Neuroscience meets public education
I'm a middle school, public school teacher (science :) ) and I just listened to your podcast with Jordan Peterson and it has provoked many a question in my mind. It's apparent to most of our world that America's public school system is in dire need of reform, not unrelated to the mirroring of challenges faced within low socio-economic communities. In thinking about *how* these systems could improve to help student engagement and thus learning, I'm curious.... what WOULD need to change from your perspective? How can a school can change it's structures to better meet the needs of it's students? I'm thinking: smaller school/classroom sizes, more intimately connected groups of teachers who share the same rules/prodecures within the classroom (to help with insula-prefrontal cortex "rule switching", as many students come in with already dysregulated nervous systems and are already having to switch to a totally new set of rules within the school AND each classroom)...what else? Change in content being taught? Are the core subjects really that relevant to some of the students? Curious about your take!
How to make boring work feel interesting
During work, there are many tasks that one needs to complete and remember that is boring. You mentioned when you were an undergrad, that you pretended the boring work you were doing was very interesting so you can remember it. Do you have any advice to make boring work feel interesting?
How to balance RIRT with the Growth Mindset?
Hello Dr. Huberman - I recently listened to your podcast on the topic of dopamine control. At one point you talked about how spiking dopamine before or after an activity could be detrimental to future motivation (as exemplified by the study with the drawing children), and so the conclusion was that focusing on getting a reward from the tasks/struggles themselves (as per the Growth Mindset) was a more sustainable approach. However, you also spoke about how using Random Intermittent Reward Timing (RIRT) as a reward protocol was so powerful that it formed the basis for casinos' success. On a superficial layer, it seems that these two pieces of advice are in contradiction - could you shed some light as to how a reward protocol and a focus on no rewards can co-exist?