Lara Porter QC’14 and Jim Stellar

LP is an economics and political science major who works in the Queens College Center for Ethnic, Racial, and Religious Understanding (CERRU) as well as participates in a small group JS runs to study the learning power of experiential education and some of its underlying psychology and neuroscience. We came across this interesting recent study in Science, “Promoting the Middle East Peace Process by Changing Beliefs about Group Malleability” out of Carol Dweck’s lab at Stanford and it seemed to resonate with some other work we were reading on a brain chemical called oxytocin.  So we decided to write about these pieces and try to tie them back to experiential learning.

The Science study cited above focuses on Israeli-Jews, Israeli-Arabs, and Palestinian attitudes toward peace after learning about and believing in the malleability of character traits.  The study concludes that belief in malleable character traits promoted “better intergroup dynamics” and “increased willingness to compromise for peace.” In other words, the study finds that each of these groups showed more positive and hopeful attitudes towards the Israeli-Palestinian peace process after learning about and believing in the ability of individuals to change their characteristic way of thinking.  

Oxytocin is a neurohormone that is released by the pituitary gland and causes, among other things, a milk-let-down neuroendocrine reflex in nursing mothers that allow them to eject milk into the vestibule of the breast upon suckling so that the baby can nurse.  More interestingly, it has an ability to create empathy or compassion between groups and it can even be administered as a spray in the nose – see the TED talk by Paul Zak where he discusses trust, empathy, and morality. In fact a very recent study from the University of Derby showed that oxytocin increases the “ease of imaging compassionate qualities” in others, which seems highly relevant to the Science study discussed above.

However this study out of Derby comes with a caution, as the authors point out that effect was much less in those participants who scored “higher in self-criticism, lower in self-reassurance, social safeness, and attachment security.”  Another cautionary study also showed elevated in-group affiliation behavior with oxytocin administration, but then showed an increased willingness to make out-group members a target.  So, it might depend on how you as an individual define the out-group whether oxytocin (administered externally or released naturally) would help a peace process.  Let’s go back to the TED talk and focus on the trust and trustworthiness part.  Maybe that is a way to expand the in-group to include what was previously an out-group and then oxytocin release could play a role in mediating conflict between different groups.

Talk about different groups - at Queens College we are in what is supposed to be the most diverse borough in the USA.  The College has among its 20,000 students from 150 or more countries who speak 60 or more languages.  A good 40% of the Queens College students are born outside the USA. 

This diversity of peoples creates tremendous opportunities for service-learning at CERRU and this is the particular area in which LP works. CERRU promotes students working together from differing cultures/religion/languages. It has many levels of student involvement. The first, most approachable level brings students together to participate in dialogues on controversial issues. Here students are able to interact with members from completely different communities and demystify their misconceptions about the “other”. Then there are student dialogue facilitators who train together as a group. These students have a larger leadership role and get to know one another on a deeper level. The aspect LP is most concerned with is the community service aspect, CERRU Volunteer Corps. We coordinate community service events at Queens College, match students with volunteer opportunities, and have bi-weekly meetings where we discuss issues like identity and service. In terms of the research, all these activities allow students to expand their “in-group” to include fellow students, or fellow volunteers, as opposed to just their racial/ethnic/religious communities. They also build trust, a huge part of Dweck’s malleability study. 

The heart of the malleability study is the notion of seeing people that are different from you as inherently irrational. Once a student works with other students as part of a larger group, whether as a volunteer or as a dialogue facilitator, they will rely on one another in a way that allows for both parties to be seen as competent, rational, and not all that different. Maybe that is the best way to begin building that trust.

How does this thinking relate to experiential education?  First, there is the service-learning component made into a more powerful experience when one reaches across the lines that divide us and steps out of one’s comfort zone.  With proper reflection and connected to academic study, this kind of service-learning can be among the most engaging of the components of experiential education much like one gets in service-learning abroad programs.  Second, this discussion touches, as do so many of the posts, on the way in which the hidden or fast-thinking brain works to create issues - in this case with the out-group.  Then one can see how those issues can be exposed through experience and how reflection with the conscious or slow-thinking brain can surface that knowledge.  One of the fascinating possibilities here is that we are talking about the same unconscious learning processes in both the work of CERRU and experiential education.  Maybe the same exercise of redefining the person from the out-group into your in-group, practices the fast-slow thinking integration skills that lets people better work on other complex problems such as defining oneself in terms of a career, a choice of major, a life’s work.  And isn’t that one of the big goals of a college education?

Lauren Donohoe QC ’11 &’13 and Jim Stellar

Lauren and I have written before about the dynamic of being an undergraduate researcher in a speech/audiology laboratory and how it can be like a family that encourages the intellectual development of the student.  Well her undergraduate career worked so well for her that she got into the very competitive Master’s program at the same department, stayed, and now has a few clients for whom she functions as an apprentice speech-language pathologist.  In a conversation, we were struck by the potential difference to the student experience of patient/client interaction that comes as a volunteer vs. professional.  So, we decided to write again, but this time focusing on the tonal qualities of the differences in the interaction and what lessons it might teach us about professional encounters for students in experiential education.

Lauren, let’s start with your describing first the experience you had with the kid you had in summer camp where you volunteered.  Particularly, could you discuss what the separation that occurred at the end of the encounter taught you about the nature of your interaction? 

When I first heard that the summer camp was for children with autism, I did not know what to expect and was nervous as autism is a disorder characterized by challenges in engaging with others.  The child I was paired with (G.) was nonverbal so I did not know how things would go and hoped that he would like me.  After spending three days with him and forming a friendship and a special bond that will always stay in my heart, I had to say good-bye to my new friend.  His father told me on my last day that no one had ever connected with him the way that I had.  When I was leaving camp that day, G. was focused on his DVD player so we never got to say an “official” good-bye.  I think that added to the emotions I felt in the car ride home from Manhattan.  I was sad to leave G., worried about how he would fair not having me by his side for the remainder of the camp, and praying that his future would be filled with relationships like the one we formed.

Thanks.  Now, let’s hear the other side of this contrast we set up.  What is the nature/depth of your association with your current patients in the speech clinic and how does it differ?

Professionalism is one of the first words that comes to my mind as a graduate student.  There is also the awareness that there are eyes on you all the time.  As much as I respect those two notions, it is impossible not to form relationships with your clients over the course of three months.  I wanted so badly for my clients to succeed and the first sign of progress made me want to do back-flips because I was so happy for them.  It is also a very special feeling to know that I was a part of their progress.  This relationship differs from the one I had with G. at camp because there was much more one-on-one time with G. and we did whatever he wanted.  As a graduate clinician, there are always other people in sessions with you; supervisors, other students, or the clients’ relative(s).  Also, as much as we do what the client wants, there is still a focus on achieving their goals.  This is not to say that I did not feel sad after my last sessions with them.  I think about how they will fair in the future without me, just like with G.      

I see.  What I hear you saying is that the necessary supervision that you must receive in the clinic actually (and naturally) blocks a bit of the one-on-one relationship you were able to develop at the summer camp.  That may interfere with the development of the client in the clinic seeing you as an independent professional.  Of course, as you progress in your training, there is always the prospect of greater independence and you are on a track now to become that professional in under 2 years when you graduate again, this time with a Master’s degree.

Once I graduate, I will need to begin my Clinical Fellowship Year (CFY), which is where I will work with clients but under a supervisor.  At this point, my supervisor is less of a “boss,” and more of a mentor, someone who will help me bridge the gap between my academic experience and becoming an independent provider of therapeutic services.  I appreciate that a CFY is a requirement because it can only add to my knowledge and experience.  The thought of having someone guide me in the right direction is comforting.  I value the opportunity to have such an involvement with a therapist who is more experienced than myself.  I plan on learning everything I can from such a person, as I have tried to do with my supervisors as a graduate student.  The one thing I always keep in the back of my mind is that after my CFY, it is expected that I handle situations on my own.  I am confident that all of the knowledge I will have gained from my supervisors will assist me in my interactions with clients and their families. 

JS often uses the words “substantial and authentic” to refer to the experiences that can produce the greatest growth.  He got this from interactions with the Law School at his previous institution where he was part of a group drafting the experiential component of the strategic plan for the university.  Moot Court, while powerful and consciously imitating the judicial atmosphere was thought by the law professor with whom he was discussing to be not authentic (it was in the Law School) and not substantial (it happened in a day, although there was preparation time required).  By contrast working on a 4 month cooperative education experience in a law clinic was thought to be both substantial and authentic because the clients came to see the law students as virtually their lawyer even thought a certified lawyer was in the clinic.  The ratio of clients to lawyers was such that the law student had to function that way even if she/he could not represent in court. 

We notice how that the experience of LD above fits with this point.  We also note that this is “other lobe of the brain” thinking as this part of a person notices when the experience is a bit more vs. a bit less real.  The closer one comes to real the more powerful the student engagement.   There is a controversy over internships today (and even a book on the subject), particularly about those that are unpaid - where the intern really just gets coffee or stuffs envelopes or the like.  The best internships are those where the employer and the student forget (temporarily) that the student must someday return to college and thus form that substantial and authentic relationship. Graduate professional training programs are more substantial and authentic than undergraduate college programs.  College needs to do more to imitate them so as to produce growth in its undergraduates.  One does not grow a new brain area between 20 as a junior and 22 as graduate student.  So, it is all about crafting the circumstances where the undergraduate can be really engaged…and learn at a very high rate.

Vanessa Castro NU’09, UMD’11 and Jim Stellar

Vanessa and I have written posts before about nonverbal communication of emotion in body movements and also about facial emotion recognition when she was a Master’s student at U. Mass Dartmouth.  Now she is a PhD student at North Carolina State University and we have been discussing the role of nonverbal communication in developing the learning power from experiential education and how that contrasts with the classroom.  I asked her to look at a lecture I gave that referred to a TED talk by Ramanchandran  on mirror neurons (which he calls Ghandi neurons for their ability to produce imitation and empathy) and to give me her thoughts on this topic and how that relates to experiential learning on co-op/internship.  That spiked this response from her which begins our new blog.  Finally, I see a relation between this blog and the last blog posted.

Nonverbal communication (including that of empathy and emotion) requires to some extent an appraisal. And I’m not sure that the Ghandi neurons explain this aspect enough. I agree that nonverbal communication (NVC) is engaged in a co-op but I think NVC also plays a large role in the classroom, perhaps greater than we understand, especially given the interplay of stereotyping, prejudice, and human error. For example, in my research we are working on a teaching grant where we hope to examine if and how African American males are perceived as more threatening, specifically more angry, by their teachers because of their race, as opposed to actual valid nonverbal cues of anger. In this way, our interpretation of cues is the most important in the classroom.  It is embedded within the situation in which these cues transfer as well as the culture in which these cues manifest. Another example would be the direct influence of culture in the hypo-and hyper- cognized emotions. Mirror neurons will only let you feel how another is feeling within the given cultural scripts. If, for example, an American student, never having been in close contact with Asian culture, finds themselves in an Asian community, they may be tempted to attribute familiar appraisals to the behaviors they see. For example, suppose you saw a child expressing great anger to their family, but not to others.  You might incorrectly assume that the child is a “bad child.” However, in this hypothetical culture, maybe it is more appropriate to display strong emotions to family members and inappropriate to display strong emotions to strangers. The opposite could be argued for another culture, say American culture.

Point well taken.  Classroom situations are full of NVC, culture, assumptions, and all of the issues that we face in a job environment. I guess what I was thinking was that in the job environment, some of the protections are gone.  For example, it can be more like a small seminar if one joins an office team.  In a small seminar and on that office team, there is no place to hide like one can in a large class.  Also, the consequences of failure are real-world, e.g. loss of the client, not just a grade.  Finally, there are fewer rules of fairness that dictate what you are supposed to know and when you are supposed to show it.  So, my idea was that in this “real-world” situation there was more reliance on NVC to share the work, evaluate the situation, and build a team.  Do you think that there is more pressure on NVC in a job environment and if so, more learning of an “other lobe” – experiential education nature?

Given your explanation above, I think that in the workplace and any kind of job environment there is pressure to both gain sensitivity in NVC and utilize these skills- if you a. care about the position and b. feel respected in your environment. I feel that this latter part may facilitate the best connection to your notion of “other lobe” experiential education. If you feel that you are not being respected, or if you are not very invested in your current position or place of employment, there may very well be little motivation for individuals to engage in active communication whereby you are communicating but also reading between the lines; building a repertoire of cues that you can use to accurately attribute behavior. There is also another side of this coin in that when an in individual is at work, they may often feel the need to inhibit or mask their nonverbal expressions. Given the dynamic nature of interactions, this need may differ based on the composition of the interactions (e.g., who the individual is interacting with). For example, while interacting with coworkers, an individual may display one particular nonverbal pattern which may differ drastically from the pattern he or she exhibits when interacting with a superior.

What I see you doing here is taking my simplistic concept (I am not a social psychologist) and making it more complex and nuanced.  It is the context that may create pressure to use NVC to tap into what Ramachandran called “Ghandi” neurons to produce learning.  It is not any greater use of NVC itself as that exists everywhere humans interact. The work place, with its unfamiliar practices that demand the student’s attention and the real consequences for the student-employee’s action, the student might be more engaged.  We know that engagement does produce activity and active learning is more powerful than the kind of passive learning which can exist (it does not have to) in large lecture classes where the professor can become a 3-D audio-visual display.

Exactly. Attention, and the engagement of attention, is an integral component of achieving adequate NVC competence. It is both reasonable and plausible to suggest that such attention would be greater in an experiential education setting than in a passive lecture-style setting. The former allows for a bidirectional route of communication, which may facilitate and maintain the skills needed for nonverbal sensitivity.

Ute Wenkemann  NU’11 and Jim Stellar

Ute and I wrote a blog post in Feb-10 about what it was like to be a student from Germany studying abroad in the USA and doing co-op there.  Previously, I had written a blog post with another student who studied abroad in Paris and stayed to work an co-op to get real language fluency.  Ute already spoke English very well and got something else out of her USA co-op.

At this point, Ute is becoming a social psychologist by studying at the London School of Economics.  We chatted recently on Skype and the topic that fascinated us both was whether organizations, like companies or universities, could function like people.  That is, for the purposes of this blog, did they have “other lobe of the brain” functions as discussed in two recent books I have been recommending by Khaneman on “Thinking Fast and Slow” and by Eagelman on the “Incognito” part of the brain that thinks largely outside conscious experience.  Ute, what do you think.  Can organizations function like that?

Well… first, let’s think about what an organization is. Essentially, it is an institution full of people, isn’t it? And if we are looking at who makes decisions in organizations and how those decisions are made, then it seems like we are just looking at a collaboration of minds – or sometimes a single mind taking other minds into account. From that angle, the answer is clearly yes, organizations can have ‘other lobe functions’ as long as the people in the organization do.

Is this what was meant in the classic business book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins written just over 10 years ago that one way to make a successful company was to have both a clear (and correct) mission and a leader who can get the workers passionate about that mission?  Is this what Simon Sinak is talking about in his TED talk?  Can companies have passion?

I think they most definitely can but that it is almost impossible for a leader to consciously create it. The problem is that passion, in most people’s minds, is coupled with fun. And ‘fun’ and ‘work’ somehow just don’t seem to go together. Or do they?

A term that comes to mind is ‘work/life balance’. People are so concerned with keeping their ‘life’ separate from their ‘work’ – and it seems difficult to me to be passionate about something that is not part of your ‘life’? Companies are aware of this and work/life balance programs are in place in lots of them. As far as I know, opinions are very split on these. I remember an article I read for a class at Northeastern by Hoffman and Cowan (2008)… they constructed a cluster analysis of the websites of Fortune’s 2004 list of ‘100 Best Companies to Work for’ and concluded that work/life programs may actually be part of a corporate ideology, a way for the organization to get more control rather than a way to empower the employee to have a good work/life balance.

I don’t know if I agree with that but it does seem to me as though there is a very fine line between good and bad organizational culture. Somehow, I also keep thinking of tourism. When a place is just discovered and maybe a little underdeveloped, people love to vacation there. It’s their secret hiding place. The more people come, the more development is required – and suddenly, there is overcrowding and people start avoiding the spot. Maybe it’s the same with organizational culture. It’s best when it’s raw/authentic. When you don’t touch it. And as soon as you start building on it, you can only go so far not to destroy it.

I want to come back to the raw/authentic point as it is so similar to the substantial and authentic point that Northeastern put on its Experiential Programs as an important characteristic in a report I helped write for their strategic plan some years ago.  But before we go there, I have to say that some of the reason that it may be almost impossible for a leader to create passion in an organization is that he/she cannot describe it because there are no words.  The part of the brain that does this (Kahneman’s fast thinking or System 1 part) does not compute in words.  It may well be highly connected to nonverbal communicative signals (topic for another blog), but it is not the deliberative, speaking, conscious part of the brain.  That may make it easy to underestimate.  What do you think of this idea, that the passion creating part of leadership is created out of the “other lobe of the brain” as we call it in the blog?

I could see that being true. I mean, passion and intuition go together, don’t they? A good leader will have charisma; something about him that activates ‘the other love of the brain’ in his employees – something that makes them want to achieve greatness without being able to pinpoint the reasons.

However, I think that, as research on all this increases, organizations are more and more aware of ‘other lobe’ functions and largely train their leaders to watch out for possible heuristics and biases and go against their intuition. It’s tough because, on the one hand, ‘fast thinking’ can be so valuable (i.e. in creating passion) but when it comes to strategic decisions, most organizations probably wouldn’t be so happy to see their managers act on intuition. Again, it’s such a fine line. And it would probably be false to say that intuition is all you need to be a good leader. But I agree that it’s definitely part of it.

The Higher Education Industry is (maybe) a special case of organizations that could create passion.  Certainly, Jim Collins thought enough of it to generate a pamphlet on non-profits after his book (cited above) had been out for a few years.  School Spirit, as in pride in the winning sports team creates that on campus emotion that may be analogous to that company with a reputation for good work-life balance.  But there is something else.  As a professor JS has served at highly ranked institutions (U. Pennsylvania, Harvard U.) and more normally ranked private and public institutions (Northeastern U., Queens College CUNY) and noticed a difference in expectations for student accomplishment. He noticed a similar shift in one of those universities (Northeastern) as it went from ~165 in US News to a current ranking of 62.  Was that difference institutional passion?  As a student, UW noticed a similar shift in the work ethic she experienced in students from Germany compared to those in the US. Of course, as she remarks educational passion in students depends to a large extend on passion in instructors and professors. 

These sweeping generalizations are unsubstantiated by studies and are violated by individual exceptions in many cases.  But they get at something.  What you think you can do is often set by (as mentioned above) the incognito brain, the fast thinking brain that is unconscious.  What an organization can do may be set by the collective action of those processes in individuals as determined by the social interaction of the members.  Certainly this is the core message of the golden circle concept Sinak discusses in his book “Start with Why” in terms of Apple and other successful companies. 

Even more relevant to this blog, both of us have noticed a change in atmosphere after leaving Northeastern University where the cooperative education program has been around for slightly over 100 years.  Students there expected, even as freshman, to have the chance to apply the knowledge they were gaining in their major to some profession where it would be tapped.  Those who had worked for one of the 6-month full-time periods of employment that alternate with full-time studies had stories and a maturity that infected the classroom for all, even those who had never done it.  The University sank resources into the salaries of the coop coordinators.  Everyone took it as part of the plan, part of the baseline, like the fact that a Boston winter was expected to be cold in temperature. 

We think that tone or expectation or even passion is the collective product of the incognito brain or the fast thinking system.  That is what that part of the brain can produce if it is used by the organization and its leaders.  People work harder, more joyously, more in service of the mission.  Fun and work go together at last and more is accomplished… in higher education for the students, faculty, and everyone.

Antonella Mason QC’ 11 and Jim Stellar

AM was a student with whom JS interacted after meeting at a student art show.  While AM was in Italy she sent the following statement in an e-mail. 

I was born a painter. All alone, I went through the psychological questions that every true artist feels in her/his heart, believing it was only about me. At the end of every chapter of my life, I found more of my real self of my own spirit: this is what ART is about. Today, I can say that my ART exists also because of others…especially because of others, to whom I dedicate the spirit of it

JS says that he almost always find that artists think in an “other lobe” fashion, perhaps because creativity is something of a mystery to the cognitive mind (Where did that idea come from?), yet this is where artists live. Prompted by the above statement, AM developed the following piece that we reprint in its entirety below.

 On Mind & Heart Connection: Contemplation and Reflection through My Emotional/Creative-Intellectual/Creative State of Mind.

               ANTONELLA MASON

                                                                                         ARTIST

I believe the heart and the mind connect through the senses. This connection develops the way we relate to the external world. Our body language communicates atavistically depending on how much we are open and receptive; however, our mind can reach different channels of communication that are determined by the training it has been subjected. In other words, while the body is spontaneous, the mind works on infinite different little transformations. These transformations are very personal but “technically” are a representation of how a human mind can be articulated and can grow infinitely.

Now, what about the heart? How can we recognize the heart is not just a “feelings container” but indeed the “other” component of the human mind? In creating my artwork I need both heart and mind together, actually, I do not even consider one existing without the other.  The act of generating art work is something driven by heart and mind acting as yin and yang, as positive and negative space on a picture. We cannot believe they can exist separated, and as such, producing separated and different reactions.

When I produce artwork without any visual reference, it is like letting my senses to express themselves in total freedom through their own language while when I think, it is like getting these senses to charge in order to be ready to move on into the external, either creating art or expressing thoughts through speaking and writing.  However, the act of freely producing artwork it is not dictated only from my feelings; indeed, it is motivated by the impulses that my heart has stored through my mind. I want to be clearer on this concept underlining that the heart can have the  function of a storage that keeps memory of feelings  when the mind relaxes, leaving space to a more active body language in which the senses are included.

Thus, when the mind leaves more space to the heart, this lets the senses free to grow and express themselves, but it does not mean that the mind does not store -as the heart did previously with feelings- inputs of brain storming and mental re-elaborations that later will generate an explosion of emotional results. If I feel that everything I have been thinking, even subconsciously, in a way or another, soon or later, is coming out and showing itself through my work, it means that as my heart has stored my feelings, my mind has stored my thinking. If the act of “storing” can be kept in some ways separated from the act of “behaving, -either acting or reacting”- it does not mean that one –heart- can exist without the other –mind-. In fact, the act of storing feelings to be later  “used” shows the relation that connects mind to heart which is the necessity to the engine mind to elaborate what will be stored; on the other hand, the same  duty is for the heart to feel and capture the emotion that later on will be elaborated. Thus, producing art to me comes from the inner development of my senses and their need to move out to be replaced by continuous head inputs.

As an artist I take Pascal writing - “The heart has reasons of which reason does not know ” – as the pure source of the art creation which is to me nothing than the sublimation of the senses; however, I believe that the senses sublimation comes from a subtle invisible construction of thoughts that our mind elaborates through the emotions that we encounter in our life time.

Education is a priority when the senses want to be developed and grow not only inside out but also outside in. This way we can elaborate concepts that show us the relationship between the mind and the heart and how they need each other either for the giving or for the taking. We may consider heart and mind strictly related but at the same time also not related at all depending from the “circumstance” the human thinking/feeling finds ‘itself’. If the heart does not dispose of great feelings, may be the mind does not feed its hunger,… may be the hunger does not exist at all. Instead, I would like to believe that the heart is the winner of the battle of the feelings that generate creativity, for the reason that I am a passionate artist, and Italian, and romantic, and dramatic, and aware that I need to be the way I am in order to create the artwork I do create.

Now, is this enough to make us believe that the heart is the first stimulus to start the intellectual mechanism of the mind in the specific case of my artwork?  I do want to keep this aspect on the personal level for not confusing my own ‘state of heart/mind’ with the one of others. I am confident in acknowledging that heart and mind connection status priority, depends on the individual. The connection not only exists, but the most of the times it is a fusion of the two –heart/mind- to become one the complement of the other.

Then, at the question if it is the heart watching us, waiting to catch ‘mental circumstances’ and translates them into feelings, or if it is the mind such a perfect mechanism, able to address its energy to create emotional conditions, we can surely assert that the whole depends from the growth of the individual. While the Heart is growing, the most of the times, through sufferance, the Mind is maturing through acknowledgement of the same sufferance. While the Mind is maturing knowledge, it starts a process in which it balances the Heart’s relationship with emotions. Thus Mind and Heart are directly connected through the development of the human being.

So what is the connection to experiential education?  Both processes involve what some have called “The Hidden Brain” and others referred to the brain as “Incognito” to indicate our lack of conscious awareness of what drives much of our behavior.  While this is nothing new to an artist, it seems it is nothing known to most of higher education where work outside the academy is only just beginning to be realized as valuable beyond what is often pejoratively called “extra-curricular.”  We need data on what people learn with this part of the brain.  We need first to recognize it exists.  We need to listen to the artists and the creative people who know that there is more to high accomplishment than what we can say and even consciously think.  That confidence an Economics major gains by working, for example, at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, interacts with the academic economic learning in the major and maybe a few other things too (e.g. writing, math, …) to give a kind of fluidity of knowledge that we recognize with maturity.  Why not start college kids off on that path while in college?

An Internship in three phases

Paulina Smietanka QC ’14 and Jim Stellar

This is a bit of a different post. Paulina, a communication sciences and disorders student in her sophomore year, arranged an internship for herself for the month of January. We agreed that she would write three posts, Before, During, and After. Those files are attached. We would like you to read them now and do so in that order.

before    during    after

Notice first that the After statement is different from the rest.  It is longer, more detailed, and more powerful.   We think that this represents two factors.  First, it is just easier to write about something in reflection after it is over considering that all the variables are set.  While there is still plenty to learn by thinking about the experience, the experience itself does not change.  When one is writing in a Before or During condition, one never knows what will happen next that will change what one has just written.  Second, the intern has now had the maturing effect of the experience itself.  This maturing effect occurs in a general way, although a month is not much when consider against 19 years of months.  The effect also occurs in the field itself.  When done properly (e.g. the intern does not just get coffee and watch others), the intern masters some aspect of the profession or the field and gains confidence.  The communication sciences and disorders field offers a variety of work settings and Paulina chose to intern at a school setting which enabled her to attain teaching skills too. 

Often the experience is with others in the field whether it is with co-workers, customers, clients or patients….  One learns how to handle these professional interactions and when that happens one begins to notice more how the field applies.  Think back to when you first learned to drive.  You were so scared about not hitting anything or anyone that you did not notice the scenery.  Now that you drive with mastery, you can afford to notice what is flying by in the car windows.   The same is true here.  What is really great is that then the college student brings that back to campus to more actively and more passionately (it is hoped) engage the academic program and the faculty.  Such internships look good on the resume, but the real benefit may be this factor.  An increased passion for learning in students results in increased learning. Paulina has mentioned that when she is seated in a classroom, she is not the same. She feels as though practical work and school work has placed her at an advantage. Paulina is now able to compare what she has learned during the intern, what she has learned in school, and what she continues to learn in school. This allows her to develop her own techniques as a speech-language pathologist in the making.

Another point we want to make is that so much of these operations happen below the surface of awareness.  Even if one is aware of their growing maturity as a speech counselor, one is typically unaware of many aspects of what that means.  Try to describe to someone how one rides a bicycle.  It is hard.  Yet you are probably a master at riding the bike, so much so that you hardly have to think about it.  This rests in what neuroscientists now are calling the hidden brain and we see it at work in fMRI brain scans.  Now that Paulina has returned from the intern, she is now more intelligent and informed both consciously and subconsciously than she was previously.

Alexandra Hilbert QC 13 and Jim Stellar

We have been reading this 9/19/10 on-line paper with the title “Neural signatures of strategic types in a two-person bargaining game.” The paper aims to get at what the authors call “The management and manipulation of our own social image in the minds of others” particularly in the area of strategic deception, e.g. bluffing in a poker game.  The paper appeals to AH’s quantitative interests as an accounting major and both of our interests more generally in how people learn from each other through experience, using principles from the new field of neuroeconomics.  Let’s start with a basic summary of the paper and then get back to experiential education.

The paper uses a two person bargaining game between buyers and sellers to explore the behavior patterns exhibited by the buyer and what areas of the brain are activated when different strategies are employed. The game is played in rounds. The way each  round works is that the buyer is assigned a value for an object, for example $6 and the buyer then sends a suggestion to the seller for a price for the object, for example $5. The seller then accepts that price or not and if the accepted price is lower than the value the buyer receives the profit, in our example $1. The catch is that the seller does not know whether the trade went through or not, so the seller cannot learn from the outcome of previous rounds. The only information about the buyer the seller gets is the suggestions the buyer sends.

The paper only brain scanned the buyers.  But first it analyzed how the buyers used their suggestions in the game. The buyers fell into three categories: the “incrementalist” who was relatively honest with their price suggestions, the “conservative” who would consistently send low values and thus hope to make a profit every time, and the “strategists” who mimics the incrementalist while actively deceiving the sellers and behaving like a conservative when there is a high profit to be made. The paper focused on the strategist type.

The strategist takes the long view of the game they are trying to maximize their profit over the course of all the rounds and are willing to sacrifice a little profit to make more over the course of the game. Strategists realized that if they send low prices when they have high values and high prices when they have low values they will make more profit over the long run then if they are truthful about their suggestions. The paper was interested in what traits and what brain areas were associated with implementing such a strategic plan. Two traits that were not correlated with performance type were IQ and socioeconomic status; that is, strategic deceivers did not differ in these traits.  What they did find was that the strategic group knew what they were doing and reported so in the debrief session after the study was over.

One of the brain areas activated in this group was the left-side, rostral or anterior (front of brain), prefrontal cortex.  This is an area of the brain known as Brodman area 10.

As an aside, these cortical areas come from painstakingly anatomical research by Korbinian Brodman in the early 1900s in which he identified each area by the different distribution of the cells that compose it.  The resulting map, much like a geographic map of regions of lakes, planes, deserts, mountains, guides much of modern neuroscience as very often functions attach to these areas. Perhaps the most famous is the primary visual cortex (V1 or Brodman area 17) where your cortical interpretation of input from the eyes begins in earnest. 

The activated left anterior prefrontal cortex has been associated with keeping in mind multiple strategies as one executes a particular task, a trait that would seem necessary in a complex world.  Another area they found activated was at the boarder of the temporal and parietal lobes of the brain (the Temporoprarietal junction), an area that may be associated with understanding the beliefs of others as well as re-orienting attention in tasks that do not involve understanding the minds of others or what is called Theory of Mind.

Understanding the minds of others or Theory of Mind is a very important concept in psychology and neuroscience where we attribute certain qualities to the unobservable mind of another (or ourselves) and then act accordingly. Clearly, in making a deal, even one as simple as executing a bluff in a poker game, one has to think about what the other person is thinking.  The concept seems simple, but is powerful as certain brain areas appear to be dedicated to it and important social concepts, such as empathy, may rely on it. It even applies to animals as one of the first theory of mind papers by Premack was on chimps.

The temporoparietal junction area is particularly interesting since its activation seems to be related to the value of the object (where the money is to be made by the deception).  The authors note that this area may play a role “particularly in the attribution of false or incongruent beliefs to another person.”

So what, if anything, does this study have to do with the theme of this blog, learning from experience.  We see a few important connections.  First, the paper shows that complex human interactions are starting to be studied now in terms of brain function to a surprising extent.  Will it be possible someday to brain scan a student returning from an internship experience to see what they have learned…probably not.  But the idea that there is an underlying mechanism begs the question of how we in higher education are preparing the students by training these mechanisms. If that makes you squeamish, how do you feel about someone practicing a skill such as playing the violin or learning calculus only to use that skill later in some important performance?

Another important implication to us, concerns the identification of the skill as a subject of learning in higher education.  One does not need a brain area or a brain scan to let us know that a subject area is important and can be mastered.  What Language or Accounting Department justifies itself in terms of neuroscience.  But when one refers to “soft-skills” being learned on an internship, one has to wonder whether that is fair.  Is learning to position oneself strategically with regard to others a soft skill if it leads to making money vs. something we can easily certify, like knowing calculus at the College level.  We are not sure, but it does seem to add emphasis to the conversation if one can also point to a brain region or regions that are specifically activated when one does it.

Shalini Singh CC’13 and Jim Stellar

Shalini took a neuroscience-based large general education course that I co-taught last spring to about 240 students.  She sat in the middle about 3 rows back from the front.  Because she was attentive in class I asked her a brief question from the floor.  Because she was 28 years old, she looked back at me solidly in the eye and answered.  I do not remember the question or the answer, but I remember in that fleeting moment thinking she was a good student.  I did not then know then her age. At my age (60), they all look young.  But I can tell when a student appears solid and ready to interact.  Let’s hear Shalini’s side of the story.

What Jim said is true…..I was moved by the course; every lecture from all of the professors contributed a clearer understanding of my past and current experiences. Therefore, to have the opportunity to speak with a professor was a privilege. After class lectures were over, he made himself available to answer student’s questions and it was quite noticeable he or his co-teacher did not judge their students based on a GPA number or the silliest questions one may ask.  

At the same time, I knew many students that did not take upon the opportunity to speak with either of the co-professors because they felt intimidated or may have had to rush to another class. I suppose I did not feel intimidated because of my age. I am 28 years old and eager to learn from individuals that can transform my life not just numerically but by enhancing my personality and perspective. Prior to my return to college to become a psychiatrist, I became an actress after leaving High School, which placed me in front of an audience at all times. I am aware this experience may have something to do with my direct response to Jim as he remembers it. 

This is nice and we teachers appreciate when students are not intimidated or have to rush to another class, but can you go farther now and talk about how experiences shaped you?

Besides innate aptitudes, experiences can form dynamic personalities as well as the individual’s ability to learn. For instance, there are many factors that characterize one’s intrapersonal and interpersonal skills. I have been fortunate to have met with professors that have changed my life. My first biology professor inspired me to fall in love with biology and I did exceptionally well in his class not just numerically but understanding life’s origin from a scientific viewpoint. I developed an interest to understand more about life’s formation and also developed an open mind. My second biology professor allowed me the opportunity to enter into QC as a research student because of my passion to learn more, I wanted hands-on experience which is referred to as active learning. My QC research mentor, revealed the importance of accommodating others in need and this is besides learning protocols for my experiments and how to operate specific equipment involving the research protocols. Finally, Jim has been attentive to my questions and helpful toward me to understand his course.

I have learned from all of these experiences mentioned above. I have also learned that you don’t disregard a student that does not come to you instead, you should go to them; one day they might just say, yes I need help. Noticeably, all of the above mentioned professors have enriched my personality and viewpoint as well as adding experiences to my life. I am grateful to each and every individual that has expanded my horizon of knowledge for the betterment of my future.

All of these experiences seem to be ones that affect the “other lobe of the brain” as we call it in this blog.  That part of the brain that may be automatic, hidden, or what one author calls “Incognito” in his book.  The thesis of this blog is that those systems do make judgments and those judgments can fit together with data.  You already had a bunch of experiences prior to our meeting in this course.  Is it just that simple?  Do we need to get 18 year old students to just have those experiences?  Is it important to have a series of them like you did?  Or is this kind of student maturity all down to age?  I have my ideas, but what do you think?

I am not a definite candidate toward successes at all times, however, I entered into college to succeed and I knew in order to succeed, I needed to be open-minded and utilize the materials of the courses and part of the course materials are professors. Perhaps, the “other lobe of the brain” became activated upon your question and I responded based upon my need to learn. I believe the simplest approach to 18 year old students may be to provide more internship opportunities, getting students to join a research lab based on their interest, or promoting students to explore the “real-deal” of the outside work environment right in a classroom by exhibiting workshop activities. The problem with many institutions of higher learning is that we have individuals graduating with high levels of intelligence in simple black and white text of their desired field of interest, but we don’t educate the students with an actual experience of these texts. Reading, discussions, and testing are all an essential part of learning in a specific course, nonetheless, I firmly believe it is important to give students an opportunity to excel in application of what they have learned. I was fortunate to have experience the outside world prior to entering into the inside world, college. Perhaps, this does make it easier for someone to apply knowledge.

I think you said it all in the last sentence.  If one can apply knowledge, one can make it their own.  These experiences outside the classroom but in the field do help students to make it their own.  When they do that, they look more mature.  It is not the years, it is the experience gained in those years and in institutions of higher education we can pack a lot of that experience, if we are careful, into the college years.

Raphael Spiro QC 12 and Jim Stellar

Raph has been reading a bit of the literature on neuroecomomics, something we have written about before in this blog.  We’d like to propose that the same brain areas that are involved in making decisions about purchases made with money are also be involved in “purchasing” with time and effort one’s major or field of study in College.  In particular, we wondered about the influence of others on these major-choice decisions.  Raph came across a series of studies that deal with the influence of others on decisions such as an auction where one is bidding against competitors.  Let’s begin by asking Raph to tell us about one of those studies.

Most people put a lot of thought into their economic decisions, and while we’d all like to think we’re above the influences of peer pressure and social competitiveness, it would seem that no amount of planning or intelligence can fight our natural inclinations.  In a 2008 study by Delgado et. al, brain imaging technology shed some light on the way in which the people around us affect our money management plans.  Participants in this study took part in two potential money-making tasks.  In both tasks, participants were asked to place a bid for the round.  If their bid was closer to the target value for the round than the competitor’s bid, they won the round and kept the difference between their bid and the value.  If they overbid, they did not win anything, nor did they lose anything.  The first task was an auction in which participants were pitted against a human competitor.  Before the auction, the participants met their counterparts.  In the second task, participants played a lottery, where the outcome was determined by a computer.  Unbeknownst to the participants, the computer and the human competitors used the same strategy when betting, based on a Nash Equilibrium.

The study found that when participants lost against their human competition in the auction game, they experienced a decrease in activity from baseline in their right ventral striatum (or what we also call the nucleus accumbens, a brain reward area).  This activation pattern is commonly seen in situations when money is lost.  Additionally, participants who experienced greater decreases in activity in their right accumbens after a loss were more likely to overbid.  That is to say, the participants who felt the effects of losing in front of a peer more were more likely to overbid.

Fascinating that the effects of losing in front of a peer was related so strongly related to overbidding, especially since we know from the work of Brian Knudson at Stanford  (and others) that believing one is going to make money activates the accumbens. 

One explanation for the results stems from the possibility that the participants in the study were not responding to a loss of money or points.  The loss of an auction carried no penalty.  Generally, a situation such as this would not be expected to produce decreased activation in the right accumbens.  The researchers suggested that the activation pattern produced was a result of the perceived loss in front of a peer.  This “loss reaction” and the overbidding it produces can be related to learning in and out of the classroom.  Both school and work place are rife with social competition and possibly analogous situations to the one examined in the Delgado et al. study.  In school, receiving marks on a test that are lower than the class average or than a specific classmate’s remarks might elicit a similar “loss reaction.”  In the workplace, receiving a bad review or being passed over for a project opportunity could produce similar effects as well.  While overbidding may be slightly maladaptive in the case of a monetary auction, in a work or school setting it seems like a positive reaction.

Overbidding in these settings would ensure a more successful outcome in all endeavors.  “Overbidding” on a test translates to over-studying.  A student who feels a very strong effect of losing will be likely to overinvest their resources (in this case time and effort) to ensure that they succeed on their tests.  Similarly, an employee or intern will work hard to ensure that they are the best candidate for a promotion or special project.

Social cues may can influence these decisions and lead to herd type behavior where one commits too much to an object (or a major?) on the advice and behavior of others.  This was shown in another fMRI accumbens study by Burke et al. 2010, where subjects were given the chance to buy stocks after observing the buying decisions of others (a group of 4 faces marked with a check for having bought the stock).  If all 4 faces were marked as having bought the stock, or did not buy the stock, the % buying by the subjects swung from 80% to 20% - the herd effect. The researchers found the subjects were also influenced by the pictures of chimpanzee faces and by data on the stocks themselves, but not as much as the herd.  The accumbens reacted to the herd effect and the authors argued that it did so independently of, and perhaps driving, the buy decisions.  Other brain areas (amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex) were involved, particularly when the buyers went against the herd, but that is another topic.

What does all this mean for experiential education?  For us it gives new level of power and weight to one’s reflections on the gut decisions in deciding if that experience is right for us.  For example, in a prior job, one of us (JS) saw that students studied abroad independently engaged in much less reflection than students who went as a group led by a faculty member.  We thought these students, participating in a program in Cairo, were sitting in their rooms at night talking over the day’s events and reflecting on lessons they had learned as they adapted to a culture and perspective that differed from what they had experience in America.  In that environment, some might have decided to become international human rights lawyers/workers.  If others in the group were also making such decisions, it is not hard to see how one could be sucked in.  In addition, this group decision could have been perceived similarly to bidding (if it took on a competitive air), leading to an occurrence of the over-bidding phenomenon, as one did not want to be perceived as making the wrong decision.  This is a common group effect that we have seen many times in social psychology and in the general course of human affairs.  But to us, it takes on a certain power and precision being linked to brain areas and quantitative economic studies.  The question is how do we in higher education leverage these phenomenon to produce better engagement and learning by our students in and out of the classroom?