Cognitive Ecologist

I’m not sure anyone gets to claim the title of cognitive ecologist outright. It sounds like something that should come with a tweed jacket, a grant, and a few acronyms. But it’s the closest description I’ve found for the work I keep circling.

I’m interested in the environments where thinking happens.

Not just brains. Not just classrooms. But the full setting: books, screens, conversations, habits, tools, rules, moods, rituals, clocks, smells, songs, seating charts, metaphors—along with the thousand small, often invisible cues that shape what kind of thinking is possible in a given moment.

That is what I mean by the ecology of thought.

A brain does not think in isolation. That sounds obvious, but it’s one of those ideas that is so large we tend to ignore it. A student solving a math problem is not just “using working memory.” She is sitting in a particular room, under certain lights, after a particular morning, next to particular people, inside a culture that has already taught her something about whether mistakes are dangerous.

The thinking is not separate from the environment.

A trail through the woods doesn’t force anyone to walk it, but it changes what walking becomes. It makes some paths easier, others harder, and still others nearly invisible. It doesn’t control behavior, but it shapes what behavior is likely.

A classroom does this too. So does a family, a phone, a grading policy, a metaphor, a joke, or even a smell at the right moment.

We understand this intuitively in ordinary life. A cluttered kitchen invites a different morning than a clear one. A quiet library changes how we think. A cathedral changes us, even if we don’t share its beliefs. A gym full of heavy objects makes certain kinds of effort feel natural. A campfire rearranges conversation.

And yet, when we talk about education, we often reduce the problem to inputs and outputs, as if learning were a vending machine with a behavior chart taped to the side. Insert instruction. Receive achievement. Jostle the machine if necessary. But people are not vending machines.

They are adaptive systems moving through complex environments while predicting, testing, imitating, resisting, remembering, forgetting, performing, hiding, exploring, and defending. They are shaped not only by rewards, but by expectations, identity, trust, uncertainty, fatigue, beauty, embarrassment, rhythm, belonging, and the sense that something is—or is not—“for people like me.”

That is the ecology. My particular corner of this work is middle grades education, which is a remarkably rich place to study cognition in the wild. It’s where childhood, adolescence, abstraction, status games, humor, anxiety, and long division all collide before lunch.

Students at this age are capable of powerful reasoning, but they are also highly sensitive to the emotional and social conditions around them. A student can be fully capable of understanding an idea and still be unable to reach it because the local conditions are wrong.

Too much threat.

Too little trust.

Too much noise.

Too little time.

Too much shame attached to being wrong.

Too few tools for starting.

So my focus is not only on what students think, but on what the environment makes thinkable.

What does the room invite?

What does the routine protect?

What does the language make visible?

What does the metaphor open?

What does the tool make easier?

What does the culture quietly punish?

And what kinds of mistakes are allowed to become information?

That last question matters. A mistake can function as a verdict: you are bad at this. Or it can function as a signal: good, now we know something. Those are not small differences. They are entirely different habitats for the mind.

A cognitive ecology can be brittle, noisy, and punitive. In those environments, students still learn, but often what they learn is concealment, compliance, speed without understanding, or the skill of appearing engaged while waiting to be rescued.

A cognitive ecology can also be rich. Not soft, and not easy, but structured, responsive, and alive. It can include friction, feedback, humor, patience, and enough safety that students can afford to be temporarily wrong in public. It can make effort visible, confusion usable, and knowledge feel less like a museum artifact and more like a tool within reach.

This is where I feel a kind of reverence. Not for my own work as I’m usually just trying to find a dry erase marker that still works, but for the phenomenon itself.

The mind is not sealed inside the skull, issuing commands. It is a living system intertwined with its environment. It reaches outward through language, diagrams, habits, and other people. It borrows structure from the world, builds ladders, climbs them, revises them, and sometimes uses them to find something real.

If thinking depends in part on the environment, then we are not powerless. We can design better environments. Not perfect ones, and not machines for producing brilliance, but better habitats for attention, memory, curiosity, reasoning, and intellectual courage.

We can build clearer paths.

We can label useful tools.

We can lower the cost of beginning.

We can make the first mistakes survivable.

We can help students see uncertainty not as failure, but as raw material.

That is the work I’m trying to understand. I’ve moved through a range of cognitive ecologies in military units, aircraft maintenance, light infantry teams in real combat, software teams, product meetings, classrooms, and my own uneven attempts to become a writer. Each had its own rules about attention, knowledge, and error.

Some treated error as shame.

Some treated it as failure with consequences.

Some treated it as data.

The best ones knew the difference.

Now I teach middle school, write, read, and try to notice the hidden architecture of thought. I’m especially interested in how students become adaptive learners: people who can enter unfamiliar situations, build useful models, notice gaps in their understanding, and find or create tools to close those gaps.

In practice, it might look like a better metaphor for fractions, a routine that makes starting easier, a parent note about sleep and memory, a wall of thinking tools, or a well-timed joke. In middle school, the shortest path to the prefrontal cortex sometimes runs through a fart joke that shouldn’t work as well as it does.

So, cognitive ecologist.

Not someone who controls minds.

Not someone who has solved education.

Not someone standing above the system with a master plan.

Just someone paying attention to the habitat and asking:

What is growing here?

What is being crowded out?

What conditions would let better thinking take root?

And what small thing can we change tomorrow?