when baby does. Some employees sneak out to their cars.
Even better would be if schools and businesses deliberately planned downshifts during the nap zone. Naps would be accorded the same deference that businesses reluctantly treat lunch, or even potty breaks: a necessary nod to an employee’s biological needs. Companies could create a designated space for employees to take one half-hour nap each workday. The advantage would be straightforward. People hired for their intellectual strength would be allowed to keep that strength in tip-top shape. “What other management strategy will improve people’s performance 34 percent in just 26 minutes?” said Mark Rosekind, the NASA scientist who conducted that eye-opening research on naps and pilot performance.
Sleep on it
Given the data about a good night’s rest, organizations might tackle their most intractable problems by having the entire “solving team” go on a mini-retreat. Once arrived, employees would be presented with the problem and asked to think about solutions. But they would not start coming to conclusions, or even begin sharing ideas with each other, before they had slept about eight hours. When they awoke, would the same increase in problem-solving rates available in the lab also be available to that team? It’s worth finding out.
Brain Rule #3
Sleep well, think well.
• The brain is in a constant state of tension between cells and chemicals that try to put you to sleep and cells and chemicals that try to keep you awake.
• The neurons of your brain show vigorous rhythmical activity when you’re asleep—perhaps replaying what you learned that day.
• People vary in how much sleep they need and when they prefer to get it, but the biological drive for an afternoon nap is universal.
• Loss of sleep hurts attention, executive function, working memory, mood, quantitative skills, logical reasoning, and even motor dexterity.
Brain Rule #4
Stressed brains don’t learn the same way.
IT IS, BY ANY measure, a thoroughly rotten experiment. Here is this beautiful German shepherd, lying in one corner of a metal box, whimpering. He is receiving painful electric shocks, stimuli that should leave him howling in pain. Oddly enough, the dog could easily get out. The other side of the box is perfectly insulated from shocks, and only a low barrier separates the two sides. Though the dog could jump over to safety when the whim strikes him, the whim doesn’t strike him. He just lies down in the corner of the electric side, whimpering with each jarring jolt. He must be physically removed by the experimenter to be relieved of the experience.
What has happened to that dog?
A few days before entering the box, the animal was strapped to a restraining harness rigged with electric wires, inescapably receiving the same painful shock day and night. And at first he didn’t just stand there taking it, he reacted. He howled in pain. He urinated. He strained mightily against his harness in an increasingly desperate attempt to link some behavior of his with the cessation of the pain. But it was no use. As the hours and even days ticked by, his resistance eventually subsided. Why? The dog began to receive a very clear message: The pain was not going to stop; the shocks were going to be forever. There was no way out. Even after the dog had been released from the harness and placed into the metal box with the escape route, he could no longer understand his options. Learning had been shut down.
Those of you familiar with psychology already know I am describing a famous set of experiments begun in the late 1960s by legendary psychologist Martin Seligman. He coined the term “learned helplessness” to describe both the perception of inescapability and its associated cognitive collapse. Many animals behave in a similar fashion when punishment is unavoidable, and that includes humans. Inmates in concentration camps routinely experienced these symptoms in response to their horrid conditions. Some camps gave it the name Gammel, derived from the colloquial German word Gammeln, which literally means “rotting.” Perhaps not surprisingly, Seligman spent the rest of his career studying how humans respond to optimism.
What is so awful about severe, chronic stress that it can cause behavioral changes as devastating as learned helplessness? Why is learning so radically altered? We’ll begin with a definition of stress, talk about biological responses, and then move to the relationship between stress and learning. Along the way, we will talk about marriage and parenting, about the workplace, and about the first and only time I ever heard my mother, a fourth-grade teacher, swear. It was her first real encounter with learned helplessness.
What is stress? It depends
Not all stress is the same. Certain types of stress really hurt learning, but some types of stress boost learning. Second, it’s difficult to detect when someone is experiencing stress. Some people love skydiving for recreation; it’s others’ worst nightmare. Is jumping out of an airplane inherently stressful? The answer is no, and that highlights the subjective nature of stress.
The body alone isn’t of much help in providing a definition, either. There is no unique grouping of physiological responses capable of telling a scientist whether you are experiencing stress. That’s because many of the mechanisms that cause you to shrink in horror from a predator are the same mechanisms used when you are having sex—or even while you are consuming your Thanksgiving dinner. To your body, saber-toothed tigers and orgasms and turkey gravy look remarkably similar. An aroused physiological state is characteristic of both stress and pleasure.
So what’s a scientist to do? A few years ago, gifted researchers Jeansok Kim and David Diamond came up with a three-part definition that covers many of the bases. In their view, if all three are happening simultaneously, a person is stressed.
A measurable physiological response: There must be an aroused physiological response to the stress, and it must be measurable by an outside party. I saw this the first time my then 18-month-old son encountered a carrot on his plate at dinner. He promptly went ballistic: He screamed and cried and peed in his diaper. His aroused physiological state was immediately measurable by his dad, and probably by anyone else within a half mile of our kitchen table.
A desire to avoid the situation: The stressor must be perceived as aversive—something that, given the choice, you’d rather not experience. It was obvious where my son stood on the matter. Within seconds, he snatched the carrot off his plate and threw it on the floor. Then he deftly got down off his chair and tried to stomp on the predatory vegetable.
A loss of control: The person must not feel in control of the stressor. Like a volume knob on some emotional radio, the more the loss of control, the more severe the stress is perceived to be. This element of control and its closely related twin, predictability, lie at the heart of learned helplessness. My son reacted as strongly as he did in part because he knew I wanted him to eat the carrot, and he was used to doing what I told him to do. Control was the issue. Despite my picking up the carrot, washing it, then rubbing my tummy while enthusiastically saying “yum, yum,” he was having none of it. Or, more important, he wanted to have none of it, and he thought I was going to make him have all of it. Feeling out of control over the carrot equaled out-of-control
