“I want my students to be stressed out and unhappy at school” said no teacher or administrator ever. But despite good intentions, it is the sad reality that school is sometimes more stressful and more isolating for kids than we’d like. And these non-physical sources of pain can obstruct learning just as much as the physical ones, especially in underserved populations.
One of the most powerful stories about how rejection or lack of connection is represented in the brain comes from a study published in Science in 2003.
Researchers from UCLA and Macquarie University, in Sydney Australia put 13 young adults in an fMRI machine to watch their brain activity while they played a virtual game of catch with two humanoid figures. Now imagine you are the young adult subject, with your head stabilized and facing a screen. The two figures toss a ball among the three of you and you “throw” the ball back by pushing a button with your finger. This game continues for a few minutes when all of a sudden, without notice or explanation, the two humanoid figures on the screen stop throwing the ball to you and instead throw the virtual ball only to each other.
When the brain activity is observed following this unexpected and admittedly minor social rejection, the researchers find that the activity pattern looks very similar to the activity pattern seen in response to physical pain (like an electric shock).
The conclusion from this study is that social rejection or lack of inclusion hurts much like physical pain. And the implications are tremendous. While we’d certainly never expect a student to learn immediately following a painful fall or hit from an errant ball, we often expect students to “get over it” and get their heads back to the classroom even after a potentially devastating social insult.
Thankfully, building a connected and caring school culture can both buffer students from the effects of social pain as well as minimize the amount of ostracizing that happens during the school day. Building this culture (some suggestions here) doesn’t detract from time spent on academic material and even gives some time back that would otherwise be lost on conflict resolution and debriefing after dramatic incidents. What’s more, a connected classroom and school culture lowers cortisol levels in students, enhances pro-social behavior and even raises math scores.
A brain-aware school culture knows that if the brain doesn’t see physical and social pain as distinct neither should educators because the brain can’t learn when it’s in pain.
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