Saturday, February 23, 2019

How are Love AND Learning Related?

Resilience determines locus of control, success and happiness.

Consider that learning and loving are predominantly physiological and natural pursuits.  How well one learns and loves is therefore increased or decreased by the drivers of executive control/working memory, language, theory of mind, inference and mental time travel.  Consider first a romantic "spark" or scene from Pride and Prejudice, starting Keira Kneightly.

The camera highlights a discreet touch between Darcy and Elizabeth, flashes their facial awareness or fighting awareness and then shows Darcy clench his fist.  Body language 101 reads his taciturn face and clenched fist as struggle.  This touch or caress to fist as Darcy gives a hand to Lizzie as he helped her into the carriage after her visit is a "spark."

Aren't students a continuum of active learners and reluctant taciturn learners?
Why?

Consider a student as needing to find the "spark" and love of lifetime learning required for happiness and success.  How can we best fan this physiological spark into a flame?

We all know students who love learning or have a passion for learning. 
I posit that every one of them has resilience.
I posit that society believes that wealth and social capital is the source of resilience.
I also posit that they are wrong!
The driver of resilience is the locus ceruleus and is a function of strong sympathetic and vagal tone.  
It is physiological not sociological.  
It is plastic, malleable and can be strengthened.

Can one tune attraction and attachment in love and learning?
I posit one strengthens physiological resilience with physiological tools based on excitement/exercise AND relaxation breathing.
These can be paced just as concretely as a pacemaker produces a steady heart rate.

Jolt of noradrenaline, increases focus with awareness of effort, joined by  jolt of acetylcholine, effort floats away with the strong impression of feeling safe and content within the bubble of communion/classroom.
No longer biased, no longer judging and aware of too much or too little. All that remains is just right.
Righteousness with self, other and the world.
The perfect physiological state for learning and love of self and others.

Isn't this recapitulated in every intimate encounter physiologically with vagal arousal and sympathetic climax between attached couples. The strength of the attachment is a function of strong vagal and sympathetic tone.  Resilient individuals and teams have strong accelerators and brakes, high HRV.  (The marriage study showing success was greater with physiology than communication/teaching) I am paralleling learning with love because orthodoxy states that love is predominantly physiological and learning is predominantly pedagogical.

I have previously reframed RESILIENCE as the relative strength of sympathetic and vagal capacity in the locus ceruleus and its projections into both brain and body.  One can stratify students and their educational attainment on the resilience to vulnerable continuum.  One can also stratify their relative vulnerability to "mind altering" substance and behavioral addictions.  A secondary benefit of resilience.

Does the resilient vulnerable continuum vary with HRV?
Does educational attainment vary directly with HRV.
The resilient are vibrant learners and high on life.
The vulnerable are searching for external drivers of vitality and are willing to JOLT their bodies with stimulants and depressants.

Unfortunately, external drivers are uncontrolled and use up precious physiologic capital needed to strengthen resilience by strengthening rest AND stress.  The vulnerable who raise HRV or strengthen autonomic tone build the physiologic capital to feel confident, try and succeed. (Amy Cuddy Body Language study showing two minutes of posing/breathing reduced or increased cortisol, affected confidence, trying, and succeeding.)

Twelve step programs have no scientific validity and a poor track record for resilience building.
Does public education have scientific validity?
What track record for building resilience do average schools have?
Even if it correlates with socioeconomic status of students, aren't there exceptions?
A single exception should make one question the correlation and not mistake socioeconomic drivers as the cause.  One can certainly point to myriad examples of failure to launch from success predicted launch pads.  And vice versa.
I suspect tuning our ANS physiology will have effects on both fluid and crystallized intelligence, educational attainment, life success and happiness.




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