Spoiling What Should Be Our Greatest Pleasures

A couple days ago, my wife and I got a hankering for shortbread. We then proceeded to eat too many shortbread cookies. They were delicious. The desire was sated . . . probably for a good long while. Not only did I spend the rest of my afternoon feeling slight queasy, but we were dinner guests that evening and I felt compelled by politeness to do their efforts justice. I went to bed stuffed to the gills which impacted my sleep, casting a pall over the following day.

I've often joked with children that the best part of being a grown-up is that you can eat cookies any time you want. The worst part of being a grown-up is also that you can eat cookies any time you want.

When we're hungry our bodies release the neurotransmitter dopamine, which motivates us to seek out food and take pleasure in eating it, hence the idiom "Hunger is the best sauce." It's an evolutionary strategy that kept our species alive during most of human existence when food was relatively scarce and often took great effort to acquire. 

In other words, our willpower is up against two millennia of evolution. 

Not only have many of us have learned to eat without hunger, we've also taken much of the effort out of it as well. When previous generations desired shortbread, it wouldn't have been handled by a quick trip to the neighborhood supermarket. Assuming there was butter, sugar, salt, flour, and vanilla in the pantry, it would have, at a minimum, required baking. But if any ingredient was in short supply it would mean a trip to the next village, or at least to a neighbor's, to borrow a cup of whatever was missing. Depending on circumstances, it might have taken the better part of a day before the urge was satisfied.

As it was, it was too easy. I overate, without appetite, and thus without pleasure. Objectively, that home cooked meal was good, but it was all I could do was choke down enough of it to convince my host that I was grateful.

"Just as eating contrary to the inclination is injurious to the health," wrote one of history's great polymaths Leonardo da Vinci, "so study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in."

Neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists tell us that dopamine is likewise connected to how our brains have evolved to learn. Dopamine plays a key role in memory and concentration and is what has motivates us to learn new things, but first must come the appetite for learning. And our hunger for learning is whetted by necessity and curiosity. Otherwise, as happens all too often in top-down, adult-centric curricula schools, we find ourselves choking it down without because we don't want to risk disappointing the grown-ups.

One of the reasons, I overate was that I was raised in the era in which the "clean plate" was expected of all good little children. Today, most of us understand that, as da Vinci knew, it's unhealthy to eat beyond hunger, so while we might still, in the name of politeness, insist that our children "at least try" something, we know to back off forcing them to keep eating when they aren't hungry. Our schools, however, have emphatically not learned this lesson when it comes to learning. Indeed, just as it was considered shameful to leave food on your plate, schools teach our children that's it's shameful to not learn everything being taught, no matter how dull and irrelevant. It's the surest way possible to destroy self-motivation because to learn without curiosity spoils the memory, just as that shortbread spoiled my appetite.

Play-based learning is self-directed learning. It is learning in the way we have evolved to learn. Dopamine often gets a bad rap because it can be manipulated to make us behave as addicts, always seeking that next "fix" be it easy food, sex, or endlessly scrolling through our social media feeds looking for something, anything new. Indeed, it's strange that one of the few areas of life in which we actively suppress dopamine is at school, where it would do the most good. Instead, we've made "learning" into the glamorous twin of overeating, spoiling what should be among our greatest pleasures. 

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