Chapter 3B

Caro’s Biology Freakout

“Mr. Brock? Can I PLEASE film this for Mackenzie since she can’t be here to see it today?” Lauren begged.
I looked in Caroline’s direction. “It’s up to you whether we film this demonstration or not.” I said.
“Please, Caro!” The rest of the class entreated.
She looked at me. “You swear I won’t feel anything?” She asked, motioning toward the hammer on the table.
I gave her that look a teacher gives when it really is a dumb question. “Caroline, first of all, I would never lie to you. And second of all, your parents would sue me back to the stone age if I ever caused any of you any harm. I like my job.” I teased.
She smiled at that and gave Lauren a nod of approval.
“Yes!” said Lauren, clinching her hands in victory.
I motioned to Caroline to take a seat on the stool in front of the box on the edge of the table and had her slide her right forearm inside the opening in it. I then carefully placed the dismembered Halloween arm prop so that it was outside the box and properly aligned with her arm inside it. I looked at her directly.
“Since you were the only one in the room to pass the nose-test for altering body image, we’re now going to see if we can convince your brain that when I am touching this fake arm that I am, in fact, touching you.” I told her. “And we will test whether we were successful or not by having Lindsey here give the artificial arm a nice strong smack with the hammer.”
Lindsey picked up the hammer and gently bounced it off the rubber.
I shook my head. “No, when I tell you to, I want you to SMACK it” I said.
I turned back to Caroline to finish giving instructions.
“So, what is going to happen,” I said. “Is that we are going to stroke the surface of the back of your hand in the box at the exact same time that we are stroking the identical surface on the artificial hand. While we do that, you are going to focus your attention strongly on the fake arm. After about 45 seconds, we will test to see if we have made your brain think the fake arm is now you.”
I looked around at the rest of the class gathered around the front table. “Just so everyone knows, there is a strong chance this will not work. Only about 30% of the people who we can make the nose feel like its longer can move on to the next level.”
“Ready?” I asked, glancing at Lindsey and Caroline. The former waggled the hammer in her hands with a slightly malicious grin on her face, and the latter simply nodded. “Let’s begin.”
I started swiping both surfaces with my index fingers while watching the clock, and after about a minute, I spoke.
“Anything?” I asked.
Caroline nodded vigorously, and I motioned with my head to Lindsey.
“Let’s test it.” I said, and the hammer came down with a blow so strong it made the rubber arm actually bounce.
“AAAAHHHH!!!!”
Caroline screamed and leapt from the stool so hard she knocked it over. The box went flying in the air. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, that is SO creepy!” She repeated, over and over. The rest of the girls reacted.
“What’s it like?” Several of them asked all at once.
“Yeah, did you really think it was you?” Jenn added, eagerly.
Caroline starred at the artificial arm with an expression that was a mixture of dismay and uncertainty. She nodded. “When the Lindsey hit the arm with the hammer, I swear to God I thought she was hitting me.”
“Could you actually feel it?” said Didi.
Caroline shook her head. “No, there was no pain. But…” She shook herself like a wet dog. “SO creepy,” she muttered.
“You genuinely were convinced that the hand touching that arm was touching you?” I confirmed.
Still staring at it, she bobbed her head rapidly, and I turned to the rest of the class.
“So you now see what I’m talking about when I say that what is real for your brain is what your brain determines is real. It’s why, for example, eating disorders are treated as psychiatric disorders: the person suffering from one literally perceives themselves differently than the rest of us do.” I said.
There were expressions of wonder mixed with a little anxiety as they pondered my words and what they had just witnessed.
“It’s why,” I told them. “In a very real way, all of you in this room are figments of my imagination; I’m simply making you up as we go along.”

Plato’s Cave

What sets the human brain apart from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we can employ symbolic reasoning to make and execute plans.  Where the brains of other mammals, for instance, would see a predator such as a leopard coming toward them and respond unilaterally (usually by running away), our brains are capable of seeing the leopard and imagining how we might kill it and use its hide for a coat.  Or we might notice the pattern of its spots and think about how we might reproduce it in a drawing.  Basically, our brains have the capacity to take the data from our stimuli and manipulate it in ways that no other animal, including our primate relatives can do.  To put it simply, what makes the human brain unique is that we can fantasize about the future.⁹

In fact, our brains essentially live in the future, using predictive information acquired from experience to bias both incoming stimuli and outgoing responses.¹⁰  But what this means (and the neuroscience research affirms) is that our perception of things—both the world “out there” and the world “in here”—is not the result of taking in input and integrating it into a single “picture” of reality; we don’t receive the stimuli and assemble them together the way a computer assembles and organizes pixels to represent an image.  Instead, perception is an active process in which our brains first generate and construct a “picture” of reality that is then tested against the sensory input for accuracy.  Perception is, in effect, (and what the research now even calls) “a controlled hallucination.”¹¹ Our experience of reality, therefore, is a construct of our brains; we make it up as we go along, testing its veracity against our sensory input.

This last point is a critical one.  The research is not suggesting that there is no reality.  A moving car, for example, occupies space and time, and if you try to occupy the same space and time, it will hit you and damage or kill you.  We are here today as a species (with our brains working the way they do) precisely because—regardless of any individual differences in the perception of it—our ancestors knew to run when they saw the leopard!

But the brain’s perception of reality is individual, and since no two brains are wired the same, “two people can see the same input and come away with vastly different perceptions.”¹²  Simply recall the blue/black vs. white/gold dress controversy from a few years ago to see this truth in action: humans have no single accurate way to perceive things.  Thus, “those flowers you decide to pay attention to actually do look much redder to you and smell much sweeter than the ones you chose to ignore,”¹³ and beauty really is in the eye of the beholder.

The implications for education are profound:  it means that in a classroom of 28 students and the teacher, there are, in fact, 29 different classrooms being experienced! It is why it is so critical to present all instruction using a variety of methods because each individual brain is testing his, her, or their construct of that instruction in different ways.  It is why it is so critical to revisit and review content repeatedly (and why teachers quickly learn instinctively to say everything at least thrice) because an individual child may not have generated a perception of the “gorilla” the first time.  It is also why the first two properties of an authentically engaged teacher that we have examined are so important:  only through appropriately intimate rapport with our students can we discover how they actually are perceiving what is taking place in the classroom, and only as a co-learner can they encounter their teacher’s perception of a subject.  The “buck-stops-here” truth that neuroscience confronts us with is that an educator simply cannot authentically engage in their niche in the classroom without always keeping in mind that their perception of what is happening may not be the students’ perception and trying to address any differences as deliberately and thoughtfully as possible. 

There really are “all kinds of minds” in that room.¹⁴