Monthly Archives: August 2010

Today

Posted on August 29, 2010
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Summer has been a relatively absent season this year, at least when it comes to temperatures. Except for less than a single handful of days when the temperature climbed up into the 90s and kept going, the temperatures have been more spring-like. The farmers’ market is however bursting with nature’s bounty, with incredibly sweet nectarines, juice-drip-down-your-chins-down-your-elbows peaches, blueberries and strawberries, soothe, cooling watermelon, cantaloupe and melons.


We went to Picchetti Open Preserve today with another family. The company:perfect, the day:gorgeous. We listened to some live music, ate good food, drank some good wine and did a hike cum meadow exploration. Maya fell into a happy sleep in the car in the early evening hours on our way back.


All this is just an excuse for me to share this exquisite poem by Billy Collins. I read this a few months back as I was perusing his Nine Horses book of poems and have been waiting to spend a day that matched the mood of the poem.

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze
that it made you want to throw
open all the windows in the house
and unlatch the door to the canary’s cage,
indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,
a day when the cool brick paths
and the garden bursting with peonies
seemed so etched in sunlight
that you felt like taking
a hammer to the glass paperweight
on the living room end table,
releasing the inhabitants
from their snow-covered cottage
so they could walk out,
holding hands and squinting
into this larger dome of blue and white,
well, today is just that kind of day.              – Today, Billy Collins

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We’ve Met The Paparazzi! They’re Us

Posted on August 26, 2010
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“However well you write about your family or friends, you diminish them.”

I read this A.S. Byatt quote in an entry in one of The Guardian’s culture blogs.

I write with some reserve when I write about my personal life. I’m especially sensitive when I’m writing about others. I usually don’t name anybody but Shanthala and Maya, I occasionally refer directly to my parents, once or twice, I’ve said “neighbor”, and I think that’s it. For example, in my previous entry about the death of a colleague, I didn’t name her (yes, I did reveal her gender) or my friends through whom I learnt about the death.

Even when I write about Shanthala or Maya, I think if what I write will embarrass them, if not today, some day in the future. When I put up pictures of other people, I usually check with them first, though I’ve been less diligent about that. However, I don’t think that I have put up any possibly embarassing pictures of anybody except maybe myself (in which case, aren’t they all embarrassing, you may ask).

A friend seemed to echo Byatt’s sensibilities when he said that he wouldn’t have written personal entries such as the one I wrote about the evolution of my relationship with Shanthala from our first encounter to our wedding. Another expressed a similar sentiment over my writings about my grief over Kitty’s death.

I have benefited from reading about the experiences of other people. Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” or C.S. Lewis’s “A Grief Observed” provide invaluable insights into the land of grief. They wrote both intensely and intimately about their grief and their relationship. In books such as “Elegy For Iris”, spouses write about what it is like to live with someone afflicted with horrifying diseases such as Alzheimer’s and plot the frightening descent of brilliant minds into unmind. Rafael Yglesias, in “A Happy Marriage”, documents intimate details of his marriage, both good and bad, in ways that illuminate the realities of a marriage. Kay Redfield Jamison writes about her struggles as a manic-depressive in “An Unquiet Mind”. She writes that writing that memoir put her in a difficult situation many times, but many thanked her for bringing out of the shadows the life of a manic-depressive. Gandhi’s “My Experiments With Truth” have helped me understand the perspective of this utterly unique individual.

What We Accept in Public Discourse

In the excellent, “The Consolations of Philosophy” by Alain De Botton, I was introduced to the ideas of the French essayist and philosopher, Michel de Montaigne. de Montaigne was a proponent of the fact that we’re far from perfect and that this aspect of our lives should not be shut away in closets and only our seemingly rational, methodical and picture perfect self presented to the world as proper. One of his more famous quotes is “Kings and philosophers shit; and so do ladies”. By stating front and center what people hitherto shied away from, he was bringing aspects of ourselves into discussion, and thereby out of the darkness. He wrote:
“The genital activities of mankind are so natural, so necessary and so right: what have they done to make us never dare to mention them without embarrassment and to exclude them from serious orderly conversation ? We are not afraid to utter the words kill, thieve or betray; but those others we only dare to mutter through our teeth.”

Alain de Botton himself eloquently adds: “If we accord importance to the kind of portraits which surround us, it is because we fashion our lives according to their example, accepting aspects of ourselves if they concur with what others mention of themselves. What we see evidence for in others, we will attend to within, what others are silent about, we may stay blind to or experience only in shame.“

When Maya throws a temper tantrum when we open the crayon box that she wanted to open herself, a tantrum that abates in an instant and she’s smiling and happy, Shanthala and I worried about her. Are we raising her right ? Are we being too indulgent ? Is something the matter with her ? Then, when we talk to friends with kids of similar age and they tell us how their kids throw a similar tantrum over the shape of the pasta for dinner or not being allowed to pick the color of their milk bottle for the day, we heave a sigh of relief.

I could go on and on. The history of the autobiography is ancient even if the history of the memoir is somehow very 20th century (and early 21st). The world has changed in ways in which more and more people, even ordinary people, not just the rich and famous, have had the ability to get their narratives published. This has unleashed a glut of memoirs, many of which are tell-alls, meant to air dirty laundry in public rather than present a story or perspective of lasting value. As someone said, “We don’t apologize any more, we just write memoirs”.

But is there more to this sentiment than just personal views ? Is there some larger, more pragmatic consequence to writing about ourselves or framing ourselves publicly ?

The Age of Not Forgetting

Information on the web is around forever. With effective search engines such as google, it is not that hard to dig up information about a person if it was posted online. Many specialize in pulling together disparate pieces to construct a fairly detailed portrait of us. Those embarrassing pictures or midnight twitters stay around forever. NYT Magazine carried an article (when most of my news is read online and not on paper, is “carry” an uesful metaphor anymore?) about a month back titled “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”.

The article begins with the story of a teacher in training, a Stacy Snyder, who posted on MySpace a picture of her toting a drink wearing a cap that said “Drunken Pirate”. A supervisor at the high school she was training at found the picture, told her that she was promoting drinking and denied her a training degree. A federal circuit judge ruled against her case. The article cites other cases like Stacy’s including an employee who was fired because she wrote that she was bored on her Facebook page and a Canadian psychotherapist who was denied entry into the US because an online search by the immigration official revealed that he had published a paper 30 years ago on his experiences with LSD. What is next ? Non-immigrants denied entry for blogging critically about the US or US policy ?

Here is a scarier quote from the article:
“According to a recent survey by Microsoft, 75 percent of U.S. recruiters and human-resource professionals report that their companies require them to do online research about candidates, and many use a range of sites when scrutinizing applicants, including search engines, social-networking sites, photo- and video-sharing sites, personal Web sites and blogs, Twitter and online-gaming sites. Seventy percent of U.S. recruiters report that they have rejected candidates because of information found online, like photos and discussion-board conversations and membership in controversial groups.”

The article goes on to state the dawn of companies like ReputationDefender that will clean up your online profile for a fee and ideas like “filing for reputation bankruptcy”. Jonathan Zittrain who reaches cyberlaw at Harvard speculates that in the future there will be companies like the financial credit rating firms, experian and equifax, that maintain the reputation rating of individuals. Here is his take as expressed in the article:
“Services like Date Check, Zittrain said, could soon become even more sophisticated, rating a person’s social desirability based on minute social measurements – like how often he or she was approached or avoided by others at parties (a ranking that would be easy to calibrate under existing technology using cellphones and Bluetooth). Zittrain also speculated that, over time, more and more reputation queries will be processed by a handful of de facto reputation brokers – like the existing consumer-reporting agencies Experian and Equifax, for example, which will provide ratings for people based on their sociability, trustworthiness and employability.”

But despite warnings by privacy advocates and reports such as this one, people in ever increasing numbers continue to share ever increasing information about themselves. Why do we do this ? While there are reasons posited for uninhibited behavior online, I wonder if in cases of normal behavior, there are other factors at play.

  • Nature: We are social animals and so the need to share is probably primal.
  • Distance and Time: We’re moving farther and farther away from family members with each generation. Even friends are no longer a constant, past a certain age. And with the speed with which we live our lives, we have less time to engage socially with many of them. So, there is a need to share information with them by keeping them informed about our lives, something better than a once-a-year, Christmas postcard.
  • Ease Of Online Sharing: Internet provides a way to bridge that distance in a cheap and easy way. Before, I had to develop the picture that I just took of Maya, put it in an album and remember to show it to you when you visit the next time. Now, I just upload right off the iPhone or my digital camera, you’re notified of the new picture and you can see it whenever you want. The ease also means that I don’t have to think as much to post a picture online, promoting a “post first, think later” mindset.
  • Newness of the Medium: But, the newness of the medium prevents us from fully perceiving other possible effects of our desire to share. For example, if I was Stacy Snyder, I may put up a picture of myself on my Facebook page because someone thought that it was a cute picture of me and I wanted my dad to see it. I might not think that a supervisor at my school would find the picture and to top that, think that posting the picture meant I was encouraging underage drinking.
  • Ease of Discovering: When social sites such as Facebook make it hard to control what we want others to see and easy for others to spot us, we may inadvertently reveal more about ourselves than we care to. Also, before the onset of social media and Google, to know more about you, I had to know someone who knew you or knew someone who knew you. Now, it is easy to piece together a picture of someone using some quite basic tools.

So, unwittingly, we’ve become our own paparazzi. Or to rephrase Pogo: “We’ve met the paparazzi and they’re us”.

The NYT article quotes, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, a cyberscholar and the author of “Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age“, about the dangers of this new world:
“By “erasing external memories,” he says in the book, “our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior.” In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast, Mayer-Schönberger notes, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them.” He concludes that “without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”

So, while I believe in writing candidly and on subjects that maybe painful or intensely personal, I exercise some restraint, cognizant that the web never forgets. But I don’t try to write to blame or titillate. I try and write non-polemically, but can’t say I succeed very well in that. But, I’m aligned with Michel de Montaigne’s sentiments rather than Byatt’s. I don’t think my writing diminishes my friends or family, only rounds them, presents them and me and our relationship in a real, three dimensional way, underscoring our humanity.

Image credit: Wikpedia’s entry on Pogo.

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On The News of A Death

Posted on August 22, 2010
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An old colleague died early Friday morning. She was my age, if not younger. A close friend, whose cousin she was married to, informed me of the news today. She had contracted H1N1, the doctors hadn’t caught it in time and when they did, she had gone straight on the ventilator. She never recovered consciousness from that time and died, nine days later.

I had known her when I had first started working. It was her first job too. We were both fresh out of college. I was hubris. She seemed quieter, less certain of things than I was. We had worked together on the same project, gone to Paris around the same time to complete the project. Once the project was over, I moved on, lost touch. I came to know of her again, a few years ago, when a new acquaintance grew to be one of our closest friends. She had married a cousin of one of these friends. My friend told me that she had enquired after me and had asked my friend to hook us up when I was in India next. She had become a VP and managed hundreds of people, I heard. I never took her up on the offer. And now I never can.

Today was the arangetram of the daughter of another friend of mine, a friend I had also met working at the same place, at my first job. His daughter is hardly eleven years old, but she danced with the poise and grace of someone much older. Maya enjoyed the dance and the music; she couldn’t take her eyes off the violin and mridangam, even when the dancer was off stage.

As I watched her dance, my thoughts drifted to the dance of life. Three people, we shared a moment in time and place. How far apart our strands have been strung now. Each has a daughter, but one is dancing, one is rejoicing and one is bereft. The grief of the unmothered, the joy of the dancer and the watcher, all mingled together to bludgeon my mind, befuddle it, in a way that I can’t seem to express.

I am fortunate to have not been touched by death until very late in my life. Death had been a guest many times before: when my grandparents died, when the daughters of  colleagues of my father’s had died – one of rabies, bitten by a dog she was caring for and the other by a snake bite -, when the parents of close friends had died. But death had never done an extended stay. Never touched me, except in sharing the sorrow of a friend’s grief. Then Kitty died. And three years later, I still can’t get my head wrapped around death. I still can’t seem to comprehend how someone is alive one instant and dead the next.

Two weeks ago, Maya stubbed her big toe and cut it when she fell running around the swimming pool. One morning, a week later, I examined her toe. It was swollen and black and infected. I rushed her to the paediatrician who prescribed an antibiotic. A week later, Maya’s toe was normal. Not too long ago, people with such infections either died or had to have their legs amputated. Today morning, I had put Maya in the jog stroller – we were going for a run together after a hiatus of several months – when I realized that I had forgotten my cap. I put the brake on and walked back towards the house to pick up my cap. Something made me turn and I saw the stroller rolling backwards onto the street. I had the stroller in my hands, safe, within a second since I was just a few steps off. But, I wondered, what if I had not turned around in time ?

Everywhere I turn, it seems death stalks us and how we escape, eludes me. Of course, no one escapes forever. I read that the Episcopalians have a saying “In the midst of life we are in death”. The only solace I find is that, at the same time, “in the midst of death we are in life”.

News comes that a friend far away
is dying now

I look up and see small flowers appearing
in spring grass outside the window
and can’t remember their name – James, by W.S. Merwin

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Getting High

Posted on August 17, 2010
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I woke up just before 5:30 am yesterday. I had coffee, checked the news and email and was ready to get out for a long run. This has been a pale summer, a summer that has yet to get over the hangover of spring and it is already fast approaching its fall. The early morning was gloomy, the sun deciding to hide itself rather than light up such a sorry looking day. There were not many people on the streets and once I hit Stevens Creek Trail, I passed but a handful of early morning walkaholics and jogaholics. The creek itself is dry almost till you get to the bay. I saw a crane and a few pelicans. A flock of geese silently flew in formation. The tide was out, exposing the salts and there was a marshy smell as I ran by the waters of the bay at Shoreline Park. By the time I returned, an hour and 20 minutes later, Shanthala and Maya were up. Finally, after over almost 3 years, I did an early morning run.

Till about three years back, every Sunday morning, I got out for a long run, usually a half marathon. I’d leave early enough so that I’d be back just as Shanthala was waking. That way, I had exercise out of the way before our day together began and we could spend time together without brooding over when I could get a run in. My legs had gotten used to running a half marathon distance without feeling exhausted the rest of the day. My early morning runs got into endangered state after Maya was born when caring for her became the primary goal. Maya was not a happy camper if she awoke in the middle of her sleep and didn’t find me there. By the time she was consoled, Shanthala would have lost her sleep, making her even more sleep deprived. So, I gave up my early runs.

When I first started running long – greater than 8 miles – I encountered unfamiliar sensations. My nipples would be chafed to the point that they were sore and hurt if I wore loose shirts or the spray from the shower hit my chest. I started taping my chest with cotton and band aid to avoid the problem. My toes would be calloused and discolored, like the finger tips of a guitarist, despite wearing shoes that were relatively loose-fitting. Running long without having pooped first upset my stomach and bowels for the rest of the day. But nothing compared to the high that I got at the end of the run. I felt my face was aglow and I felt kind, loving and willing to be of service. I felt incredibly relaxed, especially if I hadn’t run hard.

Runners high is a well known phenomenon. The popular hypothesis for this euphoric feeling was that endurance exercise released endorphins, a neurotransmitter. Discovered by Solomon Snyder and Rabi Simantov in calves in 1974 and named by Eric Simon, endorphin means “morphine produced naturally in the body”. Just like morphine, they’re able to suppress pain, act as an analgesic and produce feelings of well-being.

Runners’ high may have evolved because of possibly adaptive benefits. According to a blogger, NeuroKuz: “A possible explanation for the “runner’s high,” a feeling of intense euphoria associated with going on a long run, is that our brains are stuck thinking that lots of exercise should be accompanied by a reward. Perhaps our ancestors who were able to achieve the runner’s high while hunting for food ran more often than those who could not achieve the high. These ‘high-achievers’ (no pun intended) would gather more food as a result of their enhanced motivation, and would be more fit to pass on their genes to the next generation.”

But runner’s high was also considered a myth, hard to prove. As the authors of a paper in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, titled “Endocannabinoids and exercise” put it: “As is the case with all phenomena related to consciousness and its alterations, the runner’s high is a private experience, and the evidence for its existence rests predominantly on verbal report. Scientific inquiry into the phenomenon has been restricted even further because of its ephemeral nature. For example, the runner’s high is not experienced by all runners, and this experience does not occur consistently in runners who have experienced it previously. These observations have left laymen and scientists wondering why and under which conditions the runner’s high occurs, or whether or not it exists at all.”

Furthermore, they wrote: “In recent years, several prominent endorphin researchers—for example, Dr Huda Akil and Dr Solomon Snyder—have publicly criticised the hypothesis as being ‘‘overly simplistic’’, being ‘‘poorly supported by scientific evidence’’, and a ‘‘myth perpetrated by pop culture.’’

In that paper, the authors speculated that endurance exercise stimulated the endocannabinoid system that was responsible for the runners’ high, not endorphins. Using male student volunteers running on a treadmill or cycling for 50 minutes at 70-80% of maximum heart rate, they found dramatic increases in a neurotransmitter called anandamide in the blood plasma. This was back in 2004.

Then in 2008, German researchers at the University of Bonn led by a Dr. Henning Boecker had used PET scans on 10 runners before and after a run to show that indeed endorphins were very likely produced during running and that they were attaching themselves to areas of the brain such as the limbic and prefrontal areas. According to the NYT article that reported the news: “The limbic and prefrontal areas, Dr. Boecker said, are activated when people are involved in romantic love affairs or, he said, ‘when you hear music that gives you a chill of euphoria, like Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3.’ The greater the euphoria the runners reported, the more endorphins in their brain.”

The NYT article includes quotes the same two researchers, Dr. Huda Akil and Dr. Solomon Snyder, quoted in the British paper. According to NYT:
“Impressive,” said Dr. Solomon Snyder, a neuroscience professor at Johns Hopkins and a discoverer of endorphins in the 1970’s.

“I like it,” said Huda Akil, a professor of neurosciences at the University of Michigan. “This is the first time someone took this head on. It wasn’t that the idea was not the right idea. It was that the evidence was not there.”

Naturally produced morphine or cannabis, I can attest to experiencing what I thought of as runners’ high several times during my running life. Today morning was no exception.

P.S: All this study was triggered by an entry last week at the blog, Addiction Inbox, titled ‘Cannabis Receptors and the “Runners High”‘.

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Behavioral Sciences are WEIRD (and MYOPICS)

Posted on August 12, 2010
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The thought first occurred to me, back in the fall of 2008, as I was reading Dan Ariely’s very readable and fascinating book, “Predictably Irrational”. Chapter after chapter is peppered with conclusions drawn from experiments conducted on students studying at some of the best institutions in the US. I wrote an email to a couple of the authors of what I thought were well-respected blogs about the brain and behavior. I wrote:

“The more I read about our cognitive biases or irrationality, the more I’m struck by how many decisions have been reached using what seem fairly limited samples, many of them just college students. I don’t doubt that we’ve cognitive biases but I wonder are there any studies that go across cultures, socio-economic strata and age in determining the cognitive biases ? I googled and couldn’t find anything relevant. Is it that we all have the same cognitive biases but different ones are brought to the fore by culture ? ”

I did not get any responses to my question (they probably were optimistic that I’d learn to google better). But the feeling never went away as I encountered many new fascinating conclusions drawn from experiments conducted on college students in this country. As I was writing my entry about the death of languages, I noticed an article in that excellent blog, Neuroanthropology. While the title caught my eye, I didn’t really go back to checking the article until a few days later. The entry is titled: “We agree it’s WEIRD, but is it WEIRD enough?“. WEIRD turns out to be an acronym for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic. The article was based on a paper (then) recently published paper titled The weirdest people in the world? by Joseph Henrich, Steven J. Heine and Ara Norenzayan.

There are two main points to this paper. The first is that a lot of conclusions in behavior science are based on experiments on WEIRD people, essentially undergrad students at Western, mostly American, universities. The second thrust of the paper is to show that WEIRD people are not representative of most of humanity when it comes to behaviors.

From the abstract of the paper:

“The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans.  Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obvious a priori grounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions of human nature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity.”

Two pieces of data from the article reflect the level of skewness in the papers related to behavior science:

  • “A recent analysis of the top journals in six sub-disciplines of psychology from 2003 to 2007 revealed that 68% of subjects came from the United States, and a full 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries, specifically those in North America and Europe, as well as Australia and Israel (Arnett 2008). The make-up of these samples appears to largely reflect the country of residence of the authors, as 73% of first authors were at American universities, and 99% were at universities in Western countries. This means that 96% of psychological samples come from countries with only 12% of the world’s population.”
  • “In the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the premier journal in social psychology – the subdiscipline of psychology that should (arguably) be the most attentive to questions about the subjects’ backgrounds – 67% of the American samples (and 80% of the samples from other countries) were composed solely of undergraduates in psychology courses (Arnett 2008).”

These papers and their conclusions are not just academic papers published in academic journals for the consumption of academics. As the authors write: “In top journals such as Nature and Science, researchers frequently extend their findings from undergraduates to the species – often declaring this generalization in their titles. These  contributions typically lack even a cautionary footnote about these inferential extensions.”

The authors compare WEIRD people at four levels: western, industrialized countries vs what they term “small scale socieities”, Western industrialized countries vs non-Western, industrialized countries, American vs other western countries and finally university-educated Americans vs non-university-educated Americans. The authors base their comparisons on different aspects of behavior ranging from visual perception and spatial cognition to ideas of independence and inter-dependence and moral reasoning.

The main paper is a well written (I confess here that I only read sections of it, given my limited time and domain-specific competence) 22 pages or so. The reminder of the paper is a collection of responses from various peers to their paper and the authors’ response to the responses. Many of the responses apply the criticism to other areas such as neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy and the anthropocentric and ethnocentric attitudes related to comparing humans with other animals. Many responses question whether WEIRD is weird enough. For example, the author of the Neuroanthropology post writes:
“I worry that W.E.I.R.D. classification flatters the WEIRD, focusing on traits that Westerners typically highlight to describe themselves in ways that are, however inadvertently, pretty self-congratulatory. If we were to call the same group, Materialist, Young, self-Obsessed, Pleasure-seeking, Isolated, Consumerist, and Sedentary (MYOPICS)… you get the idea.”

A small section of the peer commentary argued against the conclusions of the article with one author even stating “WEIRD societies may be more compatible with human nature”.

In the main paper, the authors don’t attempt to explain the reasons behind the extreme differences in behavior of the WEIRD folks. But in their response to the various pieces of peer review, they touch upon this subject. They suggest two possible reasons. One is the primacy of the English language. They write: “English-bias may be impacting theorizing in the cognitive sciences, while Machery and Stich show that it has impacted philosophical inquiry”.

The second cause they speculate has to do with the relative strangeness of American middle and upper class child-rearing techniques. They write: “Lancy lays the groundwork by highlighting the relative strangeness, in a broad global and historical context, of modern middle- and upper-class American beliefs, values, cultural models, and practices vis-a-vis childrearing. Fernald and Karasik et al. review evidence that is beginning to document how these practices impact cognitive, linguistic, and motor development, including long-term cognitive outcomes.”

We’ve been here before. Many times have we encountered the notion of researcher bias and skew caused by the nature of the samples studied.

I first encountered the idea of researcher bias many years ago when I was reading Dorothy Rowe’s insightful book, “Friends and Enemies: Our Need To Love and Hate”. She writes: “An American researcher observing a number of white, middle-class American babies, or an English researcher observing a number of white, middle-class English babies can easily fail to draw the simple conclusion that this is what American or English middle-class babies do and instead generalize their observations to say that this is what all babies do.”

A more tragic story is narrated by Robert Sapolsky in his essay “Poverty’s Remains” from his book, “The Trouble With Testosterone”. Much of our understanding of human anatomy was initially based on cadavers of poor people whose internal organs were differently shaped and sized because of the way they suffered and died. Sapolsky quotes several examples of this from the thymus gland which is very small in people who live in chronically stressful conditions to the adrenal gland which is much larger in people living under stressful conditions. So, at the turn of the 19th century, the doctors had a misconceived notion of the “normal” size of organs.

Before SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) was called SIDS, an Austrian pathologist named Richard Paltauf concluded – after several autopsies of healthy infants who had died of unexplainable causes in their crib – that the cause of death was an enlarged thymus that pressed down on the trachea, strangling a sleeping infant. SIDS, which had been nameless thus far, was called status thymicolymphaticus and as far as into the 1950s, the preferred preventive treatment for SIDS was to irradiate the throats of infants. While not helping SIDS, the treatment resulted in causing thyroid cancer in tens of thousands of people. Sapolsky writes: “It is a chilling experience to wander the dusty lower floor of a medical library, reading forgotten seventy-year-old pediatric texts with their dry discussions of status thymicolymphaticus. The technical details of the disorder, the plausible etiology, the photographs of the “enlarged” thymuses, the confident recommendation for treatment – all wrong, page after page.”

More recently, at the start of the year, NYT published an article titled “The Americanization of Mental Illness”:
“AMERICANS, particularly if they are of a certain leftward-leaning, college-educated type, worry about our country’s blunders into other cultures. In some circles, it is easy to make friends with a rousing rant about the McDonald’s near Tiananmen Square, the Nike factory in Malaysia or the latest blowback from our political or military interventions abroad. For all our self-recrimination, however, we may have yet to face one of the most remarkable effects of American-led globalization. We have for many years been busily engaged in a grand project of Americanizing the world’s understanding of mental health and illness. We may indeed be far along in homogenizing the way the world goes mad.

This unnerving possibility springs from recent research by a loose group of anthropologists and cross-cultural psychiatrists. Swimming against the biomedical currents of the time, they have argued that mental illnesses are not discrete entities like the polio virus with their own natural histories. These researchers have amassed an impressive body of evidence suggesting that mental illnesses have never been the same the world over (either in prevalence or in form) but are inevitably sparked and shaped by the ethos of particular times and places.”

I cannot recommend the WEIRD paper highly enough to anybody engaged in an enquiry of human behavior, as a vocation or an avocation. I’ve saved a copy of the paper for a more thorough reading. I also recommend reading the post on Neuroanthropology for some additional insightful commentary.

Sapolsky concludes his essay “Poverty’s Remains” with a powerful and eloquent statement: “Be really certain before you ever pronounce something to be the norm, because at that instant, you have now made it supremely difficult to ever look at an exception to that supposed norm and see it objectively.”

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