Author: Milo de Prieto

ON CURIOSITY

In 1927, Heisenberg discovered that you cannot study a thing without affecting it. The character of the detached observer, aloof, clinical, untouched, is seductive, but a myth. Curiosity is a force and the act of studying is violent, sometimes soft, many times fatal. Ask the rats.

The researcher never arrives empty-handed. They carry with them the universe of their experience and assumptions, the gravity of their purpose, and the slant of their approach, an angled intent, like rays of sunlight breaking through clouds. Every question posed limits the field of view. It is a kind of incantation, summoning only what the inquirer believes might appear. Anything else is unnecessary, invisible, or worse, unimportant. Even time conspires in the distortion, there’s always a lunch break, a deadline, a limit to attention span. The researcher is not liberated from reality, they are just as bound as the frog splayed out before them, belly open to the world, wondering “why?,” or “why me?”

We would be better served by a different metaphor of research. Rather than the clinical, aloof, and detached entity poking around, we should remember we are like children giving into our sense of wonder and curiosity. Picture a child sitting on their haunches by a stream, mesmerized by the vast universe before them between a few stones. We are playing god, not god. The important and operative word is playing. The work of our research could use the joy, openness, and above all humility to know that no matter what we think we’ve figured out we are always just beginning. We are always children sitting on our haunches by a stream.

THE TECHNOLOGY

Having even a basic awareness of all that we are really doing when we pose a question is essential to the entire process of educational assessments. Our tests and probes aren’t painless nor sterilized, and the subjects are very much affected by anything we do.

One typical way of understanding and categorizing assessments is to use the spectrums offered by three parameters: purpose, frequency, and impact. Purpose is simply what the assessment is intended to study. Frequency can refer to almost daily, certain times of the year, or regularly, at say the 4th grade. Impact, which I find the most interesting, asks how do the results provide necessary information to guide how students are taught, if at all.

Testing has long been used to punish, to filter, and above all, to rank (see summative below). If you’d like a firsthand experience of testing as barrier, try navigating a written driving exam, Spain’s version offers a particularly vivid case. But none of these purposes serves to advance education in general, instruction specifically, or learning at all. And yet we’ve organized much of education, and adult life, around this reductive scoreboard logic, despite how little it actually tells us. I, for one, am not comforted by the thought of sharing the road with someone who earned their license merely by surviving a bureaucratic gauntlet. What measurable skill did that really require? When, exactly, did they become a worthy driver? What parts of their own process and skill did they come to understand?

Most people are aware of standardized tests used to rank students and educational systems, administered at certain grade levels. Their purpose tends to be to test how well a student, class, school, or educational system performs compared to others of a similar situation. These tests probe arrival at milestones, called benchmarks, what the student should be able to do or know at a certain age or after completing a course. If you encounter any kind of test, other than of your patience, you will have encountered these the most, such as the aforementioned driver’s exam, national educational benchmark tests, college entrance exams, or any test for certification. These assessments are typically known as summative, their frequency is the least (thank god), they try to get a global perspective of learning or mastery, and other than to shame or laud anyone, they don’t remotely impact how or what students are taught, they simply don’t elicit that kind of information. We keep summative assessments around out of habit and hierarchy, not because they give us what we actually need to support growth.

Interim assessments are more frequent, used to predict a given student’s journey on the way to mastery. They are administered pre or mid- instruction, and sometimes at intervals such as early into a course and then towards the end. Rather than the on/off switch of standardized tests, these may assess foundational skill development, cognitive processes (like executive functioning) that affect learning, or working understanding of a topic. These assessments are intended to flag potential areas that could use reinforcement or provide students with necessary strategies and scaffolding for success.

Advances in the neuro and cognitive sciences have allowed us to develop a more thorough understanding of how we learn. We understand that full mastery is made up of a complex ecosystem of acquired primary skills, each formed of multiple subskills, all working together. Armed with this knowledge, we can quickly and informally assess mastery of a sub-skill either right before and during instruction. This kind of assessment is called formative as it offers granular information immediately useful for adjusting a lesson in real-time to efficiently guide a student to mastery.

THE PEOPLE

But this framework, purpose, frequency, impact, is only the entry point. To understand assessment’s true force, we have to look not just at its design, but at the people it touches and how. Obviously, the purpose of any given assessment is grounded in assumptions formed by the methodology of the educators (researchers) and the immediate society that they are in. Assessment is not a neutral act, it enters the room with culture, intention, and consequence. It is almost always disruptive and somewhat “violent.” The entire procedure can provoke sincere questions of social justice (cultural bias embedded in questions favoring one group, or the understood definition of mastery of a subject) and most importantly, student development, directly affecting identity and sense of agency.

In educational psychology specifically, and psychology in general, context, situation, and narrative are more powerful determiners of behavior and success than individual capacity and personality. For example, a well-meaning but inelegant administration of an interim assessment for first grade admission, could establish in a child’s mind their identity, as role, in the coming educational journey even before the school’s doors open. Not understanding what is being asked of them, the student could find the assessment process confusing and threatening, telling them that this place is not for them (from an actual case).

Thankfully, education is evolving. By looking at development and learning as composed of both structured and situational processes, we’re recognizing how to set students up for success and really teach, rather than merely rank. For example, neurodivergence is no longer seen as a deficit to be corrected, but as a distinct pattern of perception, shaped by the brain’s unique chemistry and structure. This shift calls not for correction, but for calibration, adjusting methods and environments to fit how an individual child naturally learns.

NOTE: structured — the ecosystem of interconnected subskills and primary skills working together; and situational — we each go about that development differently with different circumstances and realities affecting our journey.

I know that as we develop a nuanced understanding of cognitive identity (the way our brains uniquely process, learn, and make meaning) allows us to design education that meaningfully and practically affirms individual journeys. We may be traveling toward similar developmental goals, but the route, pace, and terrain vary for each of us. That essential understanding will accelerate and enhance our learning and development lifelong.

THE LAND

Assessments have evolved with our understanding, functioning more as tools for insight than instruments of ranking. And yet, we still lean too heavily on ranking. Summative assessments continue to dominate, socially and institutionally, even though they offer the meagerest of insight. They rarely, if ever, serves us. What real value do we gain? Validation? Shame? That reflex alone unravels the myth of educators as clinical observers. None of us stand outside the learning process. Parents, teachers, people, we are all shaped by the same cognitive forces, elbow-deep in the same soil.

When we understand the truth that learning is a shared terrain and lifelong, assessment becomes an activity we use to grow together, not a scorecard we impose. Neuro and cognitive science reminds us that while our developmental roadmap may be shared, the navigation of it is personal. By walking those paths visibly, with our students and each other, modeling curiosity, struggle, and delight, we don’t just access growth, we develop a society dedicated to it.

This shift has radical implications, not just for classrooms, but for culture. Imagine a society where the dominant “tests” of life aren’t summative but formative, where progress is measured not by accumulated status, but by evolving skill, perspective, and purpose. Instead of comparing résumés and bank accounts, we’d know to check in on our continual development of mastery, reflect on how we’re learning, and grow alongside one another and our students. That’s not just better education. That’s a better way to live.

We are always children sitting on our haunches by a stream.

In one secondary school I had worked with in the US, two chemistry teachers with adjacent classrooms spent their own money and free time to turn both into two different sets of the starship Enterprise from TNG. Each day they wore their uniforms and invited their students to join in their simulation. Activities, lessons, and benchmarks from the curriculum were restructured into scenarios within the Star Trek universe. It took a little while for them to work out all the kinks and get into a seamless flow, but their fandom and ingenuity delivered far greater rewards than the sum of their work and investment and far more than they could have anticipated. The students, barely born when TNG ran, responded to the set-up as passionately as the teachers, not making the classes very popular but instilling a passion for learning that was reflected in their grades.

Recently, when talking with a colleague, who is also an accomplished actress, while discussing the power of context and narrative, we imagined a scenario: she had landed the role of Wonder Woman in an upcoming film and the shooting began in a month. She realized that while it would be hard work, she could easily achieve that ripped look to pull off a superhero through a proper regime of diet, exercise, and possibly working with a trainer. The thing is that she knows now exactly what to do regardless of the promise of the role. While she is fit above average normally, like any of us, she feels she could improve. Body image aside, the situation and narrative is not enough for her to make this a priority even to get to a goal less strict than that of the famous Amazon.

In both examples, narrative plays an important role in driving action. In both cases the program or curriculum already exists. The roadmap is not missing. In the first example teachers used narrative to instill drive in their students and in the second it’s used to make a vague goal into an achievable target.

In his must-read 2022 book, Laziness Does Not Exist, social psychologist Dr. Devon Price, delves into how the research has long understood the role of situation, context, and narrative in predicting behavior. Procrastination, he writes, is not a character flaw or problem to be solved with discipline, but a symptom of an individual’s situation and position within that. The context creates a narrative in our head that causes us to delay or fail to perform completely. Thinking that this can be solved by trying harder is as delusional as thinking you can move the moon off course by concentrating hard enough.

In an earlier article I pointed out how we use methodology grounded solidly in neuro and cognitive sciences to teach language acquisition, literacy, to children. Yet we then turn around and teach adults a second language with no real strategy or processes long debunked. The body of research in this field is generally called the Science of Reading. It has been proven to apply to all languages with an alphabet and so tends to have a different name in other languages if at all. The point is the thesis of how we learn and use language based on the way the brain works, literacy is achieved through the mastery of a set of primary skills, each made of sub skills, that all work together in a rich ecosystem in the brain. As the brain achieves mastery in these distinct skills, language quite literally flows out without consciously clambering through grammar rules. Through research, we are successfully applying this thesis to other disciplines as applicable and to human development as a whole. However, this comprehensive curriculum to achieve language mastery is not enough.

Imagine the entire set of skills detailed out as a map in front of you showing you the path from beginner to fully literate in a particular language. This map alone lacks terrain and live reports on the weather. I’m straining the metaphor to show how the map is not enough. It is absolutely groundbreaking and necessary. But without the proper context and narrative, you or any student won’t get very far down its path.

For children, this context obviously extends outside the classroom. Conditions at home will enhance or delay certain developmental skills and determine educational success. For example, an unstable home, filled with conflict, causes young children to develop peripheral vision rather than perpendicular or binocular vision, required for reading. Even a stable home without books or parents who read fails to extend the relevance and power of reading in the greater world in the mind of the student. It’s well researched that students whose parents read fare far better than those that don’t, a challenge exacerbated by our increasingly digital lives (and Tik-Tok rot).

It’s important to note that while parents seem to be at fault, blaming anyone is unhelpful. In fact blame is a situational structure that blocks development. If we want to grow individually and collectively we need to look at blocks in development not for the purposes of performatively “taking” or placing responsibility but to understand the mechanisms causing a situation so that we can efficiently disentangle ourselves from them.

Within the classroom, skill with situational navigation can empower or obstruct even the best curriculum. This is why we have a continuously improving set of skills for the teacher simply called best practices, as in any industry. When I was regularly consulting in the classroom, we explained that these practices would streamline the teacher’s work even when they were having a “bad hair day.” It was a colloquial way of developing metacognition of how one was good at what they did, consciously competent, so that their personal mood or situation could be subsumed into their professional situation. For teachers, this is absolutely imperative given the vast responsibilities they have to perform in demanding circumstances.

In the case of adults, the challenge for development is not the lack of will, but the narrative context they find themselves in, which includes what they believe they are inherently capable of. For example, your brain wants to learn language, it loves to communicate. But you might have decided that you are not good at speaking other languages or learning in general. You might think it’s too late or not “your thing.” These feel true only because you believe them to be. Although, also telling yourself otherwise is not going to substantially change the narrative. Referring back to the scenario of getting fit for a film role, the essential pieces that changed the motivation were the sense of purpose aligned with a realistic and easy to articulate and follow plan of action. These two effects changed the situation in this imaginary case through narration.

This mental exercise of imagining a situation with purpose and plan that could change one’s situation so as to address blockage, shows that if we are more intentional with our sense of self, using simple narrative structures innovatively in unison with well defined strategies and plans, all designed to work with our personal contextual present, we could develop in helpful ways, rather than struggle in wishful limbo. Obviously, this is not simple “manifestation,” it requires a holistic shift of certain elemental ways we have of thinking about our value, capacity, and past. Simply demanding that we “fix” our wrong thinking of, say, our value, isn’t going to get us anywhere. We must investigate how we live the “value” of ourselves as a process, the situation in action we reinforce through multiple microactions and almost unseen habits. We investigate without shame, without performative responsibility, instead with curiosity and gratitude (for the lessons — it sounds new agey, but works).

I particularly like this statement from Dr. Price:

“It’s really helpful to respond to a person’s ineffective behavior with curiosity rather than judgment.”

He attributes this awareness to the work of Kimberly Longhofer (writing as Mik Everett), who leveraged their own journey through disability and homelessness to show that situations do not define people at all. We ignore the value of anyone in difficult situations to our own detriment. What follows is that just as we acknowledge our cognitive identity (or at least personality), we should also understand our approach to our narrative patterns that form our situations. These approaches to situation are not whats but hows, not fixed truths but learned processes, which we can use to bring us towards peace rather than stress.

This further demonstrates my notion of seeing identity not as a monolith but a quantum field or wave, defined not by fixed traits but by how our cognitive patterns express themselves across possible situations. Observation collapses potential into choice, and the self takes form in relation to context. Who we are isn’t just who we are, it’s who we become when the moment calls us forth. Cognitive identity is a wave of potential that becomes observable only when refracted through the lens of real-world situations.

Consider an adult learner who’s always struggled with math. She avoids numbers in daily life, believing she’s “not a math person.” But then, she’s offered a promotion — one that involves budget oversight. The job comes with training, mentorship, and a specific goal. Framed within this new story, her relationship to math changes. It’s no longer a judgment of her intelligence; it’s a skill to serve her growth. Within months, she’s not only managing budgets but helping others demystify the same tasks that once froze her. The math didn’t change. The story did.

The thing here is that the situation is formed of the set of circumstances you have at the moment. Many of these may not be readily mutable. However, they aren’t the most important part of the situation that determines your value and capacity, they are just there. The way you configure them and your relationship to them does. Many times we are simply accepting society’s interpretation of these circumstances, rich means you’re valuable, your job or partner status defines you, etc. These are by default reductive and if laziness does exist, it’s in this process of stereotyping. The truth is that different narrative practices can radically reconfigure the meaning of the same set of circumstances, your role could be victim or agent, villain or antihero, loser or learner, and so on. The same person who finds themself “homeless” can be forming a powerful story of transformation, step by humble step. They are not a fixed point but a waveform: capable of collapsing into despair or rising, when met with a reframed context, into self-definition.

The story you believe you’re in determines the action you’re willing to take, no matter your strengths. To develop you must see yourself not only with agency but within a narrative that makes action meaningful. Our story isn’t a limited statue we chisel out from stone. It’s a field, always forming, shaped by what we see, and how we choose to see it.

NOTE: I use the term “taking responsibility” in quotes to refer to the performative action reserved for apologies. In the right context, it is cathartic and liberating. However, “taking responsibility” in that manner in the context of investigating why you are blocked, or don’t develop, can also be a cop-out, emphasizing the shame and blocking any ability to actually do anything about anything.

We now accept what artists and researchers have known for a long time: identity is a performance. We choose which facets of ourselves to show in which context. We curate impressions. Some parts of the self feel immutable, but many are constructed, refined, or shed as we evolve.

When people talk about identity, they usually mean character traits, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, social roles, or aesthetic preferences. We still treat identity as something to discover, as if we’re a monument to be unearthed. In truth, identity behaves less like a fixed object and more like a quantum field: full of permutation, contextual, fluid. But even as our language about what we mean by identity grows more nuanced, we almost never talk about it from the perspective of what’s doing the actual making of meaning, our brain. We have little notion of our cognitive identity.

Maybe you’ve taken one of the popular modern variations of the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator and been told you’re an ENFP or an ISTJ. Perhaps you’re familiar with the DISC, Enneagram, or Big Five. They place you in a predefined category from within a specific range of outcomes, similar to a horoscope. At the very least they can help you feel seen. However, while very useful, these cannot be confused with a real understanding of your identity. You share the exact same results with millions and millions of others. So how is it that your wardrobe is more original than your brain?

There are thousands of other assessments too of varying relevance, some give you metrics across spectrums in emotional stability or innovative thinking, others can tell you which Spice Girl you are. But once you’ve been seen, what’s next?

In education, we’ve long understood the power of diagnostic assessments. A good diagnostic doesn’t just say whether a student knows something. It explains why they struggle, or why they soar. It breaks down skills into subcomponents and identifies the gaps. That clarity turns frustration into strategic momentum. It gives students agency over their learning and development. These assessments are used effectively (if too rarely) in language acquisition, reading comprehension, and much more.

The same is true for adults. Or it can be. But we still cling to outdated assumptions about learning and age. We treat childhood as the only arena of development. But your brain doesn’t stop developing just because you’re paying taxes (how it grows changes, though). The capacity for growth never expires, nor does the responsibility for it either.

Your brain is the most powerful tool you own, rich or poor, thriving or flailing, Scary Spice or Posh. It’s also your greatest resource for shaping a meaningful life. Yet we rarely take responsibility for our cognitive development, let alone our cognitive identity. There’s no shared script for it. No rite of passage. No map. We’re socialized to believe that adults are cognitively “finished” and that any further development is about recovery and therapy, not expansive growth.

That’s not true. I’ll have none of it.

“I won’t have it. The world is wilder than that in all directions, more
dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright. We are
making hay when we should be making whoopee; we are raising
tomatoes when we should be raising Cain, or Lazarus.”
Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1974)

To develop, you first need to understand what you’re working with. Your brain isn’t a computer or a personality type. It’s a vast, living ecosystem of neurological and cognitive structures, functions, and processes. You could spend a lifetime mapping its terrain. In fact, you should.

So when it comes to cognitive identity, the better question isn’t “Who are you?” but “Who are you when you’re… (insert physical or mental adventure here)?”

…solving a problem, launching a project, improvising in chaos, learning a new language, city, or artform, seeing a pattern no one else sees?

We now know, such as for those of us with neurodivergent brains, even your so-called cognitive weaknesses may be superpowers in disguise (granted sometimes very well disguised).

So to know what you are working with, you need a framework, a way to talk about your cognitive patterns with precision and without judgment. I’ve built one.

It starts with what I call your brain’s primordial message, an inner orientation that reflects your role in the world and how you engage with it. It’s something your brain works on from childhood and will keep doing, job title or not. It is a concept that would make sense to your seven-year-old self (assuming you’re not seven while reading this) and to your eighty-year-old self, too.

From there, the framework maps your high-end cognitive processes: how you handle complexity, solve problems, and perceive and navigate the world. It also tracks how those processes are evolving. Finally, it aligns these insights with the core competencies and applied skills you’ve already demonstrated through experience. The result is a dynamic portrait of your cognitive identity and a practical roadmap for using it.

When you align these elements, your purpose, your deep cognitive functions, and your real-world skills, you have a much better idea of what you should be doing as well as how. You can understand what kind of work will really engage and energize you, how you naturally solve problems, and what kind of challenges will help you grow. Rather than guess you can strategically plan your next move. This opens up developmental opportunities. I believe this is the key to real quality of life.

See: Rethinking Maslow: Breaking with a hierarchy of scarcity to cultivate neuroecological abundance.

See: Rethinking Maslow: Breaking with a hierarchy of scarcity to cultivate neuroecological abundance.

But just like physical fitness, cognitive development doesn’t “just happen.” It’s a deliberate process.

Know where you’re starting. Pick a target. Determine the milestones. Use the right tools. Go, adjusting to reality along the way.

My approach is informed by my formal and informal study and research in neuro and cognitive science, which I enrich with divergent disciplines such as theology, quantum theory, esoteric traditions, fine art, and my years of educational practice and system design. But honestly, you don’t need my system. You just need a system, one that helps you understand and steer the most valuable resource you have: your mind.