March 10, 2004
Lazy Thinking is Hard-Wired
The blog at elearnspace contains a short post about new research from Duke University that suggests that the brain will "cheat" rather than think when responding to new problems. It seeks out the neural path of least resistence, searching out rote responses that have worked in the past first, rather than approaching the problem critically, or anew.
I can't tell if this is news or confirmation of what we already know.
In his own words, psychological researcher Ian Dobbins says, "It's like you know that two plus two equals four, not because you're working through the solution; you're recovering the answer from memory.... These findings...suggest that the brain is set up to circumvent the algorithmic or deliberative processes of decision making wherever possible."
No wonder our job as teachers is so difficult. And no wonder so many teachers wind up teaching rote memorization: it is a natural method of learning.
Sure, this research kind of naturalizes intellectual laziness and the impulse toward cheating -- or maybe it just says that the brain benefits from disciplined memorization, even if that method seems like a robotic and ultimately dehumanizing form of education. But if anything, it suggests to me that it is all the more important to teach critical reasoning as a form of inquiry. Even if such brain behavior is just "hard-wired" I think it is all the more imperative that we train the brain to ask questions and engage critically with problems, so that methods of inquiry themselves will become "rote" pathways of sorts. The researchers distinguish between an "executive faculty" of the brain that makes higher decisions and a baser activity that seeks to minimize the amount of work the executive faculty has to do. If the 'executive branch' of our brain (rather than body) politic resists work, then our job is to induce it to become disciplined.
I'll avoid making jokes about the laziness of the executive office.
I've been reading Freud lately, so I see evidence of the death drive in all this, too, but I'm not going there. I'm not going to get into the Marxist analysis, either, that would see a reproduction of the division of labor in all these metaphors that explain the science ("executive" is clearly the bourgeois and the rest represents the proletariat). Just thought I'd share this interesting research and some pontification.
Trackback Pings
You can ping this entry by using .
Comments
As usual, William James already had the insight that the Duke researchers discovered. He referred to habit as the "flywheel of society." But I think the intellectual path of least resistance fades into something fairly ghostly compared to the way we respond to emotional stresses. When psychic pain heaves onto the horizon, we batten down the hatches and head full steam into whatever behavior or thought pattern that we know best, no matter how bad it might be for us.
Alfred North Whitehead:
It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking about what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the numbers of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are
like cavalry charges in battle -- they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.
Sounds like a useful skill that sometimes is the wrong one. Back in grade school they *told* us to learn the addition table so we didn't have to figure out 2 + 3.