The assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University is a human tragedy first: Two young children lost their father; a wife lost her husband. But it is also a cultural tragedy, revealing corrosion at the heart of our civic life. Violence against speech is the final symptom of a disease that begins much earlier—in our failure to teach the value of hearing other voices early on, in schools.
Our brains are built to form habits. The basal ganglia—deep learning circuits that automate whatever we repeat—don’t absorb only tennis serves or piano scales. They also wire in patterns of thought. If the only messages we hear are one-sided, the brain’s habit circuits carve them into grooves of thought that resist change.
Rigidity at the neural level breeds rigidity at the civic level. Economists studying East Germany, including Harvard’s Alberto Alesina, found that decades of socialist rule left scars on behavior: Citizens became more cautious, less entrepreneurial, and slower to trust. A society that punished initiative and rewarded conformity trained its population to avoid novelty. Those scars of enforced consensus outlasted the Berlin Wall.
Neuroscience also shows that cognitive flexibility isn’t automatic. Like any skill, it must be trained. In a paper titled “One cannot simply ‘be flexible,’ ” Ghent University cognitive scientist Senne Braem and colleagues showed that when people are rewarded for switching tasks, they later switch more readily—even without realizing why. When switching is discouraged, they become more rigid. Flexibility is like a muscle: It grows with practice, feedback and time.