Standing before the Class of 2029 in Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, Prof. Peggy Mason urged students from the College to embrace what most people try to avoid: discomfort.
“I want you to learn to be uncomfortable, to take intellectual risks, grow as a thinker.” Mason said in her Sept. 25 Aims of Education Address. “Accept and ultimately revel in the severe discomfort that accompanies exposure to and potentially adoption of a perspective that clashes brutally with long-held beliefs.”
“Persevere on a thought path even if distress storms in.”
Mason, a renowned neurobiologist and the director of the undergraduate minor in Science Communication and Public Discourse in the College, has spent the past three decades helping to shape the minds of UChicago students.
That experience has attuned her to the capabilities of a given class, but also some of the patterns of learning that shape how we experience the world. In her address, Mason explained the difference between “explicit” and “implicit” modes of learning—and how each will aid the new students on their journeys at UChicago.
Explicit learning is the intentional process used for tasks such as memorizing facts or learning a new language, while implicit learning happens without us being conscious of it. That quality makes it vital, Mason said, but also “ineffable—impossible to perfectly articulate, describe or explain.”
“You can assign Wednesday night to buckle down and learn the structure of the Periodic Table. That will work. However, scheduling Thursday night at the Reg to learn to tolerate intellectual discomfort? That won’t work,” she said.
Training through trial and error
To draw the two types of learning together, Mason pointed to a universal example: potty training. She specifically pointed to the different types of training used across the world—with parents teaching their babies either implicitly or explicitly.
In the U.S. today, Mason said, toilet training is a heavily cognitive process using language cues that often starts when a child is a toddler.
However, other approaches begin long before infants can understand any words at all, Mason said, making use of implicit learning techniques.
“Almost immediately after a baby’s birth, a mother of the Digo tribe of Kenya, starts training her baby,” she said. By making use of positive reinforcement, Mason said, “the mom repeats this process day in and day out, thereby conditioningthe baby.”
This kind of learning comes down to trial and error. Success doesn’t happen every time, Mason said, but neither does failure. This also ties into her desire to have undergraduates embrace the uncomfortable.
“Just as walking, piano-playing and the pronunciation of foreign words don’t happen on the first go, neither does intellectual risk-taking,” Mason said. “Getting to be comfortable with discomfort, discordant and incongruent thoughts—this just does not happen without trying and failing. Repeatedly.”
Mason said that being right all the time is not all that it’s cracked up to be. She used an example of a championship game to prove the point of how evolution prefers striving over stagnation.
“Watch winners and losers of championships,” she said. “The champions are ecstatic—for a moment. The smiles and happy tears pass quickly. The runners-up, on the other hand, burn with a fire evident in their faces and in their demeanors that can last for weeks or months or even years. This fire fuels redoubled efforts to gain a championship in the next contest, the next season.”
But all else grow
Mason closed her address by telling the Class of 2029 to use everything around them to learn—and to run to discomfort rather than avoid it.
“During the next four years, use us—the faculty, use the bountiful resources of UChicago, your fellow students, and most importantly your precious time—to condition yourself to being flustered, exhilarated, agitated, exultant, upset and triumphant as you embark on your own most uncomfortable and simultaneously most rewarding life of intellectual quest.”
She encouraged students to continue to let their views and thoughts grow while at UChicago.
“Grow as a thinker, take risks, change your opinion even when that change brings you severe discomfort,” she said. “Learning the habits of thought that will fuel a lifelong affair with thinking and exploring, doubting and growing, changing and modifying your views is worthy of four years of your time.”