The start of my epic quest to solve the mystery of the educational micro-crisis I was observing coincided with a sharp increase in the number of neuroscientific studies using sophisticated brain imaging equipment. With much fanfare, the United States government had designated the 1990s the “decade of the brain” and allocated increased funds for brain research. The decade had lived up to the hype surprisingly well. It was marked by a true explosion of clever studies and experiments made possible by the introduction of smarter and more precise scanning technologies. The new computer-enhanced machines produced a flood of catchy images and fresh experimental results which quickly trickled down into the popular press. Some of the new findings seemed to have obvious relevance for the troubled field of education. To me, it also appeared intuitively obvious that a better understanding of the workings of the brain was essential for developing any new and improved methods of teaching and learning.
I did my best to read as many neuroscientific papers and articles as possible. Those often seemed, however, overloaded with technical jargon. Most were also too focused on finding clear-cut causal relationships between the processes ostensibly captured by brightly colored brain images and specific reactions of the human subjects stuck into the tunnels of scanning machines. So I continued to educate myself, relying to a greater extent on the guidance of neuroscientists who sought to draw some broader conclusions from their—and others’—experimental work. I also voraciously read books and articles written by neuroscientists and science writers (sometimes in tandem) who presented key findings in more digestible language and examined their larger social implications.
Among those multiplying “brain stories,”1 there was one which immediately grabbed my attention. It was an interview with Martha Herbert, a child neurologist at Harvard specializing in autism research. The interview had been published in 2001 in an obscure independent periodical, The Wild Duck Review.2 The whole issue purported to investigate the possible “End of Human Nature” in the face of recent technological advances which were transforming the natural and social habitat.
Some of Herbert’s observations provoked uneasy thoughts in this respect. She warned that sensory overstimulation, a cocktail of potentially toxic chemicals,3 ubiquitous electromagnetic fields,4 many other environmental irritants, and “social/emotional derailments” were provoking unhealthy adaptations in the developing brains of American children. She feared that a neural Rubicon had been passed beyond which the rewiring of young brains was becoming irreversible. She was also worried that the “reductionist triumphalism” kindled by “technoutopian visionaries” stood in the way of grasping the true significance of these existential threats.
Could the neural adaptations Herbert described be the clue I was looking for in my efforts to understand the cognitive changes I was observing in many of my students? I was intrigued, so I contacted Casey Walker, the environmental activist and intellectual who stood behind The Wild Duck Review and had conducted the interview. She recommended a book by Joseph Chilton Pearce, an aging child-rearing and education guru. The title of his book, Evolution’s End, was reminiscent of the title Ms. Walker had chosen for the thematic issue she had produced.5 It mixed insightful references to brain research with a whiff of New Age mysticism, and was full of prophesies which sounded darker than even Herbert’s unsettling warnings.
Pearce’s oracular pronouncements resonated with another disturbing book which attracted my attention around that time—Jane Healy’s Endangered Minds. Though published in 1990 and focused on the growing learning difficulties of American adolescents, it described with uncanny precision most of the symptoms I had observed in my students—from increasing knowledge and reasoning deficits, to muddled grammar and syntax. Like Pearce’s account, it sought to relate cognitive tendencies to detrimental modifications in brain wiring. Healy’s main claim was that these neural adaptations were being induced by an increasingly unhealthy social and technological environment. I wondered if these books could be depicting developments in which the United States had (as Tocqueville had expected) once again led the way, with other societies now following in their footsteps. That seemed a plausible conclusion. But contrary to my natural inclinations, I was not yet ready to succumb to the pessimism Healy’s and Pearce’s books so readily evoked.
My unwillingness to surrender to cultural and pedagogical gloom was bolstered by a much more hopeful book—The Art of Changing the Brain by James Zull.6 Published in 2002, it was a bold harbinger of the whole flood of “neuroeducation” research and proselytizing which was to follow. Zull, a professor of biochemistry, drew on key findings from brain research to offer a better understanding of student learning. He described learning as a function of the proper activation of different brain areas, and their horizontal and vertical integration.
From Zull’s point of view, the teacher’s main task in any field of knowledge was the same—to help students achieve this optimal brain activation and integration. That goal could only be accomplished if students were actively involved in learning exercises and experiences which stimulated all their senses, triggered in them some excitement, and prompted them to make rich cross-references and associations—between newly acquired information and relevant background knowledge, between concrete facts or events and more abstract concepts, between personal observations or experiences and larger issues, etc.
For a time, Zull’s overall argument seemed truly inspiring. I tried to follow faithfully his advice and think of yet more inventive ways to prod students to make the mental and neural connections he thought were so crucial. As already indicated, those efforts did not produce spectacular results. In fact, as I was trying to better understand my students’ learning difficulties, I couldn’t help but notice some troubling changes in my own mental functioning.
As a graduate student, in my late 20s and early 30s I had been rather proud of my intellectual sharpness. This mental self-confidence did not stem primarily from my outstanding performance in demanding classes or the quality of my research papers and dissertation. Rather, I compared myself favorably to most American graduate students and professors who often did something that struck me as profoundly odd. In a conversation or in class, they would tell an anecdote. Then, a few days later, they would tell the exact same anecdote, without the vaguest recollection of the previous conversation or class discussion. I observed those incidents with some amusement, and thought they reflected a peculiar cultural quirk. Until one day, after a few years of teaching, reading and writing, and juggling my other professional and personal responsibilities, I began doing the same thing.
Those troubling episodes started to occur with increasing frequency. They were later supplemented by an even more disturbing mnemonic hiccup. Once in a while, I would pick up an article and start reading it with interest. I would then turn the page and see with surprise a few highlighted passages or even brief comments in the margins. Those indicated clearly that I had read and mulled over the article a few months earlier. Yet, it had left no lasting trace in my brain. It seemed I faced an even greater problem than my students who could at least easily recall the lyrics of popular hits and the story lines of favorite movies. At first I thought that my worrying memory lapses were age-related. As I was pushing 40, perhaps my gray matter was beginning to atrophy, causing my memory to slip. But then, why had my fellow graduate students in the United States, all highly intelligent and knowledgeable, experienced similar symptoms in their 20s?
Survival of the Less Informed?
Curiously, many individuals with less intellectual occupations (and preoccupations) I was meeting at the time did not seem to suffer from the cognitive syndrome I was developing. In the spring of 2003, I took our family car to a garage in Blagoevgrad, the city of 70,000 inhabitants which hosts AUBG. The mechanic who greeted me, an earnest man in his 50s, looked at me and my Spartan Škoda, and asked matter-of-factly: “What happened to your Golf?” He was referring to our previous car, a Volkswagen, on which he had done some repairs two years earlier. Around the same time I went to a new hair salon close to our apartment in Sofia. The woman working there, also in her 50s, immediately recalled she had given me a haircut a few months earlier in another salon where she had worked at the time. Needless to say, I had no recollection of that encounter. I also had a few other similar experiences.
A book I picked up in 2005 at a used bookstore in London forced me to see the mental deficit I was experiencing in a new light. Written by David Shenk, it had a highly evocative title—Data Smog.7 Published in 1997, which now seem like the good old days before Google, it described with much wit and concern the challenges of dealing with chronic information overload.8 According to Shenk, opening the electronic floodgates with the advent of the internet was tremendously complicating the task of organizing relevant knowledge, storing what was worth keeping in long-term memory, and recalling it when needed.
Shenk argued that the only way to survive and thrive amidst this information glut was to adopt a strict, carefully considered “information diet.” When food had become abundant and cheap in rich countries, steadfast control over its daily intake had turned into a vital necessity. The lack of such control led to obesity and an array of health risks associated with chronic overeating. In a similar way, smart people would now need to become highly selective about the quality and quantity of the information they sought to access, process, and commit to memory.
In my mind, I tried to combine these new insights with the lessons I had learned from Zull. It seemed that the judicious consumption of information Shenk advised required the kind of conceptual and neural mapping Zull thought teachers should foster in their students. There could be a problem, though. The density of the “data smog” itself could undercut the development of that conceptual and neural framework. The underdevelopment of such a framework could make it harder to see through the informational haze, assess what is significant, and allocate relevant facts and ideas to clearly marked mental folders. This vicious circle might explain many of the cognitive problems I was observing in my students. Still, I hoped that a more lucid awareness of these problems and redoubled efforts to address them, both on my part and in my students, could help cut through that cognitive knot.
Inspired, I poured that newly found wisdom into a brief article addressing the pitfalls of “teaching and learning in the age of audiovisual pollution.”9 Drawing on Zull’s book, I advocated a relentless, reinvigorated effort to cajole students to make the necessary mental associations and neural connections. That increasingly hard task was to be accomplished through the use of lively readings, many vivid examples and various media, including the brief video clips I had started to show in class. I also presented this vision at a seminar for university faculty organized by the Bulgarian ministry of education. Later, I helped draft the section on liberal education in AUBG’s five-year strategic plan. It restated the university’s commitment to broader, holistic learning whose overall objective would be to assist students in developing a conceptual “grid”—a framework which would help them understand the larger social world and their place in it.10 This vision also became part of the description of the political science major at AUBG.
As I was plotting new strategies for making the learning I and AUBG offered more meaningful and “sticky,”11 I also tried to keep track of the exploding literature on “neuroeducation.” Gradually, however, I started to lose faith in the efficacy of the prescriptions I found there, and in my newly acquired neuropedagogical wisdom.