Would A New Theory of the Human Personality Help Us Develop Teaching Strategies for Optimizing the Mental Health of Our Students?

Staggeringly, 1 in 5 people suffer from mental illness each year according to The National Alliance on Mental Illness, NAMI.

Those of us who are educators nurture our country’s developing children for roughly 6 hours a day, 180 days each year between the ages of 3 or 5 to 18 or 21. We have to accept responsibility for the fact that one in five of them will eventually succumb to mental health problems like depression, unmanageable paranoia, unmanageable anxiety, reliance on psychotropic drugs, miserable side effects from psychotropic drugs, addiction, violence, self-harm, or suicide.

Robert Sapolsky, Stanford professor and one of the world’s leading neuroscientists says, “Often the biggest impediments to scientific progress is what we know, not what we don’t know.” In this spirit I have taken existing information about human perceptions, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions, have added my own research, plus 35 years of observing hundreds of developing children, and have come up with different ways to analyze and synthesize how humans integrate perceptions, thoughts, behaviors, and emotions. I have framed these variables differently, from new angles, and have come up with different conclusions than conventional psychological theorists have. As a result, I have new ideas for how to interact with students in the school setting.

I am careful to present my new ideas as hypotheses, which means they are not scientific facts, only potential facts. My ideas must be put through the rigors of scientific testing and peer review before they can be accepted.

Some people have heard my conclusions and have taken offense. I hope my ideas can be taken as respectful suggestions for new ways to look at old problems, problems we have been chasing out tail over but never quite catching.

I have a great deal of respect for the professionals in the field of psychology and psychiatry who are dedicated to relieving human suffering. Psychologists themselves are constantly revising and expanding what they know because the goal of psychology is not to protect past conclusions but to arrive at the most effective conclusions that can do the most good for the most people.

In the rest of this essay I will challenge what we think we know about the human personality in case our existing knowledge has been impeding and misdirecting our ability to optimize best practices in our schools towards optimizing the mental health of our students.

Unacceptably high numbers of mental illness have forced psychologists and psychiatrist to look for explanations. They have blamed bad parenting, societal pressures, poverty, and lack of education. They have blamed members of their own profession for over-diagnosing, under-diagnosing, and for dispensing too many drugs unnecessarily, or for dispensing the wrong kinds of drugs. They have blamed childhood trauma, even though the biology of our brains and bodies is hard wired to manage and recover from harsh conditions and trauma.

Puzzlingly, the theories for what causes stress, anxiety, and actual trauma to the brain are quite vague and open-ended. What forever traumatizes one person might hardly impact another person at all, but our psychological theories are not nuanced enough to absorb this fact. If we develop a new definition and theory of the human personality that sees the human personality as an individually customized information management dynamic instead of a fixed set of vague character and/or personality traits or a fixed set of enduring moods and/or temperaments that swim mysteriously somewhere in our brain or body, we would use more specific, individualized, and successful measures to define, identify, and treat trauma.

Most recently psychiatrists and psychologists have been blaming big pharma for the increasing amounts of drugs being prescribed for younger and younger children, even though pharmaceutical companies do not write the guidelines for diagnosing mental illness and they do not write the prescriptions for the drugs, psychiatrists and MD’s do. Reform for overprescribing, misprescribing, and misdiagnosing must happen at the level of psychological theory, which big pharma cannot and should not be responsible for.

I hypothesize (the launch point for questioning what we think we know) some of our existing psychological theories are not helping us reduce the prevalence of mental illness in our society, and in fact, might be doing the opposite. For one example, more and more drugs are being dispensed to younger and younger children, yet 1 in 5 people still end up with mental illness. It is time to start dissecting the definitions and theories upon which the research and applications of psychology are built.

I believe educators are in the perfect position to start the dissection because we observe hundreds and sometimes thousands of developing children and adolescents, sometimes over a period of many years. We are able to observe how developing children assess and organize information in order to make predictive decisions.

Educators are also able to observe what destabilizes children in ways that cause them to become unmanageably anxious, withdrawn, or aggressive. I hypothesize psychologists have been unsuccessful at preventing mental illness because they have way underestimated the potency of the anxiety that is unleashed on a child when his information management process becomes destabilized in even the smallest of ways.

I hypothesize successful information management is the end goal of all our biological capacities and that our biological response systems are wired to protect and defend both the conclusions we formulate and how we formulate them. I hypothesize psychologists have incorrectly determined some of the most important roles perceptions, thoughts, behaviors, emotions, and predictive decisions play in human information management.

I hypothesize psychologists have incorrectly determined that children need to learn ‘coping’ strategies for their anxiety because I hypothesize anxiety is not supposed to be coped with, it is supposed to be relied upon. We are supposed to be relying upon our anxiety as an important source of information to help us optimize our decision making.

One small example is this. Young children are taught that their developmentally natural behavioral manifestations in response to anxiety such as whining, tantrums, complaining, or protesting are unacceptable, inappropriate, or unexpected kinds of behaviors. Young children are reprimanded and taught to prevent themselves from vocally and behaviorally expressing their anxiety in all but the most benign of ways. We literally teach and sometimes force our children to willfully dissociate their anxiety until they reach the point where they can no longer connect the dots between their anxiety and the important information their anxiety is giving them.

Our discomfort and zeal to stop a child’s tantruming is one of the obvious ways we disregard anxiety as a nuisance instead of validating it as a vitally important biological cue. Disallowing expressions of anxiety at all developmental levels is what most of us educators do because it was done to us, it is the only pattern we know, and it is recommended by most psychological theories of behavior management, albeit indirectly.

Since most of us adult educators do not know how to connect the dots between our own anxiety and what it means to our personal brains and bodies due to the ways we were raised and taught, it puts at a disadvantage for understanding our students’ anxiety.

If anxiety ‘combatting’ strategies do not work for a child who has unmanageable anxiety, we urge his parents to procure a prescription for pills. For a very small percentage of kids, medication is helpful, but our current overprescription epidemic shows how dismissive and paranoid we are conditioned to be about anxiety. Because we have lost our ability to understand what anxiety is doing in our bodies, we favor squelching it and making it go away instead of relying upon and using it as important information for our predictive decision-making processes.

I hypothesize we should be treating anxiety with as much deference and importance as we do our pain sensors because anxiety is biological information that is suppose to keep us safely and sanely oriented in space and time in the exact same way pain does.

Individuals born without pain sensors suffer gruesome injuries throughout their lives because they are unable to receive the vitally important information from their sense of touch to help them orient their bodies safely in space and time. If we disable the anxiety response of our children by reprimanding them for their expressions of anxiety, we prevent them from being able to constructively rely upon it to help them orient safely and sanely in space and time. Disabling our students’ ability to express and understand their anxiety along with using erroneous psychologically informed teaching strategies that cause us to flood students with anxiety is a recipe for mental illness.

We educators have been systematically taught how to exploit student anxiety to get students to perform and behave according to our expectations with reward and punishment strategies the same way we used to be taught how to exploit student pain with corporal punishment. The word punishment has gone out of fashion, but a child who doesn’t earn a reward is being indirectly punished.

The thing is, reward and punishment can, in fact, work to motivate student achievement and behavioral compliance. Corporal punishment also works to this end. Just because something works does not mean it is a brain healthy practice.

I believe we can boost student achievement and rule compliance even better than we are now by using strategies that do not exploit student anxiety responses in any way. To develop new strategies, we need a new theory of personality that can be translated uniformly into practice.

An example of a new strategy would be this. I started giving my students stickers each day just for showing up, if they wanted them. (Some students love to keep sticker charts, some could care less about sticker charts.) I honor students for engaging, not for engaging in a specific manner that I have predetermined to be optimal. Due to many micro-changes in how I interact with students, I have ended up with much calmer, happier, and on-task students than I could have imagined possible. I am much calmer as well.

When I don’t have to be the behavior tzar, teaching becomes pure pleasure and student anxiety drops dramatically. I now focus on helping students optimally manage relevant information in the way each one is intellectually capable of managing information instead of helping students manage their behaviors. This difference has made PROFOUND changes in both myself and my students. We are all exceedingly calmer, more productive, more efficient at communicating with one another, and more constructively engaged in on-task behavior.

I believe I have found a successful recipe for interacting with students so they have normal amounts of informative anxiety, the level and kinds of anxiety mammals are biologically intended to have, instead of abnormally high amounts of artificially inflated anxiety.

How different and wonderful it is when I do not exploit or artificially jack up student anxiety in the classroom is a difference more profound than I can express in this essay, but will in future essays.

I still strive to make lessons rewarding and compelling and I still strive to rack my brain to design lessons that will motivate student engagement, but I now use what I have found are brain healthy strategies to interact with students, strategies that do not exploit or over-arouse their anxiety response.

How to interact with our students is 100% unstandardized and unregulated. If you observe teachers across all grades in a single school, or across the country, which I have, you will see a shocking amount of confusing and damaging kinds of differences between how teachers interact with their students. Students have no way to predict from year to year how teachers will respond to them or how they are expected to respond to their teachers. For some kinds of thinkers, this is uncomfortable but manageable. For other kinds of thinkers, this predicament causes confusing and unmanageable amounts of anxiety. Confusing and unmanageable amounts of anxiety lead to mental illness.

The reason we educators cannot uniformly use psychological theories to inform our teaching strategies and interaction patterns is because they don’t exist in any organized, verified, or verifiable fashion for us to use. There are too many disparate psychological theories on the books. We educators have no choice but to wade through vague and often contradictory psychological information and ultimately fashion our own individual theories. There is a false sense that teachers are regulated in how they interact with students, but this is simply not yet a possibility.

Furthermore, I hypothesize (the launch point for questioning what we think we know) the confusing array of multiple, vague, imprecise, and uncorroborated psychological theories of personality, anxiety, behavior, emotions, and child development we educators are taught to apply in our classrooms all contain inaccuracies that are actually contributing to mental illness rather than ameliorating it. We need to look no further than NAMI’s own statistics to find corroboration.

This is an upside down and backward hypothesis, however, because practically speaking, as I have been saying, the field of psychology operates with a plethora and a lack of theories all at once. Each foundational concept of psychology has multiple definitions and theories to represent it because psychologists and psychiatrists cannot arrive at mutual agreements for the foundational concepts upon which the field is built. I believe this lack of agreement reflects a disturbing degree of conceptual and theoretical chaos.

For example, depending on the year and the psychological fads most popular, there are around 10 psychological definitions and theories of personality being highlighted, give or take. There has never been scientific verification of a single one of these personality theories or definitions and there has never been mutual consensus about which definition and theory pair to settle on. So by default, each psychological practitioner and researcher must rely upon trial and error to come up with his or her own working definition of a human personality. This might not be so outlandish if psychology was anything other than the science of the human personality.

As another example, there are 90 different definitions circulating for the concept of emotion, none of them scientifically verified or mutually agreed upon. And if you read Lisa Feldman-Barrett, she will tell you most of what psychologists have claimed to be true about emotions has zero research to back it up.

Here is a lecture on YouTube by Lisa Feldman-Barett called What is an Emotion.

Psychologists read historic psychological theories and dig through clinical research studies to come up with new ideas and theories. They have started using neuroscientists to ask people questions and then measure what parts of their brain light up.

But how many psychologists since Piaget have actually been in a classroom or a real life environment where children are being children in order to simply observe the children? How many psychologists have observed the same children for a decade or more to find out how those children go about assessing information in order to make decisions, to find out what motivates them, scares them, destabilizes them, challenges them? I don’t know of any. They instead pull information from outdated, uncorroborated, unverified, and chaotic psychological theories to tell educators how to talk about emotions, how to identify normal and abnormal behaviors, how to modify behaviors, and how to manage children to get them to behave in expected ways.

This theoretical chaos is the reason psychological research has trouble replicating and it is why I could take a single mental health problem to 25 different psychologists and receive 25 different opinions and 25 different treatment plans. Some of the treatment plans will involve drugs and some will not. I must be willing to take the luck of the draw and accept trial and error guesswork. We would never accept this level of theoretical chaos is in any other field of science.

In fact, we educators demand much higher standards and higher expectations of our smart phone manufacturers than we do our psychological theorists. If our phones broke down as much as our children do, we would do something about it.

Can you imagine telling your mechanic, “I am fine with you using a trial and error approach to fixing my engine. If I get in an accident because you chose to apply the wrong theory for how to fix my engine this time around, I’ll come back so you can try theory B if I live through the accident.” As consumers we do not tolerate a pell-mell relationship between theory and practice when it comes to the building, care, and maintenance of our consumer goods. How is it that we can tolerate such pell-mell theories and applications for the care and maintenance of our most precious resource on earth, our children?

I believe we educators must start to do something about the theoretical chaos we have inherited from the field of psychology and are expected to apply in the classroom in order to do something about the unacceptably high incidences of mental illness in our society.

I believe we educators must start to demand biologically accurate and scientifically verified and uniform theories of the human personality, human behavior, and child development that can be directly translated consistently by all teachers into to brain healthy applications in the classroom. At the very least, we can eliminate mentally destabilizing teaching practices by eliminating the inaccurate psychological theories that inform them. At the very most, we can propose and eventually adopt new biologically accurate theories that can be translated into brain healthy teaching practices.

I also believe it is imperative we develop and universally agree upon a biologically accurate, working definition for what a human personality is before we can develop a theory of it. I propose the human personality can be defined as the reflection in each moment in time of how a human brain is making sense of information in order to formulate a predictive decision for what to do next in response to the information it is taking in and assessing from its internal and external environments.

Each thinker will interpret and respond to information in the environment in completely unique ways as determined by his or her I.Q. in verbal, numerical, and spatial reasoning, processing speed, past experiences stored as memory, short and long term memory efficiency, depth perception, vision acuity, auditory acuity, eye-hand coordination, height, weight, level of muscle tone, spatial awareness, etc. It is biologically impossible for humans to have standardized interpretations, responses, emotions, or behaviors to any piece of information they encounter.

I hypothesize a human personality is NOTa static set of character traits, moods, temperaments or states of mind the way the current jumble of psychological theories claim it is. Rather, I hypothesize the human personality reflects an individually customized process of information management that is in constant flux in response to the constant influx of expected and unexpected internal and external pieces of information. Emotions and behaviors are tools that enable and enhance this predictive decision-making process in an extremely customized way for each individual.

Emotions and behaviors do not have to be discussed, commented upon, improved, or modified because they have no agency in and of themselves. Predictive decision making is the initiator behind everything we do. Discussing the best possible conclusions and predictive decisions for any given situation allows us, as educators, to allows students to keep what is private and personal to them, private and personal. Emotional cues are private pieces of information to help each individual make sense of the world in a way that makes sense uniquely to him or her.

Psychologists and self-help authors have created a passive aggressive empire of information attributing the quality our humanness to the quality of our emotional expressions, as if higher quality people have stronger emotional cues and are able to articulate them better than lower quality people. Psychologists make many confusing and contradictory claims about women having too much emotion and, therefore, making overly emotional decisions and men having not enough emotion and, therefore, making overly rational decisions. The whole ‘what our emotions do debacle’ is also for another essay, one that is sorely needed.

Telling a child to be different by telling him to change or modify his behaviors or to control or moderate his emotions is like telling him to walk differently by changing the size of his feet. It makes no logical sense and is so destabilizing that I hypothesize it contributes to mental illness.

A child cannot arbitrarily change his emotions and behaviors to suit the whims, preferences, or expectations of a teacher. A child can, however, change how he cognitively understands and manages a piece of information. Changing his cognitive orientation to a piece of information is the only thing in a child’s power to change. Changes in a child’s behavior or his emotions reflect how he has changed his understanding of the information at hand in that moment, not how he has willfully decided to change his behaviors.

Behavior modification, I believe, will eventually be seen as a human rights violation and a cause of mental illness because behavior modification arbitrarily disrupts the integrity of how a human is capable of understanding and managing information in order to form predictive decisions for what to do next.

Our genetic fitness equips us with a variety of potentials. Our brain’s capacity to formulate predictive decisions activates and animates those potentials. Without our information management and predictive decision-making process a human cannot put one foot in front of the other or string two words together. Furthermore, this process is the only active role we play in our own humanity. Our arms move only when we make a predictive decision to cue them to move. Once we make the predictive decision to move our arms, our nervous system takes over and does all the work for us. All we ever do is provide one predictive decision after another to our brain. Our brain does everything else automatically or autonomically.

Therefore, the only place mental illness can creep in is inside the dynamic of how we formulate predictive decisions for what to do next. Jeff Hawkins, a neuroscientist who wrote an excellent book called On Intelligence, shows with his research that no matter what sense we are receiving information from or what the information is we are processing, our brain goes through the exact same sequence of steps to arrive at a prediction for what to do next. He has defined intelligence as our ability to make future predictions and to store learned information in our memory to assist us in making those predictions.

If Hawkins is correct, and I believe after observing developing children for 30 years that he his, then psychology has inaccurately explained reward and punishment, the basis for many of our educational strategies. If Hawkins is correct, then the brain is rewarded when its predictions for what to do next are fulfilled and it is punished when its predictions are violated.

A child cannot be motivated for a reward unless he has predicted he wants the reward. If a child hands in homework every day for a week in order to earn extra recess, it is the fulfillment of his prediction that is rewarding to his brain, not the reward itself. Once out on recess, the child might be bullied and have a lousy time. Recess is not one lump some of a reward that can satisfy the child’s brain.

To have a rewarding experience on recess, the child must be able to make a continuous string of predictions for what to do next that are fulfilled as he expected them to be. Successfully fulfilled predictions are what our brain craves, not random rewards. We have missed the point of reward and punishment all these years, which is why reward and punishment is a teaching strategy that only works consistently with the most cognitively flexible and intelligent children for whom any strategy would work.

Below is a link to a TED talk given by Jeff Hawkins from Numenta whose research I have used to develop many of my ideas:

Jeff Hawkins: How Brain Science Will Change Computing

After reading Hawkins book about 50 times, I came up with the hypothesis that the most basic human need is not whether or not a human is fed, clothed, or sheltered like Maslow taught. It is whether or not each human is free to optimally exercise his ability to take in and make sense of information in the ways that make the most sense to his unique array of sensory, motor, and cognitive capacities in order to continuously generate predictive decisions for what to do next.

When the sovereignty of a human being’s decision-making capacities are taken from him, even in the smallest of ways, it puts him in a state of extreme threat and he will feel he is being attacked, causing him to withdraw or become aggressive.

Our brain doesn’t mess around. Violations to what we have predicted in any moment in time signal our brain to cue for anxiety so we will become hyper-vigilant to figure out what the anomaly is. We can think a million thoughts, but we only have 7 or so emotional cues. Our brain/body is not very differentiated in the cues it is able to give us to alert us to a threat. So I hypothesize both small and big threats are cued with similar amounts of anxiety.

I hypothesize anxiety is as uncomfortable to our brain/body as pain is. This means behavior and emotion modification is handled by children with the same exact amount of anxiety and discomfort that corporal punishment is. This means that by not understanding how hair trigger human anxiety is, we educators are inadvertently doing the equivalent of hitting our students intermittently all day long. If we hit them intermittently every day they would eventually become mentally ill. It is clear we are doing something wrong because 1 in 5 of them are, in fact, becoming mentally ill. It follows that we need to re-evaluate how to interact with children to optimize mental health and minimize mental illness.

Many hear my ideas and believe I am saying students should be able to do whatever they want whenever they want. I am not. I believe, with micro-changes in how we interact with students, we can have much calmer and more civil classrooms with far less bullying than we do now. And I believe this because:

Teachers do the impossible….. Every.Single.Day.

Few other professionals are required to problem solve the way educators are. Therefore, I believe teachers can easily figure out new strategies for how to teach students without violating student predictions or commenting on or modifying student emotions or behaviors. Communicating to students for how they are expected to interpret and manage the information at hand, instead of telling them how they are wrong or how they are expected to emote or behave is a simple adjustment all teachers can make.

And if predictive decision making is behind every expression of a child, when he or she breaks a rule, instead of modifying their behavior, we teachers should modify our explanation of the rule. If our students are not performing or conforming as needed, we need to change how we deliver the relevant information, not change how the child behaves or receives the information.

As a parent, volunteer, and teacher, I have been able to observe teachers of all grades and ability levels in 6 cities and 3 states. Teacher brilliance at creating and presenting content material is staggering. I hypothesize all of our American schools have the potential to rise meteorically from good to great by discontinuing teaching applications informed by outdated, inaccurate, and harmful psychological theories and replacing them with teaching applications informed by biologically accurate and brain friendly theories.