The "Curiosity Chemical"

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly misunderstood as the "pleasure chemical." In modern slang, we talk of "dopamine hits" to describe what people are doing when they, say, spend hours scrolling their social media feeds or waste a day playing video games. 

Dopamine is involved in those activities, of course, but not the way many people think. It doesn't serve as a reward, but rather as a signal that something is worth pursuing or important. 

In other words, dopamine is intimately connected with curiosity, not pleasure.

When we perceive a gap in our knowledge our brain predicts that there's something here worth learning and dopamine motivates us to act to close that gap by asking questions, experimenting, and exploring. It causes our bodies to join our brain in "wanting." The reward is that we get to update our mental model of the world especially if there is an intrinsic "pay off" and it's this, not the dopamine itself, that reinforces the behaviors that led to it.

In other words, dopmine is not about the satisfaction of anything: it's about the desire to know, or in more common terms, curiosity.

This is how self-motivated learners, like children at play, operate. Dopamine is the mechanism that drives intrinsic motivation. And external motivators, like grades, are known for interfering with that by reducing our interest in doing a task or following an interest.

This is how our schools get it so wrong and what social media and gaming get right: they provide novelty, cliff-hangers, wild improbable assertions, and questions. The problem isn't the dopamine or curiosity, the problem is that they have then made closing that gap in our knowledge instantaneous. More often than not, satisfaction requires nothing more than the click of a button or swipe of a finger. It's too easy and therefore disrupts the important part of learning, which is the questions, the experimenting, and the exploring.

Questions are far more motivating than answers. The pursuit of information, the effort required to satisfy our curiosity, often has a much bigger effect on memory than knowing the answers themselves. When we've worked for it because we were curious, we are far more likely to remember it, which is to say learn it by updating our mental model of the world.

In contrast, when we've mainly worked for it in order to get a reward (an A) or avoid a punishment (an F), we may well arrive at the right answer, but we are far less likely to use that information to update our mental model, although we may well remember what grade we got in the class. Educators in standard schools are often urged to "make it interesting," but that's a tall task, especially in a world full of "distraction," which is just a negative world for "interesting." 

What play-based learning gets right, what self-directed learning gets right, is that we place the process of learning ahead of the right and wrong answers. 

It wasn't that long ago that even the scientists were calling dopamine the "pleasure chemical." That was the "correct" answer, but in the meantime, researchers have learned that the correct answer is closer to the "curiosity chemical," although since dopamine it's also related to movement, attention, cognition, mood, and so much more, we can be confident that we still don't have our answer. "The science" is what we think we know right now. Scientific progress is about questions, the unknown, and where our curiosity takes us.

When we allow children to play we don't need to "make it interesting," we don't need to create the illusion of learning through a system of external motivators like grades. Learning is both natural and inevitable. What worries so many adults is that learning through play, learning driven by self-motivation, means we must allow the children themselves to decide what is worth pursuing.

Without dopamine, our species would likely have died out long ago. It's our curiosity that drives us to learn what we need to know to adapt to an ever changing world. Modern schooling stupidly pretends that it can somehow one-up Mother Nature. 

Letting children play, means that we need to become curious ourselves and let go of outmoded ideas and notions. As play-based educators we know that our job is to question, experiment, and explore right alongside the children.

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Books have a way of transforming us unlike any other media out there. Be it fiction or non-fiction, a books has the power to fully immerse us into a world in ways that makes us come out the other side a changed -- and better -- person. I've put together this list of 16 books that have done that for me. They are intentionally not early childhood books, although each one has, in one way or another, profoundly transformed my work with young children. Maybe you'll find a few new ones here that will do the same for you. To download the list, click here.

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