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Comment by robg | Hacker News Reader

I’m working with our local school board, consists of over 200 schools in a wealthy county. Even as I got my PhD in Neuroscience 20 years ago, it’s bonkers to me that kids today aren’t being taught about their brains as performance muscles. The teenage mental health crisis is only being addressed as a need basis. It’s like telling people oncologists are available when you get cancer. If we want better brain health it starts with building better brain tools.

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> kids today aren’t being taught about their brains as performance muscles

I feel the opposite - kids are being treated like machines, with their performance judged at every step. Treating a kid's brain like a "performance muscle" is gross to me. There's a vast emotional world being papered over to squeeze out performance from children.

Gross is teaching kids about how their bodies work? I’m talking basics like the physiology of sleep and stress and how both affect learning, memory, and attention.

Student athletes learn more about their bodies and performance than students do about their brains.

Most of those things in your first paragraph are actually taught to the student athletes that you talk about in the second. Mind-body performance is actually a big part of sports today.

Kind of, the physiology of stress and fight or flight generally isn’t, even to pro athletes. But to that point, why do you think the lessons aren’t crossing over into academics?

It depends on how deep you are talking about. There's a difference between teaching in-depth theoretical knowledge on the subject vs teaching applied concepts.

"why do you think the lessons aren’t crossing over into academics?"

I don't think this. My anatomy and physiology class covered the basics about different processes. Things like sleep, stress, and attention were things that were covered in some assemblies or ad-hoc (at least from an applied standpoint and not necessarily deep technical standpoint).

It was the language you chose and the implied purpose - for academic performance.

I agree its really important to learn how one's physical body and habits shape their felt experience and to truly realize you have a lever to change it.

> it’s bonkers to me that kids today aren’t being taught about their brains as performance muscles.

k12 education is incredibly poor for our ROI. We get some algebra skills and reading skills. Hearing people say the words 'trust the science' means they didn't 'get' the scientific method.

I cannot imagine why we don't have a 'health' class that teaches about the human body scientifically works. Teach about how addictions are formed, teach about how hormones/various neurochemicals impact our brains, when we experience them, etc... I currently am learning about these and there are all sorts of LPTs you get when you realize how the brain actually works.

I think that varies by the school and the student's track. I was taught many of those things in stuff like DARE, biology, and physiology classes in grades 5-12.

No you didn't.

Seeing you include DARE in that list means you are talking about something completely different than neurobiology.

Lol, how do you teach neurobiology to 5th graders? The answer is you teach it at a conceptual level they can understand, generally focusing on outcomes or other observable results. I remember being taught the basics of chemical dependence, how it changes your thought patterns, how it affect your brain, etc, in DARE around that level.

You aren't teaching kids PhD level neurobiology. You're teaching them the applied concepts.

Even in high school when you're learning about dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, etc, it's not at a PhD level, but focuses on how those changes impact different systems, especially any observable behavioral changes.

So please don't tell me what I did or didn't learn. Please realize that neurobiology is not only available as PhD level content, but rather, like all other subjects, has content for lower education levels as well.

What are some brain tools? Or wherever would you get started?

Not OP, but I loved the book Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg. Number 1 book of all time. You can turn yourself into a robot if you want.

Neurons that fire together wire together.

Edit: cybernetic corollary: neurons that we wire together, will fire together.

From the physiology, the biggest are how sleep and stress affect learning, memory, and attention. Seems obvious but I’ve yet to find a school district that starts even there.

available advanced classes. They “ran out of space” for calculus in high school for me.

Now they allow high schoolers to take college classes during high school and get credit for both to fill the gaps in some areas.

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