The Social Animal

CHAPTER 6 LEARNING

POPULAR, GOOD-LOOKING, AND ATHLETIC CHILDREN ARE THE subjects of relentless abuse. While still young and impressionable, they are force-fed a diet of ugly duckling fables to which they cannot possibly relate. They are compelled to endure endless Disney movies that tell them that true beauty lies inside. In high school, the most interesting teachers favor the brainy students who are rendered ambitious by social resentments and who have time on Saturday nights to sit at home and develop adult-pleasing interests in Miles Davis or Lou Reed. After graduation the popular and good-looking have few role models save for local weathermen and game-show hosts, while the nerds can emulate any number of modern moguls, from Bill Gates to Sergey Brin. For as it is written, the last shall be first and the geek shall inherit the Earth.

And yet Harold, forever cheerful, carried the burden of his adolescent looks and popularity lightly. He’d had his growth spurt early, and had been a playground sports star through junior high. The other kids had caught up with him in size and surpassed him in ability, but he still played with a confidence that inspired deference and respect. Together, he and his thin-waisted, square-shouldered friends were notable for their ability to produce noise. Sound radiated out of their pores. They greeted one another explosively across the high-school hallways. If there was a water bottle at hand, they’d play an exuberant game of catch with it in the cafeteria, and everybody else had to flinch as the bottle went whizzing past. They swapped blowjob jokes with the pretty girls, which turned some male teachers into titillated spectators and reduced the sophomores into puddles of voyeuristic awe. They took delicious pride in the knowledge, never expressed but universally understood, that they were the kings of the school.

Harold’s relationships with his friends involved maximum body contact and minimum eye contact. They were forever wrestling, shoving, and otherwise engaging in little prowess competitions. Sometimes it seemed entire friendships in that group were built around comic uses of the word “scrotum,” and they were just as foul-mouthed with their female buddies. Harold went out with a string of cute girls—successively, as it turned out, from Egypt, Iran, Italy, and an old WASP family from England. Sometimes it seemed he was using Will and Ariel Durant’s Civilizations series as a dating manual.

And yet he was well liked by adults. With his friends he was all “Yo! Douche bag!” but in parental and polite adult company he used a language and set of mannerisms based on the pretense that he’d never gone through puberty. Unlike many teenagers, he could be sensitive and polysyllabic, and at times he seemed sincerely moved by the global warming–awareness pep rallies that were so beloved by teachers and guidance counselors.

Harold’s high school was structured like a brain. There was an executive function—in this case, the principal and the rest of the administrators—who operated under the illusion that they ran the school. But down below, amidst the lockers and in the hallways, the real work of the organism took place—the exchange of notes, saliva, crushes, rejections, friendships, feuds, and gossip. There were about 1,000 students and therefore roughly 1,000 3 1,000 relationships, the real substance of high-school life.

The people in the executive suites believed that the school existed to fulfill some socially productive process of information transmission—usually involving science projects on poster boards. But in reality, of course, high school is a machine for social sorting. The purpose of high school is to give young people a sense of where they fit into the social structure.

In 1954 Muzafer Sherif conducted a famous social-science experiment. He gathered a homogeneous group of twenty-two schoolboys from Oklahoma and took them to a campground in Robbers Cave State Park. He divided the eleven-year-old boys into two groups, who gave themselves the names the Rattlers and the Eagles. After a week of separation, the research team arranged for a series of competitive games between the two groups. Trouble started immediately. The Rattlers put their flag on the backstop of “their” baseball field. The Eagles tore it down and burned it.

After a tug-of-war match, the Rattlers raided the Eagles’ cabins, trashed their property, and stole some clothing. The Eagles armed themselves with sticks and raided the Rattlers unit. When they returned, they prepared for the inevitable retaliation. They put stones in socks, so they could smash their enemies in the face.

The two groups developed opposite cultures. The Rattlers cursed, so the Eagles banned cursing. The Rattlers posed as toughs, so the Eagles organized prayer sessions. The experiment suggested what dozens of later experiments confirmed: People have a tendency to form groups, even on the basis of the most arbitrary characteristics imaginable, and when groups are adjacent, friction will arise.

In Harold’s high school, nobody put rocks in socks. There, life was dominated by a universal struggle for admiration. The students divided into the inevitable cliques, and each clique had its own invisible pattern of behavior. Gossip was used to spread information on how each person in a clique was supposed to behave and to cast social opprobrium on those who violated the rules. Gossip is the way groups establish social norms. The person spreading the gossip gains status and power by demonstrating his superior knowledge of the norms. The person listening receives valuable information on how not to behave in the future.

At first, Harold’s primary concern was being a good member of his clique. Social life absorbed his most intense energies. Fear of exclusion was his primary source of anxiety. Understanding the shifting rules of the clique was his most demanding cognitive challenge.

The students would burn out if forced to spend their entire day amidst the social intensity of the cafeteria and the hallway. Fortunately, the school authorities also schedule dormant periods, called classes, during which students can rest their minds and take a break from the pressures of social categorization. Students correctly understand, though adults appear not to, that socialization is the most intellectually demanding and morally important thing they will do in high school.

The Mayor

One day at lunchtime, Harold paused to look around the school cafeteria. High school would soon be over for him, and he wanted to absorb this scene. Around him he observed the primordial structures of highschool life. Individual students would come and go, but cafeteria geography was forever. From time immemorial, the school Royalty, the clique to which he now belonged, had sat at the table in the center of the room. The Honors kids sat by the window; the Drama Girls, by the door with the Pimpled Young Rockers hanging out hopefully nearby. The Faux Hippies tended to hang out by the trophy case; the Normals, along the tables by the bulletin boards, just to the right of a mix of fringier groups: the Hemp Brigades and the Pacific Thugs—the Asian-American kids who pretended not to do their homework.

Harold was Facebook friends with two or three people in each of these groups, for his gregariousness made him something of an ambassador from the nation of Jockdom to the rest of the school, and he spent large parts of his lunch period walking around the cafeteria exchanging greetings far and wide. As a freshman he’d hung out with whoever was proximate. Then sophomore and junior years he’d been tightly bound into his clique, but as a senior he’d found himself breaking out of it, both out of boredom with his same old friends and because he was growing secure enough in his identity to wander and enjoy people of all sorts.

You could practically see his posture change as he sauntered around the cafeteria, crossing from one cognitive neighborhood to another and falling into each clique’s argot and social rituals. He took on the mood of rushed anxiety when he was with the Honors kids, who were extracurricular sluts and always had somewhere else they had to be. He put his arms around the waist of the leader of the black student group and made the sort of racially charged joke that make all the adults go tense but which the students don’t seem to mind. The freshman jocks, who had to eat lunch on the floor near the lockers, were meek around him, and as a result he was gentle. The eyeliner girls, who cultivated a defensive wall of jaundiced disdain, actually looked cheerful for once.

“The real great man is the man who makes every man feel great,” the British writer G. K. Chesterton wrote. Harold spread a little drop of good cheer wherever he landed. There’d be a group of adolescents sitting around in a circle, their heads bowed, as they silently texted each other notes across the table, and suddenly Harold would appear from above and they’d all look up beaming. “Howdy, Mayor!” one of them would jocularly shout out before Harold moved on, for he had developed a reputation for this sort of lunchroom canvassing.

The Social Sense

Harold had an ability to scan a room and automatically pick up a hundred small social dynamics. We all have a certain manner of scanning a sea of faces. For example, most people’s gaze will linger on a redheaded person in any crowd because we’re naturally drawn to the unusual. Most people will assume people with big eyes and puffy cheeks are weaker and more submissive than they are. (Perhaps in compensation, baby-faced soldiers in World War II and the Korean War were much more likely to win awards for valor than soldiers with more rugged features.)

Harold could intuit which groups permitted drug use and which groups didn’t. He could tell which groups would tolerate country-music listening within its ranks and which groups would regard it as grounds for symbolic exclusion. He could tell, in each group, how many guys a girl could hook up with per year without being regarded as a skank. In some groups the number was three; in others, seven.

Most people automatically assume that the groups they don’t belong to are more homogenous than groups they do belong to. Harold could see groups from the inside. When Harold would sit down with, say, the Model UN kids, he could not only see himself with a bunch of brains, he could guess which one of them wanted to emigrate from the Geek quadrant and join the Honors/Athletes quadrant. He could sense who was the leader of any group, who was the jester, and who fulfilled the roles of peacemaker, daredevil, organizer, and self-effacing audience member.

He could pick out who had what role in any female troika. As the novelist Frank Portman has observed, the troika is the natural unit of high-school female friendship. Girl 1 is the hot one; Girl 2 is her sidekick; and Girl 3 is the less attractive one who is the object of the other two’s loving condescension. For a time, Girls 1 and 2 will help Girl 3 with makeup and clothes and try to set her up with one of their boyfriends’ less attractive friends. But eventually Girls 1 and 2 will let it be known how much hotter they are than Girl 3, and their ensuing bitterness toward her will become more and more obvious until they finally ostracize Girl 3 and replace her with a new Girl 3. The Girl 3s never quite have enough class-consciousness to collectivize and use their combined power to throw off the yoke of their oppression.

Harold had impressive social awareness. And yet as he sauntered down the hall and entered a classroom, a slight change came over him. Harold felt perfectly in control in the hallway. But somehow he couldn’t achieve such mastery in class, with the reading material. His social genius didn’t seem to lead to academic genius. And in fact, the parts of the brain we use for social cognition are different than the parts we use for thinking about objects, abstractions, and other sorts of facts. People with Williams Syndrome have impressive social skills but are severely impaired when dealing with other tasks. Work by David Van Rooy suggests that no more than 5 percent of a person’s emotional perceptiveness can be explained by the sort of overall cognitive intelligence we track with an IQ score.

Sitting there in the classroom, waiting for the lecture to begin, Harold would lose the sense of command he possessed in the hallway. He looked over at the brains in the front of the room and decided he wasn’t one of them. He could get B1’s and say productive things in the classroom discussions, but his was rarely the answer that made the teachers glow. Somewhere along the line, Harold had concluded that he could do decently well in school, but he was not intelligent, though if you had asked him what being intelligent means, he wouldn’t have been able to give a precise answer.

Hot for Teacher

Harold settled into his seat in English class. Truth be told, Harold was sort of in love with his English teacher, which was embarrassing because she wasn’t his type.

Ms. Taylor had resented the jocks back in her own high school. She’d been more of the sensitive artist in her teenage years. She’d formed her adult identity in accordance with Tom Wolfe’s rule of the high-school opposite. This rule holds that in high school we all fall into social circles and become acutely aware of which personality types are our social allies and which are our social opposites. The adult personality—including political views—is forever defined in opposition to one’s natural enemies in high school.

Ms. Taylor was thus forever destined to be in the camp of artistic sensitivity and opposed to the camp of athletic assertiveness. She was in the aloof-observer camp and opposed to the camp of the mindlessly energetic. She was in the camp of the more-emotional-than-thou rather than in the camp of the more-popular-than-thou. This meant she was always exquisitely attuned to her superior emotions, and it also meant, unfortunately, that if she wasn’t having an engrossing emotional drama on any given day, she would try to make one up.

During young adulthood, she moved through her Alanis Morissette, Jewel, Sarah McLachlan phases. She marched and recycled and joined the boycotts of the virtuous. She could be counted upon to be moody at big events—proms, weddings, senior week at the beach—in a way that set her off from the carousing hordes of callow youth. She wrote embarrassingly sentimental notes in other people’s yearbooks and impressively found her way to Hermann Hesse and Carlos Castaneda even though no one else her age had ever heard of them. She was something of a prodigy when it came to being overwrought.

But she grew up. She smoked in college, which gave her something dispassionate and cynical to do. She also had her years in Teach for America. During that time she saw what being really screwed up was all about, and it made her less enamored of her own crises.

When Harold met her, she was in her late twenties and teaching English. She listened to Feist, Yael Naïm, and the Arcade Fire. She read Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen. She was addicted to hand sanitizer and Diet Coke. She wore her hair too long and too natural, to show she wasn’t on the job interview/law associate career track. She loved scarves and wrote letters longhand. She decorated her walls, even over her desk at home, with didactic maxims, most of them in the nature of Richard Livingstone’s observation, “One is apt to think of moral failure as due to weakness of character: more often it is due to an inadequate ideal.”

She could have grown into a normal person if she hadn’t been subjected to the high-school English curriculum. It is one thing to have to read, over the course of a few years of one’s life, A Separate Peace, The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, The Crucible, The Color Purple, The Scarlet Letter, and To Kill a Mockingbird. It is another thing to have to teach these books, period after period, day after day, year after year. One cannot emerge unscathed.

They wheedled their way into her mind. And before long she became a matchmaker. She decided it was her role in life to look deep into her students’ souls, diagnose their core longing, and then match that person with the piece of middlebrow literature that would uniquely change his life. She would stop her students in the hallway, and she would press a book into their hands, and with a trembling voice she would tell them, “You are not alone!”

It had never occurred to many of these kids that they were alone. But Ms. Taylor, perhaps overgeneralizing from her own life, assumed that behind every cheerleader, behind every band member, behind every merit scholar there was a life of quiet desperation.

And so she offered books as salvation. She saw books as a way to escape isolation and feel communion with Those Who Feel. “This book saved my life,” she would tell her students, one by one, in hushed whispers after class. She would invite them into the church of those who are redeemed by high-school reading lists. She would remind them that when times are dark, when the suffering is unbearable, there is still Holden Caulfield to walk this path with you.

And then she would kvell. Her eyes would well up. Her heart would be touched. Sometimes just looking at her in this saccharine state was enough to give an average adult diabetes. But there was one other fact about Ms. Taylor that was undeniable. She was a great teacher. Her emotional neediness was all directed to the task of reaching teenagers, and in that business subtlety and reticence have no place. All of the sentimental qualities that made her hard to take in adult company made her a superstar at school.

Her Method

Ms. Taylor was one of those teachers who understands that schools are structured on a false view of human beings. They are structured on the presupposition that students are empty crates to be filled with information.

She couldn’t forget the fact that other people are weirder and more complex than we can ever know. She taught adolescents, so the brains of her students were going through a period of tumult that is almost like a second infancy. With the onset of puberty, humans enter a period of ruthless synaptic pruning. As a result of this tumult, teenagers’ mental capacities don’t improve in a straight line. In some studies, fourteen-years-olds are less adept at recognizing other people’s emotions than nine-year-olds. It takes a few more years of growth and stability before they finally catch up with their former selves.

Then of course there are the hormone hurricanes. The pituitary glands in her female students are suddenly churning to life. Just as in early childhood, estrogen is flooding their brains. That deluge produces a sudden leap in both critical thinking skills and emotional sensitivity. Some teens are suddenly sensitive to light and dark. Their moods and perceptions change minute to minute, depending on hormonal surges.

In the first two weeks of a teenage girl’s menstrual cycle, for example, surging estrogen levels seem to make the brain hyper and alert. Then in the final weeks a wave of progesterone sedates brain activity. You can tell a teenage girl that her jeans are cut too low, Louann Brizendine writes, and one day she’ll ignore you. “But catch her on the wrong day of her cycle and what she hears is that you’re calling her a slut, or telling her she’s too fat to wear those jeans. Even if you didn’t say or intend this, it’s how her brain interprets your comment.”

As a result of hormonal surges, boys and girls begin to react differently to stress. Girls react more to relationship stress, and boys, with ten times more testosterone pumping around in their bodies, react to assaults on their status. Both have a tendency to freak out at the oddest moments. At other times, they can be astonishingly awkward. Ms. Taylor wondered why her students were generally incapable of smiling naturally in front of a camera. Plagued by self-consciousness, they put on these uncomfortable half-smiles that made them look like they’re going to the bathroom.

Her general presumption was that while she’s trying to teach English, every single boy in her class is secretly thinking about masturbation. Every single girl in her class is secretly feeling lonely and cut off.

Ms. Taylor would look out over a sea of faces in her classes. She’d have to remind herself that those placid and bored expressions are deceiving. There’s mayhem within. When she puts a piece of information in front of a student, that kid’s brain doesn’t just absorb it in some easily understandable fashion. As John Medina writes, the process is more “like a blender left running with the lid off. The information is literally sliced into discrete pieces as it enters the brain and splattered all over the insides of our mind.” “Don’t exaggerate the orderliness of their thoughts,” she’d tell herself. The best she could hope to do was to merge old patterns already there with new patterns from what she was trying to teach. As a young teacher, she ran across a book called Fish Is Fish. It’s about a fish who becomes friends with a frog. The fish asks the frog to describe the creatures that exist on land. The frog complies, but the fish can’t really grasp what he’s saying. For people, the fish imagines fish who walk on their tailfins. For birds, the fish imagines fish with wings. Cows are fish that have udders. Ms. Taylor’s students were like that. They had models, imposed by their experience, which caused them to create their own constructions of everything she said.

Don’t think the methods teenagers use to think today are the same methods they will use tomorrow. Some researchers used to believe that people had different learning styles—that some people are right brain and some are left brain; some are auditory and some are visual learners. There’s almost no credible evidence to support this view. Instead, we all flip back and forth between different methods, depending on context.

Of course, Ms. Taylor wanted to impart knowledge, the sort of stuff that shows up on tests. But within weeks, students forget 90 percent of the knowledge they learn in class anyway. The only point of being a teacher is to do more than impart facts; it’s to shape the way students perceive the world, to help a student absorb the rules of a discipline. The teachers who do that get remembered.

She didn’t so much teach them as apprentice them. Much unconscious learning is done through imitation. She exhibited a way of thinking through a problem and then hoped her students participated along with her.

She forced them to make mistakes. The pain of getting things wrong and the effort required to overcome error creates an emotional experience that helps burn things into the mind.

She tried to get students to interrogate their own unconscious opinions. Making up your mind, she believed, is not like building a wall. It’s more a process of discovering the idea that already exists unconsciously. She wanted kids to try on different intellectual costumes to see what fit.

She also forced them to work. For all her sentimentality, she did not believe in the notion that students should just follow their natural curiosity. She gave them homework assignments they did not want to do. She gave them frequent tests, intuitively sensing that the act of retrieving knowledge for a test strengthens the relevant networks in the brain. She pushed. She was willing to be hated.

Ms. Taylor’s goal was to turn her students into autodidacts. She hoped to give her students a taste of the emotional and sensual pleasure discovery brings—the jolt of pleasure you get when you work hard, suffer a bit, and then something clicks. She hoped her students would become addicted to this process. They would become, thanks to her, self-teachers for the rest of their days. That was the grandiosity with which Ms. Taylor conceived of her craft.

The Hunt

Harold found Ms. Taylor absurd for the first few weeks and then unforgettable forever after. The most important moment of their relationship came one afternoon as Harold was moving from gym class to lunch. Ms. Taylor had been lurking in the hallway, camouflaged in her earth tones against the lockers. She spotted her prey approaching at normal speed. For a few seconds, she stalked him with a professional calm and patience, and then during a second when the hallway crowds parted and Harold was vulnerable and alone, she pounced. She pressed a slim volume into Harold’s hand. “This will lift you to greatness!” she emoted. And in a second she was gone. Harold looked down. It was a used copy of a book called The Greek Way by a woman named Edith Hamilton.

Harold would remember that moment forever. Later, Harold would learn that The Greek Way has a tainted reputation among classicists, but in high school, it introduced him to a new world. It was a world alien yet familiar. In classical Greece, Harold found a world of combat, competition, teams, and glory. Unlike in his own world, he found a world in which courage was among the highest virtues, in which a warrior’s anger could propel history, in which people seemed to live in bold colors. There was little in Harold’s milieu that helped him come into his own masculinity, but classical Greece provided him a language and set of rules.

Edith Hamilton’s book also introduced him to a sensation that he had not experienced before, of being connected to something ancient and profound. Hamilton quoted a passage from Aeschylus: “God, whose law it is that he who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Harold did not fully understand that passage, but he sensed that somehow it carried an impressive weight.

He followed Hamilton’s book with others, reading on his own, in search of that sensation of connecting with something mystical across the ages. He had always studied and paid attention in the manner of a professional student, in order to get into the sort of college he would be proud to mention at parties. But he began to read about Greece in a different way, with a romantic yearning to discover something true and important. He read this material out of a sense of need. He went on to read popular histories. He saw movies about ancient Greek life (most of them bad), such as 300 and Troy. In a high-school fashion, he dipped into Homer, Sophocles, and Herodotus.

Ms. Taylor watched all this with exuberant attention, and one day they met during a free period to chart a plan of study.

It started, of course, under bare fluorescent lights, in a normal classroom, while she and Harold sat at desks slightly too small for their own legs. Harold had decided, or been cajoled, into doing his senior honors paper on some as yet undetermined aspect of ancient Greek life, and Ms. Taylor was going to be his faculty advisor. So Harold sat there listening to her as she went on excitedly about the project ahead. Her enthusiasm was contagious. It was fun to talk with her one-on-one. Studies of language acquisition have found that the quickest learning comes from face-to-face tutoring. The slowest learning comes from video-or audiotapes. Plus, there was something alluring about having a smart, attractive older woman talking about a mystery of intense interest to him.

Ms. Taylor’s theory about Harold was that he was a popular, athletic high-school boy who also showed flashes of idealism. She’d noticed it in their classroom discussions—a desire for loftiness, a desire to be part of something higher than normal life. Ms. Taylor had originally given Harold that Hamilton book because the ancient Greeks offer boys a vision of greatness that seemed to inspire them. When they met, she suggested that Harold write his senior paper linking classical Greek life to some aspect of high-school life. Ms. Taylor was a big believer in the idea that creativity comes when two disparate fields crash in one mind, like two galaxies merging in space. She was a big believer in the notion that everybody should have two careers, two perspectives for looking at the world, each of which provided insights into the other. In her case, she was a teacher by day and, less successfully but not less important, a singer-songwriter by night.

Step One

The first stage of Harold’s project would be knowledge acquisition. Ms. Taylor told him to keep reading books about Greek life and bring her back a list of five he had read. She didn’t give him an organized curriculum; she wanted him to find these books the way adults find books when they get interested in a subject, by browsing Amazon or the bookstore—by word of mouth and by chance. She wanted him to get information from different kinds of books and different kinds of authors so that his unconscious would actively work to weave it all together.

In the first stage, it didn’t matter if Harold’s research was a little dilettantish. Benjamin Bloom has found that teaching doesn’t have to be brilliant right away: “The effect of this first phase of learning seemed to be to get the learner involved, captivated, hooked, and to get the learner to need and want more information and expertise.” So long as Harold was curious and enjoying his quest, he’d be developing a feel for Greek life, a certain base level of knowledge about how the Athenians and the Spartans lived, fought, and thought. This concrete knowledge would serve as the hook upon which all subsequent teaching would be hung.

Human knowledge is not like data stored in a computer’s memory banks. A computer doesn’t get better at remembering things as its database becomes more crowded. Human knowledge, on the other hand, is hungry and alive. People with knowledge about a topic become faster and better at acquiring more knowledge and remembering what they learn.

In one experiment, third graders and college students were asked to memorize a list of cartoon characters. The third graders had much better recall, because they were more familiar with the subject matter. In another experiment, a group of eight-to twelve-year-olds who had been classified as slow learners and a group of adults with normal intelligence were each asked to recall a list of pop stars. Again, the younger, “slow learners” did much better. Their core knowledge improved performance.

Ms. Taylor was helping Harold lay down some core knowledge. Harold read about the Greeks whenever he had the chance. At home. On the bus. After dinner. This made a difference. Many people believe you should set aside a specific place to do your reading, but a large body of research shows that people retain information better when they alternate from setting to setting. The different backgrounds stimulate the mind and create denser memory webs.

After a few weeks, he came back with five books he had read—popular histories of the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, a biography of Pericles, a modern translation of the Odyssey, and a book comparing Athens to Sparta. These books, willy-nilly, filled in his picture of the life, values, and the world of ancient Greece.

Step Two

In their second session, Ms. Taylor praised Harold for his hard work. Researcher Carol Dweck has found that when you praise a student for working hard, it reinforces his identity as an industrious soul. A student in this frame of mind is willing to take on challenging tasks, and to view mistakes as part of the working process. When you praise a student for being smart, on the other hand, it conveys the impression that achievement is an inborn trait. Students in that frame of mind want to continue to appear smart. They’re less likely to try challenging things because they don’t want to make mistakes and appear stupid.

Then Ms. Taylor told Harold to go back and look over everything he had read so far, starting with the Edith Hamilton book that had been his first entry into Greek life. Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to automatize his knowledge. The human brain is built to take conscious knowledge and turn it into unconscious knowledge. The first time you drive a car, you have to think about every move. But after a few months or years, driving is done almost automatically. Learning consists of taking things that are strange and unnatural, such as reading and algebra, and absorbing them so steadily that they become automatic. That frees up the conscious mind to work on new things. Alfred North Whitehead saw this learning process as a principle of progress: “Civilization advances by extending the number of operations which we can perform without thinking about them.”

Automaticity is achieved through repetition. Harold’s first journey through his Greek books may have introduced him to his subject, but on his second, third, and fourth journeys, he would begin to entrench it deep down. Ms. Taylor had told her students a hundred times that it is far better to go over material for a little bit, repetitively, on five consecutive nights than it is to cram in one long session the night before an exam. (No matter how often she repeated this point, this was one lesson her students never seemed to automatize.)

Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to slip back into the best learning rhythm. A child in a playroom instinctively understands how to explore. She starts with Mom, and then ventures forth in search of new toys. She returns to Mom for security and then repeats her ventures forth. Then it’s back to Mom and out again to explore.

The same principle applies to learning in high school and beyond. It is a process of what Richard Ogle, the author of Smart World, calls reach and reciprocity. Start with the core knowledge in a field, then venture out and learn something new. Then come back and reintegrate the new morsel with what you already know. Then venture out again. Then return. Back and forth. Again and again. As Ogle argues, too much reciprocity and you wind up in an insular rut. Too much reach and your efforts are scattershot and fruitless. Ms. Taylor wanted to slip Harold into this rhythm of expansion and integration.

Harold groaned when she told him to read everything again. He thought he’d be bored out of his mind, going back and reading the same books he’d already finished. He was stunned to find that the second time through they were different books. He noticed entirely different points and arguments. Sentences he had highlighted seemed utterly pointless now, whereas sentences he had earlier ignored seemed crucial. The marginalia he had written to himself now seemed embarrassingly simpleminded. Either he or the books had changed.

What had happened, of course, is that as he had done more reading; he had unconsciously reorganized the information in his brain. Thanks to a series of internal connections, new aspects of the subject seemed important and old aspects, which had once seemed fascinating, now seemed mundane. He had begun to inhabit the knowledge differently and see it in a new way. He had begun to develop expertise.

Harold was not a real expert in ancient Greek history, of course, or ready for his exams at Oxford. But he had crossed the white-belt threshold of expertise. He had come to see that learning is not entirely linear. There are certain breakthrough moments when you begin to think of and see the field differently.

The easiest way to understand this is to examine the expertise that chess grandmasters possess. In one exercise, a series of highly skilled players and a series of nonplayers were shown a series of chessboards for about five to ten seconds each. On each board twenty to twenty-five pieces were arrayed, as if in an actual game. The participants were later asked to remember the positions on the board. The grandmasters could remember every piece on every board. The average players could remember about four or five pieces per board.

It is not that the chess grandmasters were simply a lot smarter than the others. IQ is, surprisingly, not a great predictor of performance in chess. Nor is it true that the grandmasters possess incredible memories. When the same exercise was repeated, but the pieces were arrayed randomly, in a way that did not relate to any game situation, the grandmasters had no better recall than anyone else.

No, the real reason the grandmasters could remember the game boards so well is that after so many years of study, they saw the boards in a different way. When average players saw the boards, they saw a group of individual pieces. When the masters saw the boards, they saw formations. Instead of seeing a bunch of letters on a page, they saw words, paragraphs, and stories. A story is easier to remember than a bunch of individual letters. Expertise is about forming internal connections so that little pieces of information turn into bigger networked chunks of information. Learning is not merely about accumulating facts. It is internalizing the relationships between pieces of information.

Every field has its own structure, its own schema of big ideas, organizing principles, and recurring patterns—in short, its own paradigm. The expert has absorbed this structure and has a tacit knowledge of how to operate within it. Economists think like economists. Lawyers think like lawyers. At first, the expert decided to enter a field of study, but soon the field entered her. The skull line, the supposed barrier between her and the object of her analysis, had broken down.

The result is that the expert doesn’t think more about a subject, she thinks less. She doesn’t have to compute the effects of a range of possibilities. Because she has domain expertise, she anticipates how things will fit together.

Step Three

Ms. Taylor’s third step was to help bring Harold’s tacit knowledge of Greek life to the surface. After the weeks of reading, and then more weeks of rereading, she asked him to keep a journal. In it he would describe both his thoughts about Greek life and his own time in high school. She told him to let his mind go free, to let his thoughts bubble up from his unconscious, and to not worry for the time being about what he was writing or how good it might be.

Her basic rule was that a student should be 75 percent finished with a paper before he sits down to write it. Before composition starts, there should be a long period of gestation, as he looks at the material in different ways and in different moods. He should give his mind time to connect things in different ways. He should think about other things and allow insights to pop into his head. The brain doesn’t really need much conscious pushing to do this. It is such an anticipation machine, it is always and automatically trying to build patterns out of data. A telephone transmits only 10 percent of the tones in a voice, and yet from that, any child can easily build a representation of the person on the other end of the line. This is what the brain does easily and well.

Ms. Taylor wanted Harold to write a journal because she wanted Harold to retrieve the knowledge that was buried inside in as frictionless a way as possible. She wanted him to go off on a reverie, and convert the intuitions he had developed into language. She was a firm believer in Jonah Lehrer’s dictum “You know more than you know.” She wanted to give him an exercise that would allow him to wander around the problem in a way that might seem haphazard and wasteful, because the mind is often most productive when it is the most carefree.

Harold would save that journal for the rest of his life, though he was always tempted to burn it because he didn’t want his descendents to see his overwrought adolescent musings. At first he would just write a word in the center of a page and then scribble the ideas or thoughts that popped into his head in a cluster around it, and sometimes a peripheral thought would become the center of its own cluster.

He wrote a lot about the passions of Greek heroes. He compared the anger of Achilles to his own anger at various situations, and in his telling he came off as the slightly more heroic character of the two. He wrote a lot about courage, and copied down a passage Edith Hamilton wrote about Aeschylus: “Life for him was an adventure, perilous indeed, but men are not made for safe havens.”

He wrote about pride, copying Aeschylus’s own passage, “All arrogance will reap a harvest rich in tears. God calls men to a heavy reckoning for overweening pride.” He tended to be the hero of his own stories, feeling more and seeing better than his classmates. But at his best, the Greek passages did lift him up and give him a sense of profound connection to an age long past and men and women long dead. “I make honorable things pleasant to children,” one Spartan teacher boasted, and this contact with excellence inspired Harold. He experienced a feeling of historical ecstasy late one night reading and writing a journal entry about Pericles’ funeral oration. He began to share the Greek sense of the dignity and significance of life. He also began, especially in his later journal passages, to make judgments and connections. He wrote one passage about the difference between the warlike Achilles and the subtle Odysseus. He began to notice the ways in which he was different from the Greeks. There were troubling passages where they seemed to lack all sympathy. They were great in expressing the competitive virtues—like seeking glory—but they were not so great when it came to the compassionate virtues—like extending a sympathetic hand to those suffering or in need. They seemed to lack an awareness of grace, of God’s love even for those who didn’t deserve it.

After a few weeks, Ms. Taylor asked to see Harold’s journal. He was reluctant to share it, because so many personal thoughts had found their way in there. With a male teacher he never would have allowed himself that vulnerability. But he trusted her, and one weekend he let her take it home.

She was struck by its nearly schizophrenic quality. Sometimes Harold wrote in a portentous Gibbonesque voice. Sometimes he wrote like a child. Sometimes he was cynical, sometimes literary, and sometimes scientific. “The mind wheels,” Robert Ornstein has written. “It wheels from condition to condition, from emergency to quiescence, from happiness to concern. As it wheels among different states, it selects the various components of the mind which operate in that state.”

There didn’t seem to be one Harold represented in this journal, but dozens of them and Ms. Taylor wasn’t sure which one she would find as she turned each page. Ed school had not prepared her for the multiplicity inside the mind of even a single student. “How do you teach a classroom of Sybils,” Ms. Taylor wondered, “who are breaking apart and re-forming moment by moment in front of you?” Still, she was thrilled. This happened only once every few years—to have a student seize on her suggestion and leap so far ahead.

Step Four

After a few weeks, Ms. Taylor decided Harold was ready to move on to the fourth and final stage of the exercise. The best learners take time to encode information before they begin work on their papers. And Harold had now spent months encoding and re-encoding information. It was time to make an argument and bring it all to a point.

Harold had drawn a picture called “Pericles at the Prom” in one of his journal entries. It showed a guy in a toga in the middle of kids in tuxes and gowns. Ms. Taylor suggested that he use that as his paper title. She noticed that in his journal Harold seemed to alternate between passages on his Greek studies and passages on his high-school life. But creativity consists of blending two discordant knowledge networks. She wanted him to integrate his thoughts on Greece with his thoughts about himself.

Harold sat at home, with his books and journal pages spread out on the floor and bed before him. How to turn all of this into one twelve-page paper? He read, with some embarrassment, some of his old journal entries. He dipped into some of his books. Nothing was coming together. He texted his friends. He played a few games of solitaire. He went on Facebook. He dipped back into some of the old books. He kept interrupting himself and starting over. A person who is interrupted while performing a task takes 50 percent more time to complete it and makes 50 percent more errors. The brain doesn’t multitask well. It needs to get into a coherent flow, with one network of firings leading coherently to the next.

The problem was that Harold was not mastering his data. It was mastering him. He was hopping from one fact to another, but had found no overall scheme with which to organize them. In a small way he was temporarily like Solomon Shereshevskii, the Russian journalist born in 1886, who could remember everything. In one experiment, researchers showed Shereshevskii a complex formula of thirty letters and numbers on a piece of paper. Then they put the paper in a box and sealed it for fifteen years. When they took the paper out, Shereshevskii could remember it exactly.

Shereshevskii could remember, but he couldn’t distill. He lived in a random blizzard of facts, but could not organize them into repeating patterns. Eventually he couldn’t even make sense of metaphors, similes, poems, or even complex sentences.

In small form, Harold was in the middle of that kind of impasse. He had a certain paradigm he used when thinking about high school. He had another paradigm he used when thinking about the Greeks. But they weren’t meshing together. He had no core argument for his paper. Being a normal seventeen-year-old kid, he quit for the night.

The next night, he turned off his phone and closed the web browser. He resolved to focus his attention, exile himself from the normal data smog of cyber-connected life, and get something done.

Instead of starting with his own writing, he went back and read Pericles’ funeral oration from The Peloponnesian War. The virtue of reading classic authors is that they are more likely to set your mind racing, and of all the things Harold had read, that speech fired his imagination most. In one passage, for example, Pericles celebrated Athenian culture: “We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show, and place the real disgrace of poverty not in owning to the fact but in declining to struggle against it.”

Harold was moved and uplifted. It wasn’t even so much the substance but the lofty cadences and the heroic tone. The spirit of the speech entered his mind and his mood changed. He began to think about heroism, about men and women achieving immortal glory through valor, dedicating their lives to the service of their nation. Pericles celebrated excellence and offered models for imitation.

Harold began to think about the different kinds of Greek heroes he had read about: Achilles, the furious man of war; Odysseus the clever leader who seeks to return to his wife and family; Leonidas, who surrendered his life at Thermopylae; Themistocles, who saved his country through deceit and manipulation; Socrates, who gave his life for truth, and Pericles, the gentleman and statesman.

Over the next few hours, Harold thought about these different flavors of greatness. He intuited that somewhere the key to his paper lay in comparing their styles, or in finding some common thread. Somehow his unconscious mind was telling him that he was on the right track. He had that feeling you get when an answer is on the tip of your tongue.

For the first time since he’d begun the writing stage, his attention was truly focused on the task at hand. He looked at his books and journal entries again for examples of different types of heroism. He was possessed by what Steven Johnson calls a “slow hunch.” He had a vague, hard-to-explain sense that he was heading in the right direction, but it would take many delays and much circling around until a solution popped into his head.

We are always besieged by different pieces of information bidding for attention. But in his aroused state, Harold shut out everything that didn’t have to do with Greek ideas of heroism. Music that might have annoyed him suddenly was rendered mute. Sounds and colors disappeared. Scientists call this the “preparatory phase.” When the brain is devoting serious attention to one thing, then other areas, like the visual cortex or the sensory regions, go dark.

Over the next hour or two, Harold pushed himself. He searched for a way to write a paper on heroism, both in Greek and contemporary life. His focus had narrowed but he still did not have an argument. So he went over his books and journal entries yet again to see if some point or argument leaped out at him.

It was hard and frustrating work, like pushing on a series of doors and waiting for one to break open. And yet none of the patterns that popped into Harold’s head bound his thoughts. He started writing notes to himself. He’d come up with an idea and then see a stray piece of paper and realized that he’d come up with the same idea a few hours ago and had already forgotten about it. To make up for the limitations of his short-term memory, he began arranging his notes and journal entries into piles on the floor. He hoped that this process of shuffling his notes would somehow bring some coherence. He put notes on courage in one pile and notes on wisdom into another, but over time the piles began to seem arbitrary. He was loosening his imagination. Sometimes an answer seemed to hang just a few millimeters out of reach. He would follow a hunch, a subtle signal from the mental regions beneath consciousness. But he still had no overall concept. Harold had reach but no reciprocity. He was tired and at an impasse.

Once again, he called it a day and went to bed. It turned out to be the smartest thing he could possibly do. There’s a controversy among scientists about what sleep accomplishes, but many researchers believe that during sleep the brain consolidates memories, organizes the things that have been learned that day, and reinforces the changes in the brain that have been ushered in by the previous day’s activity. The German scientist Jan Born gave a group of people a series of math problems and asked them to discover the rule necessary to solve them. The people who slept for eight hours between work sessions were twice as likely to solve the problems as those who worked straight through. Research by Robert Stickgold and others suggests that sleep improves memory by at least 15 percent.

Harold lay in bed after his night’s sleep, watching the sunlight shimmer off the treetops outside his window. His mind wandered, thinking about his day, his paper, his friends, and a random series of other things. In these sorts of early-morning states, people’s right-brain hemispheres are unusually active. That means his mind wandered over remote domains, not tightly focused on one thing. His mental state was loose and casual. Then something happened.

If scientists had his brain wired up at this moment, they would have noticed a jump in the alpha waves emanating from the right hemisphere. Joy Bhattacharya of the University of London has found that these waves jump about eight seconds before a person has the insight necessary to solve a puzzle. A second before an insight, according to Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kounios, the area that processes visual information goes dark, shutting out distraction. Three hundred milliseconds before insight there is a spike of gamma rhythm, the highest frequency produced by the brain. There is a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the right ear. This is an area, Jung-Beeman and Kounios argue, that draws together pieces of information from wildly different areas of the brain.

Harold experienced a blast of insight, his “Eureka!” moment. Something big had just burst forth from inside him. His eyes went wide. He felt an intense and instantaneous burst of ecstasy. Yes, that’s it! His mind had leaped across some uncharted void and integrated his thinking in a new way. He knew in an instant that he had solved his problem, that he had a theme for his paper, before he could even really say what the solution was. Patterns that had not fit together suddenly felt as if they did. It was a sensation more than a thought, a feeling of almost religious contact. As Robert Burton wrote in his book On Being Certain, “Feelings of knowing, correctness, conviction and certainty aren’t deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that happen to us.”

His core insight involved motivation. Why did Achilles risk his life? Why did the men at Thermopylae lay down theirs? What did Pericles seek for himself and for Athens? What does Harold seek for himself at school? Why does he want his team to win state championships?

The answer to all these questions is a Greek word he had come across in his reading: thumos. All his life Harold had been surrounded by people with a set of socially approved motivations: to make money, to get good grades, to get into a good college. But none of these really explained why Harold did what he did, or why the Greek heroes did what they did.

The ancient Greeks had a different motivational structure. Thumos was the desire for recognition, the desire to have people recognize your existence, not only now but for all time. Thumos included the desire for eternal fame—to attract admiration and to be worthy of admiration in a way that was deeper than mere celebrity. Harold’s culture didn’t really have a word for that desire, but this Greek word helped explain Harold to himself.

All his life, he had been playing games in his imagination. He had imagined himself as a boy winning the World Series, throwing the perfect pass, saving his favorite teachers from mortal peril. And in each fantasy, his triumph had been deliriously witnessed by family, friends, and the world around him. This fantasizing, in its childish way, was the product of thumos, the desire for recognition and union, which underlay the other drives for money and success.

The thymotic world was a more heroic world than the bourgeois, careerist one Harold saw all around him. In the modern world in which he lived, the common assumption is that all human beings are attached at the earliest and lowest level. All human beings are descended from common ancestors and share certain primitive traits. But the Greeks tended to assume the opposite, that human beings were united at the highest level: There are certain ideal essences, and the closer one is to taking possession of the eternal excellence, the closer one is to this common humanity. Thumos is the drive to rise up to those heights. It is the dream of the perfect success, when all that is best within oneself blends with all that is eternal in the universe in perfect synchronicity.

Harold’s insight consisted of taking the vocabulary of Greek motivation—thumos, arete, eros—and applying it to his life. Harold was really combining two idea spaces, making the Greek world more comprehensible to him and his own world more heroic.

He began furiously writing notes to himself for his paper, describing how the thymotic drive, this drive for recognition, explained all sorts of high-school behavior. He made connections he had never made before and mixed together old information in new ways. At times he felt as though the paper was writing itself. The words just poured out of him unbidden. When he was deeply in the rush of it, he almost felt like he didn’t exist. Only the task existed, and it was happening to him, not because of him.

Editing and polishing the paper was still not easy, but it came. Ms. Taylor was delighted by the product. It was a little overheated in places, and parts were painfully earnest. But Harold’s rapture came across in every paragraph. The process of writing this paper had taught him how to think. His insight gave him a new way to understand himself and his world.

Greek Gifts

Ms. Taylor had guided Harold through a method that had him surfing in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together—first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then willfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product. The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step. By the end, he was seeing the world around him in a new way. There was, as the mathematician Henri Poincaré observed, “an unsuspected kinship … between facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another.” Harold no longer had to work to apply qualities like thumos to the world around him; they simply became the automatic categories of his mind, the way he perceived new situations.

When he was in kindergarten and first grade, Harold struggled to learn to read, but then it came naturally to him. Suddenly reading wasn’t about piecing together words; he could concentrate on the meanings. As a senior in high school, he had similarly internalized some Greek thought, and now he could automatically apply it to his life moment by moment.

He would go off to college and he would sit in classes as required, but he understood those classes would be only the first stage of his learning. He would have to spend nights writing random thoughts in his journal. He would organize his thoughts on the floor. He would have to stew and struggle and then maybe a few times in his life, while taking a shower or walking to the grocery store, some insight would come to him and make all the difference. This would be his method for escaping passive institutional learning. This would be the way he would build for himself a mind that is not stuck in an inherited rut, but which jumps from vantage point to vantage point, applying different patterns to new situations to see what works and what doesn’t, what will go together and what will not, what is likely to emerge from the confusion of reality and what is not likely to emerge. This would be his path to wisdom and success.