MAP Strategic Wealth Advisors

About a year ago, Sweden’s education system intentionally decreased its reliance on technology in the classroom– prioritizing paper/pencils over use of computers, for instance. The outcome has been positive, showing that less reliance on technology-based learning yields greater academic success & overall understanding of information. Neuroscientists have dug into why, and presented these five findings:

1. Learning requires empathy: Learning is interpersonal. The understanding of new information is reliant a social connection we build with whomever is giving that information. This accounts for why 85% of tuition-free students and 50% fee-paying students never complete online programs.
2. Creativity demands personally coded knowledge: Technology, including AI, effectively erases the need for humans to memorize large quantities of information. But it is often our practiced understanding of learned information that allows us to use it, build upon it, or employ it creatively. Technology gives us access to knowledge, but hinders our ability to retain it– or put it to creative use.
3. Learning requires undivided attention: Given that technology is used for both academic and recreational purposes, humans become inclined to multitask between the two. Multitasking worsens performance as the functions necessary to perform multiple tasks often blend together. It also redirects our information of how to perform tasks to our subconscious memories, making them more inaccessible in the long term.
4. Location plays a key role in memory: On a neurological level, printed information is easier to recall than digitized information because print ensures that the information stays in an unchanging location, whereas digitized information can change location and form across screens.
5. Use Flashcards: committing facts to memory is the foundation for higher-level thinking. Flashcards are one of the most effective ways to get information to sink in, because they stimulate recall. Information written on flashcards help construct memory and become more easy to access in the long term.

We are in a “National happiness funk.” Why? Brooks believes that it has to do with our self-control, citing studies that show low self-control is directly correlated with lower well-being.

Brooks argues that culture today encourages us to relax our sense of self-control to get happier, leading to an unfortunate result that makes us unhappier as individuals, and therefore as a country.

Brooks notes three common influences pushing us to suspend self-control: excess alcohol consumption, anonymity online (which can encourage antisocial and corrosive behavior), and the addictive ability of social media to make one feel more powerful/important than they are.

The notion that self-control creates happiness is not new. Benjamin Franklin said, “Educate your children to self-control, to the habit of holding passion and prejudice and evil tendencies subject to an upright and reasoning will, and you have done much to abolish misery from their future and crimes from society.”

While the suppression of immediate desires may seem contrived or inauthentic, greater self control should actually be viewed as the most authentic thing you can do– and in fact, creates an authentically better version of ourselves.