Thinking with Peers

The title of this post is identical to the title of a chapter in new book by Annie Murphy Paul with some new ideas and data. The subtitle is The Power of Thinking Outside the Brain.

Ms. Paul writes, “Carl Wieman knows his way around a perplexing problem. A professor of physics at Stanford University, Wieman was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2001 for figuring out (along with his colleague Eric Cornell) how to create in the laboratory, an extreme state of matter known as the Bose-Einstein condensate. But Wieman’s mastery in the lab did not extend to the classroom, as he would be the first to admit. For years he wrestled with what would seem to be a straightforward task: how to get undergraduates to understand physics in the way he understood physics. Laying it out for them—describing, explaining, even demonstrating the core concepts of the discipline—was not working. No matter how clearly he elucidated these ideas no matter how energetically he communicated them, his students’ ability to solve problems he posed to them remained rudimentary.

Wieman ultimately found the key to his conundrum in an unexpected place: not in his undergraduate classes but among the graduate students who came to work in his laboratory. When they first arrived at the lab, Wieman noticed his PhD candidates were more like the undergrads than not. They knew plenty about physics, but their habits of thought were narrow and rigid. Within just a year or two, however, these same graduate students had grown into models of the kind of supple, flexible thinkers Wieman was trying so earnestly, and unsuccessfully, to mold. ‘It was clear to me there was some kind of intellectual process present in the research lab that was sorely missing from the traditional education process.’

A major factor in the grad students’ transformation, he concluded, was their experience of intense social engagement around a body of knowledge—the hours they spent advising, debating with, and recounting anecdotes to one another. A 2019 study published in the Processing of the National Academy of Sciences supports Wieman’s hunch. Tracing the intellectual advancement of several hundred graduate students in the sciences over the course of four years, its authors found that the development of crucial skills such as generating hypotheses, designing experiments, and analyzing data was closely related to the students’ engagement with their peers in the lab, and not to the guidance they received from their faculty mentors.

Wieman is one of a growing number of professors in the STEM disciplines who are bringing this ‘active learning’ approach to their courses. Research demonstrates that students who engage in active learning acquire a deeper understanding of the material, score higher on exams, and are less likely to fail or drop out. Wieman, who holds an appointment in Stanford’s school of education as well as in its physics department, spends most of his time evangelizing for more effective ways of teaching science; he donated his Nobel Prize winnings to improving physics instruction. His aspiration is to move science education away from the lecture format, toward a model that is more active and more engaged.

Wieman is working to achieve a wider recognition of an often overlooked truth: the development of intelligent thinking is fundamentally a social process. We can engage in thinking on our own of course, and at times solitary cognition is what’s called for by a particular problem or process. Even then solo thinking is rooted in our lifelong experience of social interaction; linguists and cognitive scientists theorize that the constant patter we carry on in our heads is a kind of intellectual conversation. Our brains evolved to think with people: to teach them, to argue with them, to exchange stories with them. Human thought is exquisitely sensitive to context and one of the most powerful contexts of all is the presence of other people. As a consequence when we think socially, we think differently—and often better—than when we think non-socially.

To offer just one example: the brain stores social information differently than it stores information that is non-social. Social memories are encoded in a distinct region of the brain. What’s more, we remember social information more accurately, a phenomenon that psychologists call the ‘social encoding advantage.’ If findings like this feel unexpected, that’s because our culture largely excluded social interaction from the realm of the intellect. Social exchanges with others might be enjoyable or entertaining. This attitude holds but they’re no more than a diversion what we do around the edges of school or work. Serious thinking, real thinking, is done on one’s own, sequestered from others.”