His talk was compelling enough that I promptly read his book as well. Like Gottschall, I’ve done some pondering about Plato’s long ago warnings against the power of the written word back when I did a nerdy deep dive into the roots of close reading (“Close Reading: The Context of an Exigesis“), so this idea that storytelling can be a double edged sword resonated with me. And his warnings about the dangers of storytelling, particularly through social media, seemed an important part of the puzzle of the rise of Trump, the far right, and QAnon, amongst other phenomenon such as anti-vaxxers during this turbulent age dominated by Facebook and Twitter.

Gottschall’s warning is that stories have a great power over humanity: we are deeply compelled by stories at a subconscious level, and while stories can broaden our horizons and capacity for empathy, they also — by nature of the narrative dynamic of a villain and a victim — leverage in-group and out-group divisions and can dehumanize those we perceive as those in our “out-group.” One of the key findings from research Gottschall cites is that the dramatization of stories reliably beats argumentation based on facts every time. We are all too easily compelled — and manipulated — by the storytelling we consume on a daily basis in the form of media, tweets, comments, podcasts, etc.

While I found this intriguing, I wasn’t quite sure what to take away from his warnings against the dim underbelly of storytelling — until today.

Three things brought it together for me:

1. I happened to listen to a Fresh Air podcast interview by an author, Nicholas Confessore, who has written a book on Tucker Carlson, and learned that Tucker Carlson is a major force on cable news (I neither watch cable, nor the news, and have never listened to Carlson, so this was news to me) and furthermore learned that continually returns to a major theme in his monologues: that of the the “replacement theory,” which posits, basically, that white people are being replaced demographically by non-white people through immigration and liberalism.
2. The horrific shooting in Buffalo, NY the very next day, in which the shooter was a white male incited by that very theory.
3. Seeing this tweet from Petter Buttigieg: https://x.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1525943090611109893?s=20

Suddenly, it clicked.

Gottschall’s book was sparked by the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh by a white male shooter who was convinced Jews were “invading” the U.S. and “killing his people.”

In both his keynote and in his book, I was struck by Gottschall’s ability to portray the shooter not as a horrific monster, but rather with the grim but ultimately empathetic understanding that this was a man who believed fictional stories about Jews.

This is the the powerful undertow that stories can have when we believe them without critique, when we see others believing in them, too, and we begin to perceive ourselves as part of the in-group that the stories include as its heroes and victims, and vilify the out-group that are its villains.

Gottschall warns that “when we villainize someone, we dehumanize ourselves,” and that is no more apparent than in the case of human beings who have become mass killers.

Unfortunately, there are no easy solutions that Gottschall can offer us to combat this, aside from generalities such as teaching critical thinking, or reducing the stories where we are the good guys and others are one-dimensional villains.

But it does beg the question, given all this talk about “freedom of speech”: where is our freedom from being manipulated? Where is our freedom from being shot when shopping, or praying, or listening to a concert, or sitting on the train, or walking down the street?

We are like moths drawn to flame to the stories we see and hear and tell on our smartphones, and our social media, and our likes and our lurking and trolling and posing and signalling.

How can we innoculate one another against the stories that simplify and demonize groups of people, and embrace stories that individuate and complicate our understanding of ourselves and one another?

#narratives #story #power #replacementtheory #skepticism #race

Discuss...

I think there’s something in the nature of presenting to a general audience of educators that compels researchers to attempt to derive generalized implications of their research that can all too easily overstep the confines of their very specialized and specific domains. For example, Mary Helen Immordino-Yano gave a powerful keynote on her ongoing research into emotions and their relation to learning. There were intriguing implications for education from brain scans and surveys of individual children, such as the insight that emotional engagement activates the same part of the brain (the brain stem) that keeps us alive at a subconscious level. This reflects a deeper form of learning that changes consciousness and is only accessed when attention is directed internally, rather than outwardly. Furthermore, and counterintuitively, such emotional engagement is most activated by admiration for others based on the nature of their virtue, rather than merely by a demonstration of their ability.

Her talk was accompanied by useful and trenchant guiding questions for us to consider as implications for education:

• What might this mean for emotional well-being? Character development?
• What might it mean for how we use technology?
• How might this change how we think about productivity? critical thinking?

Yet there was a moment – a very small moment that was more of an aside – when Immordino-Yano drew out themes around “meaningful learning” (i.e. personal connections to ideas, rather than emotions related to outcomes) to make a critique of our entire system of education. There is plenty to critique in our motley assortment of localized systems in the U.S.– but it was a moment that activated my own skepticism, as it must be remembered that Immordino-Yano’s research involves individual kids at a clinic watching a video and responding to questions, and then receiving an fMRI while rewatching the video. Hardly the conditions of a classroom, and extrapolating from such findings to the education system at large may be overstepping those specific findings.

To be clear, I found Immordino-Yano’s keynote to be the most intriguing and powerful of the entire conference – but thus I found it all the more instructive to attempt to maintain that “Goldilocks” balance of a healthy mix of openness and skepticism when considering how findings from research may apply to schools and classrooms.

Another presentation from neural scientist Andre Fenton also made me reflect on the lines between specialized research and extrapolations to classroom practice. Fenton provided a very detailed overview of his research into cognitive control training with mice in a laboratory, and to his credit, he did not make many general extrapolations beyond a few analogies, such as the quote, “What we think we become,” and some general advice such as considering how labs in science class can give kids an opportunity to “discover what is salient and ignore what isn’t” — to give “kids an opportunity to be judicious in how they process the information given to them.”

Relevant to such findings, Andrew Watson warned during his presentation to “never change your practice from research based on non-human animals.” There are indeed intriguing aspects of executive function and cognitive control training as it relates to mice we can consider from Fenton’s research, but until we have psychological studies with humans related to such findings, there may be little we can yet extrapolate on to classroom practice.

As I grappled with this, I realized that this was perfectly OK. We don’t always NEED to immediately overgeneralize specialized findings to classroom practice! We can be intrigued, we can be provoked, we can learn about the specific conditions and findings in relation to the research, and ruminate on what they might mean – but we must resist jumping to overzealous conclusions, and instead maintain our thirst for further research and learning.

Speaking of zealotry, in his keynote, Steven Pinker acknowledged that humanity et al. seems to be losing its collective mind, and provided a call for a cool-headed commitment to rationality and that “cognitive tools should be at the fingertips of every kid.” Pinker doesn’t believe people are irrational; he believes we are “logical about content relevant to our own lives and subject-matter knowledge,” but that we “have more trouble with formal rationality,” the “abstract rules and formulas that can be applied to any content.” We therefore need to make the tools of rationality “second nature,” and ensure the norms of rationality are upholded by our organizations and institutions, including educational ones. How we do this, however, wasn’t entirely clear beyond perhaps explicitly teaching concepts such as confirmation bias, systems of logic, and game theory.

There was something tucked into his talk that I found echoed in other talks as well, including by Andrew Watson, Ulrich Boser, and Jonathan Gottschall, which is that rather than seeking confirmatory evidence for our beliefs, we must acknowledge our own fallibility and instead seek evidence that challenges our thinking. We must seek to falsify our own beliefs to rationally interrogate their veracity.

In Jonathan Gottschall’s talk, he presented the paradox of stories for our species, which is that we possess a unique power that we can harness to expand our perspectives, knowledge, and empathy, but that there is a dark side to storytelling in that we are all too easily captivated by them on venues such as social media, and these seemingly innocuous stories often promote in-group and out-group dynamics through the casting of a villain. To combat this negative undertow of stories, Jonathan Gottschall urges us to maintain skepticism towards our own narratives, not just “the other side’s.”

With that wise advice in mind, I should note that my narrative account of the conference leaves out some truly insightful and compelling insights and information that I gained from talks such as from Carolyn Strom, Daniel Willingham, Ulrich Boser, and William Stixrud, not to mention some further implications from Immordino-Yano’s research findings.

There’s always more to learn! I hope I get an opportunity to attend another Learning and the Brain conference in the future.

#conference #learning #brain #research #neuroscience #skepticism #empiricism #narratives