The Neurochemistry of Positive Conversations

Why do negative comments and conversations stick with us so much longer than positive ones?

A critique from a boss, a disagreement with a colleague, a fight with a friend – the sting from any of these can make you forget a month’s worth of praise or accord. If you’ve been called lazy, careless, or a disappointment, you’re likely to remember and internalize it. It’s somehow easier to forget, or discount, all the times people have said you’re talented or conscientious or that you make them proud.

Chemistry plays a big role in this phenomenon. When we face criticism, rejection or fear, when we feel marginalized or minimized, our bodies produce higher levels of cortisol, a hormone that shuts down the thinking center of our brains and activates conflict aversion and protection behaviors. We become more reactive and sensitive. We often perceive even greater judgment and negativity than actually exists. And these effects can last for 26 hours or more, imprinting the interaction on our memories and magnifying the impact it has on our future behavior. Cortisol functions like a sustained-release tablet – the more we ruminate about our fear, the longer the impact.

Positive comments and conversations produce a chemical reaction too. They spur the production of oxytocin, a feel-good hormone that elevates our ability to communicate, collaborate and trust others by activating networks in our prefrontal cortex. But oxytocin metabolizes more quickly than cortisol, so its effects are less dramatic and long-lasting.

This “chemistry of conversations” is why it’s so critical for all of us -especially managers – to be more mindful about our interactions. Behaviors that increase cortisol levels reduce what I call “Conversational Intelligence” or “C-IQ,” or a person’s ability to connect and think innovatively, empathetically, creatively and strategically with others. Behaviors that spark oxytocin, by contrast, raise C-IQ.

Over the past 30 years, I’ve helped leaders at companies including Boehringer Ingelheim, Clairol, Donna Karen, Exide Technologies, Burberry, and Coach learn to boost performance with better C-IQ. Recently, my consultancy, The CreatingWE Institute, also partnered with Ryan Smith, CEO of Qualtrics, the world’s largest online survey software company, to analyze the frequency of negative (cortisol-producing) versus positive (oxytocin-producing) interactions in today’s workplaces. We asked managers how often they engaged in several behaviors — some positive, and others negative — on a scale of 0 through 5, in which 0 was “never” and 5 was “always.”

The good news is that managers appear to be using positive, oxytocin and C-IQ elevating behaviors more often than negative behaviors. Survey respondents said that they exhibited all five positive behaviors, such as “showing concern for others” more frequently than all five negative ones, such as “pretending to be listening.” However, most respondents – approximately 85% — also admitted to “sometimes” acting in ways that could derail not only specific interactions but also future relationships. And, unfortunately, when leaders exhibit both types of behaviors it creates dissonance or uncertainty in followers’ brains, spurring cortisol production and reducing CI-Q.

Consider Rob, a senior executive from Verizon. He thought of himself as a “best practices” leader who told people what to do, set clear goals, and challenged his team to produce high quality results. But when one of his direct reports had a minor heart attack, and three others asked HR to move to be transferred off his team, he realized there was a problem.

Observing Rob’s conversational patterns for a few weeks, I saw clearly that the negative (cortisol-producing) behaviors easily outweighed the positive (oxytocin-producing) behaviors. Instead of asking questions to stimulate discussion, showing concern for others, and painting a compelling picture of shared success, his tendency was to tell and sell his ideas, entering most discussions with a fixed opinion, determined to convince others he was right. He was not open to others’ influence; he failed to listen to connect.

When I explained this to Rob, and told him about the chemical impact his behavior was having on his employees, he vowed to change, and it worked. A few weeks later, a member of his team even asked me: “What did you give my boss to drink?”

I’m not suggesting that you can’t ever demand results or deliver difficult feedback. But it’s important to do so in a way that is perceived as inclusive and supportive, thereby limiting cortisol production and hopefully stimulating oxytocin instead. Be mindful of the behaviors that open us up, and those that close us down, in our relationships. Harness the chemistry of conversations.

https://hbr.org/2014/06/the-neurochemistry-of-positive-conversations/?utm_campaign=Socialflow&utm_source=Socialflow&utm_medium=Tweet 

Alfie Kohn: No Grades + No Homework = Better Learning

"In a thought-provoking presentation, Alfie Kohn makes a compelling case that two traditional features of schooling -- grades and homework -- are not only unnecessary but actually undermine students’ interest in learning.

Research consistently finds that giving students letter or number grades leads them to think less deeply, avoid challenging tasks, and become less enthusiastic about whatever they’re learning – and that’s true for those who get A’s as well as D’s. Similarly, making children work what amounts to a second shift after having spent all day in school not only proves frustrating but also turns learning into a chore. Surprisingly, claims that homework enhances understanding or promotes better work habits are contradicted by both research and experience.

Rather than trying to tweak the details of how students are graded, or how much (or even what kind of) homework they’re assigned, Kohn argues that we need to ask whether the practices themselves really make sense.

Alfie Kohn writes and speaks widely on education, parenting, and human behavior. His 11 books include PUNISHED BY REWARDS (1993), THE SCHOOLS OUR CHILDREN DESERVE (1999), and THE HOMEWORK MYTH (2006). Time magazine has described him as "perhaps the country’s most outspoken critic of education’s fixation on grades [and] test scores."

Enjoy each part is only just over a minute long

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How can mindfulness change your life

How can mindfulness change your life Jon Kabat Zin talks about how it works.
 https://sites.google.com/site/healthi... The history of clinical stress Jon Kabat Zinn (click subtitles for the French version) The Centre for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society is a visionary force and global leader in mind-body medicine. For thirty years, we have pioneered the integration of mindfulness meditation and other approaches based on mindfulness in traditional medicine and health through patient care, academic medical research and vocational training, and in society in general through various outreach initiatives and public service. Directed by Saki F. Santorelli, EDD, MA, since 2000 and founded in 1995 by Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., of the Centre is an outgrowth of the famous Stress Reduction Clinic - the oldest and the largest university medical centre based on the reduction of stress in the world. Association for the Development of Mindfulnesshttp://www.association-mindfulness.org 
https://sites.google.com/site/healthi...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2iYp...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZikN0...

Mindfulness in Education

The program director for the nonprofit organization Mindful Schools explains how mindfulness practice helps schools to become more compassionate places. Megan Cowan created the curricula for teaching mindfulness to elementary school students and adolescents. She has taught more than 3500 youth via Mindful Schools' in-class direct-service program, and trained more than 2000 educators, mental health professionals, and parents in mindfulness practices and applications for youth. 

Reading, math and ... Javascript? Coding is now mandatory in English schools

All public school students in England will now learn programming from the ages of 5 to 16.

Computers have been in schools for a long time, but schoolchildren in England are now the guinea pigs for one of the most ambitious computing education programs in the world.

All children between the ages of 5 and 16 in English public schools are now learning computer science — not just how to use software, but how to create it, too. Teenagers will have to master at least two programming languages: Java and Python. And then there are the kids in elementary school.

“The big change is that it’s now compulsory to teach [computer science to] our primary school children,” says Sophie Deen, head of a non-profit group called Code Club Pro that's helping to train teachers for the new curriculum.

“So [that’s] 5-years-old onwards,” says Deen. “Teaching children how to code and how to program computers, and also teaching them about computational thinking, which is the ability to look at problems, break them down into their component parts and try to think of a way to solve them using computers.”

When challenged about the wisdom of teaching algorithms to 5-year-olds, Deen says "it sounds more difficult than it actually is. An algorithm is a simple step-by-step instruction to solve any particular problem."

As an example, she uses a teacher named Philip Bagge, who stood in front of his class with ingredients for a jam sandwich. He played the part of a computer and challenged his students to "program" him to make the sandwich.

"So they might say, 'Pick up the butter with your right hand,' and he’ll pick up all of the butter — you know, he’ll get his fingers in it," Deen expains. "The kids roll around laughing ... but they really start understanding how to break down instructions so that they’re clear and simple enough, and that’s essentially what an algorithm is."

Using such methods, Deen says, "it's actually easy and fun to teach a 5-year-old an algorithm, and to get them to start thinking about the fact that computers are dumb, and that if we break things down very simply, we can get computers to do very cool and exciting things for us.”      

Deen says the big picture goal is laid out “in the first sentence of the new national curriculum, which says ‘we want to equip pupils to use computational thinking and creativity to understand and change the world,’ which I think is so cool, because it’s such an inspiring aim.” 

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-09-25/reading-math-and-javascript-coding-now-mandatory-english-schools

Mindfulness: 6 Steps to Better Memory, Verbal Reasoning and Improved Concentration

Image credit: Julian Coutinho

Mindfulness is an effective antidote to mind-wandering.

It’s the modern way–and we hear more and more people saying their attention span and memory are being eroded.If you can’t concentrate on a book, can’t sit quietly for 15 minutes or can barely make it through a blog post, then you’re not alone.
Being mindful

• had better short-term memory,

• improved their score on a verbal reasoning test,

• and experienced less mind-wandering.

Practice makes a perfect mind. The six steps to mindfulness

Maybe, they say, it’s the internet, or maybe it’s down to genes and personality.

Whatever the cause, a recent study published in the journalPsychological Science demonstrates that it can change.

In the research, 48 participants were assigned either to a mindfulness class or to a course on nutrition (Mrazek et al., 2013).

Both courses were only two weeks long and the classes met for 45 minutes over 8 sessions.

Students in the mindfulness group were asked to practice mindfulness outside the class and to apply what they’d learned to their everyday life.

The results of the study were striking. Those who’d practised mindfulness:

The researchers discovered that it was the last effect–the reduction in mind-wandering–that was responsible for the improved memory and reasoning.

It stands to reason: when your mind isn’t distracted and jumping around so much, it’s easier to keep things in short-term memory and to give a task your full attention.

The lead author, Michael Mrazek, explained:

“This is the most complete and rigorous demonstration that mindfulness can reduce mind-wandering, one of the clearest demonstrations that mindfulness can improve working memory and reading, and the first study to tie all this together to show that mind-wandering mediates the improvements in performance.”

One of the fascinating aspects of the study is that people’s scores increased on a test that is supposed to be uncoachable.

The test, the GRE (Graduate Record Examination) is a standardised test for fixed abilities.

But, if people are improving their scores after such a short intervention, it’s demonstrating that these kinds of cognitive abilities are not as fixed as is generally thought.

The second fascinating aspect of the study is the broad effect of the intervention.

Typically, people who do ‘brain training’ exercises get better at those specific brain training exercises but not much else.

For example, if you do loads of Sudoku or crossword puzzles, you get better at those specific activities, but these improvements generally doesn’t reach into other areas.

But here a mindfulness intervention was having a broad effect on memory, verbal skills and concentration.

The reason it works is because it dampens down mind wandering, our natural tendency to daydream, time-travel and generally goof off.

Psychologists call the neural structures that underlie this effect the ‘default network’.

The mind’s ‘default network’ is not a bad thing in itself, but it shouldn’t interfere when we want to concentrate:

“…mindfulness training leads to reduced activation of the default network, a collection of brain regions that typically show greater activation at rest than during externally directed cognitive tasks. Both long-term meditators and individuals who have completed 2 weeks of mindfulness training show reduced activation of the default network.” (Mrazek et al., 2013).

For those of you who’d like to try this at home, here’s what the mindfulness classes involved:

“(a) sitting in an upright posture with legs crossed and gaze lowered,

(b) distinguishing between naturally arising thoughts and elaborated thinking,

(c) minimizing the distracting quality of past and future concerns by reframing them as mental projections occurring in the present,

(d) using the breath as an anchor for attention during meditation,

(e) repeatedly counting up to 21 consecutive exhalations

(f ) allowing the mind to rest naturally rather than trying to suppress the occurrence of thoughts.”

http://www.spring.org.uk/2014/01/mindfulness-6-steps-to-better-memory-verbal-reasoning-and-improved-concentration.php

What Do Schools Risk By Going ‘Full Google’?

LA Johnson/ NPR

Kaitlin Morgan says, this year, her school district is going “full Google.”

Morgan teaches U.S. and world history and advises the yearbook at Woodlake Union High School in California’s Central Valley. At Woodlake, “full Google” means a plan to have one Google Chromebook for every two students by the spring, running Google Apps.

The Chromebook is a relatively cheap, stripped-down laptop. It’s become popular in the education world, with 85 percent of its U.S. sales last year going to the ed market.

And the Chromebook is just the beginning. Already, Google Apps for Education claims 30 million active users around the world. The free, Web-based software works on any device and allows teachers and students to use Gmail with their own .edu address.

It’s the beginning of what Google calls the “paperless classroom” — moving assignments, class discussions, feedback, tests and quizzes online.

Now comes Google’s latest education offering, launched last week: Google Classroom.

“When you’re using free services, if you don’t know what the product is, you are the product.”

Classroom enables a teacher to create a “class” at the touch of a button. She or he can upload syllabus materials, whether text, audio or video, and send out assignments on the class news feed.

Teachers see instantly who has turned in their homework. They can start a class discussion and provide feedback and grades; students can see what’s due and what’s late. The whole package integrates with the rest of Google’s apps, like Google Docs.

Zach Yeskel, product manager for Google Apps for Education, says Google “worked with innovative teachers to build their best practices and workarounds into the product. We really see Classroom as a tool that should be usable in any class setting to streamline universal workflows.”

While it’s too soon to tell how Classroom will be received, Google Apps for Education is already changing how early adopters teach — and raising some important questions about the transition to tech-enabled classrooms.

Heidi Berlusconi teaches biology at Clarkstown Central High School in New City, New York. She was a Google Apps for Education user and provided feedback on Google Classroom while it was being developed.

“One of the issues I had with students was their not citing correctly,” Berlusconi says. “There was a lot of plagiarism.” With Google Docs, she can figuratively look over a student’s shoulder and flag improper citation even before they turn in an assignment. Plus, she says, when students are collaborating, a glance at the revision history “allows you to see who really is doing the work” by who contributed what edits.

The most important impact, she says, is that Google extends her teaching time. Students hold discussions online and offer each other homework help in the wee hours after she’s gone to sleep.

History teacher Kaitlin Morgan, meanwhile, got professional development in Google and went all in with her summer school economics course.

“We used Docs for notes, Draw for projects like collages. They created their own websites through Sites for a budget project, and I built quizzes and tests on Google Forms.” Morgan also used Pear Deck, an app written to work with Google Drive, to quickly check students’ understanding during class.

“The kids love it,” she says. “They’re really engaged.”

Still, not everyone is ready to embrace Google’s free education applications.

A familiar charge is that the paperless classroom creates a digital divide. At schools like Woodlake, Morgan says, “we’re not at the point where every student has a device and Wi-Fi at home.” She had to print out some assignments for students, or else cut back on homework — not exactly what was promised.

Another big concern is commercialization and student privacy. As Yeskel has mentioned in other interviews, Google’s business motive here is to expose young users to the Google brand. To hook them early.

Khaliah Barnes, director of the Student Privacy Project of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), warns, “When you’re using free services, if you don’t know what the product is, you are the product.”

In March, as part of a federal lawsuit, Google admitted it had been data-mining student email messages to potentially improve its targeted advertising, among other reasons. As of late April, says Yeskel, “We no longer show any ads to students or use any information in any other Google products. We take ownership of any user data extremely seriously.”

Still, users of Google Apps for Education are subject to Google’s terms of service, which is subject to change.

The need to decipher service agreements to protect student privacy is a big responsibility for teachers. And that’s part of a larger dilemma as schools go digital — teachers and districts are being asked to make significant decisions about, and investments in, technology use without much help.

“The thing about Google is they’re a technology company, not really a solution company,” says Phil Hill, an educational technology consultant and market analyst. “Rather than understand needs and build a holistic solution, Google has the ability to throw stuff out and see what happens.”

A school that takes the trouble to train its teachers and switch up their workflow is taking a risk that Google might not keep supporting a product, as with Orkut, Wave and Buzz, to name a few.

Andrew Jensen, a colleague of Kaitlin Morgan’s, is excited about the possibilities of Google Classroom. But, he says, “sometimes the amount of time it takes to set these things up ends up being more than it’s worth. A few years back our districts spent many thousands of dollars on interactive whiteboards, and it was a waste of money.”

Unlike the enthusiastic early adopters, teachers like Jensen are more skeptical about being asked to adapt to a constantly changing set of tech tools.

Morgan agrees. “Some have just now got the hang of Google Apps,” says Morgan, who has been involved in training her colleagues with the transition to Google Classroom. “Now we’re saying, Everything we just taught you? Just kidding, now there’s something new.’ 

http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2014/08/what-do-schools-risk-by-going-full-google/

Why the modern world is bad for your brain

Daniel J Levitan: ‘When trying to concentrate on a task, an unread email in your inbox can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points.’

Our brains are busier than ever before. We’re assaulted with facts, pseudo facts, jibber-jabber, and rumour, all posing as information. Trying to figure out what you need to know and what you can ignore is exhausting. At the same time, we are all doing more. Thirty years ago, travel agents made our airline and rail reservations, salespeople helped us find what we were looking for in shops, and professional typists or secretaries helped busy people with their correspondence. Now we do most of those things ourselves. We are doing the jobs of 10 different people while still trying to keep up with our lives, our children and parents, our friends, our careers, our hobbies, and our favourite TV shows.
Our smartphones have become Swiss army knife–like appliances that include a dictionary, calculator, web browser, email, Game Boy, appointment calendar, voice recorder, guitar tuner, weather forecaster, GPS, texter, tweeter, Facebook updater, and flashlight. They’re more powerful and do more things than the most advanced computer at IBM corporate headquarters 30 years ago. And we use them all the time, part of a 21st-century mania for cramming everything we do into every single spare moment of downtime. We text while we’re walking across the street, catch up on email while standing in a queue – and while having lunch with friends, we surreptitiously check to see what our other friends are doing. At the kitchen counter, cosy and secure in our domicile, we write our shopping lists on smartphones while we are listening to that wonderfully informative podcast on urban beekeeping.
But there’s a fly in the ointment. Although we think we’re doing several things at once, multitasking, this is a powerful and diabolical illusion. Earl Miller, a neuroscientist at MIT and one of the world experts on divided attention, says that our brains are “not wired to multitask well… When people think they’re multitasking, they’re actually just switching from one task to another very rapidly. And every time they do, there’s a cognitive cost in doing so.” So we’re not actually keeping a lot of balls in the air like an expert juggler; we’re more like a bad amateur plate spinner, frantically switching from one task to another, ignoring the one that is not right in front of us but worried it will come crashing down any minute. Even though we think we’re getting a lot done, ironically, multitasking makes us demonstrably less efficient.
Multitasking has been found to increase the production of the stress hormone cortisol as well as the fight-or-flight hormone adrenaline, which can overstimulate your brain and cause mental fog or scrambled thinking. Multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation. To make matters worse, the prefrontal cortex has a novelty bias, meaning that its attention can be easily hijacked by something new – the proverbial shiny objects we use to entice infants, puppies, and kittens. The irony here for those of us who are trying to focus amid competing activities is clear: the very brain region we need to rely on for staying on task is easily distracted. We answer the phone, look up something on the internet, check our email, send an SMS, and each of these things tweaks the novelty- seeking, reward-seeking centres of the brain, causing a burst of endogenous opioids (no wonder it feels so good!), all to the detriment of our staying on task. It is the ultimate empty-caloried brain candy. Instead of reaping the big rewards that come from sustained, focused effort, we instead reap empty rewards from completing a thousand little sugar-coated tasks.
In the old days, if the phone rang and we were busy, we either didn’t answer or we turned the ringer off. When all phones were wired to a wall, there was no expectation of being able to reach us at all times – one might have gone out for a walk or been between places – and so if someone couldn’t reach you (or you didn’t feel like being reached), it was considered normal. Now more people have mobile phones than have toilets. This has created an implicit expectation that you should be able to reach someone when it is convenient for you, regardless of whether it is convenient for them. This expectation is so ingrained that people in meetings routinely answer their mobile phones to say, “I’m sorry, I can’t talk now, I’m in a meeting.” Just a decade or two ago, those same people would have let a landline on their desk go unanswered during a meeting, so different were the expectations for reachability.
Just having the opportunity to multitask is detrimental to cognitive performance. Glenn Wilson, former visiting professor of psychology at Gresham College, London, calls it info-mania. His research found that being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an email is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. And although people ascribe many benefits to marijuana, including enhanced creativity and reduced pain and stress, it is well documented that its chief ingredient, cannabinol, activates dedicated cannabinol receptors in the brain and interferes profoundly with memory and with our ability to concentrate on several things at once. Wilson showed that the cognitive losses from multitasking are even greater than the cognitive losses from pot‑smoking.
Russ Poldrack, a neuroscientist at Stanford, found that learning information while multitasking causes the new information to go to the wrong part of the brain. If students study and watch TV at the same time, for example, the information from their schoolwork goes into the striatum, a region specialised for storing new procedures and skills, not facts and ideas. Without the distraction of TV, the information goes into the hippocampus, where it is organised and categorised in a variety of ways, making it easier to retrieve. MIT’s Earl Miller adds, “People can’t do [multitasking] very well, and when they say they can, they’re deluding themselves.” And it turns out the brain is very good at this deluding business.

‘Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task.’ Photograph: Alamy

Then there are the metabolic costs that I wrote about earlier. Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviour. By contrast, staying on task is controlled by the anterior cingulate and the striatum, and once we engage the central executive mode, staying in that state uses less energy than multitasking and actually reduces the brain’s need for glucose.
To make matters worse, lots of multitasking requires decision-making: Do I answer this text message or ignore it? How do I respond to this? How do I file this email? Do I continue what I’m working on now or take a break? It turns out that decision-making is also very hard on your neural resources and that little decisions appear to take up as much energy as big ones. One of the first things we lose is impulse control. This rapidly spirals into a depleted state in which, after making lots of insignificant decisions, we can end up making truly bad decisions about something important. Why would anyone want to add to their daily weight of information processing by trying to multitask?
In discussing information overload with Fortune 500 leaders, top scientists, writers, students, and small business owners, email comes up again and again as a problem. It’s not a philosophical objection to email itself, it’s the mind-numbing number of emails that come in. When the 10-year-old son of my neuroscience colleague Jeff Mogil (head of the Pain Genetics lab at McGill University) was asked what his father does for a living, he responded, “He answers emails.” Jeff admitted after some thought that it’s not so far from the truth. Workers in government, the arts, and industry report that the sheer volume of email they receive is overwhelming, taking a huge bite out of their day. We feel obliged to answer our emails, but it seems impossible to do so and get anything else done.
Before email, if you wanted to write to someone, you had to invest some effort in it. You’d sit down with pen and paper, or at a typewriter, and carefully compose a message. There wasn’t anything about the medium that lent itself to dashing off quick notes without giving them much thought, partly because of the ritual involved, and the time it took to write a note, find and address an envelope, add postage, and take the letter to a mailbox. Because the very act of writing a note or letter to someone took this many steps, and was spread out over time, we didn’t go to the trouble unless we had something important to say. Because of email’s immediacy, most of us give little thought to typing up any little thing that pops in our heads and hitting the send button. And email doesn’t cost anything.
Sure, there’s the money you paid for your computer and your internet connection, but there is no incremental cost to sending one more email. Compare this with paper letters. Each one incurred the price of the envelope and the postage stamp, and although this doesn’t represent a lot of money, these were in limited supply – if you ran out of them, you’d have to make a special trip to the stationery store and the post office to buy more, so you didn’t use them frivolously. The sheer ease of sending emails has led to a change in manners, a tendency to be less polite about what we ask of others. Many professionals tell a similar story. One said, “A large proportion of emails I receive are from people I barely know asking me to do something for them that is outside what would normally be considered the scope of my work or my relationship with them. Email somehow apparently makes it OK to ask for things they would never ask by phone, in person, or in snail mail.”
There are also important differences between snail mail and email on the receiving end. In the old days, the only mail we got came once a day, which effectively created a cordoned-off section of your day to collect it from the mailbox and sort it. Most importantly, because it took a few days to arrive, there was no expectation that you would act on it immediately. If you were engaged in another activity, you’d simply let the mail sit in the box outside or on your desk until you were ready to deal with it. Now email arrives continuously, and most emails demand some sort of action: Click on this link to see a video of a baby panda, or answer this query from a co-worker, or make plans for lunch with a friend, or delete this email as spam. All this activity gives us a sense that we’re getting things done – and in some cases we are. But we are sacrificing efficiency and deep concentration when we interrupt our priority activities with email.
Until recently, each of the many different modes of communication we used signalled its relevance, importance, and intent. If a loved one communicated with you via a poem or a song, even before the message was apparent, you had a reason to assume something about the nature of the content and its emotional value. If that same loved one communicated instead via a summons, delivered by an officer of the court, you would have expected a different message before even reading the document. Similarly, phone calls were typically used to transact different business from that of telegrams or business letters. The medium was a clue to the message. All of that has changed with email, and this is one of its overlooked disadvantages – because it is used for everything. In the old days, you might sort all of your postal mail into two piles, roughly corresponding to personal letters and bills. If you were a corporate manager with a busy schedule, you might similarly sort your telephone messages for callbacks. But emails are used for all of life’s messages. We compulsively check our email in part because we don’t know whether the next message will be for leisure/amusement, an overdue bill, a “to do”, a query… something you can do now, later, something life-changing, something irrelevant.
This uncertainty wreaks havoc with our rapid perceptual categorisation system, causes stress, and leads to decision overload. Every email requires a decision! Do I respond to it? If so, now or later? How important is it? What will be the social, economic, or job-related consequences if I don’t answer, or if I don’t answer right now?

‘Because it is limited in characters, texting discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail, and its addictive problems are compounded by its hyper-immediacy.’ Photograph: Alamy

Now of course email is approaching obsolescence as a communicative medium. Most people under the age of 30 think of email as an outdated mode of communication used only by “old people”. In its place they text, and some still post to Facebook. They attach documents, photos, videos, and links to their text messages and Facebook posts the way people over 30 do with email. Many people under 20 now see Facebook as a medium for the older generation.
For them, texting has become the primary mode of communication. It offers privacy that you don’t get with phone calls, and immediacy you don’t get with email. Crisis hotlines have begun accepting calls from at-risk youth via texting and it allows them two big advantages: they can deal with more than one person at a time, and they can pass the conversation on to an expert, if needed, without interrupting the conversation.
But texting suffers from most of the problems of email and then some. Because it is limited in characters, it discourages thoughtful discussion or any level of detail. And the addictive problems are compounded by texting’s hyperimmediacy. Emails take some time to work their way through the internet and they require that you take the step of explicitly opening them. Text messages magically appear on the screen of your phone and demand immediate attention from you. Add to that the social expectation that an unanswered text feels insulting to the sender, and you’ve got a recipe for addiction: you receive a text, and that activates your novelty centres. You respond and feel rewarded for having completed a task (even though that task was entirely unknown to you 15 seconds earlier). Each of those delivers a shot of dopamine as your limbic system cries out “More! More! Give me more!”
In a famous experiment, my McGill colleagues Peter Milner and James Olds, both neuroscientists, placed a small electrode in the brains of rats, in a small structure of the limbic system called the nucleus accumbens. This structure regulates dopamine production and is the region that “lights up” when gamblers win a bet, drug addicts take cocaine, or people have orgasms – Olds and Milner called it the pleasure centre. A lever in the cage allowed the rats to send a small electrical signal directly to their nucleus accumbens. Do you think they liked it? Boy how they did! They liked it so much that they did nothing else. They forgot all about eating and sleeping. Long after they were hungry, they ignored tasty food if they had a chance to press that little chrome bar; they even ignored the opportunity for sex. The rats just pressed the lever over and over again, until they died of starvation and exhaustion. Does that remind you of anything? A 30-year-old man died in Guangzhou (China) after playing video games continuously for three days. Another man died in Daegu (Korea) after playing video games almost continuously for 50 hours, stopped only by his going into cardiac arrest.
Each time we dispatch an email in one way or another, we feel a sense of accomplishment, and our brain gets a dollop of reward hormones telling us we accomplished something. Each time we check a Twitter feed or Facebook update, we encounter something novel and feel more connected socially (in a kind of weird, impersonal cyber way) and get another dollop of reward hormones. But remember, it is the dumb, novelty-seeking portion of the brain driving the limbic system that induces this feeling of pleasure, not the planning, scheduling, higher-level thought centres in the prefrontal cortex. Make no mistake: email-, Facebook- and Twitter-checking constitute a neural addiction.

© Daniel J. Levitin. Extracted from The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload

Joy: A Subject Schools Lack

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When Jonathan Swift proposed, in 1729, that the people of Ireland eat their children, he insisted it would solve three problems at once: feed the hungry masses, reduce the population during a severe depression, and stimulate restaurant business. Even as a satire, it seems repulsive and shocking in America with its child-centered culture. But actually, the country is closer to his proposal than you might think.

If you spend much time with educators and policy makers (even if you just read editorials about education), you’ll hear a lot of the following words: "standards," "results," "skills," "self-control," "accountability," and so on. I have visited some of the newer supposedly "effective" schools, where children chant slogans in order to learn self-control, are given a jelly bean when they do their worksheet, or must stand behind their desk when they can’t sit still. When I go to these schools, all I can think of is Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, in which Wackford Squeers, the headmaster of a school, says with great certainty, "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them …"

In the novel, Squeers is hell-bent on making sure that his students leave school with the knowledge they need to be "serviceable" in the adult world. It’s not so different today. Everyone is worried about whether kids are "learning what they need" to get into college, finding good jobs, getting along in a big company, and learning new trades. The country's whole school system seems geared toward solving large-scale economic woes and producing future workers. It’s most definitely not geared toward children. In fact, the prevailing view is that if teachers focus too much on students’ pleasure they will somehow be encouraging wanton self-indulgence and dangerous hedonism.

A look at what goes on in most classrooms these days makes it abundantly clear that when people think about education, they are not thinking about what it feels like to be a child, or what makes childhood an important and valuable stage of life in its own right. This may explain why so many schools that I visit seem more like something out of a Dickens novel than anything else.

I’m a mother of three, a teacher, and a developmental psychologist. So I’ve watched a lot of children—talking, playing, arguing, eating, studying, and being, well, young. Here’s what I’ve come to understand. The thing that sets children apart from adults is not their ignorance, nor their lack of skills. It’s their enormous capacity for joy. Think of a 3-year-old lost in the pleasures of finding out what he can and cannot sink in the bathtub, a 5-year-old beside herself with the thrill of putting together strings of nonsensical words with her best friends, or an 11-year-old completely immersed in a riveting comic strip. A child's ability to become deeply absorbed in something, and derive intense pleasure from that absorption, is something adults spend the rest of their lives trying to return to.

A friend told me the following story. One day, when he went to get his 7-year-old son from soccer practice, his kid greeted him with a downcast face and a despondent voice. The coach had chastised him for not paying attention and not focusing on his soccer drills. The little boy walked out of the school with his head drooping downwards, shoulders slumped, dragging his way towards the car. He seemed wrapped in sadness. But just before he reached the car door, he suddenly stopped, crouching down to peer at something on the sidewalk. His face went down lower and lower, and then, with complete ebullience he called out, "Dad. C’mere. This is the most amazing bug I’ve ever seen. It has, like, a million legs. Look at this. It’s awesome." He looked up at his father, his features brimming with energy and delight. "Can’t we stay here for just a minute? I want to find out what he does with all those legs. This is the coolest ever."

The traditional view of such moments is that they constitute a charming but irrelevant byproduct of youth—something to be pushed aside to make room for more important qualities, like perseverance, obligation, and practicality. Yet moments like this one are just the kind of intense absorption and pleasure adults spend the rest of their lives seeking. In his masterpiece essay, Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud described childhood as a period of trying to balance primal urges to find pleasure and avoid pain with the growing need to be part of a group. Every piece of research since that essay has shown that Freud was right. Human lives are governed by the desire to experience joy. Becoming educated should not require giving up joy but rather lead to finding joy in new kinds of things: reading novels instead of playing with small figures, conducting experiments instead of sinking cups in the bathtub, and debating serious issues rather than stringing together nonsense words, for example. In some cases, schools should help children find new, more grown-up ways of doing the same things that are perennial sources of joy: making art, making friends, making decisions.

Building on a child’s ability to feel joy, rather than pushing it aside, wouldn’t be that hard. It would just require a shift in the education world’s mindset. Instead of trying to get children to buckle down, why not focus on getting them to take pleasure in meaningful, productive activity, like making things, working with others, exploring ideas, and solving problems? These focuses are not so different from the things to which they already gravitate and in which they delight.

Before you brush this argument aside as sentimental fluff, or think of joy as an unaffordable luxury in a nation where there is dire poverty, low academic achievement, and high dropout rates, think again. The more dire the school circumstances, the more important pleasure is to achieving any educational success.

Many of the assignments and rules teachers come up with, often because they are pressured by their administrators, treat pleasure and joy as the enemies of competence and responsibility. The assumption is that children shouldn’t chat in the classroom because it disrupts hard work; instead, they should learn to delay gratification so that they can pursue abstract goals, like going to college. They should keep their hands to themselves and tolerate boredom so that they become good at being bored later on.

Not only is this a dreary and awful way to treat children, it makes no sense educationally. Decades of research have shown that in order to acquire skills and real knowledge in school, kids need to want to learn. You can force a child to stay in his or her seat, fill out a worksheet, or practice division. But you can’t force a person to think carefully, enjoy books, digest complex information, or develop a taste for learning. To make that happen, you have to help the child find pleasure in learning—to see school as a source of joy.

Adults tend to talk about learning as if it were medicine: unpleasant, but necessary and good for you. Why not instead think of learning as if it were food—something so valuable to humans that they have evolved to experience it as a pleasure? The more a person likes fresh, healthy food, the more likely that individual is to have a good diet. Why can’t it be the same with learning? Let children learn because they love to—think only of a 2-year-old trying to talk to see how natural humans’ thirst for knowledge is. Then, in school, help children build on their natural joy in learning.

Joy should not be trained out of children or left for after-school programs. The more difficult a child’s life circumstances, the more important it is for that child to find joy in his or her classroom. "Pleasure" is not a dirty word. And it’s not antithetical to the goals of K-12 public education. It is, in fact, the sine qua non.