Brains On Purpose™

Mind, Brain, and Education: Implications for Educators

In several past posts, we have considered the role of learning in conflict resolution. Today I want to bring your attention to the autumn edition of Mind, Brain, and Education [pdf] because it contains several interesting articles about learning, including

• The Need for a Deeper Exploration and Conceptual Understanding: The Critical Role of Creativity and Collaboration in Real-World Learning
  R. Keith Sawyer
• Mind, Brain and Education: The Impact of Educational Neuroscience on the Science of Teaching
  David A. Sousa
• Brain, Mind, and the Organization of Knowledge for Effective Recall and
  Application
  O. Roger Anderson
• Mind, Brain and Education: The Birth of a New Science
  Michel Ferrari & Hazel E. A. McBride
• Executive Function in the Classroom: Neurological Implications for Classroom Intervention
  Harriet Greenstone
• We Feel, Therefore We Learn: The Relevance of Affective and Social Neuroscience to Education
  Mary Helen Immordino-Yang & Antonio Damasio
• The Power of Mindset in Shaping Student Success
  Megan Webster & Nathalie Bossé

Click to read these and many other articles. Related blog post: "Exploring the brain in the Bay Area: Join us in February?"

"Social Neuroscience: How a Multidisciplinary Field Is Uncovering the Biology of Human Interactions"

Excerpt:

Editor’s note: Studying only the biological or social aspects of a species can cause researchers to overlook many of the complex elements at work within and among organisms. The interdisciplinary field of social neuroscience serves to close the gaps left by such singularly focused research. Social neuroscientists boost our knowledge of the biology of animal and human interactions in areas as diverse as drug abuse, pair-bonding, and social isolation. As the field continues to grow, we will better understand the social, biological, and cognitive factors that determine how we relate to others.

...

If the solitary computer is a metaphor for cognitive neuroscience, the Internet is a metaphor for social neuroscience.

Click to read the rest of "Social Neuroscience: How a Multidisciplinary Field Is Uncovering the Biology of Human Interactions" (Cerebrum - Dana Foundation).

Although there's no certain and fool-proof way to persuade, people keep looking for the magic manipulator

How we are persuaded is individual and situational, so beware of anyone trying to sell you a surefire way to successfully convince, cajole or persuade. Nevertheless, human beings continue looking for that elusive brainwashing soap that always works. The search will probably continue as long as we are on this planet.

Speaking of soap, here's a very entertaining and informative article about some of the efforts in the world of marketing made over the years to discover the persuasion key. From "Retail therapy: How Ernest Dichter, an acolyte of Sigmund Freud, revolutionised marketing" (The Economist):

Between the late 1930s and 1960s Dichter became famous for transforming the fates of businesses such as Procter & Gamble, Exxon, Chrysler, General Mills and DuPont. His insight changed the way hundreds of products were sold, from cars to cake mix. He pioneered research techniques such as the focus group, understood the power of word-of-mouth persuasion and earned startling fees for his theories. By the late 1950s his global business reached an annual turnover of $1m ($8m today), and he enjoyed a reputation as the Freud of the supermarket age.

Dichter’s radical approach to goading shoppers, called “motivational research”, was considered so successful that he was even accused of threatening America’s national well-being. Americans have become “the most manipulated people outside the Iron Curtain,” complained Vance Packard, a

"Neuroscience, Normativity, and Retributivism"

Abstract:

Advocates for the increased use of neuroscience in law have made bold and provocative claims about the power of neuroscientific discoveries to transform the criminal law in ways large and small. Perhaps the boldest and most provocative of these claims are made in an influential article by Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen. They claim that neuroscience will reveal that criminal defendants are not morally responsible for their actions and that this revelation will thereby undermine retributivist justifications for criminal punishment. In the process of resolving previously intractable debates between consequentialism and retributivism, neuroscience will also, they contend, resolve age-old debates about free will. In this essay, we discuss several serious problems with their argument. We maintain that no neuroscientific discoveries will lead to the sorts of changes predicted by Greene and Cohen and, even if they did, those changes would not be the product of neuroscientific insight but result from unwarranted and problematic inferences which ought to be resisted.

Click to download the rest of "Neuroscience, Normativity, and Retributivism" (SSRN-THE FUTURE OF PUNISHMENT, Thomas Nadelhoffer, ed., Oxford University Press, Forthcoming-U of Alabama Public Law Research Paper No. 1968552).

Respect mediation? Love it? Prove it, shove it, move it: Mix things up, break the patterns

If someone were to take video tapes (with no audio) of your mediations, how different would one look from the other? We all tend to get into both personal and professional patterns. For example, we typically drive to errands on the same routes over time. Do we drive the same routes in mediations?

This study linked to below, another one about how our bodies may affect our cognition, reminds us that much more is going on in any session than we might guess. To circumvent or drive through roadblocks to resolution, change the routes, change the roads, change the physical positions and environment.

In previous posts, I have suggested ways to get out of ruts and to see the conflict resolution process with fresh eyes, artistic eyes, sometimes even jester eyes. Those new eyes are the hallmark of a 21st-century mediator. Re-spect means look again. Re-spect your methods of mediation.

Try this: Think of a mediation as a game of jacks; they never fall the same way and you and the parties can use lots of ways to pick them up. Positions in the circle around the game can and probably should change; the bodies of the players are just as important as the minds.

And don't forget to change the ball to get a new bounce!

Here's that reminder of how much is going on in the room beyond what's in our skulls: "Leaning to the Left Makes the Eiffel Tower Seem Smaller: Posture-Modulated Estimation" (Psychological Science). Abstract: