L.I.F.T.

My friend JR Atwood posted a great TED talk by Liz Coleman, regarding the nature of education in our day and age.

I’m more concerned with something more foundational – the use of common sense.

My father is in the hospital. He’s been in before – most seriously, when he underwent emergency surgery to replace his aorta with a gortex tube, four years ago.

He’s been having some issues, and went back in recently. The doctors have him on so many medications, it’s hard to tell what’s causing what.

And that’s my problem.

The doctors have no faith in the human body to heal itself.

In days of old, before “internal medicine” (which is anything but “internal” – consisting as it does, mostly of “external” items leveraged against the internal state), the body was regarded as a delicate and powerful system. To attain health, one usually only needed to do things (or do fewer things) to return that system to balance…

Called “homeostasis” – the balance of activity within the body.

What’s Up, Doc?

Where did the faith go?  Where is the faith in the human body to heal itself?  Only in “alternative” medicines?  Even there, many alternative practitioners have taken on the cultural values of US culture, and peddle pills and external “cures.”

Doctoring the Evidence

Another faith disappeared around the same time as the faith in the human body – faith in the healing power of the Earth.  I don’t want to get too crazy with this (you’ll be calling  me a “hippie” in a minute if I’m not careful, boxing me in), but the point is salient.

As the values of “science” (the “expertism” that Liz Coleman mentions in her talk) overtook common sense, it killed any other thought process or options.

When society realized that this expertise-value could be used to sell more products, it took the reins.  As people have become more and more inculcated in the idea of “the expert,” other options disappear.

And so does common sense.

Doctor My Doctor

Now we’ve reached  a point where it has become commonsense to refer to “experts” for our opinions – for our common sense.

My father lies in a hospital bed tonight.  The doctors have not healed him at all.  They can’t figure out what’s wrong.  Because they’re incapable of asking questions.

The foundational of all common sense is found in a single question:

Why?

Just finished reading another book…”The Philosophical Baby,” by Alison Gopnik.  In all, I really enjoyed it!

Interestingly, Gopnik mentions how critical the child’s early environment is to their mental image of the world.  This goes hand in hand with my review of the book The Future of the Body.  Raised in a culture that believes in faith healing, esp, or telekinesis, a child would believe in and attempt to practice those abilities.

She discusses Bayesian statistics – the idea that we create probabilities of possibilities, since nothing is certain – and experiments that seem to show that children are interacting with the world in a statistical fashion.

Well, from the point of view of a psychologist who has spent her career doing statistical behavioral research on children, of course it looks as if they’re thinking statistically about the world.  But is it necessarily true?

The issue is that our definitions of things (babies are statistically solving causal relationships in the world) will define not only the things themselves, but how we are able to think about other things in our world.  Once we see through statistical glasses, everything looks like a statistic.

But it’s not.

The best example I can give is the one that Gopnik uses herself.  Say you have an experiment in which you test a medication on high blood pressure.  The group on the medication has a decrease in high blood pressure.  You assume that it must be the medication causing the decrease in high blood pressure.  Fine.

But then, someone else does an experiment in which they give both groups a pill, neither of which is medication, but they tell one group that they’re receiving the real medicine.  The group that received the “real” placebo sees a decrease in HBP.

What was the medicine?

What happens, I think, as we become “adult” is that we rely more and more on the “causal” relationships we’ve identified in the world around us.  We believe our own press…or do our own supply…however you want to look at it.  Life becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts.  Wherever you look, you find evidence for your beliefs.  Because it’s all you are capable of seeing.

I really liked this book.  It comes so close, throughout, to really showing how there is no true difference between children and adults – it just doesn’t quite get there.

For instance, the author frequently cites “habituation” studies of infants.  “Habituation” refers to the tendency for infants to become disinterested in repetitive stimuli.  That is, when the same thing happens over and over, you stop paying attention to it.  However, habituation isn’t unique to infants, or to children…it’s common in all animals, at all “stages” of life.  TV advertisers are very familiar with habituation.  They change their commercials frequently enough to have a consistent effect on you.  If they just played the same Coke commercial for five years, its effectiveness would be lost.

As a brief aside, it’s interesting to observe that habituation is a physical phenomenon.  Most of the studies done on habituation are “psychological” studies.  How long does it take till this person gets bored of xyz?  But the brain is a physical entity, and the mind is a product of that physical brain.  We can observe habituation in our bodies through exercise, or, say, caffeine.  Have a cup of coffee in the morning, and it spikes your adrenals.  Have a cup every morning for a year, and suddenly, it doesn’t have any effect at all.

All of the examples that Gopnik uses to illustrate how children’s minds operate really end up showing that, through culturally-crafted pruning of behavior, we become the self-fulfilling automatons of our culture.

While that statement is a little forceful, it isn’t too far from reality.

A great example of this shows up in the book, around the middle, where the author describes a researcher who was studying Mayan culture.  Mayan mothers begin teaching their children basic skills at a very very young age, and they are careful to make sure that the children are paying attention.  This particular researcher was stunned to find 18 month old babies wielding machetes against coconuts, without any concern from their mothers – just as amazed as the Mayan mothers were that the researcher’s young daughter could operate the sink and toilet in a modern bathroom without any supervision.

My biggest point of concern for what is not said in this book goes back to James Carse’s book “Finite and Infinite Games.”

I would say that the definition of “adult” in our US culture is – “one who plays only finite games.”  If you play infinite games, you are “childish.”

You can play many finite games at the same time, but they all must be finite.  For instance, you can simultaneously be Christian, a scientist, and an NRA member.  But, as Carse says, you must play, so you cannot play.

The thing I love is the thing I hate.  Alison Gopnik, through her exposition of psychological studies of infants and children (which necessarily draw a dividing line between them and adults), shows us the qualities that we, as adults, have given up…

That we can take up once again…

I posted a very short entry last night about trying new things.  Let me explain where that came from, so it makes more sense, and is, hopefully, a little more motivating.

Earlier this year, my buddy Charlie said he was going to try the Highland Games.  I said, sweet, I’ll try it too.  We practiced a little bit, went to the Woodland games, and competed.  I pulled my right biceps on the very first throw of the day.

Today, the group we practice with down in Stanford had a little cookout.  We all threw, all day.  It was awesome.  I learned some very good lessons from all of this.  First, make sure you’re plenty warm before you try to start throwing heavy things.  Second, make sure you don’t workout two days before a competition.  Third, practice, and practice with good form.  It’ll help you to perform better, and not to get injured.  Fourth, technique is king.  A guy with average strength, but excellent technique, will beat a brutally strong guy in the Highland games.  The technique itself taught me something as well – follow.  If you try to lead the weight, or force it, it will force you right back.  The first thing everyone says when trying the men’s heavy weight for distance for the first time is “You don’t throw it, it throws you.”  In a very real sense, this is true.  You get the weight going, and guide it, and at the last second you give it a little extra help…but all along, the weight is the thing moving.  It’s moving you.  If you come at these events with this perspective, things suddenly make more sense – less force, more follow.

The second place I’ve recently experienced epiphanies due to trying something new was at a Tai Chi class at Doc Fai Wong’s school in the Sunset district of San Francisco.  This was Charlie’s idea too.  I’ve done Tai Chi before, and continue to practice martial arts by myself on a semi-regular basis.  But it had been some time since I’d had a teacher watch me or teach me, or correct my technique.  I learned a few things in that short 1-hour class.  First, don’t “walk on a tightrope.”  You don’t want your feet directly in line with each other, because then you don’t have any balance.  This is something my teacher George Wood used to tell us all the time, but it suddenly “made sense” this time.  Second, keep your body in neutral – that means your spine, scapulae, pelvis, knees, feet, etc.  If you reach a limit in your movement, you won’t be able to extend or retreat beyond that limit, and you’re vulnerable.  Know your limits, and play within those.  That’s a new definition of “safety” for you!

If I had never done these things, I would never have had these wonderful experiences.  They informed other things I was thinking about at the time, and made my life richer and deeper in the process.  Trying something new isn’t just about novelty (though your brain will thank you, by creating new synaptic pathways), it’s also about rounding out the things you already think you know.

So, like I said, go try something new, or try something old in a new way.  Be open to the experience, and really pay attention to what’s happening – how is it different from what you’re used to, or from what you expected?  What lessons can you take from the experience?  Go ahead and try!