Mysteries Make Us Curious

Anthony White (detail)

Tim Berners-Lee wrote, “In an extreme view, the world can be seen as only connections, nothing else. We think of a dictionary as the repository of meaning, but it defines words only in terms of other words. I liked the idea that a piece of information is really defined only by what it’s related to, and how it’s related. There really is little else to meaning. The structure is everything. There are billions of neurons in our brains, but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected."

Berners-Lee would know a thing or two about connections: he's the British computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web in 1990. His invention embodies the idea that information becomes meaningful through connection, one page linked to another.

As an educator, however, I'm far more interested in how he applies his insight to human cognition. Neural connections clearly matter, but brains are more than wiring diagrams. Connections come and go. Synaptic strengths change over time, use, and circumstances. Neurons and neural populations have dynamic electrical and chemical activity. Neuromodulators (like dopamine) and hormones (like cortisol) are involved. Glial cells have a role. The rest of our bodies, our sensory systems, and the environment in which we find ourselves also play parts in our thinking, not just within, but also without ourselves.

And each of those things is itself subject to, and entwined with, other processes and systems. And even all of that leaves untouched what philosophers call "the hard problem" of consciousness: why any of this should result in the subjective experience of being us.

Berners-Lee is not alone in the effort to put a bow on the effort to explain what we are by locating the mechanism. It's not "just cells." Our typical approach to science education is forever trying to “solve” the mysteries, to shut the door on this or that question by turning it into an answer for a test. This leads us to the reductionist pursuit in which we attempt to break everything apart, to simplify it down to its component parts, as if understanding all the parts amounts to understanding the whole. The mystery persists because the moment we remove one thing to look at another, we change everything. The moment we take an "objective view," we find we've merely traded one narrow perspective for another. There is no "place" outside the process upon which to stand; we are always an active part in it.

Still, I keep coming back to his core assertion that the world can be seen as connections. It would be a mistake to try to solve the mystery by simply asserting, "Everything is connections." It's too tempting to conclude, Ah yes, consciousness is a process. Democracy is a process. Learning is a process. Life is a process. Next.

What's more interesting is the mystery, the wondering, the recognition that no matter how mind-blowing the insight, it's only one perspective in a universe of perspectives, none of which provides the whole picture.

It's the mystery that makes us curious, that drives us. It's the mystery that provides the inspiration to even bother opening our eyes each morning. If everything is a process, if everything is a connection, if everything is a relationship, what a strange and wonderful world! It's a world without things, without complete answers, without an end, only more beginnings.

I have often made the outrageous assertion that we are born knowing everything only to unlearn most of it as we grow into adulthood. And what if that's the strangest thing of all? 

One of our most enduring stories involves losing a perfect Eden or paradise followed by our desire to return to it. We see in each new child that promise, that perfection of being exactly who we are exactly where and when we are. In that first moment, change is not part of our reality because there is no "once upon a time to compare it to." It's all change, including them. Our stories tell of being cast from the garden, being cast forth into an imperfect world. It's only from outside that we see we were once in paradise. From there, we see ourselves in a world of change, of process, of systems combining and colliding, and out of this comes the unsolvable but always compelling mystery.

Perhaps we weren't cast from Eden as much as we learned to imagine ourselves outside it.

Modern schooling too often focuses on declaring the mystery dead by drilling answers into children, answers that might be from some perspectives correct, but most definitely incomplete. Answers are closed doors. Mysteries make us curious.

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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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