The Costs of Paying Attention, The Value of Reflection
Recent studies done by neuroscientist Mary Helen Immordino-Yang (University of Southern California) and her colleague Joanna Christodoulou (Massachusetts General Hospital, MIT) suggest that educators need to consider much more carefully the role of reflection in learning.1 They cite new theories of two brain systems that control our attention. One is activated when we engage with goal-directed tasks in the external world, and the other is activated when we are at rest, or when our attention turns inward — when the outside world no longer demands our attention and we can engage in introspective processes. This state of inward focus engages what researchers call the brain’s default mode (DM), a system of brain regions that is activated when we cease attending to problems or tasks in the external world.
It seems that the brain toggles between these two systems, between the DM and the externally directed mode, depending on where we need to focus our attention; we can’t be in both states at the same time. Our brain is a bit like those dolls whose eyes open and close depending on their position: lay them down, and the eyes toggle closed; sit them or stand them up, and the eyes toggle open. Present our brain with external stimuli that demand our attention, and our “eyes” pop open, activating one neural network. Let us disengage from the outer world, and our “eyes” close, activating a different network that allows us to gaze inwardly.
Both networks are essential for learning, understanding, and making sense of the world and of our experiences. Also essential is our ability to toggle from one to the other — the ability to disengage from one and engage the other. Studies suggest that efficient functioning of these systems is connected to social, emotional, and cognitive functioning — such things as memory, reading, imagination, simulation, empathy, and morality. Immordino-Yang offers an illustration:
Consider the reaction of one college-age participant, “John,” during a one-on-one social emotion-induction interview in which he was told a true story meant to induce compassion. The story is about a young boy who grew up in a small industrial city in China during an economic depression that often left him hungry. The boy’s father had died just after the boy’s birth, leaving his mother to work long hours as a laborer. John was shown a video clip in which the boy’s mother describes how, one winter afternoon, she found a coin on the ground and used it to buy warm cakes for her son, who had been all day at school with nothing to eat. The mother recounts how her son had been so hungry, yet he had offered her the last cake, which she declined by lying that she had eaten already. After the video, the experimenter asked John how this situation made him feel, to which John responded:
“This is the one [true story from the experiment] that’s hit me the most, I suppose. And I’m not very good at verbalizing emotions. But . . . um . . . I can almost feel the physical sensations. It’s like there’s a balloon or something just under my sternum, inflating and moving up and out. Which, I don’t know, is my sign of something really touching. . . . [pause] And, so, the selflessness of the mother . . . and then also of the little boy. You know, having these wonderful cakes that he never gets to have, and still offering them to her . . . and then her turning them down, is . . . uh . . . [long pause] It makes me think about my parents, because they provide me with so much and I don’t thank them enough, I don’t think. . . . I know I don’t. So, I should do that.”
In answering the straightforward question of how this story made him feel, John revealed a common pattern in which deliberations leading to a complex reaction to a social situation begin with a general report of feeling emotionally touched or moved (“hit”), which is sometimes accompanied by visceral sensations (“a balloon . . . under my sternum”). Even though John did not seem to really know yet what emotion he was having (“I’m not very good at verbalizing”), he noticed the emotional power of the story based on the physiological “signs” he felt.
But he did not stop there. Instead, after briefly reviewing the relevant actions from the story (who gave whom what to eat) and their meaning based on what he knew about the situation (there is a shortage of food, so sharing food implies “selflessness”), John paused. He appeared to briefly withdraw from the interaction with the experimenter and blankly gazed into his lap. Then he emerged with a report of having spontaneously evaluated his own relationship with his parents. By evaluating the emotional implications of another boy’s situation, John learned to better appreciate his own.
How does this example pertain to the argument at hand? John’s reaction to the compassion-inducing story nicely demonstrates how new insights and understandings are actively, dynamically constructed…– learners build from prior knowledge and work to actively accommodate new information to make sense of the current situation. It also demonstrates the value of a reflective pause in moving from considering the concrete, action-oriented, context-specific details of this situation (knowing what happened and why) to constructing an understanding of the broader and longer term emotional implications for one’s own or any situation (in John’s case, what the actions mean for the protagonists’ psychological qualities and how recognizing these qualities leads him to express greater appreciation of his own parents’ sacrifices for him). What is interesting is that our neural data support the interpretation that John’s pauses are a behavioral manifestation of DM neural activity. Our current analyses reveal that the more a participant reflectively pauses in the social emotions interview, the more cognitively abstract and complex his or her answers…, the more DM activity the participant will later show when feeling emotions with moral connotations in the MRI scanner, and the stronger the participant’s DM connectivity during rest.2
This example of the role and value of reflection illustrates the need for educators to find more opportunities to make reflection part of a student’s life at school, especially amidst the incessant bombardment of distractions from cyberspace. Too much external distraction or too much inner preoccupation disrupts the smooth toggling between the two systems. As Immordino-Yang writes:
For instance, autism is associated with atypically low levels of functional connectivity between DM regions during rest; these findings are thought to reflect a paucity of social and psychological thought and emotion…. People with schizophrenia, by contrast, show heightened activation and hyperconnectivity in the DM network that are insufficiently attenuated during outward attention…; this pattern is thought to produce a heightened propensity toward mentalizing and a blurring of boundaries between one’s own and others’ minds that contributes to disordered thought when coupled with schizophrenics’ excessive alertness to the external environment…. 3
For most young people today, the dangers are the endless external demands of social media and the gadgets that deliver them:
If youths overuse social media, if they spend very little waking time free from the possibility that a text will interrupt them, we would expect that these conditions might predispose youths toward focusing on the concrete, physical, and immediate aspects of situations and self, with less inclination toward considering the abstract, longer term, moral, and emotional implications of their and others’ actions. 4
Making sense of the world and building deep understanding, a moral self, and empathy rely on a healthy ability to move between the inner and outer worlds.
Helping students learn how to toggle between these two states of attention seems important. Young people need to understand the value of the often-maligned, inwardly focused system (“Stop staring into space.”). They need practice and experience so that they can learn what sort of thinking requires which system and how to engage the system relevant to their task.
Unfortunately, the emphasis in most schools is heavily tilted toward ever more demands for external focus. “Eyes on me.” “Pay attention.” “Stop doodling.” “Hurry up. Only one minute left. Time’s up.” Yet many teachers recognize intuitively the need for what Immordino-Yang and her colleagues call “constructive internal reflection.” When people engage in ideas and problems that really matter to them, they need time to sit quietly or take a walk and allow their minds to play with possible solutions in a sort of unstructured recess. They need time to put the problem aside and circle back to it later. They need time to integrate new experiences and ideas into what they already know in order to arrive at new understandings.
Daydreaming can be more active and productive than the name implies, especially if a person’s involvement in the external world contains a sense of purpose and focus before toggling into the DM. Engagement in the outer world can provide the raw materials for constructing meaning during inner reflection. Educators, whose primary purpose is to foster and support learning, must rethink classroom practices (heavy reliance on asking students to pay attention to lectures, drill-and-kill worksheets, videos, Web searches, and endless recitation and testing) in light of the role of reflection in learning. Immordino-Yang writes:
Although the main focus in attention research relevant to development and education to date has been on “looking out” into the environment, for example, the facility with which a child filters out distractions and maintains focus on a task…, the neuroscience findings reviewed here suggest that (a) the quality of neural processing that supports the system for “looking out” is tied to the quality of neural processing that supports the system for “looking in” and to individuals’ abilities to move between these two modes efficiently; (b) the quality of neural processing during “looking in” is related to socioemotional functioning as well as to other dimensions of thought that transcend the “here and now.”5
It looks as though daydreaming, inner reflection, and letting the mind wander improve learning and performance in the external world by maintaining the ability to toggle smoothly between these two attention systems and by ensuring that the two systems will support each other. Recognizing this biological need by designing classrooms that include constructive reflection will help students develop critical abilities that improve learning.
Alden Blodget is a longtime teacher, administrator, and trustee at several independent schools. Currently, he is the humanities support teacher at The Academy at Penguin Hall in Massachusetts.
Originally published by the National Association of Independent Schools’ Independent Teacher (spring, 2015), this essay is an adapted section from a section of Learning, Schooling and the Brain: New Research vs. Old Assumptions, which explores several implications of research into how people learn and their relevance to school and teaching.
1 Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Joanna A. Christodoulou, and Vanessa Singh,
“Rest Is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education,” Perspectives on Psychological Science, vol. 7, no. 4, 2012, pp. 352–364; online at http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Immordino-Yang-et-al.-20120.pdf.
2 Ibid., p. 357.
3 Ibid., p. 355.
4 Ibid., p. 358.
5 Ibid., p. 355.