Spring/Summer '24 Scraps
A few ideas clanging around from books I’ve read this year to date.
Are we accidentally teaching kids to tantrum?
Toddlerhood is a developmental period that inevitably includes tantrums and big emotions as little ones assert their independence. This seemingly ironclad rule of toddler biology is repeated everywhere (in my filter bubble), from social media folk wisdom to academia to staid medical advice. I found a different perspective in Between Us, a fascinating book by Dutch social psychologist Batja Mesquita about the role of culture in defining how we emote. She suggests that this inevitable tantrum stage happens more frequently in cultures that prize individuality and independence. Parents demonstrate anger as a way to express their own boundaries. In doing so, they teach their kids how to use anger the same way. They also tend to hype kids up by encouraging them to smile and laugh, spending 80-90% of their interaction time with their infant face-to-face.
By contrast, other cultures value calm, and parent differently, as observed in various studies. Nso caregivers in Cameroon preferred babies that were calm and could adapt easily to an environment of multiple caregivers and childcare co-occurring with chores (i.e. much less face-to-face time). Taiwanese mothers were observed shaming their crying kids (“Didi is most annoying, simply loves to cry!”). These interactions shape kids early: Taiwanese 3-5 year olds preferred calm activities like floating in an inner tube over jumping and splashing as compared with white American children.
Why do some cultures prefer calm? The author had to spell it out clearly, as if writing to an audience that is weirded out by placidity:
Calmness is a preferred emotion in a culture that expects you to put the group's needs above your own. It allows you to pay attention to what others want, do, or say. It allows you generally to observe the flow and follow it. In contrast, excitement (and movement generally) is more desirable in a culture that expects you to take control of your environment. It allows you to act first and influence others.
This quote summarizes my dilemma in raising a third-generation American as a calm-ish parent living in an excitable culture. Mesquita mentions that it takes immigrants 1.5 generations to acculturate emotionally to a new setting, which seems about right to me. Only recently have I mastered how to speak in confident paragraphs instead of terse sentences; when to feign pride to avoid being a downer; how to make chipper small talk and hold a smile without fatiguing my facial muscles.
My migration to a new emotional territory makes me wonder how much I want to be assimilated as a parent and where I want to swerve away from the dominant culture. And whether I even have a choice. Culture seems malleable because it’s not biological destiny, but I increasingly believe culture is hardwired in ways we barely understand.
When shame is good and self-esteem is bad
Mesquita showcases a wide collection of emotions considered “right” in various cultures. Some create openings for kids to practice pride, well before it actually makes sense — she tells her own story about praising her infant son for holding a book right side up instead of upside down. Others find ways to practice shame — a Taiwanese mother points out how a child’s poor academic performance reflects badly on the family.
In the first culture, pride and self esteem serve as a buffer to ward off shame, which is seen as a Bad Thing that must be avoided or vanquished. In the second, shame is a way to think of and connect with others by being aware of the social consequences of your actions. Shame may be less isolating here because it serves to “highlight your proper place in an inalienable social network, rather than focusing on rejection or isolation. It reminds you how to behave in your network, but it does not push you out.”
My favorite chapter of the book explores how cultures raise children to value other emotions less familiar globally, such as amae (complete dependence on a caregiver) and omoiyari (empathy) in Japan or tahotsy (fear) in Madagascar. It’s full of interesting examples to convince you that emotions aren’t identical units living inside each of our heads, as depicted in the film Inside Out. She argues that this western view of emotions as MINE (Mental, INside the head, Essentialist) is not the only way to understand emotions. The book makes a case for seeing emotions as OURS (OUtside the person, Relational, Situational) — a more common view around the world, that emotions happen between us.
One of the takeaways from the book is that we should be more granular about emotions based on specific situations instead of making broad assumptions about people or countries, which one might be tempted to do after learning these culturally specific emotions. (Calm might be part of my upbringing, but here’s a whole essay about the different flavors of Korean rage.) In the OURS view of emotions, anger is less like a little red guy smoldering in everyone’s head waiting to be set free, and more like a back-and-forth scene unfolding between people in slightly different ways each time. In the latter view, anger is more similar to a concept like justice, which requires understanding the whole situation to define it. It also more accurately describes the blooming of a toddler’s tantrum, given that the parents are often fueling the situation with their own moods.
This is all highly counterintuitive if you’ve begun to assimilate to a MINE culture, so my mind is still chewing on the examples and implications of this framework. How accurate is the concept of suppressing and releasing emotions? Is there a healthy way to emote, or does it always depend on context? Does emotional expression in other cultures’ art and literature align with the OURS model? If the OURS model is true, what’s happening inside a newborn when they smile or stick out their tiny lower lip? If you don’t want to commit to the whole book, Chapter 3 (To Raise Your Child) is a good preview.
The brain is constantly predicting
Reading Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, a short book from neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, has left my brain in mind-twisting mode for months. Here’s a few choice ideas and quotes from Chapter 4, “Your Brain Predicts (Almost) Everything You Do.”
(1) We can feel things before our brain actually processes sense data:
“Scientists are now fairly certain that your brain actually begins to sense the moment-to-moment changes in the world around you before those light waves, chemicals, and other sense data hit your brain.”
Example: Your thirst is quenched right after drinking water, even though it wouldn’t work for at least 20 minutes
(2) Our brain is always engaged in confirmation bias?
“Your brain issues predictions and checks them against the sense data coming from the world and your body. What happens next still astounds me, even as a neuroscientist. If your brain has predicted well, then your neurons are already firing in a pattern that matches the incoming sense data. This means this sense data itself has no further use beyond confirming your brain’s predictions. What you see, hear, smell, and taste in the world and feel in your body in that moment are completely constructed in your head. By prediction, your brain has efficiently prepared you to act.”
I assume all this prediction also explains the placebo effect.
(3) We start acting before we think, no matter how responsible we think we are:
“All this predicting happens backward from the way we experience it. You and I seem to sense first and act second. You see an enemy and then raise your rifle. But in your brain, sensing actually comes second…Your brain is wired to initiate your actions before you’re aware of them.”
She reframes Pavlov’s experiment from he fooled those dogs into salivating at the sound of a bell —> our brains our so powerful at predicting that they prepare the body to begin digesting food before we see it.
Books about the frontiers of science inevitably touch philosophy. This one guides you to the question of free will’s existence. I thought of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave (2017), a great synthesis of evolutionary, sociological, psychological, and biological explanations for why humans do what we do. At the end of this tour of -ologies, he speculates that scientists will prove that we have very little freewill. As a result, he believes we’ll look back on our approach to crime & punishment as inhumane, because it would prove you can’t really blame people for their actions. I also remembered Ted Chiang’s short story, What’s Expected of Us (2005), which describes the lethargy that descends after a new toy proves humans have no free will.
Lisa Feldman Barrett is more optimistic. While science suggests we may have less agency in the moment, she argues that we do have the power to shape how we’ll react in future moments.
To me, this is more reason to inform with intention, especially as the internet is flooded with recycled AI-generated content designed to scare and/or sell. (Even before this deluge, I realized that most of my knowledge about pregnancy, a very important feature of life, accidentally came from sitcoms.) Information becomes fuel for our brains’ predictions, which become our reality.
There is no control environment
Suddenly mindful,
the tree was looking at me,
each green leaf alive.
I think about this Richard Wright haiku (~1959) every time I look up under the crown of a gloriously full summer tree.
Sixty-five years later, Light Eaters follows journalist Zoe Schlanger’s obsession with ferns into the emerging science of plant behavior and speculation about plant consciousness. It’s chock-full of 🤯 studies about:
plant communication (faraway leaves seemingly warning each other to change their chemical composition to poison invasive caterpillars)
plant mimicry (the boquila plant’s not-yet-understood ability to copy the shape of neighboring plants)
plant decision-making (the parasitic dodder vine scheming to select a suitable host)
and more
Unlike the scientists she interviews, who discuss their fascinating findings with cautious restraint, she eagerly sketches out philosophical and ethical thought experiments to make a case for plant intelligence.
But the part that’s been sticking with me most is a story about a biology researcher who was trying to prove that plants are genetically predisposed to certain environments (e.g. “plants in sunny environments had sunny-plant genes, and shade plants had shade genes”). On walks across campus, she noticed that the same species of plants looked different whether they were in the shade or the sun, which led to the realization that:
This means everything a plant experiences changes its outcome. No environment is neutral. Even the supposedly "standard" form for any given plant is likely the impact of its environment. This of course confounds a lot of lab work…
…she loves the realization that reliably flickers across the face of her students at some point in their course of study with her. Wait, they say. This means there IS no control environment. The environment appears to flow through organisms, altering them at the deepest level.
This statement seems obvious; of course, everything is affected by the environment. And yet it stabs at the heart of scientific knowledge, which builds on the assumption that there is a control environment where we can isolate variables to confirm hypotheses. If the lab is not a neutral environment, what on earth can we actually know?
“There is no control environment” probably explains why nutrition research is so confusing. One study cited in Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain suggests that a stressful event today can change how we metabolize food tomorrow. Or make the body have the same inflammatory response whether you ate unsaturated or saturated fat, hinting that stress can undermine your food choices. A history of depression changes metabolism too. Lack of sleep can worsen insulin resistance. No study can control for all these variables plus all the ones we don’t even know about.
All biology is ecology
Schlanger’s plant science book leads to the philosophical door of “What are we? What am I? What is the self?” The featured plants and the animals around them are so strangely connected and fantastical that they seem to illustrate a “porousness that mocks the very idea of separation.” Some examples:
🪆“The most signature behavior of termites - wood eating - is made possible by other organisms living within them.” They not only have microbes in their gut that help them digest wood; those microbes have other microbes living inside them, like a matryoshka doll of wood destroyers.
↔️ Horizontal gene transfer, in which bacteria can swap genes with other bacteria, is one potential explanation for the boquila plant’s ability to copy other plant shapes. “One begins to see the world in bacterial terms…a microcosmic sea of shifting identities and form.”
🧋“The green sea slug blurs the boundary between animal and plant.” How? A brown baby slug seeks out a specific species of algae, and then:
“When it finds them, it punctures the alga's wall and begins to slurp out its cells as though through a straw, leaving the clear tube of empty algae behind. The algal cells are bright green, owing to the chlorophyll-filled chloroplasts inside them, which are responsible for photosynthesis. Under a microscope the whole exchange looks uncannily like the slug is drinking bubble tea, one bright green boba entering its mouth at a time. The slug digests the cells but keeps the chloroplasts within them intact, spreading them out through its branched gut. Now the slug itself has turned from brown to a brilliant green. After a few algal bubble teas, the slug never needs to eat again. It begins to photosynthesize. It gets all the energy it needs from the sun, having somehow also acquired the genetic ability to run the chloroplasts, eating light, exactly like a plant. How this is possible is still unknown. Remarkably, the now-emerald-green slug is shaped exactly like a leaf, all but for its snail-like head.”
These are just a few examples of how understanding biology — and ourselves — becomes a matter of seeing ecosystems and interactions: “all biology is ecology.”
In Between Us, Mesquita borrows a phrase from Plato to describe how early emotions researchers (like Paul Ekman, whose framework influenced the film Inside Out) were attempting to “cut nature at its joints” by discovering the natural, universal categories of emotions. In Light Eaters, the author frequently reminds readers that “nature is not a puzzle waiting to be put together, or a codex waiting to be deciphered. Nature is chaos in motion.”
In my newborn sleep-deprived haze, these books all made me wonder: instead of acquiring knowledge as if we’re carving gristle in dead beings, what else could we learn if we closely watch the movement and marvels of the living?