Skill for an AI-Age: Cognitive Metabolism
As a life-long educator and founder of an education company I usually do my best to avoid conversations about how to “upskill” our children (or younger humans) to make them “work-ready” or — worse — “AI/future-proof.” While translating knowledge into economically valuable skills is unarguably important to most of the world population, I have always preferred to see children not as tabula rasa but rather as the best, most enviable members of the human species.
However, over the last few years of running my company I’ve come to believe that there is one, large, skill-area that will be vital for digital natives, both now and in upcoming generations. It underlies much of the curricular advisory and development work we do for clients and partners. I call it cognitive metabolism.
What is cognitive metabolism?
Cognitive metabolism encompasses all cognitive processes that human organisms experience, including what traditional education systems have reduced to terms like “social-emotional,” “academic,” or “intellectual.”
In traditional biology, metabolism refers to the the ability of a living cell to extract free energy from its surroundings and repurpose or translate it into new forms of energy. Building on this biological definition, cognitive metabolism is a way of talking about human development that focuses on an individual’s cognitive ability to extract energy and ideas from her surroundings and translate it into new or improved forms of ideas (or stories, structures, actions) that can help her peer group, family or community.
Cognitive metabolism is linked closely to another idea Kigumi uses throughout its trainings called cognitive integrity (Note 1).
We see these two ideas as the most important concepts for a generation of digital natives to understand, because they place the individual learner in a new light compared to previous generations — each learner is a transit point for preceding knowledge, ideas and skills, instead of being the owner of them. This means each individual is a centre of potential that is unlocked by engaging with others, actively communicating their ideas and metabolising and building on evidence from other thinkers to improve the collective whole (of their family, friend group, school, or greater community).
Why is cognitive metabolism important?
Because it suits the unique learning needs of digital natives and matches the realities of their day-to-day experiences. Attention is the currency of our digital age. Given that data doubles every 2 years, we are all already swimming in(and will continue to swim in) data, which varies in quality and form — sensory data, experiences, abstract thoughts, and secondary data are all part of our data-rich environment (Note 2). Yet data alone is not powerful (nor is access alone to data as powerful as we think); we as a species must understand how to sift through and manipulate the data (including discarding parts of it) in order to make it meaningful to our own purposes. As noted by Dr. Rose Luckin, turning data into knowledge is a process which requires conscious effort, and which each individual must engage in as part of the journey of long-long learning. Given the potential power at their fingertips, teaching children about how to interact with data from their surroundings — how to extract, observe, analyse, discard, and synthesize various forms of data — is teaching them about cognitive metabolism and turns every interaction into a teachable moment, where learning is possible at any age and within any context, both formally and informally.
Because it updates and diversifies traditional, Western metrics of success and individual achievement. Cognitive metabolism is a new educational concept that moves away from the idea that knowledge and skills exist within only one individual. Most modern educational philosophies tell children that they should be working hard to acquire knowledge (or skills, competencies, attitudes, traits) individually and that the measure of educational success is the knowledge (or skills, etc.) that one single individual can demonstrate, whereas cognitive metabolism trains children to perceive themselves as purveyors and synthesisers of data into new, improved forms of knowledge.
Because it reframes our dichotomies of what count as academic, intellectual, or emotional knowledge and metrics of success. Modern neuroscience has not made it into the education sector. As educators, our curricular and achievement-based frameworks still hinge on largely Victorian-esque (and arbitrary or outrightly inaccurate) distinctions between things like “emotional intelligence” and “academic intelligence.” In reality, what we know about the brain and human development is that all sensory experiences (including motivations, thoughts, feelings) are cognitive experiences, and we should be teaching children about these cognitive events through a framework like cognitive metabolism, which can be the basis for foundational skills ranging from emotional regulation to collaborative group learning, communication, and self-efficacy.
Where does the term come from?
We use the term at Kigumi Group to describe the story of human development that educators and caregivers should be telling upcoming generations of digital natives (starting with Gen Z and Gen A). It builds on preceding ideas like:
Rose Luckin’s notions of human intelligences, personal epistemologies and focus on metacognitive skills
Yuval Noah Harari’s work on storytelling, collaboration, and the role of the imagination in human evolution; and
Pulls analogies from theoretical physicists like Freeman Dyson and a number of others from the fields of neuroscience (Vivienne Ming), computer science and philosophy of science (Luciano Floridi), and phenomenology and psychology (Robin Hogarth). (Note 3)
We encourage interested parties to read the work of the above thinkers to find out more about the basis for the concept and metabolise the ideas on their own. The term was inspired by much of what we know about the origins of life, like the idea from Niels Bohr that an electron can’t be pictured as a freestanding, material object, but must be described by two, “complementary pictures [about] its behavior,” which inspired the idea that we must be emphasising to students the interconnectedness of the ideas, data and experiences that surround them.
How can I, as an educator or caregiver, cultivate healthy cognitive metabolism in children?
We are continuing to work on this and translate it into an operationally pragmatic set of practices suitable for interactions with children of all ages, both inside and outside a formal classroom setting. If you’d like to learn more or have a suggestion please reach out to me at info@kigumigroup.com.
Note 1. Cognitive integrity is the overall goal of cognitive metabolism and is a way to measure the self-regulatory and creative potential of an individual mind. If an individual is said to be easily (and frequently) misled, to have low-self-regulation skills, low ability to discern relevant data from irrelevant ones across varying contexts, and a poor metabolism to change given data to into new forms of data that benefit themselves or others, they may be said to have low cognitive integrity. However, an individual who has high cognitive integrity will display the adaptive ability to metabolise data across varying contexts, revise their beliefs when needed to incorporate new inputs or perspectives, communicate effectively with others and extract relevant data while discarding irrelevant information, and actively engage with others to generate enhanced forms of knowledge that help their group or peers.
Note 2. In this context I do not mean only data in the sense of digital or computer-represented data, but data broadly, meaning any sensory data that causes or generates neurological events. Human beings, like all other living organisms, deal constantly in data (or information), both unconsciously, at a cellular level (i.e. even the most basic nucleotides, or the electrical impulses that help your eyes to read this sentence, are forms of data which support our existence, but which we don’t have conscious control over), and consciously (i.e. everything from you thinking about the meaning of this sentence to you talking to your friend or feeling like you need another cup of coffee). This vast landscape of data that composes everyday experience is what I speak about when I talk about cognitive metabolism helping us process data.
Note 3. A clarification that my use of the term cognitive metabolism is purely metaphorical — I am not talking about the physical process of traditional metabolism by which our brains digest energy or how electrical impulses drive our cognitive functions. Secondly, some may raise the objection that cognitive metabolism is similar to critical thinking or other cognitive phenomena commonly housed under executive functioning. While critical thinking is unarguably important, it is only a sub-chapter within the larger book of cognitive integrity and cognitive metabolism.
References
World Economic Forum (WEF), “From Amazon to Zoom: This is what happens on the internet every minute,” 2021.
United Nations Economist Network, “Attention Economy”, no date.
Shoshana Zuboff, “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism,” 2018.
Yuval Noah Harari, “Sapiens,” 2014.
Rose Luckin, “Machine Learning and Human Intelligence,” 2018.
Freeman Dyson, “Infinite in All Directions,” 1988.
