How Our Brains Learn
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This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. There's a scene in the 1986 movie Ferris Bueller's Day Off that has become iconic. It's a spot-on portrayal of what it feels like to be disengaged and disaffected. In the film, actor Ben Stein plays an economics teacher who is not about to win any teaching awards. He speaks in a deathly monotone.
In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the anyone, anyone, the Great Depression, passed the anyone, anyone, a tariff bill.
The students in the classroom are suffering from a boredom that verges on the catatonic. On and on the teacher goes, asking for responses, but barely expecting any. And indeed, no one ventures a word.
Today, we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is, class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laugher Curve. Anyone know what this says?
There is no spark of interest or curiosity. The moviegoer can hardly blame Ferris for skipping out on school to spend a day of fun with his friends. For many of us, there is a reason this scene may be resonant. Our own time in school might have resembled this. Students currently enrolled may experience a shiver of recognition. It's not just in educational settings. Have you ever attended a meeting where leaders of your organization drone on about some new initiative or corporate mumbo-jumbo? As your eyelids grow heavy with sleep, you fear your head is going to fall through your interlaced fingers and crash onto the conference table. What is missing from these classrooms and conference rooms is engagement, a state of being absorbed and alert where you are eager to learn and know more.
This week on Hidden Brain, why so many of us feel apathetic at school and at work. and how to cultivate the magic of engagement.
I remember many days during my school years when I was so bored I would fall asleep in class. But on those very same days, I would find myself alone in a university library at night, poring over books that had nothing to do with my classwork, oblivious as the hours slipped by. How could the same person be bored to death in one academic setting and completely engaged in another? At the University of Southern California, psychologist and neuroscientist Mary Helen Imordino-Yang has explored this question for many years. She studies the science of engagement and motivation. Mary Helen Imordino-Yang, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you for having me.
Mary Helen, you're now a professor of education, but as a kid, I understand that you struggled to feel engaged by school.
I really did. I couldn't understand kind of what the point was or what it meant to do things there. And school really didn't feel like it was about learning for me. It felt like it was about doing stuff. And I can hardly describe the sense of just release on Friday afternoon and the dread on Sunday night through my late elementary, especially, and early middle school, sixth grade I finally ended up for a lot of complex reasons for things that were happening at school. I finally ended up just kind of stopping going to school. I sort of was like a soft dropout about, you know, I just stopped getting up in the morning. And I think my parents just kind of stood back and realized I was doing all kinds of interesting things.
We had the great fortune of living in the woods in Connecticut in a very remote place. And my parents were both from the inner city, one from Detroit, one from Yonkers, New York, right? And they decided they were going to raise their kids on a farm and try to grow what we ate and, you know, and have animals and all kinds of things. And so I was really deeply involved with running that farm, taking care of the animals. I was playing the piano. I was... You know, running around in the woods, training dogs and, you know, all kinds of things that was keeping me very, very busy.
I understand that at one point your grandmother once discovered something unusual in her refrigerator that you had left there. Tell me that story, Mary Helen.
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