Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect (42 page)

Consider how peer tutoring would be experienced from the vantage point of a typical eighth grader.
Instead of receiving a forty-minute lecture from a teacher, each eighth grader would spend twenty minutes teaching a sixth grader about lowest common denominators and then would receive a twenty-minute lesson from a tenth grader about basic algebraic equations.
Of course, the teacher would have to work with the eighth graders to make sure they were ready to teach the sixth-grade lesson.
However, the eighth graders,
by also working with the sixth and tenth graders, would have multiple social motivations to learn the material.

Typical eighth graders may not enjoy listening to a teacher teaching them about math, but I bet they will care substantially about the teaching relationship they have with the sixth graders.
Junior high students want to be in charge and feel autonomous, and learning-for-teaching would provide a great opportunity.
It is a chance for them to be an authority in the eyes of the adoring sixth graders, who often will leap at the chance to spend time with the cool eighth graders.
Recall from
Chapter 11
that knowing that one’s efforts are really helping someone leads to more and better effort.
To make personal learning about helping others would set these motivational processes in motion.
Older students often like having a few younger students they look out for, and peer tutoring offers an educationally focused way to accomplish this.

Naturally, there is also the fear of screwing up in front of the sixth graders, which motivates the eighth graders to learn the lesson as well.
Social embarrassment can be a stronger motivator than the fear of a low score on a test.
All of these social dynamics repeat themselves when the tenth graders teach the eighth graders.
The eighth graders may not like listening to adults, but what could be better than hanging out with the tenth graders?
Finally, I also suspect that eighth graders will like their adult teachers more if they feel they are actively collaborating with them in order to teach the sixth graders.

Remember that the trick in all this is that when the eighth graders learn the lesson to teach the sixth graders, the eighth graders will be more likely to engage the mentalizing system to boost the quality of the memory for the material.
The potential downside is that the same material will be taught twice to each student.
First, time will be spent having the eighth graders teach the sixth graders a lesson, and then those sixth graders will have to spend time revisiting the material two years later in eighth grade in order to teach it to a new group of sixth graders.
By definition, students will cover less
content in school.
But given that students are remembering so little of what they are learning now, wouldn’t it be better to teach them less and have them actually learn and retain the material?

Social Brain Class

While we are taking advantage of the fact that most class time is spent on material that will be forgotten, perhaps we should use some of that wasted time to learn something else.
Our brain craves to understand itself, the social world, and the relation between the two.
This understanding is what the mentalizing system and the self-processing regions make possible.
Neural and hormonal changes
during adolescence make this goal even more pressing.
Why not spend at least part of the day teaching what the brain is most biologically prepared to learn about?
Effective social skills are as important to most careers as other facts and analytical skills currently being taught in school.
Being able to work effectively with team members, superiors, and subordinates is critical to most work environments.
Can anyone make the argument that algebra is as important as social intelligence to most people’s professional or personal development?
Do you believe that everyone around you already has as much social intelligence as they need?

Despite the regular practice that the mentalizing network gets from birth to adulthood, our social expertise is clearly less than it could be.
Unlike nearly everything else in life, we are each left to our own devices to figure out the social world.
If you want to play piano or play soccer, you take a class or get a coach who corrects you each time you make an error.
But for learning about the social world, you are on your own.
We rarely get direct feedback about our errors
in our social thinking.
Partly for this reason, people are susceptible to a wide variety of social cognitive and self-processing errors and biases, including but not limited to naïve realism, fundamental attribution
errors, false consensus effects, affective forecasting errors, in-group favoritism, and overconfidence.
How can you correct these errors if you never have them pointed out when you make them?
How do you learn what the correct inference should have been, and why?
Teaching our students about these processes—why they occur and how to identify when we are making these errors—won’t eliminate all of them, though it would likely diminish some.
What it will do is provide a shared language for discussing and considering these errors when they occur, which in turn will help people understand that the errors that others make usually aren’t malicious or intentionally self-serving.
No one wakes up in the morning and says, “I’ve got to work harder at being a jerk today.”
We all make frequent social mistakes, and I suspect we always will.
If we, and those around us, had a more mature understanding of them, we would be able to stop these errors in their tracks and minimize the fallout that comes from their being misinterpreted.

We should be teaching our students about their social motivations and the fact that hurting someone else’s feelings is more like a physical assault than we might intuitively believe.
We should teach our students that it is natural to have both selfish and prosocial motivations and that the latter do not need to be hidden.
We should teach our students that our desires to be socially connected aren’t a weakness and that our interest in understanding the social world is an evolutionary advantage that has been baked into our operating systems over millions of years.
The developing social brain needs accurate information about the social world.
Too many of our adolescents are getting these models from sitcoms and uninformed peer opinion.
There is a science of how the social world works, and social psychology, social neuroscience, and sociology all have a lot to tell us about it.
We have an opportunity to craft far more socially savvy adults.
And there is little doubt that teachers would have less difficulty keeping their students’ attention in this particular class; it’s exactly what the adolescent brain craves.

Exercise Class for the Social Brain

The film
Gattaca
explores the commonly held notion of genetic determinism taken to its frightening extreme.
Everyone is born from a test tube in which only the best DNA from each parent was used to create the most nearly perfect person possible.
The central theme of the movie examines whether individuals born genetically “inferior” can overcome their limitations through hard work.
The premise is plausible because most of us hold contradictory beliefs that we trot out at different times, depending on what suits us.
On the one hand, we tend to believe the cards we are dealt genetically, at birth, are hugely determinative of the kind of life we will have.
On the other hand, we subscribe to the view that through hard work we can get further in life than we would otherwise.

The determinist view was buffeted
for a long time by the belief that the human brain was relatively fixed and had all the neurons it was ever going to have not long after birth.
If we think of the brain as a computer, this viewpoint leads to the ancillary belief that we can change the contents of our hard drives (that is, learn new information) but not change how the hard drive works (that is, the processes that support thinking and learning).
It is perhaps for this reason that education is so focused on the acquisition of new information rather than on trying to mold minds themselves (despite occasional claims to the contrary).

Times have changed, and it is clear to neuroscientists, if not yet to the rest of the world, that the neuronal makeup of our brains is far more flexible than previously believed.
Neuroscientist Liz Gould discovered that
new neurons can be born in adulthood
, and this process might be stimulated by exercise.
People who were learning to juggle
for a few short months came to have greater cortical thickness in brain regions involved in motion perception, an effect that lasted long after the individuals ceased juggling.
Similarly, taxi drivers in London
, who must learn an extremely complex map of
streets, come to have larger hippocampal volume the longer they have been working.

The fact that our brains are more malleable than previously assumed has led scientists to start focusing on the kinds of experiences that can change how the brain works.
One of the most exciting lines of research has focused on working memory training.
Although working memory capacity and fluid intelligence
were long thought to be fixed traits, a series of recent studies have shown that working memory training can alter both working memory and fluid intelligence with concomitant neural changes.

Is working memory just the tip of the iceberg?
Could we train our brains to be better at mentalizing, empathizing, and exerting self-control?
There is no question that these are unqualified assets and that more of each in our society would be a good thing.
While teaching about the social brain is a great idea, having “exercise class” for the social brain might be an even better one.
For twenty minutes a day, seventh and eighth graders could do various kinds of training exercises to strengthen and fine-tune the social brain.
How much of your early education would you trade to be able to better read the minds of others and to be more able to overcome your impulses?

According to recent work by social neuroscientists Jen Silvers and Kevin Ochsner,
emotionality peaks right around eighth grade
, but our capacity for emotion regulation doesn’t reach its full maturity until we are exiting our teenage years.
Besides making teens difficult to deal with at times, this hyper-emotionality can also put them at a significantly higher risk of making life-altering bad decisions leading to delinquency, addiction, pregnancy, and dropping out of school.
If a social brain exercise class could change those trends and give our students greater psychological resources for focusing in class, doing homework, and studying for tests, this would be profoundly beneficial.

How do we train self-control?
In
Chapter 9
, we saw that incredibly diverse forms of self-control all seem to rely on the right
ventrolateral prefrontal cortex.
From delay of gratification and emotion regulation
, to perspective taking and overcoming motor impulses, success is nearly always associated with activating this region.
Do we need to train each of those different kinds of self-control separately?
There is growing evidence that practicing self-control in one of these domains can pay dividends in the others.

In one study in my lab, Elliot Berkman and I
examined the effects of training motor self-control
on the ability to regulate one’s emotions.
Individuals were either assigned to the self-control training group or the non-self-control group.
Non-self-control group members came to our lab eight times over two to three weeks to practice a very simple visual-motor task.
Left- and right-facing arrows were presented on the screen one after another, and the corresponding arrow key on the keyboard needed to be pressed as quickly as possible.
The only self-control needed for the non-self-control group was overcoming the urge not to return to the lab again to spend more time on this boring task.
Those in the self-control group worked on a self-control variant of this task each time (the stop-signal task described in
Chapter 3
).
Every so often, a tone would sound after one of the arrows appeared, and this sound would indicate that the person should not press a button at all that time.

Regardless of condition, all of the participants in the study came for an initial testing session, during which we measured their emotion regulation ability using a reappraisal task.
Individuals were shown aversive images.
Sometimes the participants were asked to fully experience their emotional reaction to the images, but on other trials they were asked to reappraise the images, thinking about them in a way that would make them less distressing.
By comparing how distressing the images were for participants under these two instructions, we were able to compute a measure of how well individuals could regulate their emotional responses using reappraisal.
Three weeks later, after completing all the practice sessions with the visual-motor task, the participants returned and had their emotion regulation ability tested one more time.
Critically, participants
did not engage in any kind of emotion regulation training in the interim.

What we were interested in discovering was the effect of visual-motor self-control training on emotion regulation ability—even though these two things seem to have little in common.
Indeed, there was a relationship for those in the training group.
Individuals who had received self-control training with the visual-motor task had significantly better emotion regulation ability at the end of the study than they had had at the beginning, even though there was no emotion regulation training during the study.
To examine whether motor self-control could have been driving this effect, we looked at the relationship between motor self-control improvements and emotion regulation improvements.
The better an individual got at motor self-control over the course of the eight training sessions, the more their emotion regulation ability improved.