February, 2009

Several years ago my brother taught a class about stories.  Several weeks before the class he sent an e-mail to his friends and family asking them what to write something about why we tell stories.  As is often the case my brother and I happen to start thinking about the same things at the same time.  I had been teaching a course on the bible and had begun to get interested in the same question. Below is my response to my brother. I have left most of the personal details in, as they seem to tell the story of our relationship better than taking them out would.  

The Science of the Mind Journal

About this time last year, I helped my brother think about teaching a semester long elective on the mind and the brain. What started as a series of long phone conversation turned into a course he ran for his students at the Compass School in Vermont. The course itself was co-taught by my brother and Beth White a science teacher at Compass. Both my father and I visited my brother’s school and presented. My father presented on his work with schizophrenics. I presented on spirituality and the brain. The students heard from other guest presenters and visited and visited several brain labs.

For their final project each student wrote and article about a topic related to the brain. The topics ranged from schizophrenia to the music and the brain. All the articles were written in a popular science style, similar to what you might find in the New York Times Science section. The articles were gathered in a journal that was printed and distributed throughout the school community.

Below is the introduction my brother wrote to that journal. You can also see a full PDF of the the journal.  

Faced with the challenge of designing an interdisciplinary elective class from scratch, Beth and I, both in our first year at Compass, felt a sometimes exhilarating, and at other times daunting sense of endless possibility. During staff orientation in August we managed to meet a couple of times for fifteen minutes between icebreakers and frenzied planning for our looming fall classes. In the late summer heat it seemed only remotely possible that March would ever arrive. 

So, with a sense of almost infinite remoteness we started batting around these ideas: “Oh, oh, I’ve got it! How about, a radio journalism class?” Beth suggested, rebounding from the bad news that a politics of food class had been done last year, and thus would be repetitive. We had recently discussed our shared affinity for public radio’s This American Life and on cue I launched into an Ira Glass impersonation: “I’m Ira Glass, from WBEZ in Chicago, it’s This American Life, this week, sixteen kids, their teachers, and an examination of what it means to build community.” We both liked this idea because it would require students to follow their passions, venture outside the classroom, and ultimately, to create an authentic final project—a radio piece that could potentially be aired on our local public radio station.

To our chagrin, however, this idea was not feasible. Our class was slated to be opposite the fourth annual and very popular Compass filmmaking elective taught by two seasoned Compass veterans. Assembling their raw footage into short masterpieces, the budding auteurs would leave the school’s editing computers unavailable for our imagined future Ira Glasses and Terri Grosses to hone their craft.

The fall came and went. Beth and I settled into the Compass community, slowly getting to know our students’ personalities, talents, and learning styles. But, as the snow piled high and the elective loomed ever larger, amidst the frenzy of planning and managing our second trimester classes, we had little time to meet. The end of second trimester was quickly approaching and we still hadn’t settled on a theme for the elective.

Around this time, on a snowy January day I was talking to my brother Adi on the phone about his vision for a high school curriculum that spoke to my belief in education that is hands-on, meaningful, and personal. His idea was simple—no curriculum is more directly relevant to any teenager’s experience than a window into what’s going on in his or her head. All students (or so we hope) have an infinitely complex and still developing interconnected network of cells in their craniums. Wouldn’t they all be wiser, kinder, and joyous if they had more insight into what in the world is going on up there?

I watched the snow pile high in my yard and continued to listen. In staccato bursts of excitement, Adi outlined a series of workshops and lessons designed to shed light on the mysterious universe of the human brain. Each module, as he called them, would focus on a different aspect of how objectively measured physiological phenomenon occurring in the brain give rise to the subjective flow of experience called mind. The curriculum flowed through questions such as: What is love

Think about it this way: Imagine that you’re walking through the supermarket late on a Tuesday night searching for a perfect yellow onion for lasagna. You pick it up, feeling its weight in your palm. At that instant the heaviness of the onion exerts a slight pressure on the nerve endings on the surface of your hand from which an electrical signal is sent up your spinal chord to your brain. The sensory motor area of your brain interprets this signal, allowing you to perceive the slight pressure of the onion’s mass on your hand. If at that moment your brain was being scanned by an fMRI machine, the image would reveal a clear pattern of activity in the sensory motor area of your brain—this is the objectively measured physical phenomenon occurring in your brain. However, inwardly, you would also perceive the weight of the onion on in your hand, and this perception probably would give rise to a slue of other mental and perhaps even emotional inner experiences. This inner experience, hard to pin down and measure, but born of objectively measured physical phenomena, is the subjective world of mind.

Holding the onion, the mind might conjure up an image of a baseball because of its similar size, shape, and weight. The generic image of the baseball would bring to mind a specific baseball that you held while standing on a field of damp freshly cut grass on a late spring day at the start of Little League season when you were twelve. This memory might then trigger an emotional response—perhaps a subtle sense of nostalgia and longing for your glory days as a Little Leaguer.

Being the skeptic that I am, I told Adi that this all sounded well and good, but so what? He and I are both sporadic, yet committed meditation practitioners. Meditation is all about using the mind to watch thoughts, feelings, and perceptions with a sense of unattached curious investigation. So, I already bought in to the idea of slowing down to watch the unfolding show in our minds from an inner subjective point of view. What, I wanted to know, is the benefit of parsing experience into discrete chunks of subjective inward experience and objectively measured bursts of electrical activity in the brain? Isn’t it enough to simply mindfully choose the onion, to buy it, cook it with love and attention, and eat the lasagna with gratitude and appreciation? Two months later, Beth, and I were at the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, also known as the Brain Bank, with sixteen Compass juniors and seniors. Donning crinkly white Tyvek lab gowns, we gathered around a large rectangular table containing parts of several human brains that had been cured in formaldehyde for a couple of weeks. On the table lay one grayish white shiny hemisphere of a normal brain and a schizophrenic brain, and parts of healthy brain sliced into cross-sections. Tim Wheelock, assistant director of neuropathology at the Brain Bank, bubbled with enthusiasm as he passed around each hemisphere.

The group was awestruck. Some were a bit grossed out, but every face portrayed fascination as they held a human brain up close. This cold slimy white mass, resembling an overgrown wrinkly slug, was the seat of somebody’s personality, memories, volition, and emotions. Who was that person, and what happened to all their attributes at the moment of death? Did the memories and characteristics vanish from this mass of tissue? Is it now just a wholly inanimate blob, or does a trace of their essence remain left behind? Eyes wide with wonder, the students passed the brains from one to another like precious jewels, proudly identifying the hippocampus, amygdala, and other anatomical parts they had learned about in class.

Ever since that day, when I find myself in a room full of strangers, say at a wedding, lecture, or a concert, and I begin to feel a sense of disconnection or isolation from the group, I imagine a living human brain, inside each person’s skull. When I do this, I feel the divisions fade. I know that we are all linked by our common hardware—though our values, experiences, and opinions differ, they are born of nearly the same biology. When I imagine several hundred brains all pulsating with electricity, all sharing the same neurotransmitters, neurons, cortex, a limbic system, and a reptilian brain, I understand how important it is to continue offering experiences where students and educators alike can find deeper meaning in their education and lives through participating in a course like Science of the Mind.