Mindfulness over at Wikipedia

Over at the ever helpful Wikipedia, is their CTER section. It stands for Curriculum, Technology, and Educational Reform and is sponsored by the Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Here is their mindfulness entry.

Not very good or interesting, I would say. Unlike many entries in Wikipedia that I know something about, this seems downright impoverished- not as bad as, say, Conservapedia's entry on snakes but thin, thin, thin. Other entries seem quite good, so it looks as if we have some work to do.

Crosspost: Kevin Drum

Over the past couple of decades the wage premium for getting a college degree has gone up dramatically. In 1973 a typical college grad earned 30% more than a high school graduate. Today a college grad earns something like 90% more.

Standard economic theory predicts that this should lead to way more people getting college degrees, but that hasn't happened. Altonji, Bharadwaj and Lange report that, when various socioeconomic factors are held constant, "the supply response to the increase in skill premium between cohorts was small: about 1% on average and about 1.5% at the median." In other words, kids aren't bothering to increase their skills very much even though the reward for doing so has skyrocketed.

Why? Brad DeLong proposes that part of the answer may be the surging cost of college, which not only makes the return on a bachelor's degree lower than it would be otherwise, but probably makes it seem even lower than it really is to teenagers with short time horizons. He's also got some other ideas that he muses about here.

But I want to toss out another possibility that's been tickling my brain for a while. On the right is an EPI chart that shows declining wages for college grads over the past seven years. Ezra Klein comments:

As an economist told me a year or two back, "there's never been a worse time to be a college graduate. But there's never been a worse time not to be a college graduate." Your wages may be higher than those of less educated cohorts, but they're stagnant nevertheless.

Right. And maybe that's the problem. When I say that the premium for getting a college degree used to be 30% and now it's 90%, what do I mean? One possibility is something like this:

• 1973: high school grad makes $42K, college grad makes $55K.
  

• 2006: high school grad makes $42K, college grad makes $80K.
  

This probably would motivate more kids to get college degrees. But that's not what actually happened. Here's what actually happened for male workers (all figures adjusted for inflation):

• 1973: high school grad makes $42K, college grad makes $55K.
  

• 2006: high school grad makes $31K, college grad makes $61K.
  

The skill premium hasn't gone up because a college degree is way more lucrative than in the past. In fact, it's only slightly more lucrative over the long term and completely stagnant among recent grads. Rather, the skill premium has gone up because the value of a high school degree has cratered.

So here's my thought: even though the two scenarios above are (roughly) economically equivalent, they might not be psychically equivalent. If the value of a college degree had gone way up, that really might prompt more kids on the margin to study harder and go to college. Not only would that higher value be fairly obvious since it would get a lot of attention, but the prospect of doing better is highly motivating.

But does the declining value of a high school degee motivate them in the same way? I doubt it, even though mathematically the effect is the same. For starters, many teenagers may not really understand the hard reality of the trend in non-college wages, and in any case a slow but steady decline simply doesn't motivate people the same way as dangling a reward in front of them does. Instead of making them try harder, it tends to make them feel helpless and angry.

Am I explaining myself adequately here? I'm not sure. But it seems to me that there are lots of cases where real-life behavioral responses depend not merely on monetary differences, but on the direction and reason for those differences. Perhaps if you want more kids to go to college, you need to reward them for going to college, not merely punish them for not going.

Dan Siegel, again

This is a passage that jumped out at me:

In 1988, Siegel heard one of the pioneers of attachment theory, Mary Main, give a talk about her work on what she called "coherent narrative." Main and her colleagues had devised an instrument called the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI), in which parents were asked about their recollections of their own childhoods. What Main's research indicated was that the way these parents told their own stories-how they made sense of their past lives, or didn't-was the most powerful predictor (85 percent accuracy) of whether their own children would be securely attached to them.

If adults could create a reflective, coherent, and emotionally-rich narrative about their own childhoods, they were likely to form a good, secure relationship with their children-no matter how "insecurely attached" they themselves had been as children or how inadequate or even abusive their own parents were. It wasn't what happened to them as children, but how they came to make sense of what happened to them that predicted their emotional integration as adults and what kind of parents they'd be.

I think a key aspect here is "emotionally-rich". Many very unhappy people- rigid, judgmental, etc- have coherent narratives. Think of all the people we've known over the years who not only tell the same story of their lives, but with details emphasized the same way, as if the audience and context never changes. This is a lack of engagement, a lack of communication and mutuality, that really shrinks a person's social world.

Reflective speech can be learned: think "therapized". But "emotionally-rich" means the speaker is being generous to his or her listener. This empathy, or understanding of another, is a crucial frontal lobe function.

Our own coherent narratives- much like in traditional folk tales and post-modern fiction- is open ended. But not formless or sprawling. Each narrative loops back through the listener to the speaker, changing slightly, accommodating subtle social information. Irrelevant details are maintained in a low energy state, perhaps to be charged with significance at some later time.

In this way, the previous post regarding an older reader's slowing down over apparently irrelevant details points to another quality of the brain: each area seems to suppress other areas. Life changes such as injury, open up other possibilities. When we are telling our stories, we keep in reserve details for other situations and other audiences.

Perhaps older brains tell richer stories as well- less purposeful- but emotionally deeper. And maybe this is a quality we associate with wisdom.

Memory

from a NYT article:

In a 2003 study at Harvard, Dr. Carson and other researchers tested students’ ability to tune out irrelevant information when exposed to a barrage of stimuli. The more creative the students were thought to be, determined by a questionnaire on past achievements, the more trouble they had ignoring the unwanted data. A reduced ability to filter and set priorities, the scientists concluded, could contribute to original thinking.

This phenomenon, Dr. Carson said, is often linked to a decreased activity in the prefrontal cortex. Studies have found that people who suffered an injury or disease that lowered activity in that region became more interested in creative pursuits.

Here is the whole article

Interestingly, an overfocus on a singular interpretation of a text leads to a lessened ability to use certain details. This is why a technical article in a field one is familiar with, if read with a specific purpose, can be read quickly, whereas a poem- a good one, anyway- shouldn't be.

Every use of language has a multiplicity of interpretations and "purposes". The brain has evolved for a multiplicity of outcomes...

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The Year Ahead

One of our pet conundrums here at Tinicum Art and Science is striking a dynamic, but ultimately, balanced approach to our students' social and intellectual development. For instance, most of our students are coming off of highly stressful, if not traumatic, experiences at school. It is well established in the neuropsych literature that chronic, childhood stress is a major predictor for serious "at-risk" behavior.

What, then, is a logical way to reduce stress? Reduce the stress at school. We have found that. this, in turn, reduces the stress at home.

By reducing the social, academic, and intrapersonal stressors a student's relationships improve in quality and variety, giving rise to the (accurate) perception of a supportive social network, thus increasing resilience and further reducing stress. Such a student is much more likely to then take on social and intellectual challenges at school.

But what if that process takes a long time? Do measurable academic and intellectual skills lag behind, and if so, how big of a problem is it?

On the other hand, if we prematurely or overly emphasize intellectual development might this, in some students, short circuit the process described above?

Our tendency is towards the social, which we do very well. Yet, we are consistently trying to spiral up a more academic approach and better execution of higher level skills. Any thoughts?

Soon I will post a few summaries and comments regarding research being done in this area.

The Washington Monthly College Guide

Here's is their intro:

Welcome to The Washington Monthly College Rankings. Unlike other college guides, such as U.S. News and World Report, this guide asks not what colleges can do for you, but what colleges are doing for the country. It's a guide for all Americans who are concerned about our institutions of higher learning. Are our colleges making good use of our tax dollars? Are they producing graduates who can keep our nation competitive in a changing world? Are they, in short, doing well by doing good? This is the guide that tells you.

click here to visit their website. It is worth it.

A Baseball Intrusion

Jon Lester, left handed pitcher for the Red Sox, who, in his rookie year was diagnosed with a form of lymphoma, and last year won the clincher in the World Series, threw a no-hitter this evening against the Royals. You need luck for that sort of thing, certainly, and a cool head. But you need to be ON, and that requires MOJO. By reading this, I pass on to you his mojo, which I received by watching the game. You can thank me by continuing to read this blog.

HMS Conference

Dan Siegel, a child psychiatrist who specializes in parent-child attachment and its neurobiological orgins spoke at the Boston conference I attended this past weekend. I will try to post some comments on the conference (and blocks of quotes) but for now, a teaser from the article Mindsight: Dan Siegel offers therapists a new vision of the brain:

[Siegel] focused, for example, on the clinical implications of the fact that the right and left hemispheres work in dramatically different ways. By then it was commonly understood that the left brain is associated with logic, cause-effect reasoning, verbal processing, and linear thinking, while the right is associated with nonlinear, holistic (big-picture) thinking, intense emotion, body sense, social awareness, and nonverbal communication.

What Siegel became interested in was that a coherent narrative about the past requires both hemispheres to be fully online: the right holds the images, themes, and sense of personal self existing across time, while the left holds the drive to make logical meaning and put words to these wordless feeling states and perceptions. Right away, this seemed to explain the difficulties many people had in creating coherent narrative: if the two sides of the brain weren't working together, the story would either be chaotic and confused-overwhelming feeling, overwhelmed thought-or superficially logical but lacking the emotional oomph of a good, coherent autobiographical story.

He decided to try out the theory that integrating brain function could be beneficial therapeutically with clients who had an impoverished sense of their own past and couldn't really feel or express emotion: "I'd worked out a hypothesis that this type of patient might respond to therapy that explicitly stimulated the development of the right hemisphere." And it worked. A lot of the patients, who usually intellectualized their way through talk therapy, responded very well to guided imagery, sensate-body focusing, and practice in using and picking up on nonverbal cues.

Simply telling patients what might be going on in their brains, he discovered, could also be both deeply comforting and therapeutic. He explained to patients with PTSD the difference between implicit and explicit memory and the function of the hippocampus, and they felt less crazy. "You're telling me I'm not nuts," said one greatly relieved patient, who thought she was going insane because of the flashbacks and intrusive images that hounded her. As she put it, "It's just that the bad things that happened to me got fragmented in my mind and were never put together into my regular memory by my hippowhatsis."

Soon, he was spiking his therapy with brief, neurobiological vignettes that helped clients understand why they were so prone to sudden rages, or had such rotten love lives, or felt so anxious all the time. Siegel became adept at explaining the role of the unbridled amygdala, the self-calming talents of the neocortex, the heroically integrative properties of the orbitofrontal cortex, the amazing system of mirror neurons that allows us to pick up and feel the feelings and intentions of others-the remarkable capacity for "mindsight."

He even started keeping a chalkboard in his office to draw rough sketches of the brain and its parts, which helped ground discussions of subjective mental experience in the world of physical reality. "Unlike most psychological concepts, the brain is a three-dimensional object that you can hold in your hand," he says. "It's also a visual entity, and we're very visual creatures-a lot of our cortical real estate is devoted to vision. So when I sketch the brain on the board, people can really 'see' it."

His patients loved it. Far from making them feel that their lives were completely determined by physiological processes beyond their control, they felt empowered. They discovered that their negative feelings weren't them, but originated from one part of their brains, which could be controlled by another part, actually altered by what they think.

"Connections in the brain shape the way you think, but the flip side is true, too," says Siegel. "The way you think can change your brain. Neural firing changes neural connections-if you pay attention." We often have the idea that we have no power to control our own attention. Not so. "You can harness the power of your mind," says Siegel. "You can sit in your prefrontal cortex, where self-regulation is mediated, and simply notice, just notice, the mental processes emanating from different neural circuits of the brain-without locking onto them."

Cross-Post: Kevin Drum

from washingtonmontly.com:

RELIGION AND HAPPINESS....In Europe, the advance of secularization has corresponded with an increase in reported happiness. In America, it's just the opposite: religious participation is positively correlated with higher levels of self-reported happiness. Will Wilkinson suggests that this is mostly a matter of fitting in: since most Americans are religious, you're more likely to be happier if you fit in with our religious culture. Ross Douthat suggests the answer lies elsewhere:

My suspicion is that the difference has something to do with the role of the welfare state as well — that the benefits of belonging to a religious community are greater in the U.S. than in Europe in part because our welfare state is smaller, and religious participation provides both tangible and intangible forms of security that are more valuable in a society where the free market is more freewheeling and the welfare state weaker. If you're a Christian who prefers the American model, you might say that the Europeans use government as a substitute for God; if you prefer Europe's path to modernity, you'd probably say something about Americans clinging to churchgoing because it's the only protection available against the harsh brutality of our jungle capitalism. Either way, I suspect that this symbiosis between high levels of religiosity and economic individualism is at the heart of American exceptionalism — which is another way of saying that libertarians root for secularization at their peril.

This is way outside my wheelhouse, but here's another possibility: Europe has suffered through centuries of devastating religious wars that didn't end until fairly recently. If you live in Western Europe, there's a pretty good chance that you associate strong religiosity with death, destruction, and massive societal grief, not with church bake sales. So whatever you think of religion itself, seeing the end of religious wars, religious terrorism, and massive state-sponsored religious bigotry is almost bound to make you happy. You'd have to be almost literally crazy not to be happier in today's secular Europe than in yesterday's religious Europe.

Religion in America is just a whole different story. Sure, it's caused its share of problems, but nothing even remotely on the scale of what happened in Europe. We still have a pretty innocent view of religious belief here, and this probably accounts for part of the reason that religion is associated with happiness here but not in Europe. Whether that makes us exceptional or just naive I'll leave for others to debate.

(btw: kevin's blog is one of my daily reads...)