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In this edition of the MenLiving Thought Leader Series, Patrick NcKenna interviews Dr. Frank Keil, Professor of Cognitive Science and Director of the Cognition and Development Lab at Yale University, and author of the book, Wonder: Childhood and the Lifelong Love of Science.  They explore the beauty of wonder, being curious at every age, why we can lose our sense of wonder and how we can get it back. 

Patrick:
I know that Cognitive Studies in psychology has been a focal point of your career. I’m curious to know what pushed you into writing this new book, “Wonder.”

Frank:
Oh, that’s a good question. It is not like my other books that were more academic and for my specialty colleagues. This arose as a personal book. I put myself in this much more than I do normally in my writing, and it arose from a variety of things. It arose from my own children and the arrival of my first grandchild, who was just asking why questions everywhere. It arose from thinking about what I enjoy the most… it starts with the last arc of my life. I still just love to learn, and I think it’s the one thing no one can take away from you. And not everyone has this. I said, why do they lose it? Kids are extraordinary about it.

Patrick:
Right.

Frank:
So, I started to dive deeper and look to my own work and research and reading other people’s research, and it charged me up. To be honest, since writing the book, I’ve been wondering at a much more avid rate. The metaphor I used in the book is it’s like sharpening a lens. It’s like you suddenly see the world more crisply and clearly. You see a 3D color version of what was formerly black and white, kind of fuzzy.

We explore how things work. We look at spring, and we can know what’s making those bird songs take off, and how that evolved. We can learn why flowers bloom the way they do, and there’s a million more things to learn. One thing I did put in the book, but not as much as I perhaps could have, is just how powerful wonder works. We are always able to discuss and discover. If people are, I don’t want to say humble, they can say, “I don’t know this stuff.” I think that makes people cooler because there’s so much to learn.

Patrick:
Yeah.

Frank:
And so, I think we should challenge our beliefs all the time. I often interrogate myself and say, “I think I understood this. Do I really?” And I dig deeper, and I usually find out I don’t. I have to go dig deeper and deeper. So that’s what the book is about, why kids are built this way, their extraordinary abilities. Up to about age four or five, they are just amazing little detectives about how the world works.

 And unfortunately, we (our culture) tend to quash this inquisitiveness. Schools don’t want to foster it…they standardize tests and curiosity disappears in many cases. We all are led to follow this specific, rigid path. You see men and women both following it, and it’s just too bad.

Patrick:
Yeah. Absolutely. So how much overlap was there between the research you did specifically for this book and the work you do as a Yale Professor of Psychology & Linguistics

Frank:
For the data collection and the empirical research, I do experiments. That continued throughout writing the book because I got interested in what it means to understand mechanisms and how things work. We were looking at mechanism versus function versus facts and so on.

But at the same time, I really didn’t know. I went into researching the revolution in education because I’d heard it might be relevant. I went really into the Enlightenment and what happened with… just the Age of Wonder. There is a wonderful historical book called the Age of Wonder, what that meant, how insight took off. I read the lives of academics because these are people, men, and women, who just couldn’t stop. They just consumed by wanting to learn and loving it. The amazing people’s lives fascinated me.

Patrick:
Absolutely.

Frank:
I kept reading more and more, and then I got interested in how if you fail to wonder, you tend to fall into these terrible susceptibilities to fake news or information. You deny stuff. Basically, you start disavowing real science, and that’s a terrible thing. But it’s easy to do if you’re not asking questions. Wondering is unusual. It’s daring and audacious, but it’s also humble, because you’re saying, “Is this actually, correct? I don’t know. Tell me, explain it to me.”

That’s in a nutshell how I started with my own work for the book. I started reading more and more deeply. I started reading about the lives of great people who were lifelong wonderers, and it just took off. That was an amazing year. It took a couple years to write it, but for one solid year, I was just devouring reading and writing, reading and writing.

Patrick:
That’s so interesting what you say about just that need to have that back and forth over what we might believe or what we see as true, and it not be coming from a place of “Let me convince you,” but instead, “Let’s keep digging deep.”

Frank:
Right. Unfortunately, a lot of people fall into this “arguing to win” trap.  But we have to remember that arguing is fun and not threatening if you do it right. Our lab meetings are always arguments. I’ll say that I just came across a phenomenon the other day, and I’ll then say, “Wow, this is really strong. Tell me some reasons why it can’t be true because I don’t want to go out there and say I have this finding and find out I’ve missed something.” So, I invite people to challenge me, and then we argue and discuss it.

Patrick:
Yeah. Absolutely. A big theme in the book is the questioning and curiosity that children have when asking how or why things are the way they are. What can adults learn from children about rediscovering their own sense of curiosity?

Frank:
A bunch of things. If you look very carefully, the questions kids ask, they most want to know about how things work. They don’t want to know facts and things, but they want to know why now. And all too often, we ask for facts.

We should focus on why and how questions, and those are quite intricate. There are different kinds of why and how questions. And the more you do it, the better you get. You should ask open-ended questions. When you talk to kids and other people, don’t ask, “Is this true, yes or no?” Or “What’s the answer to this?” You ask, “How did this work?” And they have to give you a longer response.

When you talk to kids, they don’t have just one-line answers and then they’re done. Adults can be the same way. Be happy to confess your ignorance. It doesn’t mean you’re stupid. You know the history of the more people know, the more they realize what they don’t know. There’s no shame in not knowing. There’s a delight in wanting to learn. Be inquisitive.

I’ve been reading a lot about the evolution of synthesis physics that started with Faraday and ends up with Maxwell’s equations. And it’s hard to get at first, but as you dig deeper and follow the narrative, it’s amazing. I like doing those deep dives. But if you’re starting out, start out with some simpler approaches.

Patrick:
Yeah, definitely. Going back to something you said earlier, you wrote about how that loss of wondering can sometimes lead to a hostility towards scientists and science in general. I’m wondering if you can elaborate more on how that starts and the dangers that it can lead to.

Frank:
Sure, it starts as a kid in elementary school.

Just before they start school, kids are asking up to 100 why questions a day. Upon arriving at school, records suggest they’re asking zero to two a day. Now, some of the teachers aren’t bad people, but they have a class of 25 kids, and they are mandated to teach to these standardized tests, and sometimes these are high stake tests, and they are all fact based. There is no appreciation for the next generation getting curious and thinking for themselves.
There is a lot of language about all this incredibly inspirational deep thought and what’s called learning progressions. But in the end, the testing is really, just fact checks. Like how big is Uranus or which is the outermost planet. This doesn’t get them thinking…they are just memorizing stuff.

Patrick:
Yeah.

Frank:
When a child’s curiosity is limited, learning can stop being fun. It starts being work. Schools are into rewarding kids for performance. And there’s huge literature showing that when you reward kids for doing something they like to do, they say, why are you rewarding me? They begin to equate reward with work. This approach ruins their experience by converting play to work.

Patrick:
You speak about this power of wonder with such enthusiasm. The way you describe wonder it all about  fun and curiosity creates a cascade of follow-up questions about whatever topic we’re talking about and that is thrilling.

Frank:
That’s a great phrase. Cascade is exactly right. It’s ever expanding. That’s exactly what happens.  You start digging away at things and unraveling things, and it’s just amazing what you can uncover. And that’s the fun of it. I got interested in why leaves fall in the fall and how they know how to do it. And it turns out they have basically like a dotted line on the back of the leaf. There are specialized cells, they get a signal, and they just fall. There’s a whole mechanism. It’s quite elaborate.

Take one little question. My granddaughter, a three-year-old, said, “Why don’t cardinals migrate?” Well, I never knew cardinals didn’t migrate. And when I investigated it, I learned all sorts of things about cardinals…now I am interested in why cardinals are red. Just because they eat red things, just certain compound, mixture. And it’s a sign of sexual virility and health. So, I see cardinals differently now, when I see a cardinal hopping around my lawn, I think, “Boy, that guy must be really dying to attract a mate. He’s really going after the tomatoes.” And it’s just a whole different way of thinking.

Patrick:
For MenLiving, we are all about authentic connection with others, but then also with yourself, and being able to rediscover this curiosity and just playfulness that we all had in childhood. And I know you’ve hit on this a little bit, but do you have maybe more for these adults that have lost this power of wonder, do you have any tips to get it back?

Frank:

The book’s a little unusual in that I put most of the “concrete things” at the end of the book. You are asking about tips or action items?

Patrick:
Yeah, action items.

Frank:
It requires some work and effort, but we need to be more proactive here and think about ways to engage. I teach a seminar for seniors where everyone must come up with something they know nothing about, nothing related to their major, and learn as much as they can about the subject in a week and explain it to the class in 10 minutes with no slides.

Just a talk. And I’ve absolutely forbidden PowerPoints. I want to see them express themselves and learn to do it clearly. And I say practice, go to a mirror do it, do it with your friends. I want a beautiful exposition. And they are joyous when they do it, and the whole class gets excited. It can be anything. How birds learn to sing, how the first plants in spring break through the frost, how tides work. And of course, they can’t do the whole story, but they learn the art of getting some of the key issues and what questions remain. And I wouldn’t say every kid gets it, but out of 18 kids in the seminar, 15 or so say, “I’m really going to do life a little differently.” And they start getting excited about it. Some kids are doing it already, but some kids get turned onto it. It can’t equate with schoolwork. It’s not like that at all.

Patrick:
After reading the book and just thinking about this conversation, it has made me reexamine my own behavior, how I approach things when it comes to just digging deeper.  I’m someone who told himself this false narrative in high school, where I was like, I’m a writer and I struggle with math and science…I’m just not very good at math and science. Those aren’t for me. And so-

Frank:
Science is for everyone. Science is for everything. If you didn’t like it, it wasn’t taught right. I talk in the book about this fabulous teacher I had who taught science with history. It’s an amazingly personal story that appeals to humanities inclined people, but you get the science eventually too. And if you’re not comfortable with math, there’s lots of ways to do science qualitatively.

Patrick:
Right.

Frank:
And so, I do emphasize science, if only because the progress designs are so obvious. It’s clear when we’ve got insights. Humanities and the social sciences are tougher to make a case.

Patrick:
Yeah. So, my last question… that’s really fascinating. It’s illuminating to someone like me because I do want to bring it into my own life. But my last question, it’s more about relationships. How can meaningful relationships with the people in our lives, friends, family, or a relationship with a stranger like me to you, how do you think those healthy relationships can rekindle that fire of maybe wanting to learn more about ourselves and about the world around us?

Frank:
So shared interest. You married?

Patrick:
No, I have a partner of over a year and a half. We just moved in together

Frank:

Okay, so you and your girlfriend, what’s your most common shared interest? What do you both enjoy doing the most?

Patrick:
I think probably going to concerts. That’s something that’s big…we’re both big music people,

Frank:
One of my students did the science of chord systems and how the guitar generates sound. There’s a huge, interesting science of resonant instruments and chords and circle of fifths. There’s a lot of science underlying music.

It’s fascinating stuff. So maybe, you don’t have to be nerdy, but you can start looking into that a little bit more. Why do we have the chord system we do? What about guitar music? It’s very different. Are we native, do we have an innate sense of music? I’ve never explored it, but that’s one thing you can do. You can look at the construction of musical instruments. Why do certain ones resonate much better than others? What made a great piano? There’s an engineering question. They say that Steinways are great. But there’s a piano made by a small company I’ve heard that experts say built the best piano of all. What was it about… what materials did they use?

By diving deeper, the next time you hear somebody play, you go “Wow, I can see that. Their resonance is a little bit different.”

Patrick:
Yeah. Absolutely.

Frank:
There’s some psychology that gets interesting, too. A famous story about a great pianist. As he got older, he couldn’t move his fingers fast enough to do some of the very quick piano sequences, but he learned how to slur the keys and create an illusion of speed. So that’s a bit of a human factor and so yeah, music is very interesting topic to dig into. But so it is with any topic, you can dive deeper and see, what are the causal factors that make this stick and work?

That’s what it all comes down to. So, you’re in Chicago? I was going to say if you’re in Colorado, go to Red Rock. Take a vacation… you know where Red Rock is?

Patrick:

Oh yeah, I’ve been there.

Frank:
Yeah. That’s a gorgeous spot to enjoy music.

Patrick:
Yeah, definitely.

Frank:
You can ask that question. Why does this spot work? It’s just another fascinating topic you can dive into.

 

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