Madisonian way: the problem arises where the republic of science becomes too small, intellectually speaking—when its sphere contracts instead of expanding (p. 230, original emphasis).

And if the reality-based community doesn’t have enough problems already with social media impairing one of its pillars from within, this same digital technology has also made attacks on it from outside the community significantly easier as well.  And while I have written before about the origins of what Rauch calls “troll epistemology” and why internet trolls and trolling have become so successful at challenging our notions of truth, Rauch brings some fresh ideas to the table that I want to share. 

He first points out that “we forgot that information technology is very different from knowledge technology.  Information can simply be emitted [without any of the checks and balances required for true knowledge]” (p. 125, original emphasis).  Consequently, any and every thought, opinion, fiction, or other “brain fart”—however false, wrong, or delusional—can make its way immediately into our lives via our computers and phones.  The result, Rauch states, is that “what troll epistemology can do is degrade the information environment around the reality-based community” (p. 164, original emphasis)—which is highly problematic for the Constitution of Knowledge and its reality-based community because while they do not need everyone to be fellow truth-seekers, they do need most people to be truth-friendly and “to behave in ways which support rather than undermine the Constitution’s ability to do its job” (p. 115; original emphasis). 

Thus, what makes trolls so dangerous to the work of those pursuing real knowledge about the real world is that they can overwhelm people’s attention with fake news, conspiracy theories, and other dreck and drivel to the point where they are totally diverted from anything resembling objective empirical reality, utterly exhausted from the bombardment of information.  Essentially, trolling blockades the attention of those whom the Constitution of Knowledge needs to be truth-friendly, and as Rauch puts it:

if you cannot be sure at any given time whether you are being manipulated or scammed, then the natural way to protect yourself is to assume you are always being scammed, or to hunker down with online friends in your own private version of reality, or to take a demagogic politician’s word for it (p. 169).

Being truth-friendly then becomes either an after-thought or something one is even antagonistic toward, and the reality-based community finds itself fighting (and in the case of the pandemic, literally) for its life.  It is probably one of the reasons Rauch calls trolls “epistemic sociopaths.”

So what are those who value truth to do in a world of anonymous epistemic sociopaths and cancellers? How do we in the reality-based community defend a basic understanding of reality that is as objective as possible within our epistemic limits? Rauch is clear in his response.  First, “when we encounter an unwelcome and even repugnant new idea, the right question to ask is ‘What can I learn from this?’ rather than ‘How can I get rid of this?’ ” (p. 198).  And second:

Every time I hear a minority-rights advocate say that she should not have to debate haters who question her very right to exist, I say: on the contrary, that is exactly who you need to debate.  The hearts, minds, and votes we need to win are those of people who do not already agree with us—a point which might seem obvious but is surprisingly easy to overlook.  Recent research supports what activists like me learned firsthand in the gay-marriage struggle:  deploring and denouncing people rarely changed their minds, but respectfully listening and talking to them often did (p. 257).

Thus, Rauch’s response is essentially that if we do not treat even the most deplorable as propositions for potential falsification—if we do not abide by the fundamental principles of fallibilism and empiricism at all times—then we have failed to engage in the very work the reality-based community employees to generate the objective communal knowledge we believe should guide both us and our attackers in the first place.

Or as he summarizes it:

In exchange for knowledge, freedom, and peace, [the Constitution of Knowledge] asks us to mistrust our senses and our tribes, question our sacred beliefs, and relinquish the comforts of certitude.  It insists that we embrace our fallibility, subject ourselves to criticism, tolerate the reprehensible, and outsource reality to a global network of strangers.  [Its daily, never ending, defense can be exhausting, upsetting, and deeply stressful.] But we cannot afford to be snowflakes.  Epistemic liberalism, like political liberalism, is a fighting faith (p. 263).

Moreover, when it comes to this fight, Rauch is clear that “I am not an alarmist.  To the contrary, I write this book in the spirit of hope and guarded optimism” (p. 18) and that “the reality-based community has withstood much worse.  It beat back the inquisitors who imprisoned Galileo, the dictators whose gulags spanned continents, and the racists and homophobes who sought to silence voices of freedom” (p. 264).  It is clear that he believes the defense of truth is winnable.

However, here is where I stand concerned.  As I write this, a former President of the United States is facing the near certitude of a third criminal indictment, and he is all but bragging about it on his social media platform to stir up his supporters for his run again for the Presidency.  As I write this, an extremist anti-abortion group is arguing that a mother who has an abortion should be sentenced to death; it’s leader publicly arguing “an eye for an eye.”  And as I write this, the Alabama legislature has redrawn its political map in response to the Supreme Court striking down its former map with an even more partisan one to dilute the Black vote simply because the Court did not explicitly say in its ruling that there must now be two predominately Black districts due to changes in population percentages.  Simply put, we live in a world where truth-friendly is rapidly becoming an endangered species, and the anti-intellectuals of our society already greatly outnumber the members of the reality-based community.

What’s more, when Rauch wrote his book, ChatGP3 did not exist; it wasn’t even on the foreseeable horizon. Yet, as I wrote in The End of Truth?, anyone wanting to disinform or even attack can now produce such realistic material that only the most sophisticated digital analysis tools can determine whether it is a so-called “deep fake” or not (and, in fact, I learned shortly after that post that a colleague of mine had already had it happen to him).  Worse yet, if Caryn Marjorie’s use of AI—she of the CarynAI “girl-friend” experience—is any example of how people will employ this technology, then we are in deep trouble.  News services report that “one fan, at the bot’s encouragement, built a shrine-like photo wall of her;” to which her response was “this is why we have limited CarynAI to only accepting 500 new users per day.”

It is estimated that she will make $5-10 million dollars this year. Simply for consuming oxygen and exhaling carbon dioxide.

AI, therefore, has already demonstrated its potential to provide the trolls and cancellers with the social media equivalent of nuclear weapons against the reality-based community and its Constitution of Knowledge, and even its relatively benign users are not exactly demonstrating restrained wisdom.  It is not a lot to give one optimism about Rauch’s defense of the truth.  Even though I am in complete agreement with him about the value of such a defense—indeed, will never stop doing so myself—I am left wondering if we are not head more toward the equivalent of the situation in the Koreas, rather than the Allies of WWII, with the epistemic equivalent of a DMZ.

A potential creed war with at best a fragile truce.

References

Associated Press (July 21, 2023) Alabama Lawmakers Refuse to Create a 2^nd Majority-Black Congressional District.  NPR.  https://www.npr.org/2023/07/21/1189494854/alabama-redistricting-map-black-districts.

Contreras, B. (June 27, 2023) Social Media Star’s AI Clone Charges a Dollar Per Minute for Chats.  The Los Angeles Times. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2023-06-27/influencers-ai-chat-caryn-marjorie.

Johnson, C. & Inskeep, S. (July 24, 2023) Trump Could Face Federal Indictment Soon over Effort to Overturn 2020 Election. NPR Morning Edition.  https://www.npr.org/2023/07/24/1189719400/trump-could-face-federal-indictment-soon-over-effort-to-overturn-2020-election-d.

Rauch, J. (2021) The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press.

Sarat, A. & Aftergut, D. (March 17, 2023) “Pro-Lifers” Choose Death.  Verdict.  https://verdict.justia.com/2023/03/17/pro-lifers-choose-death.