Parents and teachers expend a lot of energy getting kids to pay attention, concentrate, and focus on the task in front of them. What adults don’t do, according to University of Southern California education professor Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, is teach children the value of the more diffuse mental activity that characterizes our inner lives: daydreaming, remembering, reflecting.
Yet this kind of introspection is crucial to our mental health, to our relationships, and to our emotional and moral development. And it promotes the skill parents and teachers care so much about: the capacity to focus on the world outside our heads.
Our brains have two operating systems, Immordino-Yang and her coauthors explain in an article [PDF] to be published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science. The first, which they call the “looking out system,” orients our attention to the external environment, allowing us to get stuff done. The other, which they term the “looking in system,” directs us inward, setting our thoughts
free to wander. By scanning the brains of study subjects asked simply to rest and relax, scientists have discovered that our minds are anything but inactive in these moments. Relieved of the obligation to pay attention to what’s going on around us, we engage instead with a rich internal environment: recalling the past, imagining the future, replaying recent interactions and sorting out our feelings. It’s when we engage our brains’ “looking in” mode, notes Immordino-Yang, that we make meaning out of the mass of experiences and information we encounter when we’re “looking out.”
Young people may have fewer opportunities to exercise the vital capacity of introspection. Immordino-Yang fingers two culprits: educational practices that demand constant attentiveness, even from young children, and a hyper-connected world that insistently draws attention away from the world inside. “If youths overuse social media, if they spend very little waking time free from the possibility that a text will interrupt them,” the authors write, “we would expect that these conditions might predispose youths toward focusing on the concrete, physical and immediate aspects of situation and self, with less inclination toward considering the abstract, longer-term, moral and emotional implications of their and others’ actions.”