In the past year, for diversion I’ve read some books intended for a general audience written by psychologists–several of my department colleagues would find these watered down from research journals, but I can justify the brain candy:<\/p>\n
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow <\/em> This is a guilty pleasure because of the connections to my non-historian colleagues. One department colleague has a research strand in positive psychology, so I even know how to pronounce “Csikszentmihalyi.” I’ll never be immersed in her literature enough to understand the internal debates deeply, but it’s fascinating to see the argument a key figure is making to the general public.\u00a0At some point I’d like to add Carol Dweck’s\u00a0MindSet<\/em>\u00a0and a few others, but I will probably have my plate too full until the middle of 2012 to add more to this list.<\/p>\n What’s intriguing about four of the books is the set of arguments about the structural limits of human rationality. Demasi argues that our consciousness is deeply embedded in emotions, which is bound up in our sensory capacity and the deeper layers of our brains. Well, this either fully justifies the times I anthropomorphize the expression on the face of our bearded dragon, or it means gigantic trouble for Western mind-body dualism. I’m not sure Steee is still active as a researcher, but he wrtes very clearly, and the literature on stereotype threat undermines assumptions about a priori<\/em>\u00a0definitions of achievement and test performance. ((Can anyone tell me if Tedra Osell is correct in asserting<\/a> that all of California’s state tests require students to state their race on the test sheet?)) Baumeister lays out the catch-22 of dieting (one must have sucrose in the brain to exert willpower). And Kahnemann’s body of work has catalogued multiple ways that our brains take reasoning shortcuts.<\/p>\n The last has a part of me particularly agitated as a teacher. I have identified a few slim pieces of Kahneman that suggest how teachers could accommodate our inherent cognitive laziness, or at least reduce the chances of shortcuts that impede understanding and application of critical concepts. But for the most part, I shake my head at how fragile our claim at rationality is. And yet in many ways, pedagogical habits rely on rationality. This isn’t just Vygotskian models of cognition but a long historical practice, from object lessons of the nineteenth century to advice by some writers of college-teaching books to start every presentation with the familiar experience of students.\u00a0The problem is that reliance on such familiar experience, and trust in student common-sense, might well lead students to the types of shortcuts that humans are so vulnerable to.<\/p>\n And so we start or continue the new semester with a central problem.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In the past year, for diversion I’ve read some books intended for a general audience written by psychologists–several of my department colleagues would find these watered down from research journals, but I can justify the brain candy: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Flow Antonio Demasi, Self Comes to Mind\u00a0 Claude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi\u00a0 Roy Baumeister and John Tierney, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[15,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4425","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading","category-teaching"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pag0MB-19n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4425"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4427,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4425\/revisions\/4427"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/shermandorn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nAntonio Demasi, Self Comes to Mind\u00a0<\/em>
\nClaude Steele, Whistling Vivaldi\u00a0<\/em>
\nRoy Baumeister and John Tierney, Willpower<\/em> (an impulse purchase, I’ll admit)
\nDaniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/em><\/p>\n