(May 15, 2025 at 9:38 am)John 6IX Breezy Wrote: This video clip, from 23:00-35:00 might be too technical, but it forwards a great explanation for why we become more exploratory in adolescence. I'd be interested to see if you can pick up the overall thesis, because I think it's fascinating.
I enjoyed this video a lot -- thank you for recommending it.
A lot of it was over my head, but I'm used to that feeling. Parts of it reminded me of lectures I heard when I got my teaching certificate in London many years ago. The emphasis there was on classroom practice rather than research or theory, but they did emphasize how people understand the world through schema, and interpret new information in light of the mental structures that they are accustomed to. (We didn't use the word "schema," but the ideas were similar.) I know this has been important to my teaching ever since, as I find that even quite obscure subjects (e.g. Renaissance Neoplatonism) in my classes can be introduced in ways that plug in to non-esoteric life experiences.
The finding that adolescents actually suppress (if that's the right word) memory in order to explore the world more widely makes a lot of sense to me. Certainly I became more exploratory at that age (my parents would use a different adjective). And it fits nicely with what we've been saying about the dynamic nature of people's beliefs. It appears to be natural -- almost biologically demonstrable -- for people of that age to move away from the ideas they had taken for granted in childhood. Which works against the theory that children brainwashed as toddlers will be unable to deviate from their indoctrination later on.
This was my first time to hear people talk about what's happening right now in this field of research. It's exciting to think that the field is still open and on the move.
