Teaching Children to Be Honorable

No one is born honorable. If you doubt me, just watch little kids at play. Scholarly research has confirms the point. Michael Lewis, a prominent psychologist at Rutgers, has conducted many studies of how children naturally lie and deceive and are even encouraged to do so by well-meaning parents. Certain ways of expressing emotion are taught to be acceptable while others are not. One experiment, for example, showed that children are usually taught to express sadness when their mother leaves them with a baby sitter. But the reality was that children were not sad and recovered quickly when the mother left. Other examples are how children are taught to express responses to minor insults or injuries. Some kids are taught that it is alright to over-react.

Lewis and his colleagues conducted some classical experiments in young children that revealed how their tendency for false behavior changed with age. They secretly videotaped children in an honesty test in which they were told not to peek at a toy that was placed behind them. The child was told that the adult had to leave the room for a few minutes, but when she comes back the two will play with the toy.

One-hundred percent of children as young as two peeked at the toy. As evidence that self-control grows with age, only 35% of six-year-olds peeked. However, lying seemed to increase with age as children learned to perceive a benefit from lying. When asked if they peeked, 38% of two-year-olds lied. But among six-year-olds, one-hundred percent of peekers lied about it. Boys generally had less self-control in resisting peeking, but no sex differences occurred in the extent of lying.

Clear correlations were seen with other aspects of cognitive function. For example, how quickly a child yielded to the temptation of peeking varied with IQ. Those who peeked sooner had lower IQ scores. They also had less emotional intelligence, that is, were less able to name the emotions revealed by pictures of human faces and less able to predict the kind of emotion that would be generated by certain experiences.

However, the lying varied directly with IQ and emotional intelligence. Smarter kids were more likely to lie. Moreover, Lewis and others contend that lying and deception are normal and good. Lying seems to be associated with pro-social behavior and with creativity.

Doing What Comes Naturally

Lewis and others think that children should not be condemned for their dishonorable behavior. It comes from self-serving biology. Human weakness is most evident in children, and they will often do things they know they should not do.

It is hard to know how a child really feels, because the parents are continually teaching them how they should express feelings and reactions to life events. When children become adults, the lifetime of conditioning about expressing emotions creates problems for mental health workers to treat patients because true feelings are so buried and masked.

Children learn to think and behave in untruthful ways for three reasons:

1.      Avoid negative consequences or punishment.

2.      Protect the ego from assaults on their sense of self-worth or confidence.

3.      Benefit oneself or take advantage of others.

Children also learn self-deception at rates that vary with age. The development of self-esteem is at play here. A child learns to avoid or minimize honest judgments that unnecessarily diminish their self-esteem. At the same time, a child could learn that honest self-appraisal serves the useful purpose of avoiding future mistakes or taking some necessary action.

Experimentally, pretend play provides a paradigm for studying self-deception. Very young children imitate the actions of others around them. As they get a little older, they pretend that one toy is doing something with another toy, as for example, toy soldiers engaging in battle.

Pretend play begins at around age one.  Lewis gives the example of a one-year may pretend seeing his mother talking on the phone. By age two or three the child might pretend that her doll is talking on the phone. By three years of age, a child is able to consider success or failure of the pretend scenarios and to assign blame or credit for them. At this point, self-conscious emotions have emerged that lead to shame for failure and pride in success.

Children readily learn to seek self-benefit  and to take advantage of others, as when a child lies about a misdeed and blames it on an innocent, such as a sibling. Unfortunately, little research seems to have been done on childhood development of this level of dishonesty. How does it change with age? What factors promote it? Or mitigate it? The social consequences are profound.

Children are biologically wired to behave falsely. Where do they learn moral values and respect for truth? Traditionally, this was in houses of worship. But as many parents have left formal religion, this teaching is increasingly absent. But we know that teaching of children has lasting effects, good or bad. Both Jesuits and Communist Lenin have claimed, "give me a child until age seven, and I have that child for life."

Knowledge and life experience do change what a person thinks as true. Highly intelligent kids can figure a lot of this out on their own. But they need to question, and most humans are prone to take things at face value. This formed the basis of the life of Socrates, whose mission was to show people the importance of asking questions and introspection. In my decades of teaching at the college level, I have learned that most students are intellectually compliant and do not question. Maybe they are indoctrinated to be this way. After all, they have had 12 years of taking multiple-choice quizzes where each question is deemed to be the right question that has only one correct answer.

In most cases, behaving untruthfully is stupid, because we may eventually get caught. When that happens, who will trust us again? We are made still more stupid by life experiences that create the illusion that clever false behavior works. We learn our counterproductive attitudes and behaviors, and worse yet, we reinforce them by repetition and turn them into bad habits. We do stupid things because our brains have been programmed by our learning experiences to keep doing things that are not in our best long-term interest.

Michael Lewis and some other psychologists think childhood lying, deceptions, and other forms of untruthfulness are normal developmental features  that even help children become more emotionally and socially competent as an adult. I vigorous disagree. The price to be paid for accepting childhood dishonor is that children are learning dishonorable bad habits. Children usually have a selfish reason for being untruthful and dishonorable. If parents and other adults do not correct such bad behavior as it occurs because they believe it is normal for that age, children can become spoiled brats that grow up to be self-absorbed adults who feel entitled, make excuses, shift blame to innocents, and accept and spread false narratives. They may demand "safe spaces," or even react violently when their views are not accepted by others.

Why Honor Needs to Be Taught Early

Social pathologies are rooted in flaws of conscience. These flaws begin in childhood, for it is in childhood that people develop, or fail to develop, their conscience. What’s right and what’s wrong must be taught. In an era where the divorce rate is over 50%, where out-of-wedlock births exceed 70% in some racial groups, and where more and more kids are raised by a single mom, it is not surprising that this country has so much dysfunctional behavior and crime. I read somewhere that the U.S. has the highest percentage of people in prison than any other country. Kids learn their values from somewhere, if not from a loving two-parent family, then from a gang of peers. Lack of conscience causes much youth violence, peer cruelty, stealing, cheating, sexual promiscuity, and substance abuse.

Children have a particularly hard time knowing their feelings and limitations. That is why adult nurturing is so important to help children learn how to “grow up.” It is also why children, especially teenagers, are so prone to angst and poor choices. Indeed, a critical element of growing up is self-awareness, seeing things as they really are, and resolving the things that cause problems and unhappiness. All children develop attitudes, emotions, beliefs and behaviors that need some degree of correction. In that sense, all children have a “bad brain,” and they need to be taught how to develop it constructively.

Childhood Training

Children have to learn right from wrong and then develop the discipline and character to do the right. I have a new book that should inspire readers to include in their life purpose a pursuit of truth that goes beyond the usual casual and superficial level. Each of us needs and should want to know how to detect, understand, and deal with dishonorable behavior in others, lest others betray or exploit us. Likewise, each of us needs to understand our own character weaknesses, so that we can become better, more respected, and trusted people. Children need to know the seven deadly forms of untruthfulness, which I identify as:

Lying

Deception

Pretension

Denial

Cheating

Withholding

Delusion

A useful acrostic might be: “Low-Down People Don’t Care What (they) Do”

How does one teach honorable behavior? First, note the assertion that honor is something a person can learn to embrace. If parents don’t teach right and wrong, children may not learn it. Teaching anything can involve a mixture of positive and negative reinforcement. For misbehaving children, spanking used to be the standard remedy. That does not always work, and is subject to abuse. Alternatives include withholding privileges. Young people frequently think they have a right to much of what they want in life. A loving parent may need to take away these “rights” and dole them back out as “privileges” at the pace that children grow morally.

A parent can structure rewards for good behavior. You can keep score on a calendar or in a notebook on the progress at developing a certain desirable behavior. The Boy Scout idea of doing a good deed every day has great merit. Too bad it is considered old fashioned. The merit- badge concept in both Boy and Girl Scouts is sound psychological practice for instilling the desire to do the right thing and get recognition for it.

The best teaching is not telling, but of prompting students to question what is appropriate. For example, a parent who finds her child cheating in school, should ask, “Have you thought about what might be wrong with cheating?” Or a child who steals another kid’s lunch money should be challenged with “Was it fair for you to take that money? Would you mind if another kid took your lunch money?” Or when caught in a lie, a parent could say, “Please don’t lie to me. I need to trust you. Don’t you want me to be able to trust you?”

Of course, the best approach is to prevent wrong behavior by setting a good personal example. We all know that children learn more from what we do than what we say. From family and personal relationships to practicing one's religion, what could be more destructive than hypocrisy?

Seeking recognition or rewards for good character is itself an unworthy motive. We should do the right thing for the right reasons. When a child's reason is self-serving, such as seeking praise or reward, a child may be deceiving herself and others about her real character.

In today's world, we are becoming accustomed to concealment, half-truths, misrepresentation, spin, fake news, and other forms of untruthfulness. Social media spread these distortions like a viral epidemic. I have a new inexpensive e-book at Amazon that addresses the issues: To Tell the Truth. Save Us from Concealment, Half-truths, Misrepresentation, Spin, and Fake News. This book aims to show why truth matters, identifies seven kinds of falsehood, explains the common causes, and suggests many ways we can reduce the falsehoods we commit. A concluding chapter presents an ethics model that can be used for a variety of real-world situations.

Reference

Lewis, Michael. (2015). The origins of lying and deception in everyday life. American Scientist. 103: 128-135.

What Happened to The Wonder of Learning?

I read a lot about educational theory and research so that I can share "best practices" for better ways to teach and learn with my readers. Shared here are the ideas in a most informed and intelligent article on learning, written by Catherine L'Ecuyer, a Canadian lawyer with an MBA now living in Barcelona, Spain.[1] The article explains the fundamental importance for motivating children to learn: the sense of wonder.

This notion resonated with me, because I know it to be true from personal experience. To this

day, I have vivid memories of the excitement I had as a six-year old in Fort Myers, Florida, as I walked to my first day of school. Yes, in those days it was safe for kids to walk several blocks to school unattended. And yes, there was, at least for me, no kindergarten, pre-kindergarten, or day care.

Sauntering to school, I became entranced with all the new sights and sounds, stopping several times along the way to savor a new experience. A vivid memory was my stop at a beautiful flower I had never seen before. I physically probed the bloom, astonished at the elegant expression of nature. On that day, the prospect of school was a most joyous opportunity. It did not take long for school's pedantic nature, drills, and drudgery to squelch my sense of wonder. It was only in late middle school that my sense of wonder was resurrected, and that only occurred because I had a crush on my teacher and wanted to impress her with my learning. For many children, their inherent sense of wonder that school stamps out never returns.

Clearly, a child's state of mind affects how learning and the school environment are regarded. Among the more relevant states is stimulus seeking. That is why for example I wanted to explore the innards of that beautiful flower. Then too, there is the basic human responsiveness to positive reinforcement. If a learning experience is perceived as wondrous, it is perceived as good and beneficial, serving as incentive to have other such learning experiences. It obviously helps for a child to be aware of such perceptions.

L'Ecuyer adds the sense of wonder to the list of fundamentals of the motivation to learn. She makes the point that wonder is innate in children, especially when they are young. As a child matures, much of this sense of wonder can fade. For some people, the more they learn, the less wondrous the world seems. Among adults, scientists seem to be an exception (to a biologist, pond scum is beautiful and wondrous).

L'Ecuyer argues that modern educational paradigms are behaviorist and conflict with nurturing the sense of wonder in children. By behaviorist, she means that the guiding principle of teaching is that the environment directs learning with its emphasis on teachers, curriculum, and high-stakes testing. The popular mantra is that learning is better when it is provided earlier and in abundance. Curricula are designed to bombard students with information and testing. Do we really think that is motivating?

The problem is that children can be overwhelmed by too much too soon. Yet government policy increasingly advocates pre-kindergarten. Young developing brains do not respond well to too much stimulus, too much curriculum, and too much high-stakes testing. Children become preconditioned to expect high levels of stimulation, leading to attentiveness disorders. Children become passive and bored. The associated loss of the sense of wonder diminishes a child's motivation to cope with all this stimulus and pressure.

L'Ecuyer cites convincing research showing that compared to adults children learn at a slower pace than adults. They need more calm and silence. They are more intrigued by mystery. They need to trust in a human attachment figure, most commonly a caring mother.  Unfortunately, our educational culture assumes that we don't teach enough curriculum and don't demand enough of children. Children learn to pass tests, not love learning. Our multi-tasking culture only adds to sensory and cognitive overload that interferes with learning and mental performance in general. The family breakdown in our culture diminishes a child's trust in primary caregivers and degrades attachment to them. Schools cannot provide such trust and attachment. Nor can pre-kindergarten or day-care.

These are basic reasons why I push for a reform in education that stresses teaching learning skills to young children, as opposed to the domination of traditional curriculum and excessive high-stakes testing. I am writing such a book now. When children have good learning skills, learning stops being an onerous chore. The "Learning Skills Cycle" that I advocate begins with motivation, and motivation begins with a sense of wonder.[2]

Educational policy makers seem confused about why so many students fall behind. Every year, over 1.2 million students drop out of high school in the United States. That’s a student every 26 seconds – or 7,000 a day. About 25% of high school freshmen fail to graduate from high school on time.[3] At the college level, only 59% of full-time four-year college students graduate within six years.[4] Most college data use a six-year limit because so many college students can't finish in the usual four years.

Over the last 40 years, all the educational fads we have tried apparently do not work. In this time we have had such high-profile government initiatives as "Goals 2000, New Math, Nation at Risk, No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Common Core, Next Generation Science Standards, Charter Schools, and Head Start." Where is the evidence that any of this works? SAT scores have not improved, even declining in some years, while funding for educational has increased dramatically, on the order depending on the state of 200%.[5]

Despite much ballyhoo and funding, Head Start's effects wash out within a few years. Nonetheless, many states think Head Start did not start early enough and that what is needed is government funded pre-kindergarten. Nobody considers what this too-soon, too-much, too stressful education does to childhood sense of wonder and motivation to learn.

The key question asked by L'Ecuyer is this: Are today's educational paradigms and policies promoting the sense of wonder and motivation to learn or squelching it? While all our government programs to improve education seem valuable, the results say otherwise. Teaching is now driven by high-stakes testing. While accountability is necessary, when high-stakes testing becomes the focus of education, it poisons the learning atmosphere. The law of unintended consequences applies. Today's educational environment suffocates the wonder and love of learning for its own sake.

# # #

Dr. Klemm is author of two books on learning: Memory Power 101 and Better Grades, Less Effort. Reviews and information can be found at his web site, WRKlemm.com

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[1] L'Ecuyer, Catherine. 2014. The wonder approach to learning. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. Volume 8, October 6. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00764.

[2] Klemm, W. R. 2014. Shift Away from Teaching to the Test: A Better Way to Improve Test Scores. The STATellite, 59 (1): 10-13. http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.statweb.org/resource/collection/ED7F18DF-2934-4034-BDF2-CF81CADE155A/WinterSTATellite2014.pdf

[3] https://www.dosomething.org/facts/11-facts-about-high-school-dropout-rates

[4] http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=40

[5]http://www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/state-education-trends

Excuse-making by School Children

My last column on "Blaming the Victim" was a departure from my usual emphasis on improving learning and memory. But it did set the stage for this current post on the crippling effect of allowing children to make excuses for underperformance in school.

Most of us know how common it is for kids to make excuses ("the dog ate my homework" syndrome). When we adults were young, we also probably made excuses, blaming the textbook, the teacher, the school, and whatever else could serve to avoid facing the real causes of the problems.

Why do kids do that? The main reason is their fragile egos. Confronting personal weakness is especially hard for kids when they are embedded in an adult culture that inevitably reminds them that they are relatively powerless kids.

I remember a recent dinner-table conversation with my competitive 6th grade granddaughter, who was complaining about a test in which some of the questions were not aligned well with the instruction, which itself was deemed confusing. I said, "I understand that others did do better than you on the test. Wasn't everybody facing the same handicap?" No answer. Then I added, "It doesn't matter who the teacher is or what instruction you get. If you are not first in the class, it is your fault." Again, no response.

One approach that parents and teachers use is to bolster children's egos by praising them richly and often. Too much of a good thing is a bad thing. Too much praise makes kids narcissistic. Anybody who is not aware of the raging narcissism in today's youngsters must not be around young people very much. The most obvious sign is the compulsive checking of e-mail and texting, all in an effort by a child to be at the center of attention.

I and other professors notice narcissism in college students. In a selective college, most students think they are "A" students, and because of low standards in secondary school and grade inflation they are actually told they are A students. If they don't make As in college, it is somebody else's fault (usually the professor).

Scholars are beginning to address this growing narcissism. Eddie Brummelman at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands and his colleagues studied 565 children between the ages of 7 to 12. They picked this age group because most other such studies have been in adults, and they believed that early adolescence is when children develop narcissistic traits such as selfishness, self-centeredness and vanity.

Over 18 months, the children and their parents were given several detailed questionnaires that were designed to measure narcissistic traits and parental behavior. There was a small but significant link at each stage between how much parents praised their children and how narcissistic the children were six months later. Because the effect was only small, it suggests that other things also make people selfish and self-centered. I suspect the effect is larger in the U.S.

Maybe school culture is part of the problem. As in Lake Woebegon, "all kids are above average." For brighter students, the instructional rigor is so low that these kids get a false sense of how smart they are and how easy it is to be an "A" student.

I suspect that another factor is that students are not taught enough about how to be realistically self-aware. They may not even know when they are making excuses unless adults call them on it. Too often, parents side with the student in criticizing a teacher when the real problem is with the child.

Some of the blame shifting comes from biology. It is in human nature to claim ownership of things we do that turn out well, but disown actions that yield negative consequences. Experiments support this conclusion. The most recent experiments had a primary focus on our sense of time in association with voluntary actions. The experimental design was based on prior evidence that the perceived estimate of time lag between when we do something and when we think we did it is an implicit index of our sense of ownership. Investigators asked people to press a key, which was followed a quarter of a second later by negative sounds of fear or disgust, positive sounds of achievement or amusement, or neutral sounds. The subjects were then asked to estimate when they had made the action and when they heard the sound. Timing estimation errors were easily measured by computer. Subjects sensed a longer time lag between their actions and the consequences when the outcome (the sound) was negative than when it was positive.

Teaching Kids to Deal with Failure

There is a common denominator to most self-limiting styles of living. It is a fear of failure. Children express this fear by making excuses, which has the unintended effect of blocking the path to success. Excuses may provide immediate relief of anxiety, but it creates a self-limiting learning style that assures continued underachievement.

Whatever one’s station in life, one axiom is paramount: for things to get better for you, you have to get better. This point is well illustrated in an inspiring rags-to-riches success book by A. J. Williams. He points out that a main reason that people do not make the changes they need to is that they are afraid of failure. But, paradoxically, learning from failure is how many people turn their lives around and become happier. Children, I have noticed, are highly resistant to personal change, maybe more so than adults. I am dismayed at how often I show children how to memorize more effectively and they just can't bring themselves to study in a different way. It is as if they don't believe me enough to even try new approaches. Or maybe they have convinced themselves they are mediocre and need the shield of excuses to keep others from detecting their weaknesses.

Louis Armstrong, the famous trumpeter, told an instructive story about fear when he was a boy. One day when his mother asked him to go down to the levee to fetch a pail of drinking water, he came back home with an empty pail. Upon noticing the empty pail, his mother said, “I told you to bring back a pail of water for us to drink. How come your pail is empty?” Louis replied, “There’s an alligator there, and I was scared to death.” His mother then said, “You shouldn’t be afraid. That gator is as afraid of you as you are of him.” To which Louis answered, “If that’s the case, then that water ain’t fit to drink.”

If there is an alligator keeping you away from what you need to do, have faith you will prevail over your demons. But as long as a child lets fear get in the way, her pail will stay empty.

Other kinds of fear are also self-limiting. Many children fear commitment to learning. Commitment exacts an emotional price requiring dedication, passion, and self-discipline. Children fear confusion and difficulty. They fear disapproval.

Kids need to put their under-performance in perspective. Failure and under-achievement are not permanent. They are not pervasive reflections of inadequacy. Children can acquire learning skills that lead to success. Unfortunately, schools don't teach much about learning skills, being focused on teaching to high-stakes tests.

Kids need to recognize their weakness and strive to fix them. But to bolster their motivation and general attitude about school, they need to recognize what they have done well and strive to do even more of that. Dwelling on under-performance is counter-productive.

The Most Important Thing Kids Need to Learn

Excuse-making prevents a child from developing the attitude that will best serve them throughout life: a sense of personal efficacy, a state of perceived control over one's life. I explain this more thoroughly in my book, "Blame Game, How to Win It." But a summary here will have to suffice.

How children perceive their personal power determines how much effort they will expend to control their lives. If they lack a genuine sense of power, excuse-making applies salve to their wounded egos. Self-efficacy is not the same as self-esteem. Psychologist, Albert Bandura, puts it this way: “Perceived self-efficacy is concerned with judgments of personal capability, whereas self-esteem is concerned with judgments of self-worth.” Both are important for happiness, but it is perceived self-efficacy that drives academic achievement. One practical application where this distinction is apparently not recognized is with school teachers who think the cure for low achievement in school is to foster self-esteem. Teachers should emphasize self-efficacy. Children learn self-efficacy from teachers and parents who enable them to master their environment. Students who are filled with self-doubt do not put much effort into school work. They make excuses. As kids are progressively given the skills to achieve, they develop a sense of confidence in their ability to succeed, which will motivate them to strive for more achievement. When I was a kid, I only became a good student when I discovered, more or less by accident, that I could make good grades. Discovering that I could make good grades if I tried motivated me to do just that. This sense has to be earned. It does not come from excuses.

Sources:

Brummelman, Eddie, et al. (2015). Origins of narcissism in children. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1420870112

Klemm, W. R. (2008). Blame Game. How To Win It. Bryan, Tx.: Benecton.

           

Yoshie, et al. (2013). Negative emotional outcomes attenuate sense of agency over voluntary actions. Current Biology. Dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.cub2013.08.034

Grit's Role in Learning

What do you think is the major determinant of whether our children excel in school? IQ? Good teachers? Good schools? Good standards and curricula? No, I say it is the students' motivation, or just plain grit. Other teachers think so too.

Education reporter, Libby Nelson, calls attention to the issue of grit in student learning achievement. Teachers and parents sometimes put too much emphasis on intelligence, when the more typical problem in education is that students don't try hard enough and are not sufficiently persistent in trying to achieve excellence.

Indeed, excellence is not even a goal for most students. Many students just want to do the minimum required to pass tests. A few students don't care at all. They just drop out. One student told a teacher friend of mine, "I don't need to learn this stuff. Somebody will always take care of me."

Nelson points to evidence of grit's importance with these examples:

·         West Point cadets who scored highest on a scale of grit were more likely to complete the grueling first summer of training.

·         National spelling bee contestants with more grit ranked higher than other contestants of the same age who had less grit.

·         College admissions officers know how important grit is (more important than SAT tests) but they don't know how to measure it other than grades, which of course may be inflated and inaccurate indicators of grit.

Clearly motivation is essential. I regard motivation as the cornerstone of what I call the "learning skills cycle." Learning begins with being motivated to learn, and successful completion of every step in the cycle strengthens motivation. However, every step in this cycle (organization, attentiveness, understanding/synthesis, memory, and problem solving/creativity) requires a degree of grit—the more, the better.

As applied to specific learning tasks, grit is central to all the ideas in the learning skills cycle. In the case of memory, for example, the well-known strategy of deliberate practice requires disciplined grit. Students diligently need to use established memory principles in a systematic way. This includes constructing a systematic learning strategy that includes organizing the learning materials in an effective way, intense study focus in short periods, elimination of interferences, use of mnemonic devices, and frequent rehearsals repeated in spaced intervals. Learning success depends on mental discipline and persistence.

Students differ enormously in their level of grit. It would be nice if we knew how to teach grit. Surely, parental influence is central. Parents lacking in grit are unlikely to model or teach it to their children. Some schools, especially private schools, teach grit by having high expectations and programs that help students discover the positive benefits that come from having more grit. One of those benefits is confidence, because grit promotes achievement and achievement develops confidence.

Confidence in the ability to learn is necessary for a student to try hard to learn. Here is the area where teaching skills count most: showing students they can learn difficult material and thereby building the confidence to take on greater learning challenges.

Students who have passionate goals are much more likely to invest effort and persistence in doing what is needed to achieve those goals. It is unrealistic to expect grade-school children to have well-formulated career goals. But certainly by early high-school, students should be forming specific lifetime goals. What a career goal is probably does matter as much as having one in the first place. Achieving a goal, regardless of whether it is later abandoned or not, teaches a youngster that grit is necessary for the achievement. The student learns that grit has a payoff.

Grit may not always lead to excellence in students with innate limited abilities. But grit allows such students to "become all they can be," as the Army recruitment slogan claims. Moreover, the benefits of grit perpetuate beyond success at any one learning challenge. Learning anything requires physical and chemical changes in the brain needed to store the positive attitudes that come from learning success and the learning content itself. In other words, the more you know, the more you can know.

Source:

http://www.vox.com/2014/10/9/6835197/grit-kipp-noncognitive-skills-duckworth-teaching

"Memory Medic's new book has just been released: "Improve Your Memory for a Healthy Brain." Smashwords.com

The Neuroscience of Why Children Play

All children, if given the chance, will play, preferably with other children. The games they play

are often creative, rough and tumble, and of course―fun. Some consequences are obvious:

·         Fun is a positively reinforcing emotion. It makes kids happy.

·         Play encourages exploration with fewer constraining boundaries than the drone of regular life.

·         Play is an effective way to socialize and make friends.

·         Play stimulates initiative and engagement, rather than passively observing what others do.

But there is another less obvious reason, one that is biological. In a review in the American Journal of Play (yes, there really is a scholarly journal on play), evidence is provided from controlled studies in rats and some primates. These studies show that when young animals are encouraged to play they develop improved social competence, cognition, and emotional regulation later in life. Play experience also makes them more adaptable to unexpected situations.

It is true that play is not a developmental feature in all species. The capacity (and need) for play is most evident in higher mammals with developed neocortex and that live in complex social environments. Play fighting is adaptive in predator species, like bears and lions that depend on aggression for survival as adults. In all species that exhibit juvenile play, play is a developmental tool that promotes the neocortical executive control regions to control other neural systems.

Play fighting is especially interesting because the juveniles must construct and obey certain rules. They intuitively recognize that they must not bite too hard, for example, and must give the opponent at chance to win sometimes or at least hold their own in the contest. The juveniles are clearly learning self-control, which will serve them well as adult. This reminds me of the touch football games that kids play.

Species that most obviously exhibit juvenile play are humans, dogs, cats, and ravens. In species where adults play, play can have immediate functions such as defusing social tensions and dominance relationships. Rats are an interesting case. They engage in juvenile play much more than other rodent species. Adult rats seem to exhibit novel mental capabilities, especially those involving social interactions that are not so prominent in other rodents.

When members of a play-oriented species are denied access to juvenile play, they can become dysfunctional adults. For example, rats raised in social isolation show physical and chemical deficiencies in their brains and they have behavioral abnormalities linked to impaired executive control function. They show excessive anxiety to stressful or fear-inducing situations. They over-react to benign social interactions. They are less able to coordinate movements with a partner, both in sexual and non-sexual contexts. They are less able to solve mental tasks. Similar problem are seen in monkeys deprived of juvenile play. Being raised by a surrogate mother is emotionally and intellectually devastating, but less so if the surrogate is robot-like and can interact in play-like behavior with the infant.

Juvenile play sculpts the brain to be more adaptable later in life. In modern human society, juvenile play is often obstructed by such externals as over-scheduling, too much adult supervision, and too many restrictions. The restrictions are often for reasons of safety, which is understandable in today's world. When I was a child, we had a lot more freedom to play, and in safety. It was not unusual in the summer time for a kid to leave home after breakfast and not return until supper, going alone to a park or neighbor kid's house to play unsupervised as we wished. Sadly, that is too much freedom these days. In this respect, the "good old days" really were the "good old days."

Source:

Pellis, S. M., Pellis, V. C., and Himmler, B. T. (2014). How play makes for a more adaptable brain. Ame. J. Play. 7 (1) 73-98

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Landmark Research: Why We Need to Get Enough Sleep

In other blog posts I have explained why sleep is good for the brain in general and memory formation in particular. Now a new discovery provides another reason for people to get enough sleep. The study examined a type of support cell in the brain, oligodendrocytes–let’s call them oligos for short. These cells wrap their membranes around nerve cells to form what is called myelin, which forms an electrical insulation in a way that speeds up the propagation of nerve impulses through neural networks. You may have heard about oligos in reading about multiple sclerosis, a disease that impairs nerve communication because oligos die and the myelin insulation degrades.

Speed of transmission is important–it influences IQ for example. As you know from buying a new computer, the faster processor speed gives it new capabilities your old clunker could not do. A similar idea applies to the brain.

Anyway, this new study, from the University of Wisconsin, focused on oligos because other research had shown that sleep promoted the expression of several genes that are involved in synthesis of cell membranes in general and those in oligos in particular. Unlike neurons, oligos die, and are replaced in the brain. Thus, anything that affects their turnover is important for brain function. Sleep has been implicated in this turnover because a common neurotransmitter in the brain, glutamate, is known to increase in wakefulness and decline during sleep. Glutamate  suppresses maturation of oligo precursor cells into formation of myelin insulation.

In this particular study, investigators examined a genome-wide profile of oligo gene expression in mice after a 6-7 hour periods of sleep or spontaneous wakefulness, or four hours of forced wakefulness (sleep deprivation). They found that 357 genes were expressed differently, depending on the time of day, in response to normal daily rhythms. More dramatic was the observation that 714 genes changed expression in conjunction with the sleep/wakefulness cycle, independent of the time of day. Of these genes, 310 were “sleep” genes that were selectively activated during sleep.

Many of the sleep genes contribute to maturation of oligos into myelin. In follow up experiments, mice were injected with a radiolabeled tag that marks the birth of new cells. Injection occurred eight hours before mice spent a long period of either of wakefulness or sleep. The number of newly born oligos was almost double in the sleep group compared to the wake group. More detailed analysis showed that this increase was specifically correlated with the amount of REM sleep (dream sleep in humans).

This REM effect may have particular importance in humans. Most REM sleep occurs in the early morning hours and only after substantial time has been spent in non-REM stages of sleep. Thus, cutting a night’s sleep short by getting up early may decrease the amount of REM time and thus the beneficial effects on oligo proliferation. So don’t feel guilty about “sleeping in” from time to time.

We might also think about how these findings could have special relevance to children, whose brains are incompletely myelinated. Getting children up early in the morning to start school at 8 AM may not be such a good idea. Until school districts get around to changing school hours, you might tell you kids about my learning and memory improvement e-book, Better Grades, Less Effort, available at Smashwords.com.

Source:

Bellesi, M., et al. (2013) Effects of sleep and wake on oligodendrocytes and their precursors. J. Neuroscience. 33 (36), 14288-14300.