The inseparability of the mind and body and the gut-brain connection

We often talk about the mind and the body as two separate entities, although scientifically speaking, they are one and the same. The medical establishment has known this since the adoption of the Hippocratic Oath, and yet several millennia later, treatment of psychiatric patients is still often done in entirely separate institutions and most insurance plans don’t consider mental health related treatments as standard care, let alone necessary for effective medicine. Despite the increasing awareness of the fear and stigma surrounding mental illness, we continue to think about, discuss, and treat mental and physical illnesses separately, because that’s the way it has always been and old habits die hard. 

The problem with this historical separation is most evident when mental and physical illness occur simultaneously, as they very often do. Many people living with chronic physical illnesses report that the psychiatric symptoms of anxiety and depression that almost inevitably accompany their diagnosis are far more debilitating than their physical suffering, and they wish that doctors would treat the two with equal importance. Similarly, many psychiatric patients suffer from terrible physical health issues as a result of their conditions as well as the often detrimental side-effects of antipsychotic and antidepressant medications (the mechanisms of which, by the way, are still not fully understood). While in many severe psychiatric cases, such medications remain a necessary component of effective treatment, prescribing them to treat milder cases of anxiety and depression could very well cause more harm than good.

Whether it’s psychosis or cancer, the primary illness is the one that is treated, and the rest are considered side-effects that must be tolerated because they’re less likely to kill you. While prioritizing like this is an effective way of keeping people alive, it is a very ineffective way of keeping them healthy and happy. What would happen if we started to consider the possibility that side-effects and comorbidities could be central components of complex illnesses or imbalances, and our body’s way of signalling that it’s not that simple? A new field of research suggests that causal links between mental and physical symptoms may exist at a much more fundamental level than previously thought, via two of the body’s most distant and unlikely partners – the gut and the brain.

Contrary to the way we think of ourselves as singular beings, the human body is actually a superorganism housing billions of microorganisms like fungi, bacteria, viruses, and protozoa living inside our organs and on our skin and hair. Collectively, these comprise 90% of the total cells and genes of our bodies, and the microbiota found in the gut alone consists of more than one kilogram of microorganisms, known as the gut microbiome. Recent studies have shown that something as seemingly separate as the gut microbiome can have far-reaching influence on both physical and mental well-being, and that the relationship between the two is far from straightforward. 

Thanks to developments in bioinformatics, studies investigating gut-brain interactions have grown exponentially, and scientists and psychologists are starting to revise their understanding of the relationship between the mind and the body. The microorganisms inhabiting our guts play a crucial role in the so-called gut-brain axis by reducing inflammation in the body and producing neurotransmitters that can affect a variety of habits and behaviors like appetite, sleep, mood, and our response to stress. As our lifestyles, environments, medical practices, and diets have transformed over the last few centuries, the microbiome has also changed drastically. In parallel, mental and neurological diseases are rapidly on the rise, and many scientists believe that this cannot be a coincidence.

The first few weeks after birth are a critical stage for the development of healthy gut microbiota, and problems in this stage can lead to permanent neurological damage and greatly increase susceptibility to mental health issues. Altered gut flora has been linked to a huge variety of neurological and psychiatric illnesses such as Parkinson’s disease, autism, anxiety and mood disorders, and even schizophrenia. However, since nearly all of the scientific research in gut-brain biology has been carried out in animal models, much work is needed to determine whether and to what extent the findings translate to humans, as well as to investigate whether changes in the microbiome are a cause or effect of disease. Even so, it has become abundantly clear that there is a relationship between the gut and the brain that is more than correlational.

In light of this unexpected link, new treatments are starting to emerge that focus on improving gut health to treat symptoms of mental illness. Probiotic treatments to help increase the number of good bacteria in the gut can have far-reaching effects on the brain and body. These benefits include lowering stress reactivity, reducing inflammation and cortisol levels, improving memory function, and even reducing symptoms of depression, anxiety, and neuroticism. A small number of human clinical trials show great promise for the use of pre- and probiotic treatment for environmentally induced depression and anxiety, which is mediated by metabolic, hormonal, and immune pathways. Furthermore, fecal transplantation, a procedure usually used to treat antibiotic resistant gastrointestinal disease, has been used to alter the microbiomes of children with autism spectrum disorder, improving both behavioral symptoms and gastrointestinal problems that commonly accompany the disorder.

Perhaps the most remarkable findings in this field come from several case studies of patients with chronic schizophrenia, one of the most devastating mental illnesses that affects approximately 1% of the population. In 2007, a physician reported two patients whose catatonic symptoms responded to an antibiotic called minocycline. Most likely, the antibiotic treatment altered the microbiome, in turn affecting the immune system and decreasing inflammation in the brain, thereby lessening symptoms. More recently there have been reports of two other patients who experienced complete remission of their schizophrenia after switching to a ketogenic diet and were able to stop taking antipsychotic medication entirely. The ketogenic diet is known for its metabolic benefits and has been used as a treatment for epilepsy for a while, but its potential to lessen symptoms of psychiatric disorders is a new discovery worthy of serious consideration.

Although this field of research is new and much evidence comes from animal models and case studies of human patients, the existence of a link between the gut and the brain is undeniable. In light of these findings, we are forced to consider how our medical and psychiatric practices have so far failed to treat the body holistically, and to reevaluate the way we deal with mental and physical illness. In a time of mental health awareness hashtags and a calculated effort by the younger generations to fight stigma, there remains a clear and pervasive discrepancy between the huge impact we know that mental health problems can have on our lives and the resources we devote to addressing them. Research that truly recognizes the inseparability of the mind and body has the potential to change that, but the change must happen at every level – in our language, in our thinking, and most importantly, in our medical practices. 

Saving Face: when face recognition goes wrong

Consider this scenario. You arrive at a party fashionably late (or maybe just late because you didn’t really want to go and ended up watching one too many episodes of Queer Eye on your sofa). You get yourself a drink and then spot one of your friends chatting away with a group of nice-looking strangers. You greet your friend and introduce yourself with a handshake to each of the strangers. Person 1, 2, and 3 smile politely and tell you their names (which you forget immediately), but person 4 gives you a confused look and says “Yes I know, we’ve met before… several times…”. You try to hide your disbelief, apologize profusely, pretend to remember them, and hope that someone at some point will say their name and/or something, ANYTHING, that will remind you who they are so you don’t end up embarrassing yourself any further. You spend the rest of the night clinging to your friend whispering “Do I know them?” every time someone even looks in your direction.

The ability to recognize faces is a skill that is fundamental to our social and cultural interactions. Without being fully conscious of it, we use faces every day to judge attractiveness and trustworthiness and to read emotions, thoughts, and intentions. The vast majority of people are able to recognize and remember the faces of thousands of individuals they encounter throughout their lives. A very small minority are not. I fall somewhere in the middle, having experienced various versions of the scenario described above on far too many occasions, and felt equally mortified every time. While I do feel that being a red-haired woman with blue eyes and an unusual Scandinavian name gives me a significant (dis?)advantage in the being-remembered-by-people-you-don’t-remember department, I do admit to being slightly relieved to find out that I scored below average on a scientifically validated test of face recognition skills. Although it won’t help reduce the number of embarrassing re-introductions I will inevitably live through, it is somehow reassuring to be able to blame my brain.

Owing to its importance in our social lives, we might be inclined to think that face recognition is one of the things that makes us uniquely human. However, in terms of evolution, the ability to recognize faces is more than 30 million years old. Primates have face recognition skills similar to humans, and even dogs have been found to have a brain area dedicated to facial recognition of both humans and other dogs. Human babies are born with some ability to recognize faces and respond to them by smiling back at only two and a half months. By six months, babies can even recognize the faces of other species (in this case pictures of monkeys), but by nine months, face recognition skills narrow down to only humans unless they are continually exposed to the other species. This suggests that we are born with an inherent ability to recognize faces, and that our model of a face gets narrowed down within the first year or two of development to fit the types of faces we’re most likely to encounter, based on our experiences (i.e. the babies who were not continually exposed to monkey faces lost the ability to distinguish them).

The exposure hypothesis also helps to explain the common observation that it is much easier to distinguish the faces of your own or most familiar ethnicity than those of another (you’ve probably heard at least one person say “All black/white/asian people look the same!”). Interestingly, this phenomena even translates to the most advanced face recognition algorithms used by tech companies, police, and border security worldwide, which have recently been criticized for being significantly less accurate for darker skin tones than light ones. Such algorithms are based on machine learning techniques that rely on training datasets containing a variety of features that can be used to distinguish people. Usually, the larger and more diverse the training dataset, the more accurate and generalizable the algorithm will be. The biggest problem with face recognition technology is therefore very likely to stem from the fact that the training datasets used by the companies that develop them are not properly representative. Most of these datasets are collected from the internet – by far the easiest place to find vast quantities of pictures of faces, but also a source where content skews strongly white, male, and western. Knowing that, it’s not all that surprising that the success rates of face recognition software are worst for black women and best for white men.

So the good news is that we can add face recognition to the list of things that humans are still marginally better at than computers, but what would life be like without this incredibly important hard-wired skill? While people like me sometimes struggle with recognizing others until they become familiar enough to stick, a small minority of people simply can’t recognize faces at all. Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, is a condition in which a person’s ability to recognize faces is impaired while other aspects of cognition remain completely intact. You can be born with it or acquire it later in life, though it has strong genetic determinants and acquired prosopagnosia is very rare and more likely to be the result of more general brain damage or degeneration. Severe prosopagnosia affects 2-2.5% of the general population and another 10% have been found to perform markedly below average in face recognition without being entirely face-blind.

Interestingly, people with prosopagnosia are sometimes completely unaware that they have a problem because they’ve learned to use other feature recognition strategies to recognize people. Face recognition requires the perception of a face as a whole, consisting of a collection of features (i.e. two eyes, a nose, and a mouth) arranged in a prototypical layout (i.e. eyes on top, mouth below the nose). While someone with prosopagnosia can recognize individual facial features, they are unable to process them as a whole. In this case, other distinguishing characteristics of familiar people like eye and hair color, voice, gait, mannerisms, and most importantly, context, come into play. In many of my own embarrassing cases of forgotten faces, I’m sure that my red hair, blue eyes, and unusual Scandinavian name probably help others to remember me, while I struggle to remember them because I’m seeing them in a completely different context than where I first met them. Lucky for me, I have at least never failed to recognize my own face, which was apparently not the case for the late Dr. Oliver Sacks, who has written extensively on his own severe prosopagnosia:

My problem with recognizing faces extends not only to my nearest and dearest but also to myself. Thus, on several occasions I have apologized for almost bumping into a large bearded man, only to realize that the large bearded man was myself in a mirror. The opposite situation once occurred at a restaurant. Sitting at a sidewalk table, I turned toward the restaurant window and began grooming my beard, as I often do. I then realized that what I had taken to be my reflection was not grooming himself but looking at me oddly. – Oliver Sacks in The New Yorker

Thanks to a combination of historical case studies of brain lesion patients with prosopagnosia and modern neuroimaging investigations in living brains, we know that almost all people with prosopagnosia have damage to an area of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, or fusiform face area. This brain structure seems to be unique to hominid species (meaning apes including humans) and connects directly to the visual cortex. It activates specifically in response to faces, although it has also been linked to other interesting conditions like synesthesia and dyslexia and is almost certainly not the only brain area involved in face recognition. Like all cognitive processes, face recognition takes place through activity occurring in a network of distributed brain regions. It remains a matter of debate whether there even is a distinct system responsible for face recognition or whether it is a sub-function of a more general visual identification system for recognizing collections of specific features holistically as objects. For example, in the same way that a face is a face because it has two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, a tree is a tree because it has a trunk, branches, and leaves. While faces may be more socially and culturally important to distinguish than trees, the basic underlying process of recognizing them is likely to be the same.

To finish off, I’ll leave you with a particularly fascinating case of prosopagnosia, namely that of the artist Chuck Close. Despite being completely face-blind, Close has managed to take advantage of his disability and made a very successful career out of painting gigantic portraits of faces. Although Close himself doesn’t recognize any of his subjects, he is able to “flatten them out” in a photograph and commit them to memory. His huge portraits are made up of many individual squares of painted color, which on their own carry little meaning, but together make up an almost photo-realistic face when viewed from a distance. Besides being really cool paintings, I like Chuck Close’s story because it perfectly demonstrates how in many cases, a lack of ability in one area can lead to incredible skill in another, thanks to the brain’s ability to adapt and compensate.

If you would like to test your own face recognition skills (and contribute to science!), you can do so here.

 

 

 

Confessions of a Crybaby: Why we weep and what it means

My mother has often told me that as a child, I cried so rarely that whenever I did, she knew something was seriously wrong. While I can’t really testify to the truth of that statement since childhood memories are neither unbiased nor particularly accurate, I can say for certain that things have changed. In fact today, as a perfectly happy healthy strong independent adult, I’m a huge crybaby. The extensive list of things that almost always make tears flow from my eyeballs like the flood waters of Babylon includes but is not limited to the following: seeing people I care about (especially men) cry, witnessing or experiencing the kindness of others, feeling helpless or out of control, knowing that I’ve upset someone else, and that incredible montage scene from the Pixar movie, Up. My metamorphosis from tough-as-nails kid to don’t-mind-me-I-cry-all-the-time adult is likely at least partly due to the fact that children and adults cry for different reasons. While kids most often cry in response to physical pain, adults cry in response to a huge range of complex emotions that develop over time. Perhaps it’s also related to my hair color, as redheads apparently have higher tolerances for certain types of physical pain, which would help explain my mother’s account of my childhood toughness (though not my adult crybaby-ness). Whatever the reason for the discrepancy, my overachieving tear ducts have led me to do a bit of soul-searching (because research is me-search, as they say) and I thought the answers I found to my most pressing questions were worth sharing.

What is crying?   

In order to figure out why we cry, I suppose we should start by defining what crying actually is. So let’s start with a scientific definition that literally made me laugh out loud at its long-windedness when I first read it. According to Patel et al. (1993), crying is:

“a complex secretomotor phenomenon characterized by the shedding of tears from the lacrimal apparatus, without any irritation of the ocular structures, and often accompanied by alterations in the muscles of facial expression, vocalizations, and in some cases sobbing, which is the convulsive inhaling and exhaling of air with spasms of the respiratory and truncal muscle groups”

While accurate, this definition completely misses the most important and prominent characteristic of crying. Yep, you guessed it – emotions! While many physiological responses are limited to specific emotional states (e.g. butterflies in the stomach or trembling knees), we cry in response to a huge range of very different feelings. Pain, grievance, nostalgia, shame, empathy, pride, comfort, joy, and many other emotions can evoke tears – sometimes negative, and sometimes positive. As you may have gathered, crying itself is really just the physiological aspect of a complex process that starts in the brain.

Do only humans cry?   

As the owner of an adorable Dachshund puppy and a webcam, I can tell you with great conviction that puppies most definitely do cry. The sounds they make when left alone, so-called acoustical distress calls, are undeniably similar to those of a human baby and are equally heartbreaking to the listener. These distress calls are a clear and obvious signal to the mother that the baby needs attention, and can be found in all infant mammals. One important difference though, is that puppies don’t shed tears when they cry. In spite of the occasional reports to the contrary, the capacity to shed emotional tears is a uniquely human behavior. According to legendary primatologist Jane Goodall, even chimpanzees (our closest genetic relatives) display sadness through specific facial expressions and vocalizations, but do not shed emotional tears.

Do women really cry more often than men?   

Well… yes. As a general rule, evidence does seem to suggest that women cry more frequently than men. Interestingly, men and women also seem to differ in the reasons for their tears, with women crying more often in response to feelings of anger and powerlessness, and men being relatively more likely to shed happy tears. Perhaps surprisingly, there is no convincing evidence that the menstrual cycle influences crying frequency or the common belief that women cry more often before their periods and during pregnancy. However, seeing as this is 2018 and most people reading this will likely have an unignorable and entirely justified voice in their head shouting things like “Gender isn’t binary!” and “Toxic masculinity!”, perhaps a better way of discussing these differences in crying behavior between men and women is to consider them a consequence of individual differences in personality.

The most robust associations between personality traits and crying have been found with measures of neuroticism and empathy, both of which show positive relationships with crying proneness. However, while more empathetic people tend to cry more often when exposed to the suffering of others (whether real or fictional), more neurotic people are more likely to engage in manipulative crying intended to elicit a response from another person. There also seems to be a positive relationship between self-esteem and propensity for crying – meaning that individuals with higher self-esteem cry more often. Whether this is because they actually do cry more often, or whether they are just more willing to admit to it than individuals with low self-esteem is still unclear. Although not directly related to personality differences, another interesting finding suggests differences in crying behavior between people living in different climates, with more emotional expression but less crying being reported in people living in warm as compared to cold countries.

So why DO we cry?   

The sheer number of theories that exist that try to answer this question goes to show just how little we actually know about the evolutionary origins of emotional tears. The theories range from pretty ridiculous and generally rejected by scientists (e.g. the Aquatic Ape Theory, which claims that ancestors of modern humans were more aquatic than other great apes and that tears are an adaptation to saltwater living) to relatively more believable but not quite complete. One such theory is that emotional crying evolved from reflex crying in response to physical pain, which was the first visible sign of physical distress. This makes a lot of sense when considering recent research findings revealing that physical and emotional/social pain have a lot more in common than previously thought. For example, it has been shown that emotional and physical pain activate the same brain areas and that the common painkiller, paracetamol (Tylenol), can also help to dull emotional pain. With all of this in mind, it is generally agreed that crying is a self-soothing behavior that serves to reduce negative emotions (or physical pain) and corresponding physiological arousal.

According to Murube, Murube, and Murube (No, that’s not a typo – all three authors have the same last name! Are they related? Are they married? Which one is the third wheel? I have so many questions…), all instances of emotional crying share the common denominator of help, and are related to either requesting or offering help. Although a bit simplistic, this division does aid in explaining age-related differences in crying behavior. Infants and children are constantly in need of help and cry to request it, and as we become older, we become more able to offer help, and our reasons for crying shift towards the other end of the spectrum. Related to this is another theory proposed by Dutch ethologist Frans Roes, which says that when in distress or out of control, adult members of several species (including humans) mimic the helplessness of infants in order to elicit help. So in other words, we cry because it makes us look like babies (literally, according the the concept of Kindchenschema), which makes us look helpless, which makes others want to help us.

But what about the specific role of tears? Why does salty water come out of our eyeballs when we’re in distress, and why don’t we think it’s gross? When you think about it, tears are the only body fluid that we don’t find disgusting at all, which to me is a sign that it probably has some sort of important social purpose. One interesting theory is that tears evolved as a solution to the problem of the danger associated with vocal distress calls in infants. Loud crying may get the attention the mother, but it also signals to predators that there is a helpless infant nearby. It is therefore proposed that tears evolved in humans as a safer alternative to distress calls in close interactions, when a visual cue is sufficient and safe. Another interesting theory is that tears serve as a sort of white flag in social interactions. When we cry, tears inevitably blur our vision, which makes it difficult to demonstrate any kind of aggression towards the person you’re interacting with, thereby signaling surrender and facilitating social bonding.

According to the experts, there are three different types of tears, namely basal tears (the wet stuff that’s in your eyes all the time, which is there to lubricate, protect, and nourish your cornea), reflex tears (the tears that form when your eyes are irritated and helps to wash away harmful substances like onion fumes), and emotional tears (tears formed in response to emotional stimuli). Interestingly, these different types of tears vary in their chemical composition, with emotional tears containing certain hormones and proteins not present in basal or reflex tears. Specifically, emotional tears have been found to contain higher levels of adrenocorticotropic hormone (a hormone often produced in response to biological stress), prolactin (a hormone involved in the immune system and breast milk production), manganese (an essential nutrient that needs to be regulated by the body), and leucine enkephalin (an endorphin that reduces pain and improves mood). Human tears also contain specific lacrimal proteins that help to defend and heal the eye, and their presence is a sign that nature is aware that damage to the eyes is particularly risky for survival.

Ok, but what about happy tears?   

I left this question for last, because it’s the one I really couldn’t find an answer to. All the theories I’ve mentioned so far make sense when applied to distress and pain, but none of them are able to explain why we also sometimes cry in response to positive emotions. While there are a few theories specifically relating to tears of joy that I could try to explain, I don’t find them particularly convincing, and so I think I’d prefer to leave this one a mystery. Happy tears are one of those wonderful things that might lose their magic if explained too thoroughly.

Perhaps the same thing can be said about the question that originally sparked my interest in this topic – why do I cry so often? Through all of my research, I came no closer to answering that particular question, but I’m ok with that, and I’m ok with being a crybaby. Emotional tears, both happy and sad, are just one of those wonderful things that reminds me that I am happy, I am healthy, and I am human.

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[The majority of information in this post comes from an incredibly interesting and comprehensive book called Why Only Humans Weep: Unravelling the mysteries of tears by Ad Vingerhoets. I found it via this recent New York Times article about how to stop yourself from crying. So if you’d like to read more, those are good places to start.]

In praise of surprise

Alexandria, year 48 b.C. The Roman Emperor Julius Caesar is healing in the Egyptian Royal Palace after his last battle against Pompey’s troops. Centurions and soldiers gather around and, if necessary, they are ready to die protecting Caesar’s life. One afternoon, in the midst of this uncertain atmosphere, an Egyptian slave addresses the centurion in charge asking for an urgent audience with Caesar. I am carrying with me, sir – he explains to the centurion in charge – an extremely valuable gift that only Caesar is allowed to see. The centurion raises a skeptic eyebrow, but agrees to convey the message to Julius Caesar. Caesar is deeply intrigued by this. He has heard so much about Egyptian secrets and treasures. Some people even believe that they have the key to supernatural powers. How else would they have built all those beautiful pyramids so many years ago? Maybe the Egyptian slave is carrying with him a potion for immortality. It would be terrible if the supreme leader of Rome fails to accept this mysterious gift. Caesar grants the request of the slave and allows him inside his private chamber. The Egyptian slave is a strong and beautiful man that carries with him a wrapped rug that looks very heavy. Once the door of the chamber is closed, the slave makes a swift movement and unwraps the rug. From inside the rug, and to Caesar’s great surprise and awe, Cleopatra, the Queen of Egypt, emerges in the chamber.

That scene represented the beginning of an infatuated love affaire that inspired writers and painters around the world for many centuries to come. The surprise experienced by Julius Caesar when meeting Cleopatra for the first time changed forever the relationship between Rome and Egypt and the story of Caesar and Cleopatra sets the context for understanding that surprises can have a powerful impact on one’s life. Facing surprises can shape our experiences and frame the ways we behave.

Scientists usually (and rather un-poetically) allude to surprises as reward prediction errors. This term reflects the difference between what we expect to happen and what actually happens. When the outcomes are greater than initial expectations, reward prediction errors are positive, and vice versa. Going back to our initial story, Julius Caesar did not expect to find the Queen of Egypt wrapped inside a rug, so he experienced a positive reward prediction error when she emerged. In contrast, negative reward prediction errors  occur when an outcome is smaller than expected. Imagine that you buy a box of cookies and place it in the drawer in your office. A week later, after an exhausting three hour work meeting, you rush to where the box is to grab some cookies, only to find the contents of the box reduced to a few lousy crumbs. You ask around and you find out that it was your sugar-addicted officemates who finished them off last Friday afternoon. This would be an example of a negative reward prediction error (and badly behaved colleagues).

The tendency to be surprised often is sometimes associated with a certain level of immaturity or naivité, which might have a somewhat negative connotation. If we are very familiar with our environment, we can create a pretty good mental model of what it is supposed to happen next,and when that happens, we gain a couple of life experience points. In other words, we learn what to expect from the environment and how to respond to it in order to get the best out of each situation. With time, we build habits and routines and we feel less and less inclined to explore (riskier) alternatives.

However, incidents of surprise do not necessarily result from lack of experience and may in fact have more to do with how open we are to new experiences. Take for example the old saying, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” – i.e. if something works, we should not change it. Sometimes we sacrifice adventures in favour of stability and comfort. We comply with the social rules ascribed to our age and gender because life is just easier that way #adulting, right? Sticking to rules and conventions provides us with a comforting feeling of control over life’s many uncertainties and anxieties. An effective self-defense against 21st century life.

On the flip side, an extreme lack of flexibility and openness to surprise can lead to rigidity, which as the word implies, is very disadvantageous.  If we never allow surprises to change our perceptions, rigidity can invade our reality, and whenever something doesn’t fit our existing mental schemes, we dismiss it without a second thought. Our world is anything but permanent, and surprises allow beautiful complexities and contradictions to manifest. They give us fresh air, feed our spontaneity, and provide us with different perspectives. They can inspire our footsteps. When we allow others to surprise us, when we embrace surprises with an open mind, we earn wisdom and we can break down the walls we build with our own prejudices. If we dismiss surprises, if we never leave our comfort zone, how can we improve ourselves and abandon the self-centered bubble we so often get stuck in?

Where there is room for surprise, there is hope for advancement. We are often so busy with our lives that we forget to pay attention to the elements that surround us. But the good news is that surprises can be found literally everywhere. You can find them in your interactions and relationships with friends, family or strangers. You can find them on your way to work, in a hospital waiting room, or while hiking in the forest. All you need to do is to let them cross your path in an accepting manner and they may help you tear apart prejudices and preconceptions and fill your world with beauty and wisdom. So, dear reader, may your journey be full of surprises.

 

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To my baby Elyas, the most beautiful surprise of my life.

 

 

On Morals and Money: The time I got scammed by a little old lady

On April 3rd, 2018, I got scammed by a little old lady. As it turns out, this particular little old lady has been running the same scam in the same place for at least 8 years (probably longer) and as a result, she is actually something of a celebrity in Montreal. A post-hoc google search revealed an abundance of different peoples’ versions of the same story I’m about to tell you. Nevertheless, I fell for it, which made me think, which made me want to write about it, which led to this post. So here’s my story.

I’m walking home from work on a not entirely unpleasant evening (it’s finally above zero and not raining, it almost feels like spring). It’s rush hour, the streets are very busy, full of men and women in suits, students carrying piles of textbooks, and tourists taking photos of mundane things. As I stop at a crosswalk, I see a little old lady on crutches, clearly struggling and looking quite desperate. She sees me, makes eye contact, and asks if I can help her, so of course I stop. She explains that her legs are paralyzed and that her paratransit car, which she had paid for the whole day, never came back to get her. I try to help her to a ledge for her to sit on, but I can’t hold her weight on my own, so she pleads for another passerby to take her other arm. A man does so, but as we move her backwards to sit, she yells out in pain at the man. “You idiot! My shoulder is dislocated! Why would you pull me like that??” – he looks confused and simply hurries off as she continues to berate him. She looks at me and asks, “Why would he do that? People are just clueless! What an idiot!”. I respond as calmly as I can, “He was trying to help… There’s no way he could have known that your shoulder was injured”.

The woman goes on to explain, with despair in her voice, that she had been standing on the street corner asking for help for at least 45 minutes and that no one else had stopped before me. That she was now desperate and didn’t know how she would get home to the West Island (for those who don’t know Montreal, that’s about a 30-40 minute drive from downtown). I ask her if she can call for another car and she says yes, they had even offered her a special flat rate of $40! But… she doesn’t have any cash to pay the driver.

— Now as I’m sure is the case for you as you’re reading this story, in that moment, I know exactly where this is going. Obviously she’s going to ask me for money and I will have to decide whether or not I’m going to give it to her. —

Sure enough, she goes on, “I really hate to ask but I don’t know what I’m going to do. Could you lend me the money for the car? Do you trust me? I’ll give you my phone number and I’ll call you as soon as I get home. I’ll e-transfer the money to your account right away… By the way, I love your teal jacket! It’s such a nice color! Where did you buy it? It looks so beautiful with your hair color and the blue matches your eyes! Are you Irish?”…”Thank you”, I say, “I’m actually Danish. How long would it take for a new car to get here? I can wait with you and speak to the driver”. Oh no, it would take at least 45 minutes, she says, it is rush hour after all. I really didn’t need to wait, I had already been so kind. I was her blessing today. People these days just don’t care. Nobody helps each other. Nobody cares. If I just give her the money, she will call me as soon as she’s home. If I just give her the money…

Long story short, I stood by and listened as she called for the car and arranged a flat rate with the driver, we exchanged numbers and names, and then I handed over $40 in cash to a complete stranger and walked away knowing that there was a pretty good chance that I would never get it back.

When I got home and told my flatmates what had happened, they reassured me that even if it had been a scam, I had done the right thing, and they would have done the same. Their response made me wonder whether most people would, so I decided to ask. I created a poll where I told my story and asked my [admittedly totally unrepresentative and biased sample of educated middle class] facebook friends whether or not they believed that I would get my $40 back.

Having expected most of my friends to roll their eyes at me with their 20/20 hindsight, I was surprised that 28 out of 50 votes on my poll were for “Of course, it’s Canada!” and only 22 were for “No, you silly optimist”. So although most agreed that it was all a little sketchy, many of my friends also found the little old lady’s story convincing enough, and still had some hope that her e-transfer would actually happen. *Spoiler alert* It did not, but the funny thing is that she actually did call me later that evening to thank me again and ensure me that she would transfer the money. The number she used was blocked, and the number she had given me was fake, but the fact that she actually bothered calling has been the biggest mystery of all to me.

So anyway, if part of me knew that it might be a scam, why did I give her the money?

I’m certainly not dumb – naively optimistic perhaps, but not dumb – but statistically speaking, intelligence does not protect you from being scammed. I’ve never fallen victim to a scam before (at least not to my knowledge), and as an academic researcher who receives emails from predatory publishers and organizers of non-existent conferences several times a week, I’ve gotten pretty good at recognizing when things are a bit phishy (*Fun Fact*: A version of the Nigerian email scam actually existed in 16th century Europe)

The most obvious, albeit unsatisfactory, reason I’ve been able to come up with for why I gave the little old lady my money is that $40 is worth a lot less to me than the emotional price of the guilt I would have felt if I had just walked away. I knew it was probably a scam, but what if it wasn’t? What if it had been my own mother or aunt or grandmother in need and no one had stopped to help her? What if it had all been true? It wasn’t… but WHAT IF? Clearly my empathy system had won in a battle of wills against my economic savvy. If she had asked me for a larger sum of money, maybe it wouldn’t have, but for $40, it did. The real target was my trust, not my wallet.

According to Paul Zak, a so-called “neuroeconomist”, whether you’re being scammed or doing the scamming, it all comes down to a neuropeptide called oxytocin. You’ve probably heard of oxytocin referred to as the “love hormone”, the “hug hormone”, or most controversially, the “moral molecule”, due to the huge media attention Zak has garnered in the last ten years or so (largely thanks to shameless self-promotion). Oxytocin is a powerful hormone and neurotransmitter released by the brain’s hypothalamus that is known to be involved in a huge range of social behaviors, especially those related to maternal bonding like breastfeeding and giving birth. When we hug or kiss someone, oxytocin increases (hence its nicknames), and when we orgasm, it skyrockets. It even helps protect us against stress, anxiety, and possibly depression. I could go on, but you’re probably already wondering what on earth any of that has to do with being scammed.

It all started with a paper published by a team of Swiss researchers (including Zak) in the highly prestigious scientific journal, Nature, which reported that oxytocin increases trust in humans. Since oxytocin had been found to promote social attachment in animals, the researchers wondered whether it might also play a role in prosocial behaviors, like trust, in humans. They decided to test their hypothesis using a game involving two anonymous players acting as investor and trustee.

The investor is given a sum of money and told that if they choose to transfer some of it to the trustee, the amount they transferred will triple. The trustee is then informed of the details of the transfer, and they have to decide whether they will keep all of the money for themselves or send some of it back to the investor. So, in order to win, the investor has to overcome their aversion of risk and trust that the other player will choose to share their profits. Interestingly, the researchers found that investors who inhaled a dose of oxytocin before playing the game took more risks than those in a placebo group, suggesting that they placed more trust in the trustees. To ensure that the effect they were seeing was truly related to social trust and not a decrease in risk aversion, they repeated the same experiment, this time replacing the trustee with a computer, thereby removing the social interaction. In this case, oxytocin had no effect on the investors behavior even though the level of risk they faced was exactly the same. In other words, the effect of oxytocin administration was specific to risk taking in a social context, or in other words, trust.

However, as with most things involving science, it’s probably not quite that simple. While the trust experiments are certainly interesting and no one really doubts that oxytocin plays an important role in mediating prosocial behaviors, increased oxytocin has also been associated with a number of less positive and even anti-social effects like aggression, envy, distrust, prejudice, and schadenfreude (pleasure derived by someone else’s misfortune). In fact, researchers studying the role of oxytocin in mediating trust within and between groups have hypothesized that it might even fuel xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and intergroup conflict. Because of this wide variety of effects, it has been suggested that what oxytocin is actually doing is increasing the salience of any social stimuli, which can be either good or bad, and very much depends on the context.

In the case of my own scam story, it makes sense that increased oxytocin induced by my interaction with the little old lady made me more reluctant to seem accusatory or make a scene, even if it didn’t necessarily increase my trust in a total stranger. But what about the little old scammer herself? Why didn’t her own oxytocin system pipe up and tell her that it’s not okay to trick people into giving you money? Well who’s to say exactly, but it’s likely that her oxytocin system is out of whack.

In the same types of trust experiments I described above, Zak and his team also found that 5 percent of the people they tested would always take the money they were given without sharing it, and didn’t change their behavior when given an extra boost of oxytocin. Zak calls these people “unconditional non-reciprocators” (or “bastards” when he’s trying to be funny) and claims that their oxytocin system is dysfunctional because they don’t release oxytocin in response to the usual stimuli (e.g. touch, kindness, trust).

Other researchers believe that the percentage of people who don’t respond to intranasal oxytocin is far higher, and that rather than not producing enough oxytocin, these people have lower-functioning endogenous oxytocin systems and lack enough receptors for the oxytocin to exert its effects. Either way, it’s clear that they don’t get the same pleasure from helping others or being trusted that the rest of us do. In fact, it has even been shown that both genetic and epigenetic variability in the oxytocin receptor are associated with development of psychopathy.

According to Zak, it’s empathy that makes us act like moral (read: decent) human beings, and it’s oxytocin that makes us moral. So if the little old lady was one of the 5 or more percent, she wasn’t bonding with me when she complimented my jacket or asked where I was from, but she probably knew that it would increase the likelihood of me giving her my money. She was manipulating my oxytocin system and at the same time she was immune to the effect that my trust and kindness should have been having on her own.

Two weeks later, I was walking home from work and I saw the same little old lady in the same spot, talking to a young man who seemed to be giving her his number. At this point I had read a lot of posts about her online, many of which mentioned that whenever someone who had seen her before called her out, she would totally lose it and start threatening, cursing, and even hitting them with her crutches. Since she had seemed so genuinely grateful during my own interaction with her, I suppose a part of me wanted to test this for myself, so I stopped. I tapped the young man’s shoulder and gently said “Don’t give her your money. I gave this lady money and I never got it back”.

I had barely finished my sentence when the old lady recognized me, glared at me, and  proceeded to yell all sorts of expletives at me. The man turned to me, smiled, said “Okay cool – thanks!”, and walked away. He clearly didn’t need much convincing. The whole situation was so interesting to me that I briefly considered trying to have a conversation with her, but after two more less-than-polite exclamations from the little old lady, I decided to save it for a blog post. Then I too, simply smiled and walked away.

The Earth is Flat and other Alternative Facts

Modern-day dating is like a box of chocolates – you never know what you’re gonna get, even if you’ve googled your date thoroughly beforehand. Apropos, I once found myself on a date with a seemingly intelligent 34-year old man who turned out to believe that the earth is flat, that gravity doesn’t exist, and that no human being has ever been to space. 

Now before you decide that I either have really bad judgment or low self-esteem, let me assure you that I have neither. Donald (not his real name) seemed completely normal based on the tiny amount of information that an online dating profile and a day or two of smalltalk can provide. In fact, we could have probably gone through the entire date without the flat-earth topic ever coming up in conversation since What shape do you think the earth is? is not part of my usual first date repertoire. Thankfully, the friendly bartender happened to know Donald and apparently felt that I deserved to be informed of his unconventional beliefs.

It took me approximately three and a half minutes to decide that this man would not be the father of my hypothetical future children (although to be fair, this had more to do with his drink order of vodka-water – yes, a shot of vodka mixed with still water – than his beliefs about the shape of our planet, which I wasn’t yet aware of), and yet, it took me three and a half hours to actually get up and leave, because as it turns out, talking to an honest-to-god Flat-Earther is actually really fascinating. 

Besides providing me with what is by far the best bad date story I’ve collected so far, my conversation with Donald made me reflect on the way we react and interact when we meet someone whose fundamental beliefs about the world are so drastically different from our own.

Unlike me (and probably you), Donald had clearly spent an abundant amount of time browsing conspiracy theory websites (he’s self-employed, you see) and therefore had an immediate and unrelenting response to literally everything I said. 

I told Donald that my father’s career as an astrophysicist working for the European Space Agency had contributed important evidence to the Big Bang theory using the Hubble Space Telescope in the early 90s. He told me that it’s “just a theory” and that it’s impossible to look back in time with a telescope (NB: it’s not.). I told him that I have fond memories of drinking hot chocolate on bleachers while watching a NASA space shuttle launch in Cape Canaveral as a child. He told me it was all a big hoax and that the shuttle had merely gone up into the air and then landed in the water far away where I couldn’t see it (NB: it didn’t.). I argued that if the earth were flat, surely I would have seen the shuttle come back down. He responded with a lengthy explanation accompanied by a look of such self-assuredness that I was too distracted to even listen to the words coming out of his mouth.

Unfortunately, my 10 years of higher education had simply not prepared me for this particular type of confrontation, and I found myself experiencing utter speechlessness for possibly the first time in my life. This was apparently frustrating to Donald because he kept wanting me to give him evidence to try to disprove his arguments, but I couldn’t. Not because there isn’t any evidence available, but because I, unlike him, have never had any reason to doubt the generally accepted shape of the earth, and therefore didn’t have all that information readily available to articulate in any semi-intelligible way. 

For example, when Donald asked me for evidence that the earth spins on its axis and orbits the sun (according to him, it does neither), the question seemed so outrageous to me that all I could do was laugh incredulously and sputter something along the lines of “Uhhhhh sunrise? Sunset? Seasons??”, which, although relevant, is admittedly not a particularly convincing or well-spoken argument.

The fact is that people, myself included, tend to believe that we know much more than we actually do, and our ignorance is only revealed when we’re forced to explain something in detail. I have a PhD in neuroscience, and yet I wasn’t able to properly defend some very basic knowledge about the shape of the earth, even though I know it to be true. This is a well-documented psychological phenomenon called the illusion of explanatory depth. 

To use a classic example, if you asked Average Joe whether he knows how a toilet works, he will probably say yes with some confidence. But if you then asked him to actually explain what happens when you flush a toilet, Joe might find himself saying something like “well the flusher releases water into the bowl, which gets sucked out along with whatever is in it, and then the tank fills back up for next time and the floaty thing stops it from overflowing.” Although accurate, even Joe would admit that this is a very shallow understanding of the actual mechanisms at work, which are surprisingly complicated and involve fancy physics terms like siphon effects and momentum when explained properly. Thankfully, the toilet will continue to flush successfully regardless of whether or not Joe can explain how, because someone else who can designed it to do so. 

The illusion of explanatory depth is probably a result of the fact that humans have evolved as collaborative beings. We live in societies that require different people to have different roles, and we rely on and trust in the expertise of others to the extent to which we can hardly tell where our own knowledge ends and that of another begins. When you buy a new smartphone, you don’t insist on understanding the electronics that make it work, you simply trust that it will. This may not be entirely rational from a survivalist perspective, but it is collaborative, and very much human.

So that at least partly explains my failure to defend my beliefs about the shape of our planet, but what about Donald’s unrelenting determination to back up his own? After a few minutes of debating, it quickly became clear that it didn’t actually matter how solid or articulate my arguments were, because no matter what I said, Donald had probably already read about it and decided that it was false. 

The thing about facts is that, just like theories, one can simply choose not to believe them. Donald claimed to have read entire books about Newtonian physics, but doing so had only confirmed his belief that gravity simply isn’t a thing. This is a perfect example of confirmation bias, our tendency to deny or ignore information that contradicts our beliefs, and embrace information that supports them. 

Neuroscientific studies have consistently shown that people actually experience a rush of dopamine, an important neurotransmitter associated with reward and pleasure, when presented with information that reinforces their beliefs. This means that simply being proven right (even when you’re actually wrong) activates the same reward pathways and is literally pleasurable in the same way as drugs, alcohol, sex, and delicious food, so it’s no wonder it feels so good. 

Although all of us are prone to confirmation bias, people do of course vary in their degrees of stubbornness and willingness to change their opinions. If you’re anything like me, you may feel that people who adamantly stick to their guns even when confronted with new information come across as, well…. a bit dim… compared to those willing to learn and adapt their mindset. However, evidence suggests that it has nothing to do with intelligence, and may instead be genetic. Studies have shown that genes associated with the functioning of dopamine (the neurotransmitter that makes being proven right feel so good) predict individual differences in susceptibility to confirmation bias. If that’s the case, then Donald and his counterparts might literally be addicted to believing that they are right!

Interestingly, Donald’s confirmation bias even seemed to extend to social cues, and his prior belief that the date would go well led him to ignore the many less-than-subtle signs that it was not in fact going very well at all. So after a few drinks (that I vehemently insisted on paying for myself), I found myself having to explain to Donald why I considered us to be fundamentally incompatible. 

“Do you really expect to find a partner whose beliefs about the world are exactly the same as yours?, he asked. “Of course not,” I answered, “but I think we should at least agree on the shape of the earth”.

And on that note, I think I’ll go thank that bartender…

Don’t think twice, it’s alright

Like the magic tales that grandmothers whisper to their grandsons before going to bed, love stories in real life tend to follow a predictable structure: beginning, challenge, resolution. Love often arrives to one’s life with the strength of a hurricane, obliterating and razing rationality and common sense. This madness is only temporal: sooner or later, the lovers will face one or multiple crises that will challenge their feelings, emotional ties or mutual commitment. Finally, and after an undetermined amount of time, romantic love (usually) comes to an end. Like a piece of classical music reaching climax, love stories go in crescendo, beat con passione, die in diminuendo.

Endings tend to be painful, at least for one side. Loneliness invades every inch of the skin. The lovers finds themselves collecting the pieces of their broken identity, hopes and dreams. But, amidst all the self doubts, sadness and pain, there is also ample room for soul searching, new adventures and improvements.

Bob Dylan composed “Don’t think twice” after his girlfriend Suze Rotolo left New York and moved to Italy. The song provides precious hints on how to navigate through breakups and rebuild one’s life.

An’ it ain’t no use to sit and wonder why, babe.
It’ll never do somehow

Falling out from love can be painfully piercing, breathtaking and sharp. But no matter how violently the floor under the lover’s feet has come crashing down, there is no use in overthinking the situation. There is no solution to be found. The pain felt after rejection, moreover, is absolutely useless. It is not going to make the lovers change their mind and stay. It is useless because the negative feelings can prevent the lovers from moving on. If one lover has decided to leave, the other should accept this decision and let them go.

How should one treat their own pain then?  It feels impossible to escape from distress after a loss. Many centuries ago, the roman philosopher Seneca wrote several letters to his family and friends to help them deal with grief. One of his recommendations was to avoid behaviors that amplify self-pity, self-destructive thoughts, or psychological numbness. Even if you are a zen yoga guru, looking at old messages, checking your ex-lover’s social media or entering a catatonic state and not getting out of bed will certainly undermine your emotional stability.

When your rooster crows at the break of dawn
Look at your window and I’ll be gone

Breakups are valuable opportunities for changing environments (without this having to necessarily imply that you should put an ocean in between you and your ex) or for trying new things. If walking in front of your ex-lover’s apartment makes your stomach cringe, avoid it: there are plenty of new streets in the world to discover. If seeing that old photo on the fridge of you and your ex makes your eyes water, throw it out. There will come a time when memories will not hurt any longer. Meanwhile, erasing the traces of the lover from one’s life, blocking the ways to contact them, and especially, keeping one’s mind and body busy are quick ways to regain control over one’s emotions.

I ain’t sayin’ you treated me unkind
You could have done better but I don’t mind
You just kinda wasted my precious time

After a breakup, it is possible that the lovers will never see each other again. It is then important to feel that you have expressed what you wanted to say in a respectful but assertive manner. If they broke your heart in hundred pieces, tell them. If they treated you disrespectfully, say it. If they manipulated you and acted in a deceiving manner, tell them too. And then accept that they are gone and will not come back. Close this chapter of your life and move on. Avoiding grudges and bitterness inside of you will make the transition to your new life smoother. And if the almighty gods of fortune make your paths cross again, just make small talk or share an inside joke from the past if you are in the mood, but avoid bringing back old feelings.

But don’t think twice it’s alright

So, here it is; how to fix a broken heart in three [not easy, but possible] steps: (i) do not overthink; (ii) leave the pain behind and try something new, (iii) express yourself thoroughly and then erase your ex-lover’s traces from your life. You can also do like Bob Dylan and write a song about it to give perspective to your thoughts.

—–

Disclosure: The author wrote this post inspired by Seneca’s way to treat emotional pain and Roland Barthes’ tragicomic perspective of love. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

The Great American Cosmic Coincidence

As I’m sure you’ve all heard, if not seen, there was a solar eclipse recently that was visible over most of the US and Canada. “The Great American Eclipse”, they called it, because apparently even the sun and moon want to help make America great again. The path of totality stretched from coast to coast of the US between Oregon and South Carolina, with some of the most promising weather conditions being predicted for the high desert of Eastern Oregon. That’s where I was.

Although they don’t like to admit it (“No no, it’s just a good excuse to travel!”), my retired astrophysicist dad and nature-loving mom are eclipse chasers, having traveled as far as Ghana and Indonesia to experience totality. So in a moment of possible temporary insanity that coincided with them telling me that they’d be heading to Oregon this year, I agreed to spend two weeks in an RV with my parents. This wasn’t the first total solar eclipse I had experienced since there was one visible in Germany in 1999, but that one had been slightly cloudy and I had never been to the West coast of the US before. So I flew to San Francisco to visit some friends and then meet my parents, from where we embarked on a long journey through the volcanic mountains of Northern California and the wild west cowboy country of Eastern Oregon to a tiny  (like really, itsy-bitsy) town called Unity, right smackdab in the middle of the totality zone. Unity must have had more people pass through in the three days surrounding the eclipse than it had in its entire existence beforehand. My dad had reserved us a supposedly coveted spot at Oregon Eclipse Camp, which turned out to be little more than a really expensive ticket to camp on patch of farmland with some porta-potties. The camp was full of crazy people (I mean really, anyone who travels that far into nowhereland to stare at the sun for a couple of minutes in the middle of a cowpat-ridden field has to be at least a little bit nutty), but the good type of crazy that provides an excellent and entertaining atmosphere for eclipse-centered smalltalk and people watching. People arrived in gigantic motor homes, tiny tents, and everything in between, armed with telescopes, eclipse-themed t-shirts, and a million different ways to safely stare at the sun.

For eclipse novices, here are the two most popular ways to watch an eclipse without blinding yourself (listen up, Mr. Trump):

Solar filters / eclipse glasses – Simple cardboard frames with special light filters (like the ones modeled by the handsome park ranger below)  let you look directly at the sun without damaging your eyes. Welding goggles work too.

*Fun Fact* Back in the 90s we used to look through dismantled floppy disks (not to be mistaken for 3D printed save icons) but there’s no guarantee that they filter UV light, so you could still damage your eyes unknowingly…

Pinhole projector – You can very easily make one of these by poking a small hole in a piece of cardboard, holding it up to the sun, and projecting the light that comes through the hole onto some sort of surface like a sheet of paper or a conveniently placed wall. This allows you to see an inverted image of the sun as the moon passes over it before and after totality. The same effect is sometimes produced by the light passing through gaps between leaves in the trees, so if you’re a bit lazy, just stand under a tree and look at the ground.

What is a solar eclipse?

The short answer to this is that it’s a great big incredible cosmic coincidence. The slightly longer answer is that a solar eclipse is when the moon passes directly in front of the sun, casting a shadow over the earth. Although the sun is 400 times bigger than the moon, it’s also 400 times further away from the earth, which is why the sun and moon appear to be roughly the same size in our sky, and why it’s possible for our tiny little moon to completely cover the gigantic sun.

But since the moon travels around the earth once a month, why don’t we have an eclipse every month? Well, as you might remember from your elementary school science classes, the earth is slightly tilted on its axis (which is also the wonderful reason we have seasons), so the moon’s orbit around the earth is not in the same plane as the earth’s orbit around the sun (at about 5 degrees difference), meaning that they don’t hit the celestial sweet spot at every lunar orbit. Nevertheless, total eclipses do happen quite often at about every 12-18 months, but it’s very rare that you would find yourself in the path of totality by chance. Most of the time eclipse totality occurs over the ocean, because earth is mostly water after all.

*Fun Fact* The moon is actually moving away from the earth at a rate of about one and a half inches per year due to tidal friction, so earthlings won’t be able to enjoy total eclipses forever! But not to worry, it’ll be about 600 million years until the last one, so you and I – if not all of humanity – will be long gone by then.

What’s so cool about it?

Well if the fact that eclipses even happen in the first place isn’t cool enough for you, the many weird and wonderful things that you might experience during a total eclipse should convince you.

• As the moon starts to cover the sun, the light changes and dims gradually in a way that’s surprisingly different from a sunrise or sunset. Unlike dawn or dusk, the light reaching earth during an eclipse is still full sunlight, but from only part of the sun, which produces a strange and indescribable atmosphere. Along with this change in light, it gets noticeably and rapidly colder, especially in places like the high desert of Oregon, where night and day temperatures vary hugely. Understandably, a lot of animals get confused by this sudden cold and darkness in the middle of the day. If you found yourself in the middle of an eclipse and you didn’t know what was happening, you certainly would too! Birds stop singing, crickets start chirping, spiders start deconstructing their webs, and nutty eclipse-chasing humans start cheering (the latter is mostly what I noticed).
• During the few minutes of totality, you can safely take off your goggles and look directly at the moon-covered sun. What you’ll see is a glowing ring of light called the corona (latin for crown or wreath). What you’re actually seeing is the sun’s atmosphere, which is not covered by the moon during an eclipse. Because the moon is an imperfect sphere with mountainous craters and valleys, some light occasionally slips through them, producing diamond-shaped beams of lights in the corona. These are called Baily’s Beads, because the effect created looks sort of like a shining beaded necklace.
• The darkness of totality also give some of our neighboring planets a chance to shine. Jupiter, Mars, Venus, and even Mercury, which we usually can’t see because it’s too close to the sun, become visible in the darkened sky.

When you combine the total eclipse experience with the incredible view of the night sky that you’re treated to when camping far far away from any source of light pollution,  you get a beautiful reminder of our place in the universe. The sun may be the center of our solar system, but it’s just one of the hundreds of billions of stars that make up the milky way, which is just one of the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the infinite universe. In the famous words of Carl Sagan, the earth, our pale blue dot, is just a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.  If that doesn’t produce a total eclipse of your mind (or Bonnie Tyler’s heart), I don’t know what will.

The Epidemic of Busy-bragging: How the language we use creates our reality

Beware the barrenness of a busy life. – Socrates

Once upon a time [in a galaxy far far away], leisure time was seen as a status symbol. Having time to do nothing meant that you probably had people to do everything else, which securely placed you at the very top of the social hierarchy. Now let’s fast-forward to today, when life seems faster, more stimulating, and more overwhelming than ever. If you’re busy in a world like that, the only logical conclusion is that you must be important and successful. Likewise, if you’re not constantly busy, your life must be a bottomless pit of emptiness. Maybe you’re unemployed? (*gasp*) Maybe you have no friends? (imagine that!) Or maybe you have good time-management skills, know how to set priorities, and choose not to use the vague concept of busyness as an excuse for being unreliable? (Wait, what? Nah… that’s not a thing. No one has time for that kind of self-awareness.) As the headlines so often exclaim, busyness does indeed seem to be a 21st century epidemic, but I’m convinced that the real problem lies less in actually being busy, and more in how we just can’t seem to stop talking about it. The epidemic of busy-bragging, if you will.

We use the word busy in so many different ways that it’s starting to lose its meaning. Instead of saying no to things we don’t want to do, we say “Sorry, this week is just too busy”. Instead of replying to emails and texts in a timely manner, we delay and then say “Sorry, I’ve been crazy busy”. As a sign of respect for our superiors, we might say “I know you’re extremely busy, but if you have a moment…?”. We even use “busy” as a response to “How are you?”, which, when you think about it, doesn’t actually answer the question at all.

Now before this post starts sounding like an unbusy-brag about how wonderfully unbusy I am all the time, let’s just clarify one thing – I am just as guilty of busy-bragging as anyone else, and my awareness of that is precisely what inspired this post. I don’t have children or anyone else depending on me for care, and as an academic I have one of the most flexible working schedules possible, but I still sometimes find myself overwhelmed by the busyness of life. The great irony of academia is that despite having control over our own working hours, academics are probably some of the “busiest” people around. The privilege of working whenever you want tends to come with a sense of guilt that pervades every moment that you choose not to, and that leads to a constant feeling of busyness.

The tricky thing about busy-bragging is that no one (or hardly anyone) does it on purpose – we really do think we’re that busy. We’re not consciously trying to impress anyone with our busyness, we just genuinely feel like there aren’t enough hours in a day to accomplish everything we think we need to do. We treat busyness like some kind of external force controlling us, and as a result, it contaminates every aspect of our lives, including our free time. But how busy are we really?

One popular method used to investigate busyness involves having people keep time use diaries, where participants record, step-by-step, exactly how they spend their day (e.g. 07:30 breakfast, 07:45 clean up coffee that jerk cat decided belonged on the floor … 21:15 Netflix and chill, etc.). Oxford University even has a Centre for Time Use Research, which has the biggest collection of time use diaries in the world. Their archives amount to over 850,000 recorded days spanning 50 years and 50 different countries. Such a collection is really quite a useful resource, not just for checking whether we’re really as busy as we think we are, but also to investigate questions asked by population scientists and epidemiologists like how the increased prevalence of chronic diseases may be linked to lifestyle changes over time.

Anyway, according to John Robinson, a sociologist who supposedly carries the rather epic nickname, Father Time, if we look at how we actually spend our time (as measured by time use diaries) versus how we think we spend our time (as demonstrated by our tendency to busy-brag), things simply don’t add up. Despite the pervasive belief that life in 2017 is busier and more demanding than ever, it turns out that the average number of hours worked per week in developed countries around the world hasn’t really changed since the 1980s. Here are a couple of facts from the 2016 American Time Use Survey (sampled from people in the USA, obviously):

• Employed people work an average of 7.6 hours on work days
• 96% of people aged 15 and over engage in some sort of leisure activity (TV, socializing, exercise etc.) on an average day
• Men spend more time on leisure activities than women (5.8 versus 5.1 hours)
• 35 to 44 year olds spend the least time on leisure activities (4.0 hours)
• Employed adults with no children spend 1.1 hours more on leisure activities than those with children

While none of these facts seem particularly interesting or surprising on their own, I’d bet that if you picked any one of these average Americans and told them that they have 30-40 hours of free time per week, they simply wouldn’t believe you.

Research surrounding the question of how language shapes the way we think has been a hot topic since the 1940s when linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf first proposed that the structure of our mother tongue restricts the ways in which we are able to think. Based only on theories about Native American languages, it turned out that Whorf didn’t really have much evidence for his claims, and it is now generally agreed that it’s not so much that different languages limit the way were are able to think (if that were the case, all those lists of wonderfully untranslatable words would be totally meaningless to us all), but rather that they oblige us to think in certain ways.

There are many fascinating examples of this, the most obvious of which is that of gendered languages. In English, inanimate objects are genderless things, but in many languages like Spanish, French, and German, speakers are forced to think of objects as being either masculine or feminine because the definite articles preceding them have genders (e.g. masculine le and feminine la in French). Additionally, the genders of specific objects differ between languages, and as a result, Spanish speakers seem to agree that if a fork could speak, it would have a man’s voice, while French speakers say that it would be a woman. Similarly, a German might describe a bridge using more feminine words like slender and elegant, while a Spaniard might say it is strong. Although this concept of linguistic relativity refers to differences between languages, it is easy to extrapolate the theory to how our choice of words might influence our perception of reality. There is plenty of evidence, for example, that the way narratives are worded affects people’s opinions on how to solve problems, which of course has huge implications for our political and justice systems, but is just as relevant and applicable to our personal lives.

Despite having incredibly complex brains, in many ways we humans are simple creatures that are easily fooled and manipulated by others as well as by ourselves. My favorite example of just how true this is, is a study showing that forcing people to fake-smile by putting chopsticks between their lips actually decreases their physiological stress response. Furthermore, it has been shown that self-affirmation (repeating positive statements to yourself over and over again) actually works, improving problem-solving under stress and making us more open to negative feedback and threats to our integrity. With this in mind, it’s not at all outrageous to conclude that the more you tell yourself that you’re super busy, the more busy you will feel. As they teach you in every intro to neuroscience class, neurons that fire together wire together, and so every utterance of the word “busy” is quite literally strengthening a neural circuit in your brain and reinforcing your perception of your own busyness.

So – wanna feel less busy? Stop saying that you are and expand your vocabulary when describing the many variants of busy. Channel your inner Trump and repeat to yourself “I know words, I have the best words” (self-affirmations work, remember?!). Are you busy, or are you diligent, determined, productive, industrious, engaged, engrossed, overwhelmed, preoccupied, bustling, hustling, excited, assiduous, swamped, tied up, fully-booked, or quite simply unavailable? Choose one (or two, or three) and abracadabra*, you’re no longer busy.

*Bonus fun-fact: the incantation, Abracadabra, traditionally used in stage magic tricks is actually an Aramaic phrase that translates to “I create as I speak”. Words are magic!

International Day of [Badass] Women and Girls in Science

Today, February 11th, is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, as declared by the United Nations. While the fight for gender equality has certainly gained traction and made some leaps forward over the past few decades, gender disparities are still rife in science. The problems span from easily measurable inequalities in education, hiring, earning, and funding, to more subjective and personal differences in the way female leaders are perceived as compared to their male counterparts.

As three female scientists ourselves, we are well-aware that we are still a minority in science. However, countless trailblazing women have come before us, and to celebrate this day, we would like to highlight three of our favorite, most inspirational, most badass women in science:

Sarah Blaffer Hrdy (11 July, 1946 – present)

To celebrate the International Day of Women and Girls in Science, I can think of no better woman to pay tribute to than Dr. Sarah Hrdy. Dr. Hrdy’s work has been particularly inspirational to me, not only as a female researcher, but as a researcher interested in motherhood and infancy.

As the third daughter born into a rich, highly patriarchal oil family in south Texas, Hrdy was the “heiress to spare”, which allowed her to go off on her own to study and explore the world. And study and explore the world she did.

Through her groundbreaking research, Dr. Hrdy has championed the role of the woman in evolutionary theory. She has directly challenged and transcended a field that has widely been based on male behavior by revealing the evolutionary pressures on the female.

Her first insights into female behavior came from observing the langur monkey in India. In langur groups, occasionally a new alpha male will drive out the previous male. One of the first tasks of the new alpha male is to kill all offspring of the previous male. What Hrdy observed was that females proceeded to mate with the infanticidal male. What could drive females to this kind of behavior? Why not refuse to mate? Dr. Hrdy suggests that females need to be opportunistic as well, and to ignore the new alpha male would be to be shunned from the group. By immediately mating with the new male, the langur females have a better chance of raising offspring in a supportive environment.

Thinking about Dr. Hrdy’s work on motherhood reminds me of a quote from another brilliant female researcher, Dr. Alison Gopnik:

“After all, women haven’t been twiddling their thumbs for the last ten thousand years; they have been raising the entire population of the earth.” (from “We Are All Stardust”, by Stefan Klein, pp. 247).

Today, not only are we raising the entire population of the earth, but we are churning out incredible science. I am truly grateful to all of the trailblazing female researchers who have come before me. Us females need to stick together to inspire the next generation of renowned scientists. It is my wish that, in the future, females in science will be the norm.

-Katie

Valentina Tereshkova (6 March, 1937 – present)

“A bird cannot fly with one wing only. Human space flight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women.” – Valentina Tereshkova

Soviet cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova was the first woman in space, which is just about as badass as it gets if you ask me. In June 1963, she piloted Vostok 6 and spent just under three days in space, logging more flight time than all American astronauts before her combined, and orbiting the earth 48 times in a tiny spherical capsule alone.

Having started her adult life as a textile factory assembly worker, Tereshkova was later selected for the Soviet space program out of over 400 applicants, partly thanks to her experience as an amateur skydiver (other qualifications included being under 30 years of age, under 170 cm tall, and under 70 kg in weight).  Arising from a moment of grand inspiration by the [male] chief Soviet rocket engineer, Sergey Korolyov, Vostok 6’s primary mission was to collect data about the female body’s reaction to spaceflight. This was the first time that women were allowed to participate in the cosmonaut corps, and the Soviet government prized Tereshkova and the four other female members (none of whom ever made it to space) mainly for propaganda purposes.

During her flight, Tereshkova kept a detailed flight log and took invaluable photographs of the horizon, which were later used to identify aerosol layers in earth’s atmosphere. Despite having made history as the first woman in space, 19 years passed before Svetlana Savitskaya was able to follow Tereshkova as the second [badass] woman in space.

Back on earth, Tereshkova went on to graduate with distinction as a cosmonaut engineer at the Zhukovsky Air Force Academy, earn her doctorate in engineering in 1977, hold a number of esteemed political offices in the Soviet Union, and win a ridiculous number of awards that I won’t even try to list here.

Last but not least, my favorite fun-fact about Tereshkova is that on her 70th birthday (in 2013) in the company of Vladimir Putin, she reportedly said that she would gladly go on a one-way trip to Mars if the opportunity arose. So here’s to you Valentina – may your badass Girl Power take you all the way to Mars!

-Estrid

Rita Levi-Montalcini (1909-2012)

“I did not expect to have a name or recognition. I was enthusiastic in the possibility ‘alla Robinson Crusoe.’ I was working for the beauty.” – Rita Levi-Montalcini

In the twentieth century, science was mainly a man’s world, but Rita Levi-Montalcini was a notable exception. Born to a wealthy Sephardic Italian family, Levi-Montalcini’s life could very well inspire a Netflix biopic. She studied Medicine at the University of Turin and worked there as an assistant, investigating the development of the nervous system. With the rise of Italian fascism and the start of WWII, she lost her job at the university and all of her research started getting systematically rejected from Italian scientific journals because of her Jewish surname. This, of course, would not deter a badass like Levi-Montalcini (read: “Nevertheless, she persisted”), and she managed to publish her scientific results in academic journals printed in Belgium, Switzerland and in the Vatican. Finally she moved to Washington University at the end of WWII, where she developed her pioneering research on the nerve growth factor together with Stanley Cohen. Thanks to Levi-Montalcini’s work, we now know that the nerve growth factor is a protein that supports the growth and survival of nerve cells, promoting the formation of neural networks.

In 1968, Rita Levi-Montalcini won the Nobel prize of Physiology or Medicine together with Cohen. Besides her academic career, she was also involved in several humanitarian activities such as her foundation, which supports projects dedicated to fostering education for children and women across several African countries.

Levi-Montalcini continued her research until her death at the age of 103. Her secret for longevity? In an interview, she said that she slept only a few hours per night, barely ate, and put some drops of nerve growth factor on her cornea every day.

-Isabel