by David Brooks
After a few weeks, Ms. Taylor asked to see Harold’s journal. He was reluctant to share it, because so many personal thoughts had found their way in there. With a male teacher he never would have allowed himself that vulnerability. But he trusted her, and one weekend he let her take it home.
She was struck by its nearly schizophrenic quality. Sometimes Harold wrote in a portentous Gibbonesque voice. Sometimes he wrote like a child. Sometimes he was cynical, sometimes literary, and sometimes scientific. “The mind wheels,” Robert Ornstein has written. “It wheels from condition to condition, from emergency to quiescence, from happiness to concern. As it wheels among different states, it selects the various components of the mind which operate in that state.”
There didn’t seem to be one Harold represented in this journal, but dozens of them and Ms. Taylor wasn’t sure which one she would find as she turned each page. Ed school had not prepared her for the multiplicity inside the mind of even a single student. “How do you teach a classroom of Sybils,” Ms. Taylor wondered, “who are breaking apart and re-forming moment by moment in front of you?” Still, she was thrilled. This happened only once every few years—to have a student seize on her suggestion and leap so far ahead.
Step Four
After a few weeks, Ms. Taylor decided Harold was ready to move on to the fourth and final stage of the exercise. The best learners take time to encode information before they begin work on their papers. And Harold had now spent months encoding and re-encoding information. It was time to make an argument and bring it all to a point.
Harold had drawn a picture called “Pericles at the Prom” in one of his journal entries. It showed a guy in a toga in the middle of kids in tuxes and gowns. Ms. Taylor suggested that he use that as his paper title. She noticed that in his journal Harold seemed to alternate between passages on his Greek studies and passages on his high-school life. But creativity consists of blending two discordant knowledge networks. She wanted him to integrate his thoughts on Greece with his thoughts about himself.
Harold sat at home, with his books and journal pages spread out on the floor and bed before him. How to turn all of this into one twelve-page paper? He read, with some embarrassment, some of his old journal entries. He dipped into some of his books. Nothing was coming together. He texted his friends. He played a few games of solitaire. He went on Facebook. He dipped back into some of the old books. He kept interrupting himself and starting over. A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50 percent more time to complete it and makes 50 percent more errors. The brain doesn’t multitask well. It needs to get into a coherent flow, with one network of firings leading coherently to the next.
The problem was that Harold was not mastering his data. It was mastering him. He was hopping from one fact to another, but had found no overall scheme with which to organize them. In a small way he was temporarily like Solomon Shereshevskii, the Russian journalist born in 1886, who could remember everything. In one experiment, researchers showed Shereshevskii a complex formula of thirty letters and numbers on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a box and sealed it for fifteen years. When they took the paper out, Shereshevskii could remember it exactly.
Shereshevskii could remember, but he couldn’t distill. He lived in a random blizzard of facts, but could not organize them into repeating patterns. Eventually he couldn’t even make sense of metaphors, similes, poems, or even complex sentences.
In small form, Harold was in the middle of that kind of impasse. He had a certain paradigm he used when thinking about high school. He had another paradigm he used when thinking about the Greeks. But they weren’t meshing together. He had no core argument for his paper. Being a normal seventeen-year-old kid, he quit for the night.
The next night, he turned off his phone and closed the web browser. He resolved to focus his attention, exile himself from the normal data smog of cyber-connected life, and get something done.
Instead of starting with his own writing, he went back and read Pericles’ funeral oration from The Peloponnesian War. The virtue of reading classic authors is that they are more likely to set your mind racing, and of all the things Harold had read, that speech fired his imagination most. In one passage, for example, Pericles celebrated Athenian culture: “We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining to struggle against it.”
Harold was moved and uplifted. It wasn’t even so much the substance but the lofty cadences and the heroic tone. The spirit of the speech entered his mind and his mood changed. He began to think about heroism, about men and women achieving immortal glory through valor, dedicating their lives to the service of their nation. Pericles celebrated excellence and offered models for imitation.
Harold began to think about the different kinds of Greek heroes he had read about: Achilles, the furious man of war; Odysseus the clever leader who seeks to return to his wife and family; Leonidas, who surrendered his life at Thermopylae; Themistocles, who saved his country through deceit and manipulation; Socrates, who gave his life for truth, and Pericles, the gentleman and statesman.
Over the next few hours, Harold thought about these different flavors of greatness. He intuited that somewhere the key to his paper lay in comparing their styles, or in finding some common thread. Somehow his unconscious mind was telling him that he was on the right track. He had that feeling you get when an answer is on the tip of your tongue.
For the first time since he’d begun the writing stage, his attention was truly focused on the task at hand. He looked at his books and journal entries again for examples of different types of heroism. He was possessed by what Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch.” He had a vague, hard-to-explain sense that he was heading in the right direction, but it would take many delays and much circling around until a solution popped into his head.
We are always besieged by different pieces of information bidding for attention. But in his aroused state, Harold shut out everything that didn’t have to do with Greek ideas of heroism. Music that might have annoyed him suddenly was rendered mute. Sounds and colors disappeared. Scientists call this the “preparatory phase.” When the brain is devoting serious attention to one thing, then other areas, like the visual cortex or the sensory regions, go dark.
Over the next hour or two, Harold pushed himself. He searched for a way to write a paper on heroism, both in Greek and contemporary life. His focus had narrowed but he still did not have an argument. So he went over his books and journal entries yet again to see if some point or argument leaped out at him.
It was hard and frustrating work, like pushing on a series of doors and waiting for one to break open. And yet none of the patterns that popped into Harold’s head bound his thoughts. He started writing notes to himself. He’d come up with an idea and then see a stray piece of paper and realized that he’d come up with the same idea a few hours ago and had already forgotten about it. To make up for the limitations of his short-term memory, he began arranging his notes and journal entries into piles on the floor. He hoped that this process of shuffling his notes would somehow bring some coherence. He put notes on courage in one pile and notes on wisdom into another, but over time the piles began to seem arbitrary. He was loosening his imagination. Sometimes an answer seemed to hang just a few millimeters out of reach. He would follow a hunch, a subtle signal from the mental regions beneath consciousness. But he still had no overall concept. Harold had reach but no reciprocity. He was tired and at an impasse.
Once again, he called it a day and went to bed. It turned out to be the smartest thing he could possibly do. There’s a controversy among scientists about what sleep accomplishes, but many researchers believe that during sleep the brain consolidates memories, organizes the things that have been learned that day, and reinforces the changes in the brain that have been ushered in by the previous day’s activity. The German scientist J
an Born gave a group of people a series of math problems and asked them to discover the rule necessary to solve them. The people who slept for eight hours between work sessions were twice as likely to solve the problems as those who worked straight through. Research by Robert Stickgold and others suggests that sleep improves memory by at least 15 percent.
Harold lay in bed after his night’s sleep, watching the sunlight shimmer off the treetops outside his window. His mind wandered, thinking about his day, his paper, his friends, and a random series of other things. In these sorts of early-morning states, people’s right-brain hemispheres are unusually active. That means his mind wandered over remote domains, not tightly focused on one thing. His mental state was loose and casual. Then something happened.
If scientists had his brain wired up at this moment, they would have noticed a jump in the alpha waves emanating from the right hemisphere. Joy Bhattacharya of the University of London has found that these waves jump about eight seconds before a person has the insight necessary to solve a puzzle. A second before an insight, according to Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kounios, the area that processes visual information goes dark, shutting out distraction. Three hundred milliseconds before insight there is a spike of gamma rhythm, the highest frequency produced by the brain. There is a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the right ear. This is an area, Jung-Beeman and Kounios argue, that draws together pieces of information from wildly different areas of the brain.
Harold experienced a blast of insight, his “Eureka!” moment. Something big had just burst forth from inside him. His eyes went wide. He felt an intense and instantaneous burst of ecstasy. Yes, that’s it! His mind had leaped across some uncharted void and integrated his thinking in a new way. He knew in an instant that he had solved his problem, that he had a theme for his paper, before he could even really say what the solution was. Patterns that had not fit together suddenly felt as if they did. It was a sensation more than a thought, a feeling of almost religious contact. As Robert Burton wrote in his book On Being Certain, “Feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction and certainty aren’t deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us.”
His core insight involved motivation. Why did Achilles risk his life? Why did the men at Thermopylae lay down theirs? What did Pericles seek for himself and for Athens? What does Harold seek for himself at school? Why does he want his team to win state championships?
The answer to all these questions is a Greek word he had come across in his reading: thumos. All his life Harold had been surrounded by people with a set of socially approved motivations: to make money, to get good grades, to get into a good college. But none of these really explained why Harold did what he did, or why the Greek heroes did what they did.
The ancient Greeks had a different motivational structure. Thumos was the desire for recognition, the desire to have people recognize your existence, not only now but for all time. Thumos included the desire for eternal fame—to attract admiration and to be worthy of admiration in a way that was deeper than mere celebrity. Harold’s culture didn’t really have a word for that desire, but this Greek word helped explain Harold to himself.
All his life, he had been playing games in his imagination. He had imagined himself as a boy winning the World Series, throwing the perfect pass, saving his favorite teachers from mortal peril. And in each fantasy, his triumph had been deliriously witnessed by family, friends, and the world around him. This fantasizing, in its childish way, was the product of thumos, the desire for recognition and union, which underlay the other drives for money and success.
The thymotic world was a more heroic world than the bourgeois, careerist one Harold saw all around him. In the modern world in which he lived, the common assumption is that all human beings are attached at the earliest and lowest level. All human beings are descended from common ancestors and share certain primitive traits. But the Greeks tended to assume the opposite, that human beings were united at the highest level: There are certain ideal essences, and the closer one is to taking possession of the eternal excellence, the closer one is to this common humanity. Thumos is the drive to rise up to those heights. It is the dream of the perfect success, when all that is best within oneself blends with all that is eternal in the universe in perfect synchronicity.
Harold’s insight consisted of taking the vocabulary of Greek motivation—thumos, arete, eros—and applying it to his life. Harold was really combining two idea spaces, making the Greek world more comprehensible to him and his own world more heroic.
He began furiously writing notes to himself for his paper, describing how the thymotic drive, this drive for recognition, explained all sorts of high-school behavior. He made connections he had never made before and mixed together old information in new ways. At times he felt as though the paper was writing itself. The words just poured out of him unbidden. When he was deeply in the rush of it, he almost felt like he didn’t exist. Only the task existed, and it was happening to him, not because of him.
Editing and polishing the paper was still not easy, but it came. Ms. Taylor was delighted by the product. It was a little overheated in places, and parts were painfully earnest. But Harold’s rapture came across in every paragraph. The process of writing this paper had taught him how to think. His insight gave him a new way to understand himself and his world.
Greek Gifts
Ms. Taylor had guided Harold through a method that had him surfing in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together—first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then willfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product. The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step. By the end, he was seeing the world around him in a new way. There was, as the mathematician Henri Poincaré observed, “an unsuspected kinship … between facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another.” Harold no longer had to work to apply qualities like thumos to the world around him; they simply became the automatic categories of his mind, the way he perceived new situations.
When he was in kindergarten and first grade, Harold struggled to learn to read, but then it came naturally to him. Suddenly reading wasn’t about piecing together words; he could concentrate on the meanings. As a senior in high school, he had similarly internalized some Greek thought, and now he could automatically apply it to his life moment by moment.
He would go off to college and he would sit in classes as required, but he understood those classes would be only the first stage of his learning. He would have to spend nights writing random thoughts in his journal. He would organize his thoughts on the floor. He would have to stew and struggle and then maybe a few times in his life, while taking a shower or walking to the grocery store, some insight would come to him and make all the difference. This would be his method for escaping passive institutional learning. This would be the way he would build for himself a mind that is not stuck in an inherited rut, but which jumps from vantage point to vantage point, applying different patterns to new situations to see what works and what doesn’t, what will go together and what will not, what is likely to emerge from the confusion of reality and what is not likely to emerge. This would be his path to wisdom and success.
CHAPTER 7
NORMS
ERICA, WHO WOULD SPEND SO MUCH OF HER LIFE INTERTWINED with Harold, started out in a very different place than he. At age ten, she almost got arrested.
She and her mom had moved into a friend’s apartment in a public-housing project. Their new neighborhood had a charter school called the New Hope School, which was in a new building, with new basketball hoops with nets, and with new art studios. The students w
ore elegant maroon and gray uniforms. Erica was desperate to go there.
Her mother took her down to the social welfare agency, and waited in a hallway for over an hour. When they finally got in, the caseworker told them that Erica couldn’t even qualify for the lottery to go there because she didn’t have legal residence in the neighborhood.
The social workers spent their days besieged by impossible requests. To make their lives manageable, they developed a brusque and peremptory way of talking. They kept their eyes focused down at their papers, and sped through the supplicants who came streaming through the doors. They spoke in municipal-government jargon that nobody else could understand and challenge. Their first instinct was always to say no.
The moms had no confidence in settings like that—in an office with people in business dress. Half the time, they couldn’t understand what the caseworker was saying and were afraid of revealing how little they knew about the rules. They put on a mask of apathy and sullenness to disguise their nervousness. Most of the time, they just accepted whatever judgment the caseworker rendered and went home. They’d make up some story to explain their humiliation for their friends later on.
Erica’s mom was following the pattern. They’d moved into this neighborhood three months before, but the truth is they had no legal status there. It was a friend’s apartment, and Erica’s mom didn’t want to raise a fuss about the school and risk getting evicted from her home. When the caseworker kept repeating that she had “no authorization” to be in the school district, Erica’s mom stood up and got ready to leave.
Erica refused to budge. She could already imagine the way her mom would be on the bus ride home—cursing the caseworker, spewing out all the anger she should have let loose right here in the office. Plus, the caseworker was a bitch—chewing gum, looking down on them. She’d barely looked up from her papers to make even a show of eye contact. She hadn’t even tried to smile.