Reviews

Penguins, parrots, bears, and humans

Posted on by Mary / 0 Comment

Not to hurt or humble the animals is our first duty to them, but to stop there is not enough. We have a higher mission, to be of service to them whenever they require it. If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.—St. Francis of Assisi

How can we be of service to animals or include them in the shelter of our compassion? Three recent documentaries address this question, obliquely or directly. March of the Penguins suggests that we can learn about the lives of wild creatures and understand that in some ways, as the narrator of the film says, we are not so different from them after all. The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill shows how one human found a way to relate to wild birds and balance respect for their wild natures with the ability to provide help when they needed it. Grizzly Man is a disturbing look at what happens when a human identifies so strongly with wild bears and wants so urgently to help them that he gives his life for the chance to be near them.

The penguins

When I went to see March of the Penguins, I didn’t know much about penguins. I had a mental image of a creature so absurd it’s endearing, a waddling bird/fish in a tuxedo. I found that they have as dramatic a story as any living thing, and display great endurance in carrying out the task of not only surviving but bringing new penguins into the world.

The movie, narrated by Morgan Freeman and based on a story by Luc Jacquet, covers a year in the life of a group of Emperor penguins. We are told at the beginning of the movie that their home, Antarctica, is the darkest, coldest, windiest, driest place on earth. During the relatively warm months of summer, the penguins swim in the cold water and eat fish. With the approach of winter in March, they begin a long trek to their breeding ground, many miles from shore (at least during the colder months when the ice extends out over the water).

At the breeding ground, they pair off in couples; penguins, like some humans, are serially monogamous, pairing off anew each breeding season. After the mother lays an egg, it must be protected from the harsh environment if it is to hatch. Penguins shelter the eggs with their bodies, cradling the eggs on top of their feet and shrouding them with the lower parts of their bodies. One of the severe tests of a couple’s parenting skills comes long before the egg hatches: the female must transfer the egg to the male, and quickly, before it has a chance to lose too much heat. When that is accomplished, the female sets off for the ocean again to eat and bring back food for the baby that will hatch while she is gone. The males hunker down to endure most of the long cold winter alone, keeping the eggs warm.

The film makes it plain that penguins are winnowed out of the race to reproduce at every stage. There are more females than males, so not everyone finds a mate. Not every pair manages to successfully transfer the egg from female to male. Not every father makes it through the winter. Not every mother evades the hungry seals and comes back with food. Not every hatchling survives the cold and the predators. Every ungainly velvety gray chick waddling around on the ice looks like a lucky miracle of survival.

The narrative talks of the mother, father, and baby as a family, but they don’t really spend much time together. The fathers head for the water as soon as the mothers get back, because they desperately need to eat. Then the parents take turns going to the water and staying with the babies. At the end of the first year, the babies are old enough to be on their own. At first I thought that calling the three penguins a family was a somewhat strained analogy, because the penguins are so different from human families. But if you think of families as groups of individuals whose purpose is to rear a new generation of their kind, then I guess these penguin groupings qualify. And there’s certainly no reason that the way they do it should be like the way we do it. The undertaking requires what looks to me like trust, patience, perseverance, and affection.

It’s hard telling what it looks like to the penguins, though. I don’t know the degree to which they’re responding to instinct or hormones in caring for their young (but then how much of love between people is mediated by hormones?). I’m not sure how much sense we can make of the idea that the penguins are brave or loving, and I hesitate to assume that that they are like us when I just don’t know. It was surprising, though, how human some of their behavior seemed. There was a moment when the hungry males, nurturing their offspring while besieged by violent winter storms, first hear the approach of the returning females. Every head lifts and turns at the same instant; I’ve seen similar moments in human crowds. And the noises they made were surprisingly expressive. Early in the journey to the breeding ground, one penguin slid down a slope and into the back of another penguin, who turned to deliver what sounded for all the world like an irritated scolding. When the camera watched one couple fumble their egg transfer, the penguins made low mournful noises as the doomed egg froze.

This movie left me much more aware of some of the other rhythms of life that are going on all over the planet. It fosters a sense of kinship with other lives even though they’re very different from anything we could possibly experience for ourselves. Maybe you’ve seen the software that shows you on a map which parts of the earth are sunlit; I’ve been watching how the distribution of sunlight is changing as we move toward northern-hemisphere fall. I don’t like to see the light retreating toward the south, but as I watch the white bulk of Antarctica touched by the returning sun, I think of those penguins and I’m glad their long vigil is nearly over.

The parrots

I knew a little bit more about parrots going into The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill than I did about penguins. My brother Vinny has several birds and he also provides a foster home for birds who have been neglected or mistreated. In fact, Vinny sent me a copy of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill: A Love Story . . . with Wings for my birthday this year. The book and the documentary describe Bittner’s discovery of a wild parrot population in San Francisco, his efforts to make friends with some of the birds, and his relationship with the flock.

There was a lot I didn’t know, though. For example, San Francisco is not the only major city that has a group of wild parrots. No one’s sure exactly where San Francisco’s parrots come from, although there are several stories. Some cities have populations near the airport; perhaps the birds escaped from a shipment destined for a pet store. Parrots are smart and resourceful enough to find food and make their way in a strange environment. (As a matter of fact, I blogged a story awhile back about how brain size is inversely correlated with a tendency to migrate: the bigger the average brain size, the less likely a species of bird is to be migratory. This might be related to the ability to find food without having to travel somewhere else.)

Many birds migrate to warmer places in the winter not because they can’t deal with the cold, but because their food sources are not available during the winter. So they evidently do all right in Chicago because they can find things to eat. In fact, some cities have parks that use plants that are native to where the birds are from, so they can eat what they’re used to. I was intrigued by the idea of both the birds and their food being imported to the city for different reasons and then meeting up again, so to speak, on strange new turf.

For all the legitimate concern about invasive species of plants and animals, I was glad to hear that these transplanted birds are by and large doing all right, especially after I learned about the sometimes brutal and destructive practices that people have used to catch birds to sell.

Bittner was a lonely, somewhat rootless “dharma bum” of middling years when he discovered the wild birds in his San Francisco neighborhood. He was fascinated and tried to learn more and to get to know them. He succeeded so well that they would flock to his balcony for feedings, climbing all over him, sitting on his head or his arms. He got to know individual birds and gave them names based on their personalities or physical characteristics. In the movie they were sometimes like a large rowdy group of kindergarteners, mostly silly, one or two of them more reserved or shy or dignified or aggressive. A number of them were clowns, doing goofy stunts evidently for the sheer joy of it. I knew from my brother that birds have distinctive personalities, and even from my relatively short exposure to the birds in the film I could see that they were not all the same.

The subtitle for the Wild Parrots book is “a love story with wings”. Bittner found companionship with the birds, forming individual friendships. He also learned a great deal as he became more and more involved with the birds, from the history of his own neighborhood to the natural history of the birds. Eventually his involvement with the birds led him to the human companionship he sought. The birds led him toward, not away from, other people.

His relationships with the birds were fascinating and often charming. He wrote in the book that while parrots “aren’t exactly like human beings”, he believed “that each bird is no less an individual personality than I am.” They were social creatures, and it’s obvious that many of them felt trust and affection for him. There is a delightful moment in the film where Bittner is playing the guitar and singing the blues and a bird called Mingus is listening interestedly and bobbing with the music. It was a great example of two species finding some common ground. As he formed emotional bonds with some of the birds, though, Bittner worried sometimes about whether he was anthropomorphizing them and assuming they were more similar to humans than they really are. He also wrestled with questions of how to help a sick or injured bird, recognizing that it’s important both to preserve their lives and to preserve their spirits as wild creatures.

As with any relationship with other animals, not all the stories are happy. Several of the birds died. Toward the end of the movie Bittner described the death of a young bird called Tupelo after an illness, in particular the emotional bond he felt with her and the feelings that he felt she was expressing at the end: sadness, a wistful desire to be comforted, resignation. I was not the only one crying by the end of that part of the film.

In a chapter of the book called “Consciousness Explained”, Bittner describes what he learned from the birds. It’s a wonderful, thoughtful, moving meditation on his beliefs about the nature of consciousness and life, and our relationship to other creatures. He articulates a Buddhist philosophy that accepts scientific explanations for the origins and workings of life, and seeks beyond science for spiritual meaning. The chapter concludes with Bittner’s realization that humans and parrot alike are finite pieces of a larger consciousness.

A story that came late in the movie illuminated more or less the same truth for me. An older bird, Connor, was killed by a red-tailed hawk. This kind of thing happens in nature all the time, of course. Birds of prey have to eat too. (Bittner wrote in the book that he wasn’t mad at the hawk.) What struck me was that although you can understand the food web and the way ecosystems work all you like, it still hurts that that bird died that way. He had a name; he was an individual. You miss that one, that particular bird. It’s exactly the same realization that led me to the idea of thinking meat in the first place, years ago. We are prey to large predators and small bacteria and the imperfections and vulnerabilities of our own bodies, just like other living things. I can understand the way death is woven inextricably into the fabric of life, and try to accept that fact. But because we are conscious beings who are aware of each other as individuals, we can’t just fold our hands philosophically and talk about the web of life or survival of the fittest when someone close to us dies. What I didn’t realize is that all this doesn’t apply only to people. You can have that same complicated set of feelings, recognizing the necessity of death but protesting each individual loss, for other living creatures, like these birds.

The bears

I worried about anthropomorphism when I was writing about the penguins, and Mark Bittner begins the chapter “Consciousness Explained” with his concerns about anthropomorphizing the birds. Timothy Treadwell, the subject of Werner Herzog’s aptly titled Grizzly Man, identified so strongly with grizzly bears that I don’t know if the question of whether he was anthropomorphizing them ever occurred to him. Treadwell spent 13 summers living with and filming the grizzly bears of the Alaskan peninsula until he and a companion were eaten by a grizzly bear in fall 2003. In Grizzly Man, Herzog talks to people who knew Treadwell and also includes plenty of Treadwell’s own video footage of himself and the bears. The result is a disturbing, haunting film that raises questions well beyond that of our relationship to other animals.

Treadwell loved the bears. He repeated this fact over and over, to the camera and to the bears themselves. He also loved the foxes he met in Alaska. He gave the bears names: Mr. Chocolate, Sgt. Brown, Aunt Melissa, Mickey, Saturn, Grinch, Demon, Hatchet. He thought that he had a mission to protect the bears, although it was not obvious to me how he was protecting them, or from what. Most of the land Treadwell covered was federal land where the bears were already protected; it’s not clear how much poaching was going on or how Treadwell thought he would fight it, or even whether his presence truly did the bears any good.

Herzog interviewed a native Alaskan, who said that the natives understood that the bears were different from people. Humans and bears each have a place in nature, and humans respect the bears by not crossing over into their turf. Treadwell, he said, breached a boundary that the natives had lived with for 7,000 years. Habituating bears to humans is generally not doing them a favor; it’s better for bears to learn to avoid humans. (The bear that ate Treadwell and his companion was shot by park rangers.)

But Treadwell was plainly deeply dedicated to the task of understanding the bears and teaching the rest of the world about them. He survived for much longer among them than most other people could have. (When he died, he was in Alaska later in the year than he normally was, and he was attacked by a bear he did not know well, an older male who apparently was desperate to find food before it was time to hibernate.) When you listen to Treadwell talk about being a kind warrior and being stronger than the bear, or rhapsodizing over fresh bear droppings, it’s easy to think that he was just plain crazy (and in fact I agree with a friend’s opinion that the movie traces his descent into madness). But he did understand a great deal about the bears, and he managed to survive some very close encounters. It was amazing to see the bears coming up very close to the camera and hear Treadwell telling them to go away, and to see that they did indeed go away.

Treadwell spoke of the bears and the foxes as a parent might speak to or about a child. When a hunting party throws rocks at one of the bears, Treadwell, skulking in the brush, says indignantly but sotto voce to the camera that the man is throwing rocks at “my Quincy”. When a fox starts playing with his hat, he sounds like a parent with a toddler: “What are you doing to that hat? Where’s that hat going?” But when the fox runs off with the hat, Treadwell loses his temper and gives chase, swearing and berating the fox.

I don’t know how he expected the fox to know how he wanted him to behave. For someone so in love with nature, he seemed remarkably resistant to some of nature’s most basic facts. He wanted to see harmony and love, and he wanted the creatures he loved to be immune from the sometimes cruel workings of nature. When a fox died or a baby cub was killed by an adult male (which bears do sometimes; it makes the mother stop lactating and go into estrus again, so that the male can impregnate her), Treadwell alternately mourned and cursed. During a drought when the bears were hungry, he stormed heaven with outraged entreaties for rain for his animals. Herzog saw nature as chaos and murder; Treadwell seemed to expect the freedom and joy of the wilderness to be the whole story, and to be almost taken by surprise by the inevitable harshness and unpredictability of nature.

Herzog also said that while he saw no kinship in the faces of any of the bears that Treadwell filmed, Treadwell himself thought of them as friends. He had been an alcoholic before retreating from the human world into the world of the bears, and he thanked the bears for giving him a life. He said he had an agreement with them: he’d protect them, and they’d help him be a better person, which is really strange when you stop to think about it, because being with the bears seemed to make him almost not want to be a person at all. When Bittner said that he and the parrots all shared a part of a larger consciousness, he was still aware that they were not the same as humans and he was respectful of the differences. I think if humans and bears share any consciousness, it’s at a much more elemental level than anything that humans share with birds. The bears seemed to understand, eventually, when Treadwell would tell them to go away, but they seemed totally indifferent to his declarations of love and loyalty (although the foxes would sometimes sit quietly and let him pet them). After he watched two males in a horrifying fight over a female, he talked to the winner, sounding almost like a reporter with a microphone talking to a victorious athlete. The bear seemed to be asleep, not even turning his head.

Technically, what am I?

My brother once told me a story about a bird called Koko that he looked after one weekend for a friend of his. Koko was talking about my brother like he was one of the birds, and Vinny had to explain that technically, he wasn’t really a bird. Koko evidently liked the sound of that, because when she went home at the end of the weekend she startled Vinny’s friend by announcing, “Technically, I am not a bird.”

Technically, I am not a bear, but I tend to talk about myself and those closest to me as bears. Bears are in some sense my totem animal. Bears are often playful, smart, and curious, and I admire those qualities. I’m surrounded by various representations of bears: many photos, a couple of bear pendants that I wear sometimes, a small figure of a bear with a fish in his mouth, even a twonie, the Canadian two-dollar coin, which has polar bear on one side of it. But I know I’m really not a bear. I don’t fish in a stream with my paws for salmon and eat it raw. I don’t even fish with a line and eat it cooked. I haven’t been very close to many real live bears. Any kinship I feel with them is based on a much more distant and abstract understanding of them than Treadwell had from living intimately among them as he did for so long.

So my understanding of bears is heavily filtered through my humanity, and not true to any direct experience of the animals themselves. I feel almost sheepish about it, after seeing someone who really truly did identify with bears in a way I never could. But for all his direct experience of the bears, Treadwell’s concept of the ursine was filtered through his humanity too.

I think Herzog hit the nail on the head when he said that Treadwell’s film of the bears was perhaps not so much a look into wild nature as a look into ourselves. Several of the people interviewed in the movie said that Treadwell wanted to be a bear, to become so connected that he merged with them. Herzog described him as wanting to leave the confines of his humanity. Treadwell did not like or enjoy or thrive in the world of people and of civilization. Judging from what I saw of him in his own videos, he was emotionally very volatile (he quit taking antidepressants because he felt the middle way was not for him; he needed the highs and lows) and he sought out danger and risk. He seemed to harbor a very Romantic notion of nature and of wild animals, going beyond even Rousseau, who at least thought that humans in their natural state were full of grace (the noble savage). It looked to me like Treadwell by and large had to seek outside the human race entirely to find a group of beings with whom he felt much affinity.

Treadwell’s tragedy seems to be that he couldn’t find a way to fit into the human world, and the world that he tried to enter instead wound up killing him. Before he left for his last summer with the bears, he told a friend that if he didn’t come back, it was the way he wanted to go. Although I don’t deny his right to choose how to live his life, it’s hard for me to say how much that really mitigates the tragedy for the people he left behind. Certainly I value the human world far too much to ever turn my back on it the way he did. And while for most of us it’s evidently not as hard as it was for him, we all do have to fit ourselves somehow into a world of flawed human beings. One of the most rewarding things about being here is the effort to continue to grow, to learn how to overcome your weaknesses and stretch yourself to incorporate some uncomfortable but necessary behaviors into who we are. But you can only stretch so far before you start to feel like you are betraying your true self, and for Treadwell that limit was much closer than it was for most of us.

I’m of two minds about this. On the one hand, he was passionately true to himself, and I have to respect that genuineness and the courage it took him to follow his love for the bears wherever it led. On the other hand, not everything about ourselves is good. The process of deciding what to embrace about your own physical or emotional nature, and what to acknowledge but try to curb, is a difficult one. Negotiating a realistic balance between the demands of the outer world and the needs of your true self requires a firm grasp on reality, and an acceptance of the truths of nature and human nature as they are, not as you would like them to be.

When I was talking about the movie with a friend, he said that Treadwell obviously felt a deep love for the bears, no matter what kind of illusions he was harboring. But I wonder, how truly can you love nature or any part of it if you don’t understand and respect the reality of what you love?

Coda

All three movies offered some visual treats, and all were worth seeing. Parrots was far and away my favorite, because it resonated most strongly with my own beliefs. Penguins and Parrots both are much gentler films than Grizzly Man, which is darker overall and contains much starker contrasts (between Herzog’s and Treadwell’s views). I think Parrots provides the most balanced view of our relationship to other animals, seeing both the similarities and the differences without getting too carried away in either direction. If you’re going to see Grizzly Man, you might want to bring along a friend or two. The movie is sure to spark some vigrous discussion about questions of nature, wilderness, sanity, and identity.

Thinking Meat Project

The epigenome

Posted on by Mary

The epigenome is something like a link between your DNA and your environment. This article from Wired describes it as a part of your genetic makeup that’s handed down from your forebears, and that changes according to your environment. The epigenome consists of biochemical reactions that affect whether or not a particular gene is expressed. The article focuses on ways that we will be able to predict and treat certain diseases, particularly cancer, as our understanding of epigenetics grows. I remember reading in one of Matt Ridley’s books that nature and nurture are like the length and width of a rectangle: just as you need both the length and the width to calculate the area, you need both nature and nurture to explain a creature’s behavior. I wonder if the epigenome is part of what connects the two. At any rate, it’s a fascinatingly complex development in our knowledge of living things and their DNA.

http://wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68468,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_4

Thinking Meat Project

Brain fitness

Posted on by Mary

Here’s an article from Wired about maintaining your mental fitness as you age. Cognitive fitness is probably as important as physical fitness for quality of life, if not more so. These days people are paying more attention to keeping their brains fit in the hopes of warding off problems with memory or other cognitive functions as they age. The article describes various programs and activities that are being developed toward this end. I’m all for keeping your brain active, and in fact I plan go on writing, and running this web site or whatever its later equivalent will be, until I’m a very old woman. However, I’m a bit dubious about making up activities to exercise the memory or the brain. Aren’t there enough mentally stimulating activities available already? Turn off the TV and read a book, or work a crossword puzzle, or build something with your hands, or listen to some music that requires a little effort to understand.

We don’t necessarily need to spend a lot of time and money developing Granny Einstein programs when there are so many opportunities for using your brain. Three days a week I work out on an elliptical machine in a huge room at the gym with a bunch of other people treadmilling away, and I think sometimes about how exercise used to be a vital part of survival, rather than something artificial that had to be added onto our lives. I can see that there’s not much need for my meager muscular contribution to human welfare these days, so I can live with the artificiality, but with mental exercise, I’d rather beef up our popular culture to the point where it provides some needed mental stimulation rather than tacking on a lot of mental treadmills for people to labor away at. The joy of engaging your mind in something challenging might well be part of the reason that cognitive fitness enhances people’s later years. In all fairness, maybe that’s the goal for some of the programs being developed, but the article didn’t seem to say much about encouraging activities that are integral to a person’s interests and lifestyle.

http://wired.com/news/medtech/0,1286,68409,00.html

Best of Thinking Meat

Art: Bringing minds into contact

Posted on by Mary / 0 Comment

Recently I was driving home after running some errands, upset over difficulties in a relationship that’s important to me. As I sat at a stop light, seething with a mix of unhappy emotions, the Largo from Handel’s Xerxes began to play on my tape deck. Even if you don’t recognize it by name, you might recognize the music. I have long loved this piece for its slow gentle dignity and its mood of meditative serenity. In a complex emotional reaction that I’m not sure I entirely understand, the music brought the sadness in my mind to the forefront (ahead of the anger and frustration), and it also brought a welcome feeling of acceptance and even peace. Since I’ve known this music for years, through many different moods and events, and it’s been around for centuries, I felt my problems of the day being cast in more manageable proportions. Set against the emotional ebb and flow of everyday life was the tranquil beauty of the music, steadfast in time.

Several years ago at a world music festival I remember jotting down some notes about how maybe art is one of the answers to the problems of being thinking meat. I’ve thought a lot since then about how art does this. I don’t know why we evolved in such a way that we create art. That’s a topic for another day. What I’m speculating about here is the ways that art can make it easier to be a thinking mortal animal on this planet.

At the music festival I was thinking that music lets us share our feelings, so we know we’re not alone, and create something beautiful out of them, so we can experience the grace that, as U2 sang, makes beauty out of ugly things. A Cajun band, for example, sang about the homesickness of Acadians for their homeland. A Mongolian woman sang of the long journeys the men used to take in search of salt to bring back home, and the loneliness of the women who waited for them to come back. The artists who created this music took painful experiences and transformed them, through some alchemy of the mind, into beauty (art can also turn misery into humor or food for thought). Art simultaneously shares the specific details of another person’s experience, and tells a more generic story that most people can identify with (for who has not been homesick, or missed a beloved person who was far away?). We’ve all been there. There is some poignance and perhaps even beauty in the sadness, and comfort in knowing that you are not alone.

The specific details of some art—novels, songs, some poems, some paintings—let us share in the lives of other people that we will never have the chance to know, and to experience things far beyond what we could otherwise cram into our time on this planet. One of the troublesome things about being thinking meat is that we are here for such a short time. There are so many times and places and minds we will never know. We are born with curious and thirsty minds, but we’re always encountering limits to how much information we can soak up about the world. Art lets us experience vicariously some of these worlds that would otherwise be closed to us.

In particular, art can allow us to share the thoughts and emotions of people who lived in other times. If we’re lucky enough to create great art, it lives on after we’re gone. Even for most of us, who can’t reasonably expect to leave any masterworks behind, it’s comforting to sit in a concert hall or read a book or look at a painting that some other person conceived long before we were born, and to touch the mind of someone else. Carl Sagan wrote of how amazing an activity reading is: “You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree…and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)” I think that experiencing the arts in general begins a similar amazing process. It gives me a feeling of continuity, of being a part of an interchange of ideas much bigger than myself, something that I hope will go on long after I am gone. For all the inherent fragility and transience of each human mind, we can still reach out to other minds across sometimes vast gaps of time and space.

A couple of months ago I was at an early music concert on campus and heard a Psalm setting by Handel, a passionate piece that was intricately put together and beautifully performed. Audience and performers alike were caught up in the dense interweaving of voices, human and instrumental, and at the end of it I turned to the woman in the next seat, whom I did not know, and we smiled broadly at each other before breaking into applause. Imagine leaving behind something that can inspire 40-odd people to rehearse and perform it several hundred years later, and total strangers to grin at each other like delighted children upon hearing it. I didn’t write it, or even perform it, but I felt like my narrow spot in space and time was somehow widened by the experience.

One thing we can gain emotionally from art is the knowledge that emotions come and go, that people survive them, and that it can sometimes be possible to stand back from them and take a wider view. Wordsworth said that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility”. And that tranquil recall can help the artist shape a balanced, more orderly view of the emotional events. Art involves picking out the most telling details or selecting just the parts of experience that tell a particular story, and recognizing a pattern in the welter of emotions and experiences that make up our lives. (Even abstract art often involves an element of selection and composition.) Art frames life in a meaningful way by shaping happenings into some kind of a form, often a narrative. It gives us at least the feeling of having some control over life. Julian Barnes, in Flaubert’s Parrot, wrote that he could understand why people prefer books to life: “Books make sense of life. The only problem is that the lives they make sense of are other people’s lives, never your own.” True, but in books, or music, or paintings, we can sometimes see things that help us decide on the meaning we will give to our own lives, even—especially—at times when we are eternally left in the dark about some essential aspect of the situation.

And when we know, or have decided on, a meaning, we can shape our emotions accordingly to some degree. Art can be an excellent way to do this. When I was angry and bitter about my problems the other day, there was not much I could do at the moment, and dwelling on the anger and bitterness were not helping me get through my day any better. The music fostered a mood of sadness and resignation, which set my mind at rest so I could accept where I was and go on with something else. I was surprised at how quickly I shifted mental gears, but I’m certainly familiar with the emotional effect that music can have.

In fact, music might be one of the more common mood-altering substances around. Who hasn’t played lively music to get through a boring job, or sunny music to pull out of a brief emotional slump? Who doesn’t have some favorite vacation music that echoes the freedom you feel driving down the road, or rainy night music or comfort music? The music festival where I started thinking about art and thinking meat was full of rollicking danceable music that spread happiness to everyone within earshot. Poetry has a similar range of applications, and perhaps the other arts do as well, but I suspect words and music might be among the most accessible on an everyday level. Much has been written about the Mozart effect, which I consider to be overhyped psychobabble for the most part, but music can certainly change an attitude or an emotion and we use it that way all the time.

I’d love to say that my mind is no longer troubled in the least by the difficulties that were making me so miserable when I stumbled into the soothing effects of that piece by Handel recently. Art doesn’t make being thinking meat easy, however; it just makes it easier. It gives us some tools that can help us get through the bad parts with more grace than we might otherwise be able to muster. That’s enough, though. I’m happy about any gift of grace that I can find.

Thinking Meat Project

Joy, mortality, and music

Posted on by Mary

This evening I went to an excellent performance of Mahler’s Symphony #2, “Resurrection”. It was a red-letter evening: gorgeous, emotionally intense music, skillfully performed and incorporating deeply meaningful words. (I don’t believe in a supernatural resurrection awaiting any of us, but I do believe we can bloom again after life’s barren times.) I spend a lot of time thinking about the long road that lead to where we are: the slow story of evolution, the contingencies that led to our capacities for language and music, and the way our use of language and music has grown and changed over human history. Our awareness of our own mortality, which sets us apart from other living creatures, is one of the more difficult aspects of being thinking meat, but on the other hand it leads to some of the most creative and poignant acts we humans are capable of, including this particular symphony. As I sat there in the concert hall surrounded by the soaring music of the last movement, I had to marvel at being able to listen to several hundred musicians bringing to life something so beautiful that originated in the brain of someone now gone. It made me feel very lucky to be here.

No links today, no news stories. I’m still basking in the music.

Thinking Meat Project

Tool-using dolphins

Posted on by Mary / 0 Comment

Dolphins appear to be the first documented case of a marine mammal using tools. Bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay, near Australia, apparently use sponges on their noses to protect them when looking for food in the sand of the ocean floor. Not only that, it looks like mother dolphins may teach this behavior to their offspring. Researchers investigated whether it could be an inherited behavior, but the evidence for genetic transmission doesn’t look promising. (The dolphins that know how to do it are all related to a recent common female ancestor, but not all the females in that family know how, which suggests that some mothers teach their young how to do it.) No one has seen any signs of one dolphin teaching another this behavior, but I expect that’s one of the next things that these researchers will look for. Depending on how you define “thinking”, I guess you could say that some thinking meat swims in the sea, which is pretty cool. (I get this image of a scene from some Douglas Adams-style book where the dolphins explain what they’re really up to with those sponges, with some laughter about the weird mistaken ideas those humans have about what’s going on.)

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050606/full/050606-2.html

Thinking Meat Project

Thoughts on gender and science

Posted on by Mary / 0 Comment

Here’s some follow-up from the Edge about the Pinker-Spelske debate on how differences in men’s and women’s brains might affect women’s participation in the sciences, which in itself was a follow-up to the uproar following some comments from Lawrence Summers of Harvard back in January. In this round, four academics react to points brought up in the Pinker/Spelske debate. I found Alison Gopnik’s description of how genes and environment interact to be particularly interesting. She suggests that one big environmental consideration that hampers women, the need for scientists to establish themselves in their careers during a woman’s prime reproductive years, could be changed by things like making part-time tenured positions available for both men and women who are raising children. This makes me curious about how the whole system got set up in the first place. I’m pretty sure that in mathematics, there is a perception that a person does his or her best work when young, and I wonder to what extent that perception is true, and whether or not it is true to any degree in the sciences as well.

http://www.edge.org/discourse/science-gender.html

My undergrad degree is in astrophysics, but I chose not to go for a PhD and continue with a career in astronomy, in part because I had two young children and wasn’t willing to have my time with them subject to the long hours, financial uncertainty, and frequent relocations that are involved in establishing a career in astronomy. Do I ever miss astronomy? Sometimes. Would I make the same choice if I had it all to do again? Absolutely! Was there any way the experience of getting a PhD and going through post-docs and tenure-track positions could have been made more palatable to a woman with two small children? Perhaps; certainly at the time I railed against what I saw as the harsh demands of a career in science. But the kind of career you would have with a more family-friendly career path might be fairly different from what you would have otherwise, and so you would still have to make a choice, not between having a family and having a career, but a choice about what kind of career and what kind of family life you want to have. I think it would be good if men faced the same dilemmas as women here (i.e., if child-care responsibilities were shared as much as possible), but I think it genuinely is a dilemma. Having a family shouldn’t close off all other options for your life, for men or women, and I like the idea of family-friendly jobs, but raising children is an occupation itself, and it might simply be incompatible with some kinds of higher-powered careers (and not just in science). If more parenting-friendly options were available for scientists, and more women than men chose them, would there be complaints that the parenting-friendly options don’t provide as much opportunity (like complaints about the “Mommy track” in other occupations)? Quite possibly, but I don’t think gender bias would necessarily be involved. Sometimes you really do have to choose; that’s one of the challenges of being thinking meat. “There is never enough time to do or say all the things that we would wish.” (Charles Dickens)

Thinking Meat Project

Tempus fugit

Posted on by Mary

One of the reasons you sometimes hear advice about living as if each day were your last is that that approach intensifies your appreciation for life. Here’s a press release from UC San Diego about research that produced some data on the emotional effects of a sense of limited time. Young people were asked about the feelings they thought they would experience in several different scenarios. The situations that involved time limits or an impending leavetaking of some sort evoked stronger and more complicated emotions. This certainly jibes with my experience.

http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/TeuscherTimeLimits.asp

I’ve heard people say that if we could live forever, we would lose the motivational spur of having limited time, and also a certain poignancy that gives meaning to our lives. I’ve always wondered about the motivational part. I’d like to think I would accomplish bigger things if I knew I had more time to complete them, but on the other hand, procrastination is a powerful force even when I know I won’t be here forever. But there is no denying the emotional impact of the brevity of our lives. In one of his books, Heinz Pagels quoted the following poem, which has haunted me ever since I first read it. (I just Googled “Dendid” and found that he is a deity of the Dinka in Sudan.)

In the time when Dendid created all things
He created the sun, and the sun is born, and dies, and comes again.
He created the moon, and the moon is born, and dies, and comes again.
He created the stars, and the stars are born, and die, and come again.
He created man, and man is born, and dies, and never comes again.

Thinking Meat Project

And all the while, the trees were balding

Posted on by Mary

This is an intriguing story from Nature about another location in the brain, this one involved in metaphorical and abstract thinking. When the left angular gyrus, a small area in the cerebral cortex, is damaged, people lose the ability to extract a broader meaning from a figure ot speech. Such people tend to place a literal intepretation on sayings such as “reach for the stars” or “the grass is always greener on the other side.” The left angular gyrus is near parts of the cortex that process sight, sound, and tactile sensations, so maybe it is a place where synthesis of dissimilar sensory information can take place. Metaphor is fascinating to me, partly because I work in information technology and I’ve noticed that so many of the things we talk about in IT are more or less abstract or at least non-physical, and we talk about them in terms of analogies with more concrete things. (Just think for a minute about hotlinks, cookies, and bounced email, for starters.)

http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050523/full/050523-9.html

(The header for this post is a quote from Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers; it comes from a part of the book where the narrator is describing the economy involved in this kind of metaphorical thinking. The AI program he has been working with has come up with a figure of speech for old age that involved leaves falling: trees were balding, the mind shed its leaves. “…the neurodes storing winter lent half their economical pattern to the neurodes signalling old age.” Fascinating stuff, metaphor, however—or wherever—it arises.)

Best of Thinking Meat

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations

Posted on by Mary / 7 Comments

It takes all kinds, my father would say when I was growing up. It took me awhile to realize that this is literally true for living things. Look at the different kinds of plants and animals there are, each adapted reasonably well to its local environment, and thriving there while other creatures exploit other niches. Living things have different tool-kits, shaped by the conditions under which they evolved, that allow them to thrive. Think of the quicksilver brilliance of a hummingbird on the wing, the aggression of an ostrich protecting a nest, the graceful swoop of a pelican and the ungainly waddle of a well-insulated penguin, the raucous clamor of crows. Which one is the best bird? Well, best for what? Each one is better than others at living in its own environment.

I wonder sometimes if there’s a metaphor there for human personality traits. Personality traits are like different tools that are distributed across the population, and each one offers advantages and disadvantages depending on the situation. It really does take all kinds.

Are there any truly bad personality traits? Perhaps not. (There are truly negative behaviors, but that’s not the same thing, although traits obviously predispose us toward certain behaviors.) Maybe there are unhealthy extremes for each trait, but by and large each one helps you sometimes and hurts you at others. I think we call the same trait by either a positive or a negative name depending on who has it, whether we’re finding it useful or annoying in the current situation, and to some degree our history of interacting with people who have that particular trait.

The art of building successful families or workplaces or teams of any kind has a lot to do with finding a way to use the strengths of a variety of personality types, not trying to make everyone match some ideal. Think about going to the video store with friends. If everyone’s really opinionated, you might never find something everyone can agree on. On the other hand, an easy-going crowd can drift for a long time saying, “Well, that would be nice” or “Whatever you want” until you all leave the store, irritated, with a movie that no one really wanted to see but everyone thought someone else wanted to see.

This is obvious, of course, but there are areas these days where we sometimes think in terms of ideals that we should all try to reach. For example, psychopharmacology is probably going to continue to come up with new ways to tinker with our selves; some biochemical interventions are obviously beneficial, but if we move toward shaping personality rather than curing illness, we will at some point need to realize that there isn’t any one ideal personality that will be happy and productive in all situations. Psychiatry and related sciences seem bent on describing variations from normal as syndromes or disorders, ignoring the possibility that there is no such thing as normal. Since each trait, and each constellation of traits that makes up a personality, has its good and bad points, none is trouble-free and probably none is completely negative.

Another area where this comes into play is genetics. When people talk about the potential for genetic manipulation that will allow us to select particular features of our children, they tend to assume that there is one desirable set of characteristics that everyone will want his or her children to have. But when you think about it, this might turn out to be remarkably hard to do. First, I don’t know if it’s ever going to be possible to figure out how to select for something as broad and subjectively identified as personality characteristics. Even something like intelligence comes in many flavors and possesses many components, and is not determined by a single gene or even a simple combination of genes. Leaving that aside, how on earth would we choose what kinds of humans to produce, given the chance?

Would we favor extroverts over introverts? The practical over the innovative? The builders or the dreamers? The cautious or the daring? I wouldn’t want to be responsible for choosing any one of these over the others, because I think every personality trait is a mixed blessing. And if people did want to choose, they would choose differently. There certainly are dumb things we can and maybe will do if we start trying to engineer personalities, either through pharmaceuticals or through genetics, but I don’t think we’ll create a uniform race of superpeople. Even if we could agree on their attributes, and even if we could figure out how to create them, they’d struggle with the downside of their strengths the same as the rest of us.

In short, there is no ideal and maybe not even a normal. We vary in the traits we possess and the strength of each one. The environments we’re raised in shape our inborn tendencies in different ways. And that’s as it should be. The diverse combinations that result can be a source of strength, not a liability.

The challenge is to find the strengths in our diversity. We often feel that life might be easier if everyone were just like us. You think how many mistakes could be avoided if everyone paid careful attention to details like you do, or you wish other people would try to get the big picture and stop harassing you with those little details. It’s usually easy to appreciate your own traits, and harder to appreciate those of others.

Obviously our traits are more malleable than the bright plumage of the hummingbird or the caw of the crow. We live in a complicated environment that requires different things from us at different times. We can learn how to flex, how to be the best of who we are and still work around our weak spots, sometimes borrowing insight from those who are not like us.

This is often easier said than done. Sometimes when you’re dealing with people who are bafflingly or annoyingly different, it’s tempting to shrug and give up on understanding, much less learning from, their take on the world. But if we’re smart and charitable, we try to figure out how the world looks to them rather than just assuming they’re malicious or crazy. On the other hand, sometimes we don’t think they’re crazy; sometimes we admire them and wish we were more like them. Either way, we have to stretch to learn other ways of experiencing the world.

My friend Jean suggests that one way to do this with people close to you is to try to find positive or at least neutral terms to describe the other person. You know how this naming of characteristics goes. For example, we have the courage of our convictions. Those other guys are stubborn or even downright pigheaded. I value good living; he’s a spendthrift. I’m thrifty; she’s a tightwad. I’m meticulous about details; you’re a fussbudget. This is something of a parlor game that you can use to translate personal ads and resumes. My friend’s idea is, for example, to try not to think of your partner or child or friend as flaky, and to ask them to reconsider their claim that you’re timid. “Spontaneous” and “prudent,” respectively, are much more generous assessments of each other’s characters.

Of course, different personality types tend to favor certain values and behaviors, and you need to negotiate the ground rules for behavior within a relationship, no matter what kind of personalities are involved. The whole process is easier, though, if you can shift your perspective somewhat, and one way to begin is to change the labels you put on things.

Note that I’m not talking about a fuzzy-headed effort at enhancing self-esteem by never saying anything bad about other people. For starters, there are some behaviors that are in my opinion required of everyone, and I’m not trying to whitewash misbehavior by blaming it on the personality someone was blessed and burdened with. I’m talking about balance. You probably already have some negative words for the things that irritate you about other people. The best way to learn how to accommodate the inevitable differences in people is to try to understand how it looks from the other side. Maybe this will ease the friction in a family or at work, and at its best, it can give you a glimpse of another way of seeing and evaluating the world, something more or less foreign to you but still understandable if you make the effort.

Of course, we’re sometimes attracted by someone’s spontaneity and then frustrated by his or her flakiness. This is another place where the alternate names for a single trait come into play. A charming playfulness turns into airheadedness; a protective streak comes to seem controlling; someone with a strong sense of responsibility winds up looking like a fuddy-duddy. Again, the good and the bad are opposite sides of the same thing. If you want a mate who is willing to take over paying the bills, you’re going to have to put up with times when he or she looks to you like a killjoy. I think one of the richest experiences of growing older is to learn to accept things and people as wholes, in all their complexity.

In some cases, I wonder if there are biological underpinnings to particular characteristics, so that the pluses and minuses reflect an inevitable trade-off. You may have read the recent news story about the gonopodia of mosquitofish: larger ones attract the ladies, and thus enhance reproductive success, but they also make it harder to evade predators. You can’t be both a babe-magnet and the speediest swimmer. Or to take a human example, I’m fairly sensitive to emotional and other stimuli, so it takes me awhile to adapt to new situations. While I enjoy traveling and seeing new places, I have to do so carefully, because the discomfort of strange surroundings can wipe out the joy of discovery. I might dream of adventures, but I have to accept that, like the Mole in The Wind in the Willows, I am by and large a creature of the garden-plot. On the other hand, I can derive a great deal of enjoyment from the most everyday things. I don’t need to spend a lot of money or go to exotic places to find joy and pleasure in the mundane. (And as Mole realizes, the pleasant places that surrounded him “held adventure enough, in their way, to last for a lifetime.”) I don’t know if there is a physiological basis for this sensitivity to stimuli, but I do think that the good and the bad aspects are linked and I probably can’t have one without the other.

I think the key thing to realize is that everyone is trying to perfect a kind of balancing act, to live with the mixed bag of attributes that make up who he or she is. We are, I hope, never going to make humanity over into a uniform personality, and we need to learn to live with what we’ve got. The best way to look at it might be similar to the Vulcan idea from Star Trek of infinite diversity in infinite combinations, and, as Spock once said, the way our differences combine to create meaning and beauty. Think of the grace and tact of the wishy-washy among us, for example, or the strength and tenacity of the loudmouths. Remember the steady reliability of the worry-warts in your life, or the joie de vivre of the unpredictable. Even if there are some personality types that you simply can’t get along with in close quarters, be glad that there are people out there who are different from you and willing, even happy, to do all the jobs and fill all the roles that you can’t imagine yourself in. It’s not always an easy way to look at life, and maybe I’m dreaming to think we can manage it. But then, I do tend to be an idealist and a dreamer. You could call me a visionary, or you could call me impractical, or even a crackpot. I like the word “dreamer” though. It can go either way.