The Power of Mindful Learning (10 page)

After the participants completed each task, we asked them
how much they enjoyed it and how often their minds wandered while they were working on it. Subjects enjoyed doing
the first task whether we called it work or play, but significantly more in the "work" group reported that their minds
wandered while they were doing the task. For the two more
difficult tasks, more participants enjoyed the tasks when they were presented as play than when they were presented as work.
Once again, minds wandered twice as often in the "work" as in
the "play" groups.

For those who enjoy doing crossword puzzles, consider the fun
in trying to come up with a word that fits the puzzle's requirements. Then imagine doing the same puzzle with the expectation of being graded on speed and accuracy. If we assume an
activity is play, we approach it nonevaluatively and proceed to
get involved in it. What makes the activity enjoyable is the
process of going from not knowing to knowing. If there are
several possible solutions and we narrow it down to one that
works, the puzzle is more fun than if we only come up with one
solution.

When we are involved, much of the pleasure resides in
drawing distinctions or noticing things that, by the fact that
we select them for noticing, are interesting to us. The
Provincetown Art Association has an auction every year. I
look over the paintings and plan to bid on one or two. I notice
all the particulars about them: color, theme, style, and so on. I
continue to draw distinctions and even try to imagine them in
various locations in my house. The more I notice, the more
excited I get about the potential purchase. Often at the auction I am outbid-by someone who has more money than I
or someone who has gotten even more involved in the
process. Whether I take home the painting or the money I went with, the activity is great fun, and year after year I wait
for the event.

In a work task, there tends to be little freedom as to the distinctions we attend to, or at least it appears so at first. Much of
the work we do has rigidly prescribed steps: go over these
twelve points when teaching the lesson; spell out these five features to the customer; set up the display in this way and in this
order. But no matter how much in our work is spelled out,
there is always room for finer choices and distinctions and for
variations in our approach.

For students learning a history lesson, there seems little
freedom in what they must study. Those are the facts that happened, and their task is to learn them. History was always my
least favorite subject. I memorized all I needed to, but the task
was always draining. It was as if I took Mark Twain's advice in
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn literally:

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be
prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

With all these possibilities forbidden or, more precisely,
never taught, I never understood that involving myself in
history by making idiosyncratic distinctions would make it
fun to read. The only lessons I really learned were that history was about the past, not the present or future, and that it
was not much fun.

We sort the activities in our lives into categories of work
and play. These categories vary from culture to culture. The
anthropologist Robert LeVine told me of field observations he
made in a rural community in Kathmandu.' There, hight-caste
Hindu men-fathers, grandfathers, teenage brothers, and
uncles-take over the care of children for hours, not only when
they feel like playing with them. They feed and wash the babies
with evident enjoyment and affection. This activity does not
seem to jeopardize their masculinity. Since the Nepalese Hindus are patriarchal, this was a surprise. High-status Nepalese
prefer infant care to other tasks. Those who have been to
school cut better deals so they can remain with the babies
rather than go out in the field. Care of babies is seen as a
leisure-time activity.

Among the Gusii of Kenya, in contrast, caring for a baby is
considered menial work and carries a lower status. Men and
teenage girls don't do it.

Virtually any task can be made pleasurable if we approach it
with a different attitude. If we have long held a mindset that a
particular activity is arduous, changing to a mindful attitude
may be difficult, but the difficulty stems from the mindset and
not the activity.

Stanley Milgram took advantage of the power of this
approach when he ran some of his social psychology experiments in New York City. Most researchers pay people to
encourage them to be subjects in studies, that is, they pay in
return for work. Milgram on occasion had research assistants
stand outside the Graduate Center of the City University of New York carrying signs announcing that today, people could
be in his research for free. He had many takers.

Lori Pietrasz and I tested the idea that even disliked tasks
can be made pleasurable.' Participants in our study listened to
or watched something for which they had no particular liking:
either music tapes or televised football. For them this was much
more a chore than a delight.

Participants who did not particularly like rap music heard a
tape of rap music; those who had no liking for classical music
heard a tape of classical music; and those who thought watching football was boring watched the Super Bowl. Participants
were asked to notice three or six novel aspects about the activity. In each case, a control group was exposed to the same music
or football game without instructions to make such distinctions. The groups instructed to draw distinctions chose their
own. For football, it may have been particulars about the looks
of the players or the interaction among teammates. For music,
it may have been which instruments they could pick out or the
meaning or lack of meaning of the words. In each case, we
assessed people's liking for the activity before and after they
became engaged in the task. Each group asked to draw distinctions ended up liking the activity more than before. The more
distinctions drawn, the more the subjects liked the activity.
There were no changes in liking for the control groups.

In another experiment, conducted with Andrea Marcus,
participants were exposed to unfamiliar works of art.' All participants were shown two paintings. For the first, they were either instructed to notice novel aspects of the work or given no
instruction about it. For the second, they were asked to make a
comparative judgment. Rather than ask how much they liked
the art, we wanted to see how deeply the involvement affected
them. After the subjects viewed the art, we gave them a sheet
of paper containing the titles of the two paintings. Under one
title were several signatures; under the other there was only one
signature. We asked participants to write their names under the
title of the work they preferred. We wondered whether those
subjects who mindfully approached the painting feel strongly
enough about their preferences to go against the judgment purportedly made by the vast majority of other participants and
select the unpopular work as their choice.

The people who drew novel distinctions were indeed less
likely to conform. These participants were more confident of
their feelings than were the subjects who had been asked
merely to judge the paintings.

Social psychology includes a body of work on what is called
the mere exposure effect. In the original study on this phenomenon, subjects were exposed to unfamiliar Turkish words.' The
target words appeared on a list either several times or only
once. Subjects were asked to make up definitions for these
unknown words. Their definitions were then evaluated and
rated according to how positive they were. Words that had
appeared several times were defined in more positive ways.

Increased exposure to unfamiliar stimuli often has the effect
of increasing liking. Liking seems to increase more for complex stimuli than for simple ones; more for exposure sequences that
are varied than for those that are static; more for briefly presented words that are unrecognizable than for words that are
recognizable; and in general more for people who have a
greater tolerance for ambiguity.' Furthermore, boredom seems
to limit the mere exposure effect.10 These findings, taken
together with the other studies described here, suggest that the
mechanism behind this effect may be increased involvement, or
mindful engagement as a result of exposure.

Mindful engagement not only increases liking for words
and objects, but it also increases liking for people. Benzion
Chanowitz, Richard Bashner, and I11 showed slides of people
with disabilities to children in elementary school and asked
the children several questions about each person they saw.10
The children were asked for one answer or for several answers
to each question. For example, the children were shown a slide
of a woman they were told was deaf. The control group was
asked to name one way she might be good at her job as a cook
and one way she might be bad at it. The other group was
asked to name four ways she might be good at her job and
four ways she might be bad at it. Next, the children were told
that a child with a disability was coming to their school. They
were asked if they wanted to attend a picnic with that child or
have that child as a partner for various activities. Children who
had been asked to provide a variety of answers in the earlier
activity were less likely to want to avoid the new child, and
their responses were more differentiated. For example, these children were more likely to want a blind child as a partner for
an activity for which blindness could be an advantage, such as
pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, but not for an activity for which
they thought blindness could be a disadvantage, such as a
wheelchair race.

Drawing distinctions can have advantages other than
making an activity fun. Many people making career plans are
taught, implicitly or explicitly, to wait for something out there
to grab them, to take hold of their interest. Year after year
students are lost or unhappy because they don't know what
career to pursue, as if without any involvement, they should
know. Internships provide some information, but choosing an
internship poses the same problem as choosing a career. We
give up too much control if we wait to find careers that grab
us. Involvement requires us actively to draw distinctions.
Doing so often means breaking the activity into smaller
pieces. Activities other than jobs-hobbies and pastimesbecome enjoyable only with involvement. How many times
have we seen people dragged around museums by a friend or
spouse who's interested in what's there, when their own interest hasn't been piqued. Whether we are talking about art, a
hobby, or the choice of a profession, more often than not people expect to know whether they'll like it before they engage
in it. Clearly, many more choices open up to us when we realize that we can take a more active role in determining our
preferences. If we don't take this active role, then even play
can feel like work.

Song ofloy

WANG KEN