Through my 30-year teaching career, I came to focus more on the learning process itself. I return often to the Parable of the Game Cube.
The Game Cube arrived. It looked cool – sleek and sci-fi, an actual silver cube – and Benji, my 5 year-old son was delighted. It was a gift from Granny, who also included a couple of games. We chose to begin with Mario Kart. You zoom around various tracks in bizarre vehicles while a cast of characters tries to cut you off, pummel you with giant shells, etc. And there are mushrooms around that may be very helpful – I’ll come back to this…
Benji had just started to play computer games. He took to them like a fish to water. The GameCube was his first big videogame console. He took a controller in his hand and was eager to start the race!
My videogame experience began when there were Atari systems and Timex had just released a $99 computer that ran a bowling program and some other stuff. I played combat games and a few driving games in college and was excited to see how far they’d come. I noticed how complex the controller was compared to those old joysticks of yore.
Granny, meanwhile, remembered when everybody used abacuses and slide rules, and I remember her giving me an ancient calculator with bright green LEDs when I was a kid. She had a scrunched up expression somewhere between confusion and frustration as she considered the silver cube, controllers, and instruction manual. She chose the manual.
You can imagine the scene. A vivid demonstration of age-related differences in how we approach unfamiliar problems.
Benji the kindergartener wildly swiveled the joystick and pressed buttons as his car careened around the screen. He laughed joyfully with every setback and disaster. His attention was utterly fixed on the action as he allowed his instincts to adjust the quick twitches of his fingers this way and that. No evidence of mulling anything over, analyzing a problem, thinking at all – total immersion in the game!
I the young father found a few patterns quickly. This button made this happen, that one did that – this is how you throw things at your enemies, etc. Because Mario Kart is very simple compared to some videogames, this approach was reasonably effective. But I flinched with every on-screen mishap, reprimanded myself for each error – and consciously tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Once in a while, when the race was tight, I would click into the zone and stop trying so hard – but I could not resist the impulse to put every discovery about the game in language. “Remember, this button is dangerous to press on that kind of track, because…”
Granny, who had brought the Game Cube, sat on the chair, perplexed but soldiering on. One hand held the manual, the other a controller upside-down. She read aloud, “The B-button, if pressed repeatedly…” Her car, of course, never started the race. She shook her head, looked at the screen, put down the manual and held the controller there without touching a thing. This made Benji cackle for a moment when he realized it but then his attention snapped back to the the characters in their cars.
What a treasure trove of insights into learning! The child goes hog-wild, failing “early and often” as they say, immersed in the moment, delighted even when the car spins off the track into space. The 35 year-old looks for patterns and shortcuts as he tries to master a few simple rules, as he tries to encode these rules into language he can remember. Each failure sparks a conscious attempt to learn, to expand the language that helps him understand the game. The 60 year-old, meanwhile, only fails once because the car never starts the race. The time is spent trying to build a very certain error-proof procedure, but that task is impossible.
And we all know the result. Benji trounces Dad, while Granny is stuck at the starting gate. I flash forward a few years to my youngest daughter crushing me at Super Smash Bros., laughing at me. I was not only trying so hard, concentrating so intensely it hurt, and had chosen my most familiar character (Bowser). And it took Benji a few weeks to destroy me every time at Mario Kart, without fail, even though I thought I was learning so effectively.
There are of course neurological reasons for this. The brain wears down with age like everything. But to what extent does this decline in learning ability (at least for things like videogames) stem from psychological habits that could be improved? Could a 35 year-old let go of the fear of failure and embrace the flail-around-pressing-all-buttons approach of the little kid? Could a 60 year-old put down the manual, relax and let her fingers learn without analyzing and consciously seeking patterns?
And if these things can be done, and people can learn to be better learners, how can this be best accomplished? Let’s return to the mushroom from Mario Kart. (It’s actually an amanita muscaria, but I’m going to talk about the psilocybin mushroom.) Had Granny gotten the car rolling, she might have run over a mushroom that would have conferred super speed. Or made her car suddenly tiny, or some other wild effect. But let’s imagine Granny had ingested an actual mushroom – one with psilocybin – before her GameCube initiation.
There is evidence psilocybin (along with some other psychedelics) improves learning capacity. Some studies describe “neuroplasticity” and others a barrage of cognitive tests. It’s hard for such science to produce conclusions as general as, “psilocybin improves learning.” But we can get a holistic understanding of psilocybin’s capacities – and challenges – by thinking about psilocybin as a substance that restores “Child’s Mind.”
There are studies, such as this one comparing brain scans of folks on LSD and babies, that point in this direction. But it completely makes sense, if you posit two things, each of which is easy to confirm: (1) Psilocybin alters consciousness, and (2) Psilocybin does not reduce or diminish consciousness – This is not a rigorous scientific statement, but will get nods of approval from those who have experienced the mushroom.
This means whatever is brought into awareness, a sense impression, a thinking process, a feeling in the body, will be experienced as newer, less familiar, more strange. This is the world of the baby and child! Attention is stoked all the time, emotions are piqued, because everything in the world is new! In this state, learning will be on overdrive. But just as the child will be more susceptible to the “meltdown” than the grownup, the learner on psilocybin may be more prone to anxiety. Indeed, this is a common side effect reported by those who microdose psychedelics.
This would likely happen to Granny. If it weren’t for the possible (in her case probably inevitable) anxiety, there would be great benefits to an oldster’s ingesting psilocybin before the Mario Kart competition. The sheer newness of everything would override the detrimental habits like trying to encode everything into language and procedures. The oldster on shrooms would have a better chance of putting aside the manual and diving in – failing “early and often” like those precocious youngsters!
And it wouldn’t be a good trade. Whatever benefits were acquired by the movement toward Child’s Mind, the increase in newness, they’d be wiped out by the effects of anxiety. As a teacher I can attest that there’s nothing that impairs learning more. So what is Granny’s option, if she is determined to use psychedelics skillfully to have a prayer of whooping her energetic grandson on the GameCube?
The answer is basic yoga. I don’t mean a class card to a studio that holds vinyasa classes filled with gymnasts and dancers. I mean a few stretches (asanas) coordinated with the breath. Some pranayama will be most effective – slow, deep breathing and total letting go with every exhalation. Even a brief period of meditation.
Granny can be taught basic techniques for balancing energy within the (very mild) psilocybin-microdose state. In a cool feedback process, the psilocybin can help her learn how to learn with psilocybin. Balanced energy and low anxiety are essential, so Granny should keep practicing her breathwork, even in-between GameCube-focused microdosing sessions.
And because some of Granny’s malaise, her low-grade, constant depression, rely on mental habits developed over a lifetime, the mushroom may provide yet another benefit. The psilocybin-induced newness – Child’s Mind restoration – combined with basic yogic practice will allow her to learn new habits, new ways of thinking and feeling about the world. This is a good way of understanding psilocybin’s effectiveness in treating depression.
The ideas in this post could be submitted to scientific study. Have two groups of oldsters go at it – some new videogame, different from anything they’ve ever seen. Give one group microdoses of psilocybin and instruction and guided practice in basic asana, pranayama and meditation – with specific focus on how to balance and calm the body and breath. Give both groups the full kit – console, game, controllers, and manual.
I’ll bet I can predict who will be rocketing around the landscape racking up the points and who will be in the real-world chair with eyes glued to the manual!
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