Is compassion still necessary is akin to asking whether thinking is still necessary? While not everyone may practice thinking, thankfully most people believe it necessary. The same can be said of compassion. A world where most people are not compassionate would be a world without progress; for compassion is about holistically understanding the world around you so that you can find solutions to problems, thereby improving the quality of life. Compassion is necessary, especially if you want the world to progress. Even in a world full of compassion, it would still be necessary because compassion is like love; the more you use it, the more there is of it. In short, compassion will always be necessary just as thinking will be.
The host of Tipping Point Radio’s The Mastermind Show, Craig Meriwether, recently interviewed me for a specific program called “Is Compassion Still Necessary?” Craig and I discussed a wide range of issues as they relate to compassion such as politics, education, neuroscience, parenting, economics, religion and even video games. I hope that you’ll take a 45 minute ‘mindwalk’ about compassion with me and Craig: Click here to listen to the show.
Teachers are the artists who help us paint who we are and the astronauts who help us explore the people we become. Teaching is a profession that explores and experiences, in the words of The Outer Limits intro, “the awe and mystery that reaches from the deepest inner-mind … to the outer limits.” Teachers mold our minds and help us reach for the stars. The best educators know that there is an art to teaching and science, especially neuroscience, is just beginning to help us understand how great teaching creates inspired learning.
My talk for the Jesse Lewis Choose Love Foundation’s 2014 workshop for teachers titled “The Science of Artful Teaching” explains how and why great teachers are both artists and astronauts. The talk, which is part of my Inspiring Teachers Talks (The IT Talks), weaves together research in neuroscience, education and even cosmology to show educators that what and how they teach literally and figuratively paints and sculpts their students’ brains and futures.
If you are willing to explore the cosmos, the brain and be “blinded by science” all in an effort to understand the power and influence of a teacher, then “The Science of Artful Teaching” is for you.
Here’s my talk.
The American Dream, as James Thurow coined and described it in 1931, is about the equality of opportunity. If you believe that Thurow is right, then you need to wake up and open your eyes … now, because organizations from the American Federal Reserve to the International Monetary Fund to Science magazine have all released reports this year showing that inequality is dangerously high. The reports caution that if nothing is done to address the inequality of opportunity in the United States, the American Dream will slowly become a nightmare for Uncle Sam.
The nightmare is being conjured up by two interconnected trends: a growing income gap fueled by diminishing educational opportunities. Educational opportunity provides the surest footing when climbing America’s socio-economic ladder but that foothold is slipping away from an increasing number of Americans each year. In other words, education is becoming less of a force for economic opportunity because the number of Americans each year that have the resources to pursue educational achievements (which will help them climb the socio-economic ladder) is fewer and fewer.
Janet Yellen, Chairperson of the United States Federal Reserve, recently explained (October 17, 2014) “The extent and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me…I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.” The International Monetary Fund (IMF) warned in March 2014 that the level of inequality in the U.S. “has returned to levels not seen since before the Great Depression” and more generally that “rising income inequality is weighing on global economic growth and fueling political instability.” Science magazine focused its entire May 2014 issue on inequality and one of its main findings was that “the United States has both the lowest [socio-economic] mobility and highest inequality among all wealthy democratic countries.” There are many other non-partisan reports, books and articles released this year but I think you get the point: inequality and, more specifically, inequality of opportunity is rapidly growing thereby slowly killing the American Dream (it is neither a Democrat nor Republican issue but an American challenge).
The best way to keep the American Dream alive has been and continues to be through education, especially a college education (it offers every individual an opportunity to climb the socio-economic ladder). Although Yellen called early education and higher education the “cornerstones of opportunity,” she worried aloud stating “I fear the large and growing burden of paying for it may make it harder for many young people to take advantage of the opportunity higher education offers.” She cited a report showing that “the median annual earnings of full-time workers with a four-year bachelor’s degree are 79 percent higher than the median for those with only a high school diploma” but also provided statistics that showed that every year there are fewer Americans who have the resources to pursue such an opportunity:
…the wealthiest 5 percent of American households held 54 percent of all wealth reported in the 1989 survey. Their share rose to 61 percent in 2010 and reached 63 percent in 2013. By contrast, the rest of those in the top half of the wealth distribution—families that in 2013 had a net worth between $81,000 and $1.9 million—held 43 percent of wealth in 1989 and only 36 percent in 2013. The lower half of households by wealth held just 3 percent of wealth in 1989 and only 1 percent in 2013.
The problem is that although education is the key for unlocking economic prosperity—especially in a globalized-knowledge based economy—the key is out of reach for an increasing proportion of Americans every year. Education has been our society’s equalizer until the last couple of decades. However, a new college-rating index that ranks colleges on their ability to provide “pathways for social and economic mobility” was released this month and it seeks to refocus and strengthen America’s great equalizer: higher-education.
The Social Mobility Index (SMI), which was created by CollegeNET and PayScale, was constructed to “stimulate other schools to move beyond opportunity rhetoric towards meaningful action.” Some universities such as Western Connecticut State University (ranked #11 in the country and #1 in Connecticut), where I am fortunate to be a professor, are taking meaningful actions—but there are too few WCSUs “contributing in a responsible way to solving the dangerous problem of economic immobility in our country” (SMI). In answering the question “What should students and their families take away from the SMI rankings?” the authors reply: “If a student wants to pursue academics in an institution that models awareness and civic responsibility, the SMI can provide a valuable guide.” Shouldn’t all educational institutions and organizations strive to pursue such meaningful actions? Wouldn’t a focus on SMI rankings rather than “pursuing the false prestige in popular periodicals” (you know the ones) make our society stronger and more dynamic?
T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia) said “All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity. But the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.” While WCSU is one of this country’s leading universities in creating Lawrence’s day dreamers, educational institutions and leaders at all levels have important roles to play in creating and sustaining America’s day dream believers (men and women capable of transforming their dreams into reality). This country was built on the equality of opportunity and education has been a cornerstone of not only building the American Dream but for its realization. Those who diminish and weaken our educational institutions and opportunities at any level (local, state & national) and for any reason will abruptly awaken to a living nightmare created by their own vanity. Education on the pre-K, primary, secondary and higher-ed levels are the ‘pillars’ upon which the strength of America rests and the ‘pillows’ upon which the American Dream occurs.
Binyamin Appelbaum, “Janet Yellen Warns of Inequality Threat,” The New York Times, October 18, 2014
Gilbert Chin and Elizabeth Culotta, “The Science of Inequality: What the Numbers Tell Us,” Science, May 2104
Pedro Nicolaci da Costa, “Janet Yellen Decries Widening Wealth Disparity,” The Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2014.
Nicholas Kristof, “It’s Now the Canadian Dream,” The New York Times, May 14, 2014
Survey Acknowledges WCSU as a Leader in Promoting Social Mobility Western Connecticut State University website
Ian Talley, “IMF Warns on the Dangers of Growing Income Inequality,” 3/14/2014, The Wall Street Journal
Yellen, Janet L., “Perspectives on Inequality and Opportunity from the Survey of Consumer Finances,” Speech at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System at the Conference on Economic Opportunity and Inequality (October 17, 2014), Boston, MA.
Emotion is an integral part of a person’s rationality and vision—literally—of reality. From studies on people who lost a part of their brain’s frontal cortex to researchers at the University of Toronto testing how emotion influences vision, neuroscientists are demonstrating that emotion affects every aspect of cognition. Indeed, without emotion human beings find it difficult to be rational.
Historically, from Plato to Descartes to most modern economists, it has been assumed and argued that logical decision-making excludes emotions and feelings. The work of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio upends that historical assumption. Damasio’s research on people with brain damage to their frontal cortex clearly demonstrates that emotion plays an important role in logical reasoning. In the preface to his seminal work, Descartes’ Error, Damasio writes::
…the reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning process…When emotion is entirely left out of the reasoning picture, as happens in certain neurological conditions, reason turns out to be even more flawed than when emotion plays bad tricks on our decisions…[I] see emotion as at least assisting reason and at best holding dialogue with it…I view emotion as delivering cognitive information, directly and via feelings…the brain systems that are jointly engaged in emotion and decision-making are generally involved in the management of social cognition and behavior.
Logical decisions are made when emotions are a part of the reasoning process. If emotions are taken out of the reasoning process, as occurred in Damasio’s patients, irrational behavior increases. One of my favorite television and movie characters, Commander Spock of Star Trek, is now tarnished after reading Damasio’s various studies. For how would Spock respond to Damasio’s finding that “Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior”?
A person’s emotions or mood are such integral parts of cognition that they sometimes play the role of gatekeeper for how and to what extent each one of us sees reality. Our vision is literally affected by our emotions. Positive and negative moods, according to a 2009 neuroscience study, affect the way we see the world around us by either broadening (positive) or narrowing (negative) our peripheral vision respectively. The study clearly demonstrates that our moods modulate the activity of the visual cortex “with positive affect broadening and negative affect narrowing the distribution, or scope, of one’s field of view (FOV).” Our feelings about (rather than for) people even determine if we see them as attractive or not. The more honest we believe someone to be, for example (and reported by Robert Sapolsky), the more likable they are to us “and the more likable, the more physically attractive” we see them to be (and vice versa). The reason, according to neuroscience, is that we do not ‘see’ with our eyes; rather, we see with our brains. Because it is our brains that see and not the eyes, emotions and opinions define our vision of reality.
Shouldn’t we be trying to create more positive environments at home, school and work, simply based on neuroscience, if we are interested in attaining our goals? If positive values such as compassion and trustworthiness increase your awareness of the world around you and your likability, wouldn’t that also increase your probability of achieving success? It appears as though the color of success is rose; for the argument of wearing the proverbial rose-tinted glasses just became stronger.
ARTICLE & BOOK:
Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (New York: Penguin Group, Inc., 2005).
Robert Sapolsky, “Pretty Smart? Why We Equate Beauty with Truth,” The Wall Street Journal (January 17, 2014).
Taylor W. Schmitz, Eve De Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson, “Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding,” The Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 29, no. 22 (June 3, 2009).
Benjamin Franklin instinctively knew the power of marshmallows in explaining success. Yes, marshmallows. A 40-year-old marshmallow experiment by Walter Mischel of Stanford University brought Franklin’s words to life: “Educate your children to self-control…and you have done much to abolish misery from their future.” Mischel’s now famous 1970’s marshmallow experiment testing the self-control of 4-year-old children and his 1989 follow-up analysis of those same kids will get a fresh airing when his new book titled The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control is released on September 23, 2014.
Mischel’s original test (see video for a reenactment of the marshmallow test provided below) on delaying self-gratification was seminal for recognizing the role of innate or natural self-control in determining a child’s level of success not only in school but in their future career, health and even relationships. As Mischel wrote in the abstract of his 1989 study: “Those 4-year-old children who delayed gratification longer in certain laboratory situations developed into more cognitively and socially competent adolescents, achieving higher scholastic performance and coping better with frustration and stress. Experiments in the same research program also identified specific cognitive and attentional processes that allow effective self-regulation early in the course of development. The experimental results, in turn, specified the particular types of preschool delay situations diagnostic for predicting aspects of cognitive and social competence later in life.” Ever since Mischel’s test and subsequent analyses, some parents, teachers and scholars have focused upon developing character traits such as determination and grit to help with self-control. The importance of character development has been popularized in the last couple of years by Angela Duckworth’s TED Talk on grit and Paul Tough’s book How Children Succeed.
A 2012 study from the University of Rochester by Celeste Kidd, Holly Palmeri and Richard Aslin, however, has found that another factor plays an important role in a child’s demonstrated level of self-control: the “reliability” or trustworthiness of their environment. In the Rochester experiment, Kidd, Palmeri and Aslin found that only 1 out of 14 children waited to eat their marshmallow in an “unreliable environment” (where the researcher broke 2 promises) while 9 out of 14 children successfully waited in a “reliable environment” (where the researcher kept all promises). In short, a person’s level of self-control is a result of a combination of nature with nurture. While research has demonstrated that the development of self-control occurs (or not) mostly at home, teachers can help their students learn it through a well-organized, predictable and compassionate classroom. In other words, teachers can structure a classroom so that it creates a reliable and trustworthy environment; an environment that can help children develop the “cognitive and social competences” needed to succeed in life and “abolish,” in the words of Franklin, some unnecessary “misery in their future.”
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