Efficiency gone wrong

Daily activity in our brains plays out like a tug-of-war over energy. MRI's have shown that brain activity occurs throughout the organ but only a fraction of the brain is active at any given time.

Like that annoying kid who flickers the lights on and off, on and off, on and off - our brain's regions fire on and off, on and off. Because energy is so precious, efficiency is the name of the game.

In his book Iconoclast: a neuroscientist reveals how to think differently, Gregory Berns explains how the brain performs daily exercises in efficiency:

Humans depend on vision more than any other sense to navigate through the world. Mostly we take the visual process for granted. And rightly so, for if we had to think too much about what we see from moment to moment, scarce brain power would remain for doing anything else. Most of the time, the efficiency of our visual systems works to our advantage. Hitting a major league fastball for example, requires the precise coordination of eyes and body. A 90-mile-per-hour fastball reaches the plate in about 0.4 seconds, but the batter must decide whether to hit it when it gets about halfway. The limit of human reaction time is about 0.2 seconds, which means that the task of hitting a fastball pushes the vision and motor systems to their limits. There is not time for thought. The connection between eye and body must be seamless. This automacity lets us accomplish anythign that requires hand-eye coordination, but this automacity comes with a price. In the interests of crafting an efficient visual system, the brain must make guesses about what it is actually seeing. Most of the time this works, but these automatic processes also get in the way of seeing things differently. Automatic thinking destroys the creative process that forms the foundation of iconoclastic thinking.

While it is true that our brains need automacity in order to survive the day - we couldn't provide enough energy on a daily or even hourly basis if our brains were less efficient - we must understand that imagination and creativity are born out of the ability to break from this efficiency model.


Gregory Berns explains:

Before one can muster the strength to tear down conventional thinking, one must first imagine the possibility that conventional thinking is wrong.

A quit smoking seminar can provide all sorts of methods for quitting but if the audience can't imagine why they would want or need to quit in the first place, the seminar will be an exercise in futility.

A teacher's conference can provide sessions on how alternate forms of assessment place far less emphasis on grading, but if the teachers can't imagine why they would want or need to quit grading, the session won't encourage any sustainable change.

We will never see things for what they might be if we are riveted to seeing things only as they are now.

Mindful learning

In her book The Power of Mindful Learning, Ellen Langer writes:

Clearly some experience is necessary to acquire complex skills. Yet imagine a coach or piano teacher prescribing a set amount of practice, every day. To claim that any particular amount of time on task is sufficient to learn that skill overlooks the state  in which practice is approached. How much piano, or golf, or tennis can one learn while daydreaming about some other activity? Pressed to its logical extreme, this teaching method would rely soley on moving the body, with the assumption that the mind would follow. If so, one could learn while asleep simply by having one's body moved in the proper patterns.

Although certain therapies have actually made use of some version of this mode (body therapies or neurolinguistic programming), full mastery is not their goal. Recognizing the difference between going through the motions and moving one's body in awareness brings us into the domain of mindfulness.

There is a big difference between going through the motions and focusing intensely. When it comes to homework, I think we can all agree that a student who completes their homework with accute mindfulness is likely to be the exception, rather than the rule. And this is no accident - think about how we speak to kids about their homework. Are parents more likely to ask "are you done your homework?" or "what did you learn from your homework?"

When we only ever ask about the completion of homework, we explicitely tell kids that getting the homework done, regarldesss of quality, is most important.

Just get it done.

And when we don't ask about whether the homework supported their learning or whether it was worth doing in the first place, we implicitely tell them that we don't really care about the learning.

Just get it done.

Automacity is a by-product of mindlessness. When we cease to place the kind of due care and attention into our efforts, we fail to further our progress. We go into a kind of auto-pilot that works to stunt our improvement.

Rather than falling into rote-memorization-through-repetition, it is far more advisable for learners to keep learning new things, to routinely change their approach and not lock into any single pattern.

How else will we ever learn something new and grow as life-long learners?

The perils of automacity

Just as Alfie Kohn challenges us to rethink our use of the word reinforce, Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent is Overrated, challenges us to rethink automacity. Colvin explains that to attain real improvement what we want is mindful deliberate practice but these are rarely ever found in automacity:

When we learn to do anything new - how to drive, for example - we go through three stages. The first stage demands a lot of attention as we try out the controls, learn the rules of driving, and so on. In the second stage we beign to coordinate our knowledge, linking movements together and more fluidly combining our actions with our knowledge for the car, the situation, and the rules. In the third stage we drive the car with barely a thought. It's automatic. And with that our improvment at driving slows dramatically, eventually stopping completely.


By contrast, great performers never allow thmeselves to reach the automatic, arrested-development stage in their chosen field. That is the effect of continual deliberate practice - avoiding automacity. The essence of practice, which is constantly trying to do things one cannot do comfortably, makes automatic behavior impossible. It's certainly true that a great performer is able to do many things in his or her field with far fewer mental demands than a novice performer; an excellent pilot lands a 747 without breaking a sweat. But ultimately the performance is always conscious and controlled, not automatic.

Colvin's point is duly noted - life rarely remains stagnant - the environments we perform in rarely afford us the same situation over and over again. So we must remain adaptable, and to do that we must be very mindful and deliberately focused.

Think about your own driving skills. Unless you're Danica Patrick, you've probably entered a kind of automaticity stage with your driving. How much does your driving continue to improve while remaining in this automatic stage?

When we are no longer mindful and we do things with barely a thought, we sever ourselves from further gains and sabotage our potential in favor of a comfortable plateau.

to reinforce or not to reinforce

Those who look to defend the practice of assigning homework in school quite often will use the automacity argument. That is, we want children to be able to know their times tables or spelling with a kind of automacity.

I have made the case before that perfection is not a desirable outcome, and now I wish to do the same for automacity. Like the pursuit of perfection, the pursuit of automacity is likely to paralyze rather than energize - and in the end sabatoge learning.

In The Homework Myth, Alfie Kohn explains nicely how sit-and-get-now-spit-and-forget should never be desirable inside or outside of the classroom:

Giving students homework that involves drill and practice is often said to "reinforce" the skills they've been taught in class. This verb is tossed around casually, as if it were sufficient to clinch the case. But what exactly is meant here? Unless it's assumed that practice is reinforcing by definition, one would have to demonstrate that good results are indeed likely to follow from mere repetition. And it's not at all clear that this is true, except under very limited circumstances. For example, it wouldn't make sense to say "Keep practicing until you understand" because practicing doesn't create understanding - just as giving kids a deadline doesn't teach time management skills. What makes sense, at least under certain conditions, is to say "Keep practicing until what you're doing becomes automatic." But what kinds of proficiencies lend themselves to this sort of improvement?

Think about that.

How do you practice an understanding?

It's one thing to say you want a child to practice their times table and be able to bark "36!" in response to the stimulus of "6 x 6", but it is quite another to say that you actually want the child to understand how 6 x 6 can or should equal 36.

Any math teacher who concerns themself with children understanding what is happening when they multiply two numbers will tell you that this process is anything but automatic.

To reinforce the behaviorial response may actually undermine efforts to construct meaning behind mindful learning.