Before you read this essay, take five minutes to do a little experiment. Watch this You Tube video:

Promoting cognitive development.

Have you heard about the Gorilla that went missing? Yes, the now famous You Tube video of the Gorilla that walks on screen, thumps “his” chest, and exits, only to be totally overlooked by half the people who watched? How in the world can anyone miss seeing something so unusual and “obvious”? We actually see with our brains, not our eyes. If we are not expecting to see something, it can be totally “overlooked”.

The research involving the Gorilla has many interesting variations involving other errors in observation* or perception. We now know that “what you see is not what you get”. Eyewitnesses to the same events recall them very differently. Even the versions offered by the same person change over time, as the brain alters, embellishes and edits what it has “remembered”. Sometimes people and events from different times and places are incorporated into a memory that the person swears to recall with 100% certainty.

And these misperceptions or distortions were committed by adults – with IQ making no difference. So what does that say for the reality our children make of their day-to-day lives? Children whose brains are not fully developed, who are not yet capable of integrating the different parts of their lives or have the experience to draw upon to reason about the meaning of events?

Therapists and clients spend endless hours searching through the past, trying to make sense of what happened, how it felt and what it meant. What is remembered? What is reality? What was traumatic and what effect has it had? It is increasingly the case that it is our interpretation of the experience and our reaction to it that defines our reality.

The simple take-away message for parents is this – get to the child before the cement dries. Regularly asking your child about his day affords you the opportunity to be attuned to what is going on in his life, who his friends are, what he finds interesting and … what is upsetting him. An event for one child may be insignificant, while for another be traumatic. We cannot assume to know without asking. And for those events that are traumatic, what makes them so? Asking your child to explain and elaborate not only makes the process available to you, but it also calls upon him to listen to what he is saying and reflect upon it. Saying it out loud is different than letting it bounce around in his head, unedited. Just as writing reveals gaps in logic or areas left incomplete, so does the telling of his story. The causal connections and interpretations he has made that make us cringe are then available – not for criticism, but for understanding (via our curiosity).

Asking for elaboration can often allow a child to find his own dead ends in logic. Sometimes our questions of “How do you know that?” or “What did he (actually) say?” ease the process along. And when the script is totally out of control, we have the opportunity to say, “Do you want to know what I think?” or “Why don’t you ask her (what she said, meant, did)?” or “Do you really think you are a &*!# ?”. Without our help children can fail to challenge assumptions about themselves and others.

What better place for the development of logical thinking and healthy skepticism. We want our children to know for certain that there is no such thing as certainty.

Our brains are designed to jump to conclusions, to come up with immediate explanations for what has just happened. In terms of evolution, it was essential for survival. Our brains are wired to attribute causes to observations. Any good student knows that correlation does not necessarily mean causation, but the saber-toothed tigers ate most of the guys who stopped to analyze their data before running. Ultimately, the slower, analytical thinking is what eventually got us off the saber-toothed tiger menu for good. Ideally, we need both the quick reacting and the slow analyzing processes.

Children are vulnerable to jumping to conclusions due to this built in quick firing brain process, but they are additionally compromised because their brains and life experiences limit their ability to do the careful slow analysis of their assumptions or conclusions.They are dependent upon adults for this sorting through and analyzing work as their cortexes continue to develop. Yet, as many adults prove, careful analysis does not come with age and capacity. We all have a built in tendency to stick with these quickly formed assumptions. Logical thinking and analysis – where assumptions are tested – must be learned. That process begins with a parent’s curiosity and requests for elaboration and explanations.

Sleep is when our brains do much of the work of converting memories to more permanent storage. Bedtime is a good time to talk. It is also a good time to get to our children’s potential certainty before the cement dries. Then, at least, when he sleeps, the annotated version of his day is going into the memory bank.

Bedtime is for reading stories, telling stories, and listening to your child’s stories. This is when they can tell you about their day, how it affected them, and what they’re concerned about. Genuine curiosity about what happened and what sense they made of it conveys caring and promotes attunement. It also brings these quickly formed conclusions out to see if they survive the “analysis” entailed in listening to themselves talk about it and explain why they believe what they have concluded.

Key Competencies: Logical thinking; communication; relatedness (engagement)

Key Words: Inattentional blindness; certainty; elaboration; listening; genuine curiosity; expectations; biases

If you thought their YouTube was interesting, wait until you read their book: The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us, by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons. The implications for inattentive blindness are profound and often life threatening. You will also look both ways at an intersection, twice!

The work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky described significant biases in judgement and decision making. Regardless of intelligence level, humans make judgement errors due to built in cognitive biases or unconscious errors in reasoning. For a complete summary of what you don’t know and what you don’t know you don’t know, read Kahneman’s new book Thinking, Fast and Slow. He describes our intuitive System 1 brains as capable of drawing quick judgments and causal conclusions and our analytical System 2 brains as capable of slower, more deliberate thought. Unfortunately, System 2 not only fails to get involved enough, but when it does it is often in the service of substantiating a false assumption that originated with System 1. I do not do justice to a great book. If you are at all curious about how we think and make decisions, it is a must read. For a review, see Two Brains Running, by Jim Holt of the New York Times.