Can Daydreaming Promote Academics?

USC assistant professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang co-authored a paper, “Rest Is Not Idleness,” which examines the neurobiology of the brain at rest or in “default mode.”  The article suggests that diminishing opportunities for young people to look inward and reflect could have negative effects on their well-being, morality and academic success.

A child with a wandering mind in the classroom may perform poorly on the task that requires concentration. Part of helping the child to focus better, the research suggested, is to help him or her learn to manage inward and outward attention more appropriately. Attending to tasks effectively is essential for gathering new information from lessons. But the reflection a child may learn to engage during mind wandering also is potentially critical for healthy development and learning in the longer term.

Immordino-Yang argued that teachers need to distinguish between a loss of focus and mindful reflection, teaching students skills for constructive internal processing and productive reflection. She also warned against an overuse of social media among teens, which appears to be harmful to the development of the higher-thinking abilities and associated benefits.
“Consistently imposing overly high-attention demands on children, either in school, through entertainment or through living conditions, may rob them of opportunities to advance from thinking about ‘what happened’ or ‘how to do this’ to constructing knowledge about ‘what this means for the world and for the way I live my life,’ ” she said. 

http://news.usc.edu/#!/article/34757/can-daydreaming-improve-academics/

The New Humanism --attunement, equipoise, limerence

David Brooks on "The New Humanism". Article here.

Interesting passage, related to Daniel Pink's A Whole New Mind:

You get a different view of, say, human capital. Over the past few decades, we have tended to define human capital in the narrow way, emphasizing I.Q., degrees, and professional skills. Those are all important, obviously, but this research illuminates a range of deeper talents, which span reason and emotion and make a hash of both categories:

Attunement: the ability to enter other minds and learn what they have to offer.

Equipoise: the ability to serenely monitor the movements of one’s own mind and correct for biases and shortcomings.

Metis: the ability to see patterns in the world and derive a gist from complex situations.

Sympathy: the ability to fall into a rhythm with those around you and thrive in groups.

Limerence: This isn’t a talent as much as a motivation. The conscious mind hungers for money and success, but the unconscious mind hungers for those moments of transcendence when the skull line falls away and we are lost in love for another, the challenge of a task or the love of God. Some people seem to experience this drive more powerfully than others.

What makes learning stick? Experiment

Edutopia yesterday: find it here

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