Thinking about thinking

Metacognition is the most evident predictor for if a person is going to be successful in his or her studies and in his or her life. This is shown by a well-known study commonly referred to as 'The marshmallow task'. This tasks studies the behavior of four year olds and whether or not they settle with one marshmallow or are able to wait for fifthteen minutes and then gets two marshmallows.

Jonah Lehrer writes on his blog in The New Yorker that this ability to wait for fifthteen minutes is all about self-control. This self-control is obtained by using the ability metacognition, which is to think about your own thinking. The kids that actually could wait for fifthteen minutes realized that if they focused on the object of their desires - that is, the marshmallow - they would lose. Instead they directed their attention away from the marshmallow. They did good-for-nothing distracter tasks, until fifthteen minutes had passed and they received their rewards.

After an amount of years, when the kids had grown up into teenagers or young adults, they did a follow-up study. This time they compared the results in The marshmallow task to what the person had obtained in life, e.g. their grades. It was shown that the task was the most powerful predictor of whether you were a successful student or not. Metacognition therefore has a very powerful part to play in life.

When I think of myself, I think of my own thinking about desires. I often think about desires and of how I can arrange my life and my surroundings so as to most easily not only follow my tempting-for-the-moment-desires. When I think about desire I think of it as something that restricts myself form attaining my long-term goals. Desire is something I indulge in for a short period of time, and then have to push myself up from to be able to be content with my life and myself. The objects of my desires often stand in contradiction to my long-term goals. This is because my desires are what they are because they are trouble-free, easy to obtain and are forbidden - this funnily enough only because they stand in contradiction to my long-term goals and values about life.

So if I have a desire to watch stupid TV-shows all night, I sometimes indulge in that desire and feel really bad afterwards. And if I maybe, for a time, instead read books in the evenings, which fits my long-term goal (which is to learn interesting things and have interesting thoughts), I feel really good about myself instead.

One task that really put your metacognition up to the test, is the project National Novel Writing Month. When participating in this huge writing project, you set a goal to write 30.000 words in exactly a month. This requires that you restrain yourself from your desires and are able to delay the gratification. You have to wait a month! That's not a short period of time and to be able to feel good in a months time you have to put some effort in every day and really restrain yourself from your desires every single day.

I made it. I wasn't able to restrain myself from my desires every day, but at the end of the month, I had my 30.000 words. I remember this month as one of the most interesting months of my life, where I was so full of fun thoughts and had so many creative ideas. This was even though I also went through a really turbulent time as I split up from my partner and had to find a new place to live.

Why do I feel bad when I obey my desires? For me it seems like a kind of cognitive dissonance. My behavior clashes with my values which creates anxiety and an inconsistence in my life. I can handle this in two ways. Either, I can change my behavior and not watch TV. Or, I can put another element into play, which acts as a buffer and makes me feel not so bad. This element could be a motivation phrased "Watching TV is really not so bad because I can learn things from 'Friends' and anyway I'm really tired tonight and wouldn't be able to concentrate on reading a book".

This is how I do things most of the time. But when competing in NaNoWriMo I instead had this alliance with my values and didn't have to come up with these elements that handled cognitive dissonance. While not cluttering my mind with useless thoughts, my cognitive effort could instead go directly to having fun and really creative thoughts. I opened up a "thought space" and this made me feel unlimited and unconstrained in my thoughts and in my life.

This is an example what metacognition can do to you. Metacognition allows you to think about your thinking and controlling your attention so you can accomplish what you want to accomplish. One really important question is therefore; how can you teach metacognition in school? How can you integrate metacognition in the ordinary education?

The ordinary education today has more and more of a particular element in it. That is - interactive learning games. Learning games teachers and schools conveniently let the pupils play with because it is both cheap for the schools, easy for the teachers and fun for the pupils. But what is the quality of the learning in the games? Is it merely a fun activity? Donald Norman talks about two different kinds of cognition; experiental and reflective. Doing something interactive like playing some sports, watching a movie or playing a game is the experiental kind. The reflective mode is about contemplating, and is a slow process which requires a quiet environment. Both modes are essential for human performance. But in a learning environment where pupils need to grasp something unfamiliar, they need to reflect on that concept and think about it.

But this isn't what currently is happening. The educational system is more and more trapped in an experiental mode, where we strive to keep our students engaged by entertaining them. But maybe we can outsmart the system? Maybe we can turn our interactive learning games into being reflective rather than reactive?

One important question should therefore be; how can you integrate the concept of metacognition and reflective cognition in interactive learning games? How can you turn something experiental into something reflective?

This is something that a cognitive scientist should do.