Learning and the brain: The good life will not be televised

"The nature of the good life is a non-computable problem." - Dr. Zachary Stein

When I answered to "Moonbeam," my trail name; pulled my hair back in a ponytail; and drove a white Subaru Outback, I was just 23 years old - Facebook had recently launched, the iPhone and the Amazon Kindle were two years away, and many people had a "1,000 songs in their pocket" overnight.

I was working at a wilderness therapy camp in Old Fort, North Carolina, and led at-risk youth into the woods for weeks at a time, teaching them survival skills along the trail; it wouldn't have been too difficult to guess what I thought about all these innovations. I was a committed "Luddite," a rejector of most new technology - I was also an English major who was fascinated by "Fahrenheit 451," "Brave New World" and "1984."

I felt confident that technological advancement meant the eventual enslavement of humanity, for many reasons, but none so obvious as the one Aldous Huxley highlighted: "man's almost infinite appetite for distractions." It's hard to argue against him when you look around, in nearly every context, and see how glued we all are to our phones.

Oddly enough, we know it's a problem, we chastise ourselves - like smokers of old, we will quit on Monday, but time and again, we return to our screens. If, like neuroscientist and philosopher Iain McGilchrist argues, "attention is a moral act," then we are potentially one of the most immoral generations in the history of humankind, given that the bulk of our screen-time attention is monopolized by trivialities, trash and terror that mislead, polarize and destroy. That is not a judgment about people. It's a judgment about our nature - I've written before, we have a "negativity bias" built into our brains, which was necessary, but is now exploited by incredibly powerful companies in Silicon Valley. Our attention is what they crave, it is what makes them money, and our attention is held longer by negativity.

But "[i]nstead of assuming technology is either good or bad by definition," like ol' Moonbeam was doing, "technology should be understood as intrinsically value-laden and value-creating. All technologies are created with the actualization of certain values as a goal; they are embedded with values from the start," argues social philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger. Our behaviors and values, in other words, are shaped by the technologies we use. So we need to be intentional about what technologies we integrate into our (and our children's) lives.

Schmachtenberger's insight is perhaps why research on the effect of computers and internet technologies on learning has been so deflating to those techno-apologists who believe, wrongly to this point, that these innovations would completely disrupt how we teach and dramatically improve student performance (mainly because it would increase engagement…but teachers know, you can be engaged and not learn). Unfortunately, the research reveals that either a.) computers do not improve student performance, and with excessive use, can impede student learning or b.) neutral ("computers do not harm learning" or "they have the same impact as traditional teaching methods"). The advent of sophisticated artificial intelligence (AI) seems poised to change this history of technological failure in schools, but it's unclear, for one reason mainly, in my opinion.

As neuroscientist and educator Dr. Jared Horvath argues, "the primary function of a tool is largely dictated by how individuals most often utilize the tool […] This is why, when using a computer for homework, students typically last less than six minutes before accessing social media, messaging friends and engaging with other digital distractions." Students could use their laptops and smartphones for deep, rigorous learning, but they often don't, because the primary use of these tools is for entertainment. (i.e., A hammer has many uses, but mainly, you nail things.).

That is the value pre-embedded in these technologies. The technologies implicitly and explicitly declare, "Attention is something we give to what is immediately gratifying. What is not immediately gratifying does not deserve our attention."

Physical books, as another example, are also a technology. What values come embedded in books? Books demand sustained attention, delayed gratification, critical thinking and time. They are often cognitively challenging; they require energy and effort and create lasting joy, all the attributes we want for our students. But who has time to read these days?

Busyness, anxiety, distraction, paranoia, stress, suicidal ideation and alienation: these are the attributes that are increasing in the younger generation. Is that because we are trying to "compute" the "non-computable"? Is that because we are monopolizing our time with technologies - tech that feeds itself on the worst in us - all in the hope that we'll achieve happiness from the same tools that de-value joy, contentedness and higher laws because that's a losing market strategy?

In "Amusing Ourselves to Death" (1985), Neil Postman predicted, "years from now […] it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved."

The good life will not be televised…or recorded on our iPhones. The good life is free, requires nothing extra. It is non-computable. We must, though, re-tune our attention to what sustains a good life: authentic joy that emerges from positive relationships, from living a purpose-driven life, from helping and serving others, and from being absolutely and completely present in our lives (which is an incredible challenge). There is not an app for the good life - not yet at least. There is only you looking into the face of the cashier at the grocery checkout and having a real exchange of goodwill; you pausing to listen to your child's meandering, ridiculous stories; you pausing when you feel the twitch to distract yourself by mindlessly scrolling; you choosing the technologies that promote the values you want to uphold; and you modeling what this should look like for the next generation.