If nothing else, mindfulness training might help balance against the cognitive consequences of the media-saturated (and hence distraction-rife) world we have come to live in. Would you draw a similar line for physical fitness as for mental acuity? There’s a whole host of innocuous (heck, beneficial!) things that your position seems to obligate you to stand against. It just seems to me that you’re drawing it in awfully benign territory. Of course there is a line to be drawn as the relentless pursuit of human achievement encroaches upon our capacity for self-acceptance and being-oneself. The whole enterprise of schooling is an improvement initiative what exactly justifies the pronounced scrutiny and skepticism under which you place this particular program? Is it simply that it represents a foray beyond the level of the ‘normal’ – an arbitrary and rising watermark if there ever was one? John, I understand your concern – superfluity of the reductio ad Nazium aside – but I fail to see how this method of “tinkering with our kids” is substantively morally different from educating them in the first place.
Image Credit: Calligraphy by Kanjuro Shibata What it does for kids is much like what mindfulness-based stress reduction does for adults: captures the advantages of ages-old meditation techniques and transposes so that it is applicable to the modern world.Ī wonderful piece of brain technology indeed. The MindUP™ program has obvious roots in Buddhist meditation techniques but is decidedly non-religious. “My child is always talking about his prefrontal cortex and amygdala – he is so happy and has been teaching all of us MindUP™ at home.” His mom was amazed… and told the teacher and many parents at school.” While in the car, he told his mom he knew why the other boy bullied him…he said the boy did not use his pre-frontal cortex to make good decisions and he often acted that way because of his amygdala. Apparently he spent some time thinking about what had happened. Recently this student had contact with his previous class and classmates. “A kindergarten student who was being bullied in school was moved to another class. It really helped me basically with a lot of things, like sleeping through the night, eating, being happier at school, making new friends and blocking out my little sister’s nagging!” Some testimonials from the MindUP™ website. As an added benefit, MindUP™ is also making kids budding neurobiologists – each lesson is accompanied by a description of what goes on in the brain when one practices mindfulness, and kids apparently go home to their families and tell them about their brains. It has turned into a full-fledged meme, spreading like wildfire in the absence of marketing. High school teachers are starting to ask for a version of the program for their students. When teachers who are not using the program see what a powerful positive effect it is having on kids in other classes, they clamour for having the curriculum included in their daily lesson plans. The results are not yet published, but even the non-quantitative results are compelling.
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Kim is in the process of carrying out a proper experiment on the MindUP™ program, with some classes receive no training, others receiving sham training, and other getting the full MindUP™ curriculum. Because each session of the program is brief, children are not only able to manage it but love it, telling their friends & families about their experiences on a regular basis. Three times a day, kids are given three minutes of a version of mindfulness training which, in aggregate, takes them through four 30 minute lessons: (1) Quieting the mind (2) Our senses (3) Practical Applications (4) Mindfulness and ourselves in the world. What she told me was nothing less than astonishing. Supported by the Hawn Foundation for Mindful Education, the MindUP™ program is reaping great rewards for schoolchildren in Vancouver and beyond. I had the pleasure of spending a couple of hours on an airplane yesterday speaking with UBC Associate Professor Kim Schonert-Reich, one of the lead researchers on the efficacy of the MindUP™ curriculum on schoolchildren. The MindUP™ program, developed by actress Goldie Hawn and neurologist Judy Willis uses short bouts of mindfulness training to help elementary school children learn to regulate their own brains. If you think this is a fantasy, you would be wrong.
Imagine a brain manipulation which gives children greater mental focus, improves empathy, and increases optimism.
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