wiring
Rule #3
Every brain is wired differently.
MICHAEL JORDAN’S ATHLETIC FAILURES are puzzling, don’t you think?
In 1994, one of the best basketball players in the world—ESPN’s greatest athlete of the 20th century—decided to quit the game and take up baseball instead. Jordan failed miserably, hitting .202 in his only full season, the lowest of any regular player in the league that year. He simultaneously committed 11 errors in the outfield, also the league’s worst. Jordan’s performance was so poor, he couldn’t even qualify for a triple-A farm team. Though it seems preposterous that anyone with his physical ability would fail at any athletic activity he put his mind to, the fact that Jordan did not even make the minor leagues is palpable proof that you can.
His failure was that much more embarrassing because another athletic legend, Ken Griffey Jr., was burning up the baseball diamond that same year. Griffey was excelling at all of the skills Jordan seemed to lack—and doing so in the majors, thank you. Griffey, then playing for the red-hot Seattle Mariners, maintained this excellence for most of the decade, batting .300 for seven years in the 1990s and at the same time slugging out 422 home runs. He is, at this printing, sixth on the all-time home-runs list.
Like Jordan, Griffey Jr. played in the outfield but, unlike Jordan, he was known for catches so spectacular he seemed to float in the air. Float in the air? Wasn’t that the space Jordan was accustomed to inhabiting? But the sacred atmosphere of the baseball park refused to budge for Jordan, and he eventually went back to what his brains and muscles did better than anyone else’s, creating a legendary sequel to a previously stunning basketball career.
What was going on in the bodies of these two athletes? What is it about their brainsability to communicate with their muscles and skeletons that made their talents so specialized? It has to do with how their brains were wired. To understand what that means, we will watch what happens in the brain as it is learning, discuss the enormous role of experience in brain development—including how identical twins having an identical experience will not emerge with identical brains—and discover that we each have a Jennifer Aniston neuron. I am not kidding.
fried eggs and blueberries
You have heard since grade school that living things are made of cells, and for the most part, that’s true. There isn’t much that complex biological creatures can do that doesn’t involve cells. You may have little gratitude for this generous contribution to your existence, but your cells make up for the indifference by ensuring that you can’t control them. For the most part, they purr and hum behind the scenes, content to supervise virtually everything you will ever experience, much of which lies outside your awareness. Some cells are so unassuming, they find their normal function only after they can’t function. The surface of your skin, for example—all 9 pounds of it—literally is deceased. This allows the rest of your cells to support your daily life free of wind, rain, and spilled nacho cheese at a basketball game. It is accurate to say that nearly every inch of your outer physical presentation to the world is dead.
The biological structures of the cells that are alive are fairly easy to understand. Most look just like fried eggs. The white of the egg we call the cytoplasm; the center yolk is the nucleus. The nucleus contains that master blueprint molecule and newly christened patron saint of wrongfully convicted criminals: DNA. DNA possesses genes, small snippets of biological instructions, that guide everything from how tall you become to how you respond to stress. A lot of genetic material fits inside that yolk-like nucleus. Nearly 6 feet of the stuff are crammed into a space that is measured in microns. A micron is 1/25,000th of an inch, which means putting DNA into your nucleus is like taking 30 miles of fishing line and stuffing it into a blueberry. The nucleus is a crowded place.
One of the most unexpected findings of recent years is that this DNA, or deoxyribonucleic acid, is not randomly jammed into the nucleus, as one might stuff cotton into a teddy bear. Rather, DNA is folded into the nucleus in a complex and tightly regulated manner. The reason for this molecular origami: cellular career options. Fold the DNA one way and the cell will become a contributing member of your liver. Fold it another way and the cell will become part of your busy bloodstream. Fold it a third way and you get a nerve cell—and the ability to read this sentence.
So what does one of those nerve cells look like? Take that fried egg and smash it with your foot, splattering it across the floor. The resulting mess may look like a many-pointed star. Now take one tip of that star and stretch it out. Way out. Using your thumb, now squish the farthest region of the point you just stretched. This creates a smaller version of that multipronged shape. Two smashed stars separated by a long, thin line. There’s your typical nerve. Nerve cells come in many sizes and shapes, but most have this basic framework. The foot-stomped fried-egg splatter is called the nerve’s cell body. The many points on the resulting star are called dendrites. The region you stretched out is called an axon, and the smaller, thumb-induced starburst at the farther end of the axon is called the axon terminal.
These cells help to mediate something as sophisticated as human thought. To understand how, we must journey into the Lilliputian world of the neuron, and to do that, I would like to borrow from a movie I saw as a child. It was called Fantastic Voyage, written by Harry Kleiner and popularized afterward in a book by legendary science-fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Using a premise best described as Honey, I Shrunk the Submarine, the film follows a group of researchers exploring the internal workings of the human body—in a submersible reduced to microscopic size. We are going to enter such a submarine, which will allow us to roam around the insides of a typical nerve cell and the watery world in which it is anchored. Our initial port of call is to a neuron that resides in the hippocampus.
When we arrive at this hippocampal neuron, it looks as if we’ve landed in an ancient, underwater forest. Somehow it has become electrified, which means we are going to have to be careful. Everywhere there are submerged jumbles of branches, limbs, and large, trunk-like objects. And everywhere sparks of electric current run up and down those trunks. Occasionally, large clouds of tiny chemicals erupt from one end of the tree trunks, after the electricity has convulsed through them.
These are not trees. These are neurons, with some odd structural distinctions. Hovering close to one of them, for example, we realize that the “bark” feels surprisingly like grease. That’s because it is grease. In the balmy interior of the human body, the exterior of the neuron, the phospholipid bilayer, is the consistency of Mazola oil. It’s the interior structures that give a neuron its shape, much as the human skeleton gives the body its shape. When we plunge into the interior of the cell, one of the first things we will see is this skeleton.
So let’s plunge.
It’s instantly, insufferably overcrowded, even hostile, in here. Everywhere we have to navigate through a dangerous scaffolding of spiky, coral-like protein formations: the neural skeleton. Though these dense formations give the neuron its three-dimensional shape, many of the skeletal parts are in constant motion—which means we have to do a lot of dodging. Millions of molecules still slam against our ship, however, and every few seconds we are jolted by electrical discharges. We don’t want to stay long.
swimming laps
We escape from one end of the neuron. Instead of perilously winding through sharp thickets of proteins, we now find ourselves free-floating in a calm, seemingly bottomless watery canyon. In the distance, we can see another neuron looming ahead.
We are in the space between the two neurons, called a synaptic cleft, and the first thing we notice is that we are not alone. We appear to be swimming with large schools of tiny molecules. They are streaming out of the neuron we just visited and thrashing helter-skelter toward the one we are facing. In a few seconds, they reverse themselves, swimming back to the neuron we just left. It instantly gobbles them up. These schools of molecules are called neurotransmitters, and they come in a variety of molecular species. They function like tiny couriers, and neurons use these molecules to communicate information across the canyon (or, more properly, the synaptic cleft). The cell that lets them escape is called the presynaptic neuron, and the cell that receives them is called the post-synaptic neuron.
Neurons release these chemicals into the synapse usually in response to being electrically stimulated. The neuron that receives them can react negatively or positively when it encounters these chemicals. Working something like a cellular temper tantrum, the neuron can turn itself off to the rest of the neuroelectric world (a process termed inhibition). Or, the neuron can become electrically stimulated. That allows a signal to be transferred from the presynaptic neuron to the post: “I got stimulated and I am passing on the good news to you.” Then the neurotransmitters return to the cell of origin, a process appropriately termed re-uptake. When that cell gobbles them up, the system is reset and ready for another signal.
As we look 360 degrees around our synaptic environment, we notice that the neural forest, large and seemingly distant, is surprisingly complicated. Take the two neurons between which we are floating. We are between just two connection points. If you can imagine two trees being uprooted by giant hands, turned 90 degrees so the roots face each other, and then jammed together, you can visualize the real world of two neurons interacting with each other in the brain. And that’s just the simplest case. Usually, thousands of neurons are jammed up against one another, all occupying a single small parcel of neural real estate. The branches form connections to one another in a nearly incomprehensible mass of branching confusion. Ten thousand points of connection is typical, and each connection is separated by a synapse, those watery canyons in which we are now floating.
Gazing at this underwater hippocampal forest, we notice several disturbing developments. Like snakes swaying to the rhythm of some chemical flute, some of these branches appear to be moving. Occasionally, the end of one neuron swells up, greatly increasing in diameter. The terminal ends of other neurons split down the middle like a forked tongue, creating two connections where there was only one. Electricity crackles through these moving neurons at a blinding 250 miles per hour, some quite near us, with clouds of neurotransmitters filling the spaces between the trunks as the electric current passes by.
What we should do now is take off our shoes and bow low in the submarine, for we are on Holy Neural Ground. What we are observing is the process of the human brain learning.
extreme makeover
Eric Kandel is the scientist mostly responsible for figuring out the cellular basis of this process. For it, he shared the Nobel Prize in 2000, and his most important discoveries would have made inventor Alfred Nobel proud. Kandel showed that when people learn something, the wiring in their brains changes. He demonstrated that acquiring even simple pieces of information involves the physical alteration of the structure of the neurons participating in the process. Taken broadly, these physical changes result in the functional organization and reorganization of the brain. This is astonishing. The brain is constantly learning things, so the brain is constantly rewiring itself.
Kandel first discovered this fact not by looking at humans but by looking at sea slugs. He soon found, somewhat insultingly, that human nerves learn things in the same way slug nerves learn things. And so do lots of animals in between slugs and humans. The Nobel Prize was awarded in part because his careful work described the thought processes of virtually every creature with the means to think.
We saw these physical changes while our submarine was puttering around the synaptic space between two neurons. As neurons learn, they swell, sway, and split. They break connections in one spot, glide over to a nearby region, and form connections with their new neighbors. Many stay put, simply strengthening their electrical connections with each other, increasing the efficiency of information transfer. You can get a headache just thinking about the fact that deep inside your brain, at this very moment, bits of neurons are moving around like reptiles, slithering to new spots, getting fat at one end or creating split ends. All so that you can remember a few things about Eric Kandel and his sea slugs.
But before Kandel, in the 18th century, the Italian scientist Vincenzo Malacarne did a surprisingly modern series of biological experiments. He trained a group of birds to do complex tricks, killed them all, and dissected their brains. He found that his trained birds had more extensive folding patterns in specific regions of their brains than his untrained birds. Fifty years later, Charles Darwin noted similar differences between the brains of wild animals and their domestic counterparts. The brains in wild animals were 15 to 30 percent larger than those of their tame, domestic counterparts. It appeared that the cold, hard world forced the wild animals into a constant learning mode. Those experiences wired their heads much differently.
It is the same with humans. This can be observed in places ranging from New Orleans’s Zydeco beer halls to the staid palaces of the New York Philharmonic. Both are the natural habitat of violin players, and violin players have really strange brains when compared with non-violin players. The neural regions that control their left hands, where complex, fine motor movement is required on the strings, look as if they’ve been gorging on a high-fat diet. These regions are enlarged, swollen and crisscrossed with complex associations. By contrast, the areas controlling the right hand, which draws the bow, looks positively anorexic, with much less complexity.
The brain acts like a muscle: The more activity you do, the larger and more complex it can become. Whether that leads to more intelligence is another issue, but one fact is indisputable: What you do in life physically changes what your brain looks like. You can wire and rewire yourself with the simple choice of which musical instrument—or professional sport—you play.
some assembly required
How does this fantastic biology work? Infants provide a front-row seat to one of the most remarkable construction projects on Earth. Every newly born brain should come with a sticker saying “some assembly required.” The human brain, only partially constructed at birth, won’t be fully assembled for years to come. The biggest construction programs aren’t finished until you are in your early 20s, with fine-tuning well into your mid-40s.
When babies are born, their brains have about the same number of connections as adults have. That doesn’t last long. By the time children are 3 years old, the connections in specific regions of their brains have doubled or even tripled. (This has given rise to the popular belief that infant brain development is the critical key to intellectual success in life. That’s not true, but that’s another story.) This doubling and tripling doesn’t last long, either. The brain soon takes thousands of tiny pruning shears and trims back a lot of this hard work. By the time children are 8 or so, they’re back to their adult numbers. And if kids never went through puberty, that would be the end of the story. In fact, it is only the middle of the story.
At puberty, the whole thing starts over again. Quite different regions in the brain begin developing. Once again, you see frenetic neural outgrowth and furious pruning back. It isn’t until parents begin thinking about college financial aid for their high schoolers that their brains begin to settle down to their adult forms (sort of). It’s like a double-humped camel. From a connectivity point of view, there is a great deal of activity in the terrible twos and then, during the terrible teens, a great deal more.
Though that might seem like cellular soldiers obeying growth commands in lockstep formation, nothing approaching military precision is observed in the messy world of brain development. And it is at this imprecise point that brain development meets Brain Rule. Even a cursory inspection of the data reveals remarkable variation in growth patterns from one person to the next. Whether examining toddlers or teenagers, different regions in different children develop at different rates. There is a remarkable degree of diversity in the specific areas that grow and prune, and with what enthusiasm they do so.
I’m reminded of this whenever I see the class pictures that captured my wife’s journey through the American elementary-school system. My wife went to school with virtually the same people for her entire K–12 experience (and actually remained friends with most of them). Though the teachersdated hairstyles are the subject of much laughter for us, I often focus on what the kids looked like back then. I always shake my head in disbelief.
In the first picture, the kids are all in grade one. They’re about the same age, but they don’t look it. Some kids are short. Some are tall. Some look like mature little athletes. Some look as if they just got out of diapers. The girls almost always appear older than the boys. It’s even worse in the junior-high pictures of this same class. Some of the boys look as if they haven’t developed much since third grade. Others are clearly beginning to sprout whiskers. Some of the girls, flat chested and uncurved, look a lot like boys. Some seem developed enough to make babies.
Why do I bring this up? If we had X-ray eyes capable of penetrating their little skulls, we would find that the brains of these kids are just as unevenly developed as their bodies.
the jennifer aniston neuron
We are born into this world carrying a number of preset circuits. These control basic housekeeping functions like breathing, heartbeat, your ability to know where your foot is even if you can’t see it, and so on. Researchers call this “experience independent” wiring. The brain also leaves parts of its neural construction project unfinished at birth, waiting for external experience to direct it. This “experience expectant” wiring is related to areas such as visual acuity and perhaps language acquisition. And, finally, we have “experience dependent” wiring. It may best be explained with a story about Jennifer Aniston. You might want to skip the next paragraph if you are squeamish.
Ready? A man is lying in surgery with his brain partially exposed to the air. He is conscious. The reason he is not crying out in agony is that the brain has no pain neurons. He can’t feel the needle-sharp electrodes piercing his nerve cells. The man is about to have some of his neural tissue removed—resected, in surgical parlance—because of intractable, life-threatening epilepsy. Suddenly, one of the surgeons whips out a photo of Jennifer Aniston and shows it to the patient. A neuron in the man’s head fires excitedly. The surgeon lets out a war whoop.
Sound like a grade B movie? This experiment really happened. The neuron in question responded to seven photographs of actress Jennifer Aniston, while it practically ignored the 80 other images of everything else, including famous and non-famous people. Lead scientist Quian Quiroga said, “The first time we saw a neuron firing to seven different pictures of Jennifer Aniston—and nothing else—we literally jumped out of our chairs.” There is a neuron lurking in your head that is stimulated only when Jennifer Aniston is in the room.
A Jennifer Aniston neuron? How could this be? Surely there is nothing in our evolutionary history suggesting that Jennifer Aniston is a permanent denizen of our brain wiring. (Aniston wasn’t even born until 1969, and there are regions in our brain whose designs are millions of years old). To make matters worse, the researchers also found a Halle Berry-specific neuron, a cell in the man’s brain that wouldn’t respond to pictures of Aniston or anything else. Just Berry. He also had a neuron specific to Bill Clinton. It no doubt was helpful to have a sense of humor while doing this kind of brain research.
Welcome to the world of experience-dependent brain wiring, where a great deal of the brain is hard-wired not to be hard-wired. Like a beautiful, rigorously trained ballerina, we are hard-wired to be flexible.
We can immediately divide the world’s brains into those who know of Jennifer Aniston or Halle Berry and those who don’t. The brains of those who do are not wired the same way as those who don’t. This seemingly ridiculous observation underlies a much larger concept. Our brains are so sensitive to external inputs that their physical wiring depends upon the culture in which they find themselves.
Even identical twins do not have identical brain wiring. Consider this thought experiment: Suppose two adult male twins rent the Halle Berry movie Catwoman, and we in our nifty little submarine are viewing their brains while they watch. Even though they are in the same room, sitting on the same couch, the twins see the movie from slightly different angles. We find that their brains are encoding visual memories of the video differently, in part because it is impossible to observe the video from the same spot. Seconds into the movie, they are already wiring themselves differently.
One of the twins earlier in the day read a magazine story about panned action movies, a picture of Berry figuring prominently on the cover. While watching the video, this twin’s brain is simultaneously accessing memories of the magazine. We observe that his brain is busy comparing and contrasting comments from the text with the movie and is assessing whether he agrees with them. The other twin has not seen this magazine, so his brain isn’t doing this. Even though the difference may seem subtle, the two brains are creating different memories of the same movie.
That’s the power of the Brain Rule. Learning results in physical changes in the brain, and these changes are unique to each individual. Not even identical twins having identical experiences possess brains that wire themselves exactly the same way. And you can trace the whole thing to experience.
on the street where you live
Perhaps a question is now popping up in your brain: If every brain is wired differently from every other brain, can we know anything about the organ?
Well, yes. The brain has billions of cells whose collective electrical efforts make a loving, wonderful you or, perhaps with less complexity, Kandel’s sea slug. All of these nerves work in a similar fashion. Every human comes equipped with a hippocampus, a pituitary gland, and the most sophisticated thinking store of electrochemistry on the planet: a cortex. These tissues function the same way in every brain.
How then can we explain the individuality? Consider a highway. The United States has one of the most extensive and complex ground transportation systems in the world. There are lots of variations on the idea of “road,” from interstate freeways, turnpikes, and state highways to residential streets, one-lane alleys, and dirt roads. Pathways in the human brain are similarly diverse. We have the neural equivalents of large interstate freeways, turnpikes, and state highways. These big trunks are the same from one person to the next, functioning in yours about the same way they function in mine. So a great deal of the structure and function of the brain is predictable, a property that allows the word “science” to be attached to the end of the word “neuro” and keeps people like me employed. Such similarity may be the ultimate fruit of the double-humped developmental program we talked of previously. That’s the experience-independent wiring.
It’s when you get to the smaller routes—the brain’s equivalent of residential streets, one-laners and dirt roads—that individual patterns begin to show up. Every brain has a lot of these smaller paths, and in no two people are they identical. The individuality is seen at the level of the very small, but because we have so much of it, the very small amounts to a big deal.
It is one thing to demonstrate that every brain is wired differently from every other brain. It is another to say that this affects intelligence. Two scientists, a behavioral theorist and a neurosurgeon, offer differing perspectives on the subject. The theorist believes in seven to nine categories of multiple intelligence. The neurosurgeon also believes in multiple categories. He thinks there may be billions.
Meet Howard Gardner, psychologist, author, educator, and father of the so-called Multiple Intelligences movement. Gardner had the audacity to suggest that the competency of the human mind is too multifaceted to be boiled down to simplistic numerical measures. He threw out the idea of IQ tests, and then he attempted to reframe the question of human intellectual skill. Like a cognitive Jane Goodall in an urban jungle, Gardner and his colleagues observed real people in the act of learning—at school, at work, at play, at life. He began to notice categories of intellectual talent that people used every day that were not always identified as being “intelligent” and certainly were not measurable by IQ tests. After thinking about things for a long time, he published his findings in a book called Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. It set off a firestorm of debate that burns unabated to this day.
Gardner believes he has observed at least seven categories of intelligence: verbal/linguistic, musical/rhythmic, logical/mathematical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, and intrapersonal. He calls these “entry points” into the inner workings of the human mind. The categories don’t always intersect with one another, and Gardner has said, “If I know you’re very good in music, I can predict with just about zero accuracy whether you’re going to be good or bad in other things.
Some researchers think Gardner is resting on his opinion, not on his data. But none of his critics attack the underlying thesis that the human intellect is multifaceted. To date, Gardner’s efforts represent the first serious attempt to provide an alternative to numerical descriptions of human cognition.
mapping the brain
But categories of intelligence may number more than 7 billion—roughly the population of the world. You can get a sense of this by watching skilled neurosurgeon George Ojemann examine the exposed brain of a 4-year-old girl. Ojemann has a shock of white hair, piercing eyes, and the quiet authority of someone who for decades has watched people live and die in the operating room. He is one of the great neurosurgeons of our time, and he is an expert at a technique called electrical stimulation mapping.
He is hovering over a girl with severe epilepsy. She is fully conscious, her brain exposed to the air. He is there to remove some of her misbehaving brain cells. Before Ojemann takes out anything, however, he has to make a map. He wields a slender white wand attached to a wire, a cortical stimulator, which sends out small, unobtrusive electrical shocks to anything it touches. If it brushed against your hand, you would feel only a slight tingly sensation.
Ojemann gently touches one end of the wand to an area of the little girl’s brain and then asks her, “Did you feel anything?” She says dreamily, “Somebody just touched my hand.” He puts a tiny piece of paper on the area. He touches another spot. She exclaims, “Somebody just touched my cheek!” Another tiny piece of paper. This call and response goes on for hours. Like a neural cartographer, Ojemann is mapping the various functions of his little patient’s brain, with special attention paid to the areas close to her epileptic tissue.
These are tests of the little girl’s motor skills. For reasons not well understood, however, epileptic tissues are often disturbingly adjacent to critical language areas. So Ojemann also pays close attention to the regions involved in language processing, where words and sentences and grammatical concepts are stored. This child happens to be bilingual, so language areas essential for both Spanish and English will need to be mapped. A paper dot marked “S” is applied to the regions where Spanish exists, and a small “E” where English is stored. Ojemann does this painstaking work with every single patient who undergoes this type of surgery. Why? The answer is a stunner. He has to map each individual’s critical function areas because he doesn’t know where they are.
Ojemann can’t predict the function of very precise areas in advance of the surgery because no two brains are wired identically. Not in terms of structure. Not in terms of function. For example, from nouns to verbs to aspects of grammar, we each store language in different areas, recruiting different regions for different components. Bilingual people don’t even store their Spanish and their English in similar places.
This individuality has fascinated Ojemann for years. He once combined the brain maps for 117 patients he had operated on over the years. Only in one region did he find a spot where most people had a critical language area, or CLA, and “most” means 79 percent of the patients.
Data from electrical stimulation mapping give probably the most dramatic illustration of the brain’s individuality. But Ojemann also wanted to know how stable these differences were during life, and if any of those differences predicted intellectual competence. He found interesting answers to both questions. First, the maps are established very early in life, and they remain stable throughout. Even if a decade or two had passed between surgeries, the regions recruited for a specific CLA remained recruited for that same CLA. Ojemann also found that certain CLA patterns could predict language competency, at least as measured by a pre-operative verbal IQ test. If you want to be good at a language (or at least perform well on the test), don’t let the superior temporal gyrus host your CLA. Your verbal performance will statistically be quite poor. Also, make sure your overall CLA pattern has a small and rather tightly focused footprint. If the pattern is instead widely distributed, you will have a remarkably low score. These findings are robust and age-independent. They have been demonstrated in people as young as kindergartners and as old as Alan Greenspan.
Not only are people’s brains individually wired, but those neurological differences can, at least in the case of language, predict performance.
ideas
Given these data, does it make any sense to have school systems that expect every brain to learn like every other? Does it make sense to treat everybody the same in business, especially in a global economy replete with various cultural experiences? The data offer powerful implications for how we should teach kids—and, when they grow up and get a job, how we should treat them as employees. I have a couple of concerns about our school system:
1) The current system is founded on a series of expectations that certain learning goals should be achieved by a certain age. Yet there is no reason to suspect that the brain pays attention to those expectations. Students of the same age show a great deal of intellectual variability.
2) These differences can profoundly influence classroom performance. This has been tested. For example, about 10 percent of students do not have brains sufficiently wired to read at the age at which we expect them to read. Lockstep models based simply on age are guaranteed to create a counterproductive mismatch to brain biology.
What can we do about this?
Smaller class size
All else being equal, it has been known for many years that smaller, more intimate schools create better learning environments than megaplex houses of learning. The Brain Rule may help explain why smaller is better.
Given that every brain is wired differently, being able to read a student’s mind is a powerful tool in the hands of a teacher. As you may recall from the Survival chapter, Theory of Mind is about as close to mind reading as humans are likely to get. It is defined as the ability to understand the interior motivations of someone else and the ability to construct a predictable “theory of how their mind works” based on that knowledge. This gives teachers critical access to their studentsinterior educational life. It may include knowledge of when students are confused and when they are fully engaged. It also gives sensitive teachers valuable feedback about whether their teaching is being transformed into learning. It may even be the definition of that sensitivity. I have come to believe that people with advanced Theory of Mind skills possess the single most important ingredient for becoming effective communicators of information.
Students comprehend complex knowledge at different times and at different depths. Because a teacher can keep track of only so many minds, there must be a limit on the number of students in a class—the smaller, the better. It is possible that small class sizes predict better performance simply because the teacher can better keep track of where everybody is. This suggests that an advanced skill set in Theory of Mind predicts a good teacher. If so, existing Theory of Mind tests could be used like Myers-Briggs personality tests to reveal good teachers from bad, or to help people considering careers as teachers.
Customized instruction
What of that old admonition to create more individualized instruction within a grade level? It sits on some solid brain science. Researcher Carol McDonald Connor is doing the first work I’ve seen capable of handling these differences head-on. She and a colleague combined a standard reading program with a bright and shiny new computer program called A2i. The software uses artificial intelligence to determine where the user’s reading competencies lie and then adaptively tailor exercises for the student in order to fill in any gaps.
When used in conjunction with a standard reading class, the software is wildly successful. The more students work with the program, the better their scores become. Interestingly, the effect is greatest when the software is used in conjunction with a normal reading program. Teacher alone or software alone is not as effective. As the instructor teaches the class in a normal fashion, students will, given the uneven intellectual landscape, experience learning gaps. Left untreated, these gaps cause students to fall further and further behind, a normal and insidious effect of not being able to transform instruction into apprehension. The software makes sure these gaps don’t go untreated.
Is this the future? Attempting to individualize education is hardly a new idea. Using code as a stand-in for human teaching is not revolutionary, either. But the combination might be a stunner. I would like to see a three-pronged research effort between brain and education scientists:
1) Evaluate teachers and teachers-to-be for advanced Theory of Mind skills, using one of the four main tests that measure empathy. Determine whether this affects student performance in a statistically valid fashion.
2) Develop adaptive software for a variety of subjects and grade levels. Test them for efficacy. Deploy the ones that work in a manner similar to the experiment Connor published in the journal Science.
3) Test both ideas in various combinations. Add to the mix environments where the student-teacher ratio is both typical and optimized, and then compare the results.
The reason to do this is straightforward: You cannot change the fact that the human brain is individually wired. Every student’s brain, every employee’s brain, every customer’s brain is wired differently. That’s the Brain Rule. You can either accede to it or ignore it. The current system of education chooses the latter, to our detriment. It needs to be torn down and newly envisioned, in a Manhattan Project-size commitment to individualizing instruction. We might, among other things, dismantle altogether grade structures based on age.
Companies could try Theory of Mind screening for leaders, along with a method of “mass customization” that treats every employee as an individual. I bet many would discover that they have a great basketball player in their organization, and they’re asking him or her to play baseball.
Summary
Rule #3
Every brain is wired differently.
• What you do and learn in life physically changes what your brain looks like—it literally rewires it.
• The various regions of the brain develop at different rates in different people.
• No two people’s brains store the same information in the same way in the same place.
• We have a great number of ways of being intelligent, many of which don’t show up on IQ tests.
