Transcription
I spend a lot of time thinking about thinking. In my cognitive communication rehabilitation lab here at the University of Georgia, we do research into the kinds of supports that students need to be successful in college after they've had a brain injury. And that thinking about thinking is called metacognition.
We're interested in metacognition because we, and others, have done some research to show that it's critical to those students' success. So, who are those students with brain injury? Many times, they've been in car accidents. Recreational accidents are common as well: bike accidents, skiing, sledding, also falls. Maybe falls from bunk beds, falls down stairwells, that sort of thing. You've probably also heard a fair bit in the media about concussions. And a concussion is a brain injury. It's a mild one, so for the most part, people get better. The students that I see are those that have had six, eight, ten concussions, people who have been really hard on their brains, and as a result, they're having a hard time in the classroom.
So, what I want to do now is, I actually have an audio clip of one of our students with brain injury. And we finally got her connected to the Disability Resource Center so that she could have extra time for her tests, and she could also take those tests in what are called distraction-free rooms. And despite the name, what you're gonna hear in this audio clip is that actually, she found all kinds of distractions in that room. And what I want you to do is that I want you to listen carefully because I want you to remember those distractions because fair game, there's gonna be a quiz. All right, so listen up. Remember all of the distractions that you can.
"I finally went to disability service to take exams. That's so much better. Is it? The distractions for your rooms have so many distractions in them. And I like, you sit in a swivel chair and it, you can like rock it back and forth, and you can dim the lights, and you can, and there's like pencils and sharpeners too, and Kleenexes, and they have like earplugs and stuff, and a light in the clock. And I was like, you can just sit there. Yeah."
Okay. So the good news was that our student did, in fact, do better taking her exams over there, despite the fact that she found all those distractions. What I want you to do now, though, is that I want you to think about how many of those items you're gonna remember when I ask you about them later. So we've got a handy-dandy lineup here. We've got zero down here, that means none. And then over here, we've got a hundred percent. You're gonna ace the quiz when it happens. You're gonna remember all of those distractions. So place yourself somewhere on that line and just kind of make a mental note of what that number is.
All right. So I told you that I worked with students with brain injury, but what is a brain injury? The formal definition is that it's a blow, bump, or jolt to the head that disrupts the normal functioning of the brain. That old trope that if you've seen one, then you've only seen one, applies to brain injury as well. There's a huge range of deficits that people might experience as a result of a brain injury. Common cognitive complaints, though, are problems with attention, problems with memory, and problems with executive function.
So, problems with attention might be difficulty paying attention to me and ignoring the person wrestling in their seat behind you, or maybe the buzz of the phone in your pocket. Problems with memory is not so much problems with remembering where your parents are or where you went to elementary school. This is problems learning new information after the brain injury. Executive function: control processes that we use to plan and sequence behavior, to organize our thoughts. And that gets us closer to metacognition.
And I told you that metacognition is thinking about thinking. But we also have metacognitive beliefs. We know how our brain works. We know what it's good at. We know the times that it might let us down. And those beliefs are built on lots and lots of experience that we've had using our brain. So this is why you might hear people say things like, "I'm really bad with names," or "I have a photographic memory." That, that is based on lots of experiences of forgetting names, or maybe remembering things once you've looked at it.
For our students with brain injury, they have also developed metacognitive beliefs based on lots and lots of experience living with their brain their whole lives. And then after a brain injury, their brain no longer works the way that it did before. So they have to relearn how their brain works. And at the same time, that relearning of how their brain works is being done by their brain, the same brain that was injured to cause the problems. So you can see where it becomes this troublesome loop.
So what we do with our students with brain injury is that we explicitly teach them to self-regulate. And we all use self-regulation in big and small ways, on hard and easy tasks, but we may not think about it so much. But for our students with brain injury, we force them to think about it. And self-regulation is a process through which we monitor our performance and then we exert control to make sure that we're getting the performance that we want.
So I'll show you what it looks like. So the first thing we do with our students is that we have them set a goal. And this does not have to be some kind of big, lofty goal like graduating from college. We're talking about easy goals that you can just pick off. So maybe paying attention through a seventy or five-minute class. So the student sets this goal. The first thing that's going to happen is that they're going to monitor. They're going to check to see if they're paying attention. So they're gonna check to see if their actual performance is meeting their goal performance. So they're in class, five minutes in, and they check to see, "Am I paying attention? What did the professor just say?" And if they don't know, then they're gonna exert control. So they're not meeting their goal. So now they're gonna come up with a strategy. It's five minutes in the class. You know, maybe it's just something simple: you sit up straight, take a sip of water, refocus your energy toward the professor. So they execute that strategy. And then it's a loop. So we're back up around to the top where we're now going to be self-monitoring again. So they're checking their actual performance to see if it's meeting their goal performance. "Do I know what the professor's talking about? What just happened?" And if they miss it again, they still realize, "I am still not with it." Maybe now they're gonna execute another strategy, like writing notes. Gets them actively involved in class. If they're gonna write down what the professor is saying, they have to pay attention to it. So they execute that strategy. Come back around, they monitor. "Do I know what the professor just said? Yeah, I just wrote it down. I'm good." So now their actual performance is there, and they have achieved what they wanted to achieve, and they can continue checking the rest of class. Though, let's be honest.
So the other thing, though, is that all of this is happening within the backdrop of our metacognitive beliefs. And it matters because if you believe that you're gonna do just fine, you might not ever enter into this loop. You might not monitor because why would you if you thought that you were going to do just fine? The other thing is that we have to activate this loop many, many times of monitoring and control, lots of experience and feedback, before we start to get beliefs to shift.
So let me give you another example. Let's say that I asked you to run to the grocery store and I say, "Hey, can you grab milk and bread for me?" How many of you are gonna write that down? Show hands. Okay, some of you, not many. Fair enough. All right. Let's say that I say, "Hey, can you run to the grocery store for me and can you pick up milk and bread and dishwashing soap and zip lock bags and sour cream?" How many of you are gonna write that down? Show hands. Oh my gosh, you guys are all writing it down. You made that decision very quickly. And you made that decision very quickly because you went right to your beliefs. Beliefs are fast. And you did that based on lots of experience that you've had with your memory, lots of experience we've had going to the grocery store, maybe lots of experience you've had writing grocery lists. And let's be fair, maybe sometimes you've forgotten two good items. Okay. For someone who's had a brain injury, they know that second list is hard. You won't need that second list. It was hard. It's the first list. It's the first list that our folks with memory impairments might miss. And it's because a lot of you thought it was easy. So why wouldn't it be easy? They've lived with a brain that remembered milk and bread for years and years. Instead, they might go to the store and end up with two items, but maybe it's milk and eggs. So they still come home with two things from the staples category, or from that category of what you buy when the weatherman says snow.
So let's return again to our student and all her distractions. I had you judge your learning before, and now I want you to do it again. How many of those items do you think you're going to remember when I ask you? And again, pick a number for yourself. Zero, a hundred. You're acing the quiz. Somewhere in between. How many of you changed your judgment? Some of you did. Okay, great. Well, the time has come. Remember your items. You can chat amongst yourselves. See how many of those items you can remember.
So from here, it sounds like you have all remembered all of them, and maybe like 300 more. That was a lot. However, the answer key is here. You can check yourself, and you can also maybe find some items that were nagging you. All right, you can also grade yourself here. I trust you. You can see what you actually scored on the quiz. All right. Okay.
So I'm gonna ask you again now. How many of you were overconfident that you thought you were gonna remember a whole lot and then you didn't do so great? How many? Some of you. Okay. How many of you were pretty well calibrated, that you were pretty much on target? Okay, more hands for sure. And then how many of you were underconfident, that you actually did much better than you thought you were gonna do? How'd we do? Good. Great. So typical adults tend to be a little bit underconfident. And we think that's because that little bit of feeling that you get, that unsure, sort of, "I don't know," that's what makes you use a strategy. So if you're a little unsure, you're gonna do the work to make sure.
Now, the other thing that I want to say here is that I had to make that judgment two times. And people tend to be much more accurate the second time. The first time I asked you that information was still very fresh. You had just heard it. It was sitting in what we call working memory, which you can think of as the chalkboard in your mind. And if it's still written on the chalkboard, you don't know if you've memorized it because you can still see it. So when people make that first judgment, they make that based on beliefs. You make that based on previous experiences that you've had with your memory, maybe listening to information. The second time that I asked you, there was lots of time in between for me to distract you, think about other things. So what people usually do is when I say, or when we say, "How many you're gonna remember now?" You do what's called a covert retrieval attempt. You check. You start thinking about it like, "Well, okay, well, [Music] Jr, there are some Kleenex. What else was there? Okay, maybe half." So you actually monitored. You did the work to check your thinking at that point.
So if you're thinking about, "Now this seems useful." I'm glad it is. Why I bring it up, but I do want to bring up one more point about our students with brain injury. That many people who have brain injuries have really nice recoveries, and they look like the person they were before, and they are not that person. And so we call it an invisible injury. That you can't see what's different. And it's easier to understand why this is a problem if you think about someone who has a physical injury. Let's say that you had a friend who just had a knee replacement, and you say, "Hey, how's it going?" And he said, "You know, it's good, but I got to do my exercises all the time, and I got to go to the physical therapist every day." You probably wouldn't say, "Oh man, I know, I really need to go to the gym." I mean, you might not be wrong, I don't want to judge, but maybe you do need to go to the gym. But you probably wouldn't say it to your friend because you know that he doesn't do his exercises, if he doesn't see the physical therapist, his knee might not work right. He might not get to walk the next day. And it's the same way for our folks with brain injury. They have to do this work. It is an imperative. And that it is an imperative, that it is compulsory, feels very different. It is part of the weight of living with a brain injury, and as part of the hard work of recovery. So don't minimize it. For the rest of us, it's a choice. We have this choice, but we don't often take it.
So our beliefs are stable as a protective mechanism. Our beliefs are stable so that they're not blown about in the wind every time the weather changes. But they can also trap us in a previous iteration of ourselves. That our beliefs might not be mapping to the person that we are. So I want you to think about why you were interested in this talk, or why you were interested in TEDx. What did you want to get out of it? Did you come just to hear something interesting, or did you come because you thought you might want to take that with you? That you can learn, that maybe you believe in change, that maybe you have a goal out there. And I'm here to tell you that you can do it. That you can think about it, think about your thinking, and make the change happen. Thank you.