Dave Snowden, founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge, and Joshua Cooper Ramo, co-CEO of Kissinger Associates and former senior editor of Time magazine, sat down in April 2016 at the New York Public Library for a conversation entitled "Edge Tools in a Digital Age: Social Processes in a Radically Contingent World."
At one point in the discussion, Mr. Snowden made an interesting comment about virtual reality (VR). He said, "If you don't engage the body in the (VR) game, you don't have a proper game. You haven't got stress, you haven't got chemical release... [For example] Smell is an important determination of trust... It's the level of stimulus that concerns me. We are increasingly learning that things happen in the body chemically which influence consciousness, which has been vastly overlooked, and if you just rely on visual and auditory stimulus you're damaging human intelligence."
Adventure education is about heuristic learning—engaging all the senses in transformative trial-and-error experiences. When it comes to resilience, strong personal relationships, cultural fluency (and perhaps even cognitive acuity), there really is no satisfactory substitute for authenticity. We still learn best by taking on new challenges in the real world.