Legalize dopamine at schools

Hi, my name is Craig and I am a dopamine addict. I'm from a family of addicts. But I guess as you're reading this you're also an addict, but that's OK, because it's time to accept it as part of our modern society. 

We have a real problem in our education system today. Schools are finding it increasingly difficult to keep children's attention, with some studies reporting a 42% increase in Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder over the past 8 years. This is resulting in falling grades and increasing dropout rates.

There are three approaches to deal with this rapidly worsening problem:

• The first is to ignore it by saying that “it's just the modern generation, and they will have to adapt”. 
  
• The second is to attempt to medicate the children so they are more compliant and concentrate better. 
  
• The third is to adopt new approaches to teaching and learning. 
  

However:

• The first approach, is an ostrich mentality and will not solve the problem. 
  
• The second approach is increasingly being rejected as addressing the symptom not the problem. 
  
• This leaves us with the third approach. This approach opens up a vista of opportunities, led nowadays by digital solutions. However, even these apparently progressive solutions can, and have failed. 
  

The solution may however lie in a combination of the second and third approaches - chemical and technological, however not in the chemicals we make, but rather the chemicals our bodies create. 

By using technology effectively, dopamine induced learning could not only solve education's problems, but result in highly motivated learners with good memories.

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Credit: medimoon.com

The legal drug
Dopamine is a chemical that functions as a neurotransmitter. It's role is related to reward-motivated behaviour. Rewarding behaviour results in an increase in the level of dopamine in the brain. Quite simply, this chemical gives you a mini high when you do certain things. Every time you read your email or scour the web or read social media posts, you are getting bursts of dopamine.

These little bursts of dopamine make you feel good, and keep you coming back for more. In fact reading this post is probably giving you a dopamine high. 

Hugh McGuire, who dedicated his life to books, and started numerous online book repositories, confessed that he just couldn't read a book anymore. However he is hooked to reading emails, checking on Twitter, and scouring social media sites. 

Why? 

Because new information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, and this makes us feel great, which then compels your brain to ask for more dopamine, and hence you must go and find more new information. 

Could we use this drug to impact how we teach and learn, and even enable us to read books or other long content pieces?

Dopamined and ready to learn
A study conducted on the impact of dopamine on learning found that mice who were dopamine deficient showed no evidence of learning on a task they were set, compared to those with dopamine. 

The study concluded that the 
“lack of dopamine results in a performance/motivational decrement that masks their learning competence.”

The key impact of dopamine is on motivation. 

If you doubt it's power, then try be away from your mobile phone for a day, or don't look at any social media, news, or emails for a day. 

For most of us this is not an easy thing to do. We miss our content. Often we miss it so much we even have to be on our digital devices while we're watching TV. The bottom line is that we are motivated by dopamine to come back again and again. 

So how could this natural chemical be used in education?

There are many ways in which technology can be used to motivate learning through dopamine production, such as;
gamification, 
using social media, 
creating digital content, 
conversation-centric learning, etc. 

Take gamification, as an example. Gamification seeks to use elements from games, especially elements that cause games to be so motivating, such as levels, challenges, rewards, etc. to motivate learning. 

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Gamification makes use of small reward cycles that get learners hooked into the learning experience. 


The myth around dopamine is that it is produced when we are rewarded for our actions, like getting a badge for completing something. However this is not true. A challenge produces an achievement which results in pleasure because of dopamine being released.

Credit: gamingintraining.wordpress.com

The result is we seek another challenge, so we can have more achievement, and hence more pleasure/dopamine. It's not simply completing a game that attracts a gamer, but rather the cycle of getting through increasingly difficult levels. 

The same applies in learning. 
It is not the reward or badge in a gamified courses that is important, but getting through the challenges. Modern education focuses on the reward; the mark. Even gamified courses often do this with their focus on badges. 

This is not what generates the high. It is the achievement itself.

High on Learning
There are two essential parts to motivating students to learn in our modern technological age: 

• The first is creating smaller learning tasks, just like games. These small units which may all build towards a final scenario, or provide clues or parts of a story, motivate students as they learn. It's about creating an anticipation of achievement that releases the dopamine. Then once achievement is attained, there is more satisfaction, and desire to continue. Consider how games like Angry Birds have such short play times on a level, yet people spend hours playing them, as they are flooded with dopamine, the pleasure drug. So while the tasks are short, the end result can be large.
• The second essential part to motivating students is using curiosity. Research published by Neuron found that curiosity increased the production of dopamine, which in turn strengthens people’s memories. Students, who were curious, were not only better at remembering answers to trivia questions, but they also exhibited improved memory on unrelated information.

“When we compare trials where people are highly curious to know an answer with trials where they are not, and look at the differences in brain activity, it beautifully follows the pathways in the brain that are involved in transmitting dopamine signals,” said Ranganath. “The activity ramps up and the amount it ramps up is highly correlated with how curious they are.”

A combination of novel activities, 
with smaller chunking of tasks, 
that potentially weave together to unlock stories, or levels, or further information, 
will be highly motivating for learners. 

As Ranganath concludes, “once you light that fire of curiosity, you put the brain in a state that’s more conducive to learning.” 

Maybe it's high time we prescribed dopamine rather than Ritalin to solve our education problems.