Younger youngsters observe cognitive lodging on a regular basis. Consider a toddler whose solely expertise with canine is the household’s small Shih Tzu. Someday, the kid meets the neighbor’s Nice Dane. Wow! The kid’s psychological idea of “dog” shortly expands to incorporate extra styles and sizes.
Cognitive lodging is on the coronary heart of excellent schooling: It’s what permits college students to construct on prior data to revise, increase, and deepen their understanding of an idea. As Summer time Allen wrote in “The Science of Awe” white paper: “Awe’s ability to elicit cognitive accommodation may also explain why humans evolved to experience this unique emotion. Experiencing awe may be adaptive because it encourages us to take in new information and adjust our mental structures around this information, helping us navigate our world.”
The Awe-Curiosity Connection
“One of my favorite findings suggests that awe might help spur curiosity about the world,” psychologist Craig Anderson instructed me. Anderson was a part of a group that studied how this emotion influenced youngsters. “The more awe they felt, the more curiosity they expressed and the better they performed in school,” he mentioned.
Awe is typically described as a “knowledge emotion.” Paul Silvia, a psychology professor on the College of North Carolina, Greensboro, describes data feelings as “a family of emotional states that foster learning, exploring, and reflecting.” These feelings embrace shock, curiosity, confusion, and awe and stem from experiences which are “unexpected, complicated, and mentally challenging, and they motivate learning in its broadest sense.”
In response to Silvia, awe is a strong instructional software as a result of it motivates individuals to discover issues that stretch their understanding of the world. He wrote, “When people see beautiful and striking color images of supernovas, black holes, and planetary nebulas, they usually report feelings of awe and wonder. These feelings then motivate them to learn about what they are seeing and their scientific importance.”
When You Marvel, You’re Studying
None of this analysis would shock Fred Rogers, for whom marvel was pedagogy. He knew that curiosity is what primes kids’s brains for studying. He additionally had this unbelievable capability to speak his personal marvel by way of the display—notably his fascination along with his younger viewers.
I reached out to Gregg Behr and Ryan Rydzewski, coauthors of When You Marvel, You’re Studying: Mister Rogers’ Enduring Classes for Elevating Inventive, Curious, Caring Children, to listen to extra about what they realized from finding out Rogers’s work. They instructed me:
When Fred Rogers sang the phrases, While you marvel, you’re studying, he wasn’t kidding. In a really actual sense, he was proper. We all know from trendy science that once we’re in a state of marvel, one thing switches on within the mind. We begin to take in all types of knowledge. And the extra curiosity we really feel, the extra doubtless we’re to retain that info. . . That’s why some scientists suppose that curiosity could also be simply as necessary as intelligence in relation to kids’s success in class.
In response to researchers, curiosity has a “fundamental impact on learning and memory.” When youngsters are curious, they’re extra motivated to be taught and more proficient at retaining info. Take into consideration a four-year-old who is aware of the identify of each dinosaur, a ten-year-old who can recite and clarify the g-forces of dozens of curler coasters, or a fourteen-year-old who has memorized each Hamilton lyric. No trainer has assigned this work. The four-year-old went to a pure historical past museum and was mesmerized by the large skeletons. The ten-year-old rode their first curler coaster and have become fascinated by the sensation and the physics of all of it. The fourteen-year-old had by no means heard a musical, or historical past, fairly like this one, in order that they stored on listening. Awe, curiosity, studying, reminiscence.
Right here is one other unbelievable discovering: Curiosity has an amplifying impact on different studying. One examine out of the College of California, Davis, discovered that when members had been curious concerning the preliminary info introduced to them, they may then extra simply take in unrelated info. Merely being in a curious frame of mind helped members’ brains memorize materials that they had been much less enthusiastic about. Because the examine’s lead creator, Matthias Gruber, mentioned, “Curiosity may put the brain in a state that allows it to learn and retain any kind of information, like a vortex that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and also everything around it.”8
