Being Practical

A little while ago, I was walking down an isolated beach in the Caribbean when I met up with a young boy playing on the remains of a wrecked sloop. He was native to the island, which meant that he had been born there and was of African descent. The original natives, the Lucayans, had all been wiped out within a generation of Columbus’ landing in the New World, and African slaves had been imported to work the salt pans and sugar cane fields.

As we talked, he mentioned that he had just won the spelling bee at his school. I congratulated him and then asked if he’d ever seen the movie “Akeelah and the Bee.” The film is about a young African-American girl who competes in a spelling bee. I had watched it with my young daughters and they had found it very inspirational.  They both said it made them feel like they wanted to work really hard and excel at something.

The young boy had seen the movie as well, he told me, and he particularly liked how even though the white people had cheated, Akeelah had beaten them. I thought for a moment, and then remembered a scene where the parent of one of the contestants had indeed tried to coach her child from the audience.  At the time, it hadn’t struck me as very significant.

There is no question that the “white” people have behaved very badly in the Caribbean, both in the past and in the present, and any honest person will admit to some racial tension on this island paradise, on both sides. Race has always been fertile ground for irrational prejudices and unfair stereotypes. One has only to think of Obama’s comment about how his white grandmother was afraid of young black men on the street, while she was raising a young black man herself.

But what struck me most about my conversation with the boy was how different our perceptions of the movie were. We saw a different movie, selectively remembered different parts, and probably took away different messages. One could speculate that the messages would also drive different behavior.

For me, the most incredible discovery of brain science is that what happened with the perception of the movie isn’t the exception, but the rule. All of know that we have biases and that they affect the way we read situations, when we stop and think about it. But when that MRI first tracked the flow of information through the brain and we saw how the brain first disassembles sense data and then reassembles it with input from the areas of the brain responsible for our beliefs, attitudes, and desires, we realized that all of us are creating our own views all of the time, and there is no objective standard to measure them by.

The MRI didn’t necessarily teach us anything we didn’t already know, but it gave us the kind of scientific data that we consider proof, and the ramifications of the finding should transform how we behave. When we can’t trust our view as the truth, or be sure that others see things the way we do, we have to change the way we operate.

The science makes me humble. It teaches me that I’m not in sole possession of the truth, so I’d better seek out other ideas that will challenge mine. I can no longer feel righteous indignation over the words or actions of others, because they simply stem from a different view. When I’m interacting with people whose support I need, it’s no longer a question of what I want, but of understanding what others want.

So when I’m on my game and attending to the new view science gives us, I try to behave differently. I try not to judge others, but to appreciate their point of view, so I declare less and ask more questions. I try not to get trapped in the way I see things, but instead empathize first. I don’t expect my employees, my spouse, or my children to follow my direction, no matter how entitled or right I may think myself to be.

I’m not alway on my game, of course, although the tricks of perception might delude me into believing I am. So it’s an ongoing struggle. Many would see this as simply being polite or moral. But I also see it as practical. We are social beings, highly dependent on others, and anticipating where others are coming from is the starting point for figuring out how we can gain their support.

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Betcha Can't Eat Just One

My daughters are now at the age where they’ve discovered the corner convenience store, and what they find most convenient is a wide assortment of junk food. Being a fan of empty calories myself, I’m willing to indulge them within limits, so I’ve established as a ground rule that they can only consume one half of the tasty morsels they buy within any 24 hour period.

Imagine my surprise when I found out that they didn’t adhere to my rule. I’ve given them all of the reasons for exerting some self-discipline, but to no avail. I even told them about the goldfish I accidentally overfed as a kid, and it’s tragic end when it exploded. But the lure of the sweet and crunchy trumped my logic.

Of course it would. My daughters’ orbital frontal cortices (the area of the brain responsible for self-control) haven’t yet matured, so they’re ruled by the now. It’s what makes parenting such a joy. But it isn’t just my daughters that have difficulty delaying immediate gratification. The Stanford Marshmallow Test showed that two thirds of four year olds couldn’t control their desire to eat a marshmallow for twenty minutes, even when they were promised a second one if they could.

This goes way beyond junk food and marshmallows. The four year olds that did delay their gratification grew up to perform better on the SATs when they were teenagers and enjoyed greater career success as adults. There’s a huge payoff for the ability to consciously override our desires, and our other emotions.

Never one to delay the intellectual gratification of a sweeping generalization, I propose that this battle between “getting it now” and waiting for a better payoff in the future defines the human condition. We can see it as the cause of the credit binge that produced both intoxicated consumers and bankers looking for short term gains at the expense of their institutions, leading to our current financial crisis.

And we can see it in our desire to give a piece of our minds to those that have offended our sensibilities. Recently, the NYT ran a story about a dust up between the author Alice Hoffman and a critic. She was apparently so incensed by a review that she sent a tweet calling the critic a “moron.” She then followed up by posting the critic’s phone number and email address online, and suggested that we let her know what we think of “snarky critics.”

There is a long history of writers responding to those critics they found to be less appreciative of genius than they should be. Both Coleridge and Disraeli saw critics as those who had failed in their fields and so turned to criticism. Samuel Johnson had a more practical view, writing that he’d “rather be abused than forgotten.” Abraham Lincoln anticipated the neuroscientific view with his “people who like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they like.”

There is no accounting for taste, but we need to be accountable for holding our emotions in check. While some may see this as a moral issue, it’s also just practical. If Alice Hoffman had just let the criticism roll off her back, she would’ve been better off. The review would’ve soon been forgotten and her impressive corpus of work would continue to speak for itself.  Now, however, many of us will view her writing through the lens of this story about her intemperate behavior.

But Hoffman’s story is our story. We all say and do things that make sense in the short term, but cost us in the longer term. There is an ongoing tension between the orbital frontal cortex and the seat of our emotions in the amygdala, and we all wrestle with it, whether we try to control our desire for the wonders of the corner store or the attractions of Argentina.

Beyond the battle to control our emotions and our tendency to see only what we’re looking for, there is another lesson here. Technology amplifies our effect beyond our ability to control it. We need to think twice before tweeting or hitting the send button.

Perhaps Hoffman’s story will help us value holding our emotions in check, and so make us better at it. But at the same time, we need to be a little more forgiving of those that are overwhelmed by their emotions, for our feelings are what make us human.

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Socrates Versus the Apes

I am overwhelmed by the incredible number of opinions I am treated to everyday in blogs and columns, some of which I find quite helpful and others not so much. With my logical and opinionated mind, I’ve tried to make sense out of them by dividing them into two categories.

In the first category are those whose authors assert a strong point of view and declare that those not in agreement are wrong. Often such statements are accompanied by colorful metaphors that characterize in less than flattering terms those that might hold an opposing point of view. These authors appear to believe they have found truth and that it is self-evident.

All too often they neglect to define the logic supporting their opinion or pointing out the flaws in others’ arguments. It can be fun to read them when I’m in agreement, sort of like listening to talk radio or cable news. But given the mind’s ability to discount ideas we don’t share, I have a hard time believing that they change anybody’s mind.

This makes it hard for me to understand the purpose of the writing, and so choosing a colorful metaphor of my own, I end up thinking about Jane Goodall’s chimpanzees. In their battle for alpha status, the chimps will often hoot and throw rocks to demonstrate their strength. But then they will become conciliatory and engage in mutual grooming to build the strong relationships social groups thrive on. Neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga believes most human behavior is also aimed at creating alpha status. Unfortunately, too many writers don’t get past the hooting.

I, for one, love to read a well reasoned opposition to my opinion. If I’m wrong, I’d like to know it before I do any damage or make a fool out of myself. If I’m right, challenges just force me to make a better case for my position. But there’s also the possibility that I’m not totally right or totally wrong, and then an opposing point of view prompts me to broaden my own thinking.  And that brings me to my second category.

There are writers that really capture the original meaning of the word essay as a trying out of ideas. While they may present strong opinions, they are careful to explain the logic that produced them. When addressing opposing points of view, there’s more of an effort to consider their validity. I think such writing stems from a belief that we’re all seekers after truth and none of us are in sole possession of it.

Socrates is the role model for these writers. While revered (and feared by some) as the wisest of all men during his time, he was careful to assert his ignorance, and to question more than declare. In Plato’s Symposium, we see his belief in a competition of ideas, not to determine whose is better, but to arrive at bigger ideas that incorporate opposing points of view.

As this post shows, I’m not above unsupported opinion and I too favor colorful metaphors. I’m also human and subject to the logical fallacy of seeing the world as black and white when it’s actually gray. Rather than the two categories I’ve proposed, clearly there is a continuum. But perhaps we’d all benefit, regardless of where we are on the continuum, by keeping in mind a lesson I struggle to keep in mind everyday: we have readers.

We owe them, at the very least, writing that is worth their time to read. Either it should entertain or inform, or even better, do both. Ideally, it will make them smarter so that their opinions are well thought out, even if they end up being different than our own.

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