The Learning Brain

Interesting and provocative. Good fodder for a conversation on questions like:

• Where is all this change in our habits leading us as a society?
• Are there cultures with norms about face to face interactions that are different from ours and can we learn anything about their emotional development and how it might compare to ours?

First thoughts: 

He says “the online world is giving you no practice in managing emotions… no practice in expressing negative emotions” but I don’t see him providing evidence of that. He’s jumping to a causal relationship when it sounds like his research has only proven a correlative one. I don’t really see how we can make any conclusions about online life. The only conclusion we can make is that there is a benefit (if we can call it that) in having more face to face interactions - and those only lead to a certain cultural “norm” we call “emotional health”. 

This makes me think back to a great session I attended at the last learning and the brain conference. Jerome Kagan of Harvard ( http://necsi.edu/faculty/kagan.html ) was presenting on technology and mental health. An idea he brought up was how the cultural and historical context underpin and inform our models of mental health. There’s something to this that I think we don’t recognize because we’re so used to looking at the present as compared to the past, as opposed to the present as the future’s past. 

Aside from new technology that makes interaction with information more like the pre-internet age, more like interpersonal, physical interactions (Did you read Feed by MT Anderson?) we’re going  to be dealing with more and more information in the future. Even as schools adopt technology, the structuring of face-to-face time into new models of the classroom won’t likely be standardized. As more offerings develop for students to learn outside and away from the institution of school, we’ll lose the chance to ensure that kids receive that training. 

He uses the example of the changing model of a family dinner to illustrate a correlation between our (likely not just kids, but adults as well) ability to manage and regulate emotions. This seems a bit of a stretch to me. There’s also this implicit longing for “the old days”, and he makes the assumption that somehow people were better off emotionally, but yet he doesn’t explore the possibility (Now You See It) that there are potential gains in emotional health. I’m not sure what they might be, but we can’t necessarily rule them out.

Are we going to be worse off or just different? Were people better at managing emotions in the past? What evidence do we have for people having “better” abilities for emotional regulation in the pre-internet, industrial age? Are we blinded by our agreement of what is normal? Do we forget that normal changes?

More than anything, I conclude from this that the presence and ubiquity of new media is changing those of us who live in info-tech societies. Where it’s leading I don’t know, but it’s implied in Nass’ saying that he’s not solely interested in measuring what’s changing scientifically, he also is biased about maintaining social norms, like the definition of mental health, which is bound to change as the historical and cultural context evolves.