It's the Risk That Matters

A woman approached me at the entrance to Trader Joe's the other day. She wanted to talk to me about a group she belongs to that meditates for world peace. I have nothing against either meditation or world peace, but I was hoping to get in-and-out, so I took the card she handed me and started to move past her. As I did, she stopped me, "May I ask you a question? Don't you worry about riding your bike out there in all this traffic? I know I worry about you all."

This is far from the first time someone has expressed this to me, going back decades. I've spent my entire life, from the time I learned to ride, sharing the road with cars. There have been a few close calls, but not as many as you might think. In part that may be because drivers aren't as "crazy" as we've let ourselves believe, but mostly, I think, it's because I've learned to stay alert to my surroundings while on the bike.

In the rest of my life, I can let my mind wander, but on the bike, on roads full of pot holes and random debris, amidst cars and trucks and buses, all being driven by people who may or may not be giving their full minds to the task, I better stay alert . . . or else! And it's my alertness that has kept me relatively unscathed over the decades. (I'm knocking on wood as I write this!)

This is a powerful thing for my 63-year-old brain, even if it means taking risks with my 63-year-old body.

One of the delightful things about working with young children is that young minds are exceedingly plastic, which makes it a perfect mechanism for absorbing data about the world. Everything is new. Novelty is everywhere. You never know what to expect next, so you better stay alert. They say that our brains are prediction machines, that we don't perceive the world as it is, but rather as we expect it to be. This is essential to survival, but it can sometimes blind us, or cause us to gloss over, changes both large and small. But you can't get much past a young child because they are so alert to anything out of the ordinary. I like to think that's one of the things cycling does for me as well.

There was a time, not very long ago, when we believed, as a fact of biology, that adult brains simply stopped being so plastic. This was determined by studying bonobos (one of our species' closest relatives) in cages. Perhaps not surprisingly, when scientists thought to study bonobos who were not in cages, they found that adult brains retained much of their plasticity, which is to say their capacity for learning new things, throughout their lives.

I've been thinking about those cages as a metaphor as I've moved into the final third of my life. Too many of my peers become befuddled, disinterested, and set in their ways. We generally think that this is just a natural part of aging, but what if these prediction machines we carry around in our heads have, over time, simply built a cage that doesn't allow us to perceive much of anything beyond the bars of the expected? If our brain expects nothing new, it becomes less alert, less capable of caring about, let alone perceiving, novelty.

When we watch a young child encounter something new, they approach it with some combination of excitement, trepidation, and curiosity, all of which are manifestations of alertness. As they contemplate this novel thing, as they handle it, as they ask questions about it, they're in a state of open-minded awareness, beyond the cage of hidebound prediction. They then, as they play with that object, begin to feel the satisfaction of mastery, of knowing, of understanding. In the natural order of things, this is followed by an alert restlessness that draws them toward the next new thing. This entire process is a visceral experience of our plastic brains absorbing data then gradually solidifying around what we perceive to be true before moving on to the next new thing.

And the cycle repeats like a flexing muscle.

A mind that stops being alert, that anticipates nothing new, falls increasingly into a cycle of habit, which helps to further ensure that nothing new happens, including learning. 

This is all just personal theory, based on my admittedly limited understanding of brain science and my more extensive experience in observing young children at play, which is to say, while learning at full capacity.

Of course, when people worry about me out there on my bike, I generally just agree with them, showing crossed fingers, but that belies my confidence (if that's the right word) in my own ability to remain alert for anything that seems amiss, unusual, or odd. And, yes, at the end of the day, it's the fear that I might get injured or even die, that compels me to be alert.

It's the risk that matters. Real, visceral risk, including risk of the social, emotional, and intellectual variety. Children need this as well. And they know it. This is why no matter how safe we try to make things, the children in our care invariably attempt to play the risk back into it: they climb too high, go too fast, wrestle, hide, and explore as we overly-cautious adults scold them back to "safety." There are no reliable statistics on playground injury rates, but what little we have tends to tell us that our "safe" playgrounds do nothing to reduce injury, and may, in fact, lead to an increase. I suspect that's because when everything is padded, when all the corners are rounded, the children perceive that they can let their guard down, to be less alert. When they perceive that there's nothing here that can hurt them, they fall into the habit of letting their minds wander from the task at hand, and as a person who has spent as much time as I have cycling amidst traffic, that's when things get truly dangerous.

I appreciate the people who worry about me, but I'm happy that none of them have the power, the way adults do over children, to force me to stop. Cognitive philosopher Andy Clark, points out that our minds have evolved for hunting and foraging, free from our self-imposed cages, both alert and on the move in a world full of both hazards and opportunities, fingers crossed. It's called being alive.

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I've been writing about play-based learning almost every day for the past 15 years. I've recently gone back through the 4000+ blog posts(!) I've written since 2009. Here are my 10 favorite in a nifty free download. Click here to get yours.

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