Our Minds Have Minds of Their Own

Several years ago, we had a scare while on a field trip. A boy, racing to the bus stop, attempted to get around one of the adults by shooting for a narrow gap between her and the roadway. While both his feet were off the ground, her hip swung slightly in that direction, knocking him into the street. I'd been watching the whole thing and managed to snatch him back to safety. Seconds later, a garbage truck came rumbling past.

It wasn't exactly a close call, but it did cause us to review our safety protocols, especially around traffic.

A few days later, at our leisure, the boy and I were discussing the incident. He casually asked, "Do you remember when you knocked me into the street?"

That's not what had happened! "No, I rescued you."

"No, you bumped me and I went into the street, but I got back on the sidewalk just in time."

It's not surprising that he remembered the event. We tend to form memories around unexpected or unusual things, what memory researchers call novel experiences. Yet, his specifics were all wrong. I had had the benefit of extensive conversations with the boy's mother (who had been the one who released his hand to let him race), the parent whose hip had nudged him while in flight, and other adults who had witnessed it. We were in agreement about what had happened, yet this boy, the protagonist at the center of the story, had formed a memory in which he was his own self-saving hero.

As a species, we've evolved memory, not so that we can commune with the past, but rather to help us orient to the future. As adults, we had used our memories explicitly for this purpose, cobbling together our best recollections in order to tighten up our safety measures for the next field trip. The boy, however, had taken the exact same novel incident and formed a memory, however inaccurate, in which he had kept himself safe with quick, effective action, a picture that may very well secure his safety in the future.

Memory researcher Charan Ranganath says our hippocampus, the part of our brain most associated with memory, prioritizes memories for "the unexpected oddball pictures." Surprising events trigger a sequence of neural responses that increase learning. 

Non-surprising events reflect things that we've "seen" in the past, but by now seem old hat, which goes a long way toward explaining why many of us find so much of what we are taught in school to be irrelevant or boring. The novelty of yet another equation or rule of grammar stands no chance of cutting through the novelty of, say, a friend passing us a note or a raven spiraling in thermals in the sky outside the window.

This is why so many educators in normal schools work to remove "distractions." They forbid note passing. They close the shades. They hope to focus students' minds by leaving them little else to think about, narrowing the world as much as possible to the lesson at hand. Meanwhile, the children, whose brains are wired to prepare for the future are busy seeking out unexpected oddball pictures, like dust motes swirling in a ways reminiscent of those ravens or a friend trying to pass notes via eye contact and smirks. More experienced teachers then strive to introduce "novelty" to their lessons by, say, stern warnings, cracking jokes or forcing participation, all of which may focus young minds for a moment, but are no guarantee that their takeaway memories will have anything to do with the lesson being taught.

Our minds have minds of their own. They shape memories, learning, from raw experience, each in their own way as they attend to novelty after novelty, question after question, satisfying curiosity, always looking for knowledge that will serve their future.

Things like grades, the promise of rewards, and the threat of punishment have an impact, of course. Experienced students have learned that these external motivators are a kind of payment they receive (or suffer) for proving (or not) to the teacher that they have retained in their short term memory what is intentionally being taught. However, this leaves long term memory relatively untouched.

This is why the anxiety of school endures so much longer than the lessons themselves. It's why some of us, still, 40 years later have dreams about sitting for a test only to realize we're totally unprepared. It's why we remember that raven spiraling or that note from a friend far more clearly than anything the teacher was saying. We've evolved to remember novelty.

Play-based learning dispenses with the pre-planned lessons, the grading, the testing, and, ideally, even the rewards and punishments, replacing it with each child's quest to fill their memories with useful knowledge, which requires actively attending to novelty while largely ignoring the mundane. After all, no matter how much adults wag their fingers about the future, these children will be the ones creating the future and the future is the entire purpose of learning.

I doubt that the boy who recalls saving himself remembers much of anything about the day leading up to that moment of danger, even though we had spent the morning at the Center for Wooden Boats using hammers and nails and rowing ourselves in umiaks around the south end of Lake Union. I mean, for five-year-olds who attend the Woodland Park Cooperative Preschool in Seattle, hammers, nails, and getting out on the water is nothing new. Almost getting run over by a garbage truck? Now that's exactly the kind of thing for which his hippocampus is eager to make into something useful. 

That the boy's memory involved his own agency is an important lesson for his future, even if it is not entirely accurate. That we adults used our memories to improve our safety measures is an important lesson for our future.

When we are free to play, we free the mind to do exactly what it has evolved to do: to notice novelty, get curious about it, ask our questions, then store the memory in a way that will help us orient to the future. That's learning.

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