A fascinating short blog post from Brain Blogger.  More kids are receiving psychotropic drugs. What role, if any, should teachers play in this?  This is the quote that jumped out at me:

more than half the parents seeking medication treatment for their child’s externalizing behavior in one pediatric setting were doing so as the result of recommendations from school personnel.” Yet, the teachers in their study responded that they had “none or limited” (88.9% and 100% respectively) training on children’s mental health problems or the medications prescribed to treat them.

Teachers make recommendations that lead parents to seek medication.  It seems to me we must do a better job of training teachers to think about behavior from a bio-psycho-social perspective.

Check out this image. Up close we see Albert Einstein.  But vision like other things can be relative.  Now stand up, walk to other side of the room and take another look.  

Strange huh? It turns out that our visual system is designed to pick up different levels of detail at different distances. Up close we pick up fine details. At a distance we pick up coarse details.  This can allow us to see the image above as two completely different images.  Read this article from the great neurophilosophy blog to get more information on this interesting phenomenon.

Jonah Lehrer argues convincingly that we should take seriously what neuroscience research has to tell us about investing heavily in early childhood education, even if we choose to ignore what it might teach us about the war on drugs, the legal system or credit cards.

Very interesting stuff from David Brooks. I have read (and taught) a bit about Haidt and his work. I think that Brooks gets it but it’s hard to both get an idea across and challenge it in single op-ed piece. If you haven’t already, it’s worth looking at Haidt’s stuff. 

I would say also that part of the philosophical tradition (or the talmudic tradition) is learning how to use reason to override moral emotions in ways that are counterintuitive at first but lead towards greater value in the long run. I don’t think that spells the end of Philosophy, but a re-working of our approach to philosophy. For a philosophy to change the way that we live it has to work both intellectually and emotionally.

The End of Philosophy

Published: April 6, 2009

Socrates talked. The assumption behind his approach to philosophy, and the approaches of millions of people since, is that moral thinking is mostly a matter of reason and deliberation: Think through moral problems. Find a just principle. Apply it.

One problem with this kind of approach to morality, as Michael Gazzaniga writes in his 2008 book, “Human,” is that “it has been hard to find any correlation between moral reasoning and proactive moral behavior, such as helping other people. In fact, in most studies, none has been found.”

Today, many psychologists, cognitive scientists and even philosophers embrace a different view of morality. In this view, moral thinking is more like aesthetics. As we look around the world, we are constantly evaluating what we see. Seeing and evaluating are not two separate processes. They are linked and basically simultaneous.  Read the rest…