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A Toy Around Every Corner

Posted on October 27, 2009
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The past few weeks, when I go running, I stop midway and let Maya down from the stroller. Part of it is because I make the first part of my run so fast that I’m winded at the 3.5 mile mark (I run those miles at a 7 minutes/mile pace). The other part is that I let Maya down one day because I was tired for some other reason and since then, she insists on being let down. To run those miles non-stop, I try a different route.

At the 3.5 mile mark, we’re at the edge of the Shoreline marshlands. This close to the bay, Stevens creek is rarely dry, even in summer. I usually lead Maya away from the main track and onto a dirt track that parallels the paved track, but is broken up in places by the creek bed. Some sections are a little steep as they head down closer to the creek. The loose gravel and the descent makes things a little slippery for a 20 month baby. In the beginning, Maya took little steps, bending down the moment she her grip slipped, holding her arms out to balance herself. But, she didn’t want any help as she descended or ascended the path. Only sometimes did she reach out for my hand. Last week, the path was still muddy from the storm of the past week, but Maya went down like a pro, hardly slowing down and continuing to look around as she walked instead of being focused on taking the next step.

As the track levels out, it is quite close to the creek, though the creek is still hidden by the undergrowth in places. I take Maya closer to the water, especially when there are mallards and teals. Maya watches them fascinated. They waddle in the water, a little wary of the sudden interest so close. Maya says “quack, quack” pointing at them. They sometimes fly away from this attention. Sometimes, they put on a show for her. They dip their beaks in the water, to catch some food, becoming almost perpendicular to the liquid plane, their tails pointing straight up at the sky. Sometimes, they quack at each other. A couple of times, they flew in, using their feet to break their fall, making a big, splashing sound. Maya is enthralled.

If it isn’t the ducks, Maya is fascinated by the dead leaves that carpet the path in places. I can’t name most of the plants they belong to. But, Maya knows the word leaf. She points at them as she walks, picking one or two up for a closer examination. She usually selects one or two to carry back to the stroller. Most leaves are dry and brown, but some are still green. Maya examines them all closely, looking at me as she does so, asking me to explain them or name them. I say leaf and yeleh (leaf in Kannada).

This past Thursday, a crane and an egret were resting in the shallow creek. The crane was still on the bank, a little distance away. The white crane looks so beautiful and fragile, with its reedy legs. Maya can hardly contain her excitement after the initial surprise. She breaks into a run to get closer. I ask her to stop a little distance from the bird, to not scare it away. She heeds my message only for a moment or two. Seeing her too close, the crane spreads its wings and majestically glides a little distance away.

Maya’s also drawn to rocks and pebbles. She picks them up and examines them closely, her eyes gleaming. I tell her that we cannot take them with us and she reluctantly drops them back. She then reaches for the trees and massages her hand against the bark, feeling their texture.

These are Maya’s toys. Pebbles, leaves, sand, kitchen utensils. I dramatize. She does have a few of the more mainstream toys (mostly hand-me-downs) and a few puzzles.

Juliet Schor writes in “Born to Buy: The Commercialized Child and the New Consumer Culture” that a typical first-grader in the US can identify 200 brand names, accumulates toys at an average rate of seventy new toys per year, and spends an average of two hours in front of a TV per day. In 2002, children between the ages of 4-12 spent $30 billion of which toys were the number two spending category (sweets, beverages and snacks was the numero uno).

This is the the age of smart toys and edu-toys. When I was growing up, toys were meant for play, not to train (or educate as we like to say) or be smart. Living in the age of anxiety and dog-eat-dog, no instruction can start early enough. 62% of parents surveyed by the Kaiser Family Foundation in 2004 said that educational toys are very important to children’s intellectual development. The anxiety has gotten so out of whack that there are toys such as those made by BabyPlus, which allow a pregnant woman to strap a device to her belly, twice a day, that then proceeds to produce sounds that are supposed to make for smarter babies right out of the womb. In the movie, Baby Mama, Tina Fey’s character wants the surrogate mother to listen to Mandarin tapes, based on the idea that learning a second language helps babies get smarter.

A Fisher-Price advertisement says: “We all want to be parents of the next Einstein” and markets their toys on the mantra that “the right toy at the right time will enrich the play experience of your little genius”. Another toy maker, Neurosmith, says that their toys “..stimulate key areas of the brain and actually help teach your child how to learn”. And parents are lapping these messages up. LeapFrog, a major educational toy vendor, alone notched $640 million in sales in 2004, according to Pamela Paul, author of the incisive “Parenting Inc.”. Baby Einstein, which dominates the baby media market has sales of $200 million annually. $200 million. Just for baby CDs and DVDs. According to a 2003 study, a third of all American babies from 6 months to 2 years old had at least one “Baby Einstein” video.

Are these educational toys “educational” or helpful or are they turning kids into passive consumers who demand that the world entertain them at the press of a button, rather than entertain themselves. Pamela Paul writes: “Many toys on the market today may as well have a sticker on them that says “Imagination Not Included”". She says that these toy manufacturers and parents are misguided in their understanding of “interactive” toys: it is the children that must interact with the toys and not the other way. She tells the story of a kid who asked “What does it do ?” when given an old-fashioned toy, puzzled that play didn’t involve pushing a button. She quotes my favorite pediatric anthropologist, Meredith Small, who fears that we’re either overstimulating our babies or stimulating them in wrong ways. Research supports her concerns.

  • A Harvard researcher, Chuck Nelson, who monitored what goes on inside infant brains, says that babies filter out a lot of what the toy is putting out, that they’re not like a sponge, absorbing everything.
  • Elizabeth Spelke, a famous developmental cognitive scientist says that her studies have found that attempting to teach infants things such as learning to read or count is useless at best, but possibly harmful. We evolved to learn about the world from real people, not the TV or DVD. Patricia Kuhl, a leading expert on child development especially w.r.t language conducted a study in which a native Mandarin speaker played for an hour with one group of babies. Three other control groups of babies were setup: one watched a video of the native Mandarin speaker playing with the babies, one heard an audio recording of the native Mandarin speaker speaking and the third group had no exposure to Mandarin at all. Of these, Dr. Kuhl found that only the group that only the first group of babies (with the live Mandarin speaker) tested as being capable of distinguishing Mandarin sounds from English.
  • Andrew Meltzoff, a co-author of the excellent “Scientist In The Crib”, says that his research has found that a key to language development is the baby’s ability to read the mother’s face, her reaction to various events and actions by the baby. These so-called interactive dolls/toys have an unchanging expression, no matter what the baby does. Another researcher, Catherine Tamis-LaMonda, concludes similarly based on her research with parent-baby interaction in “naturalistic” environments.
  • Laura Schulz, a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT says that once children understand the causal relationship of a toy, they move on (pressing a button produces one of these six sounds). She says that children with these smart toys become passive absorbers and even develop impatience.
  • Alison Gopnik, another prominent developmental cognitive scientist, wrote an op-ed piece in NYT in which she says: “The learning that babies and young children do on their own, when they carefully watch an unexpected outcome and draw new conclusions from it, ceaselessly manipulate a new toy or imagine different ways that the world might be, is very different from schoolwork. Babies and young children can learn about the world around them through all sorts of real-world objects and safe replicas, from dolls to cardboard boxes to mixing bowls, and even toy cellphones and computers. Babies can learn a great deal just by exploring the ways bowls fit together or by imitating a parent talking on the phone. (Imagine how much money we can save on “enriching” toys and DVDs!)”. She writes that kids younger than five have a hard time being goal-oriented which is what so many of the so-called educational toys attempt to do.

On Sunday, NYT reported that Disney is offering refunds to parents who bought the Baby Einstein products, admitting that they did not produce the geniuses they promised.

All these so-called educational toys cost so much more than the old-fashioned ones. What’s worse in the modern world is that with the outsourcing of much of the manufacturing to China, parents are subject to the yearly scare of recalls because many of the toys are toxic. To avoid this, well heeled parents have begun to search for toys not made in China, hand-crafted toys, which are more expensive. No wonder a modern family cannot be supported on a single income. Worse still of course is the lack of time that parents have with their children. An absence that fuels the guilt that causes them to indulge in all these expensive toys. The executive VP of Chicco toy division explains the success of his division:
“My viewpoint is that with so many dual working parents, the guilt factor steps in. They’re looking for toys that make them feel good. They think, if I’m not around enough, something can fill in that void for me, maybe if the toy teaches them something.”

What does help babies ? In the article on Baby Einstein, Vicky Rideout, the VP of the Kaiser Family Foundation says: “To me, the most important thing is reminding parents that getting down on the floor to play with children is the most educational thing they can do.”. Alison Gopnik writes: “But what children observe most closely, explore most obsessively and imagine most vividly are the people around them. There are no perfect toys; there is no magic formula. Parents and other caregivers teach young children by paying attention and interacting with them naturally and, most of all, by just allowing them to play.”

This is what my parents and many parents of my generation and older did. This is how we evolved. Surrounded by people from whom we learnt to make sense of the world.

Maya runs around the dirt track by the Stevens creek, stepping on dry twigs and leaves, relishing the crackling sound that it makes. Sunlight dapples in the creek. A plane flies by overhead and Maya points to it. “Bye Bye”, she says. She spots an acorn on the ground and picks it up. She can’t say acorn yet, but I’m guessing that the smile on her face and her pointing at it is an indication that she recognizes this from the pictures she’s seen in her books. To her, there’s a toy around every corner and the world is a playground.

To see a World in a grain of sand,
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour - William Blake, Auguries of Innocence
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Neurological and Cultural Underpinnings of Being Plugged

Posted on September 8, 2009
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First, an apology to my readers. I’ve let trivia overwhelm me. That combined with a few other things have prevented me from updating my blog more promptly. I hope to rectify the situation this week.

Part 1: The Hardware (or Biology)

A day or two after I posted my article on the madness of speed in the modern culture, I read an entry on Frontal Cortex that shed some more neurological light on our pathological condition. I wrote a little about this in my earlier article, but this hopefully provides a more complete picture. I was indulging in speculation then, but it looks like I wasn’t that far off.

Back in 1954, a psychologist at McGill University in Canada, James Olds, and his team accidentally discovered that if a probe is inserted into the lateral hypothalamus of a rat and the rat was allowed to stimulate its own probe, the rat would stimulate itself till it collapsed. This was hailed as the discovery of the brain’s pleasure center. But neuroscientists were unhappy with this term. They found that far from producing pleasure, people who were stimulated in this area were more crazed than happy. Two researchers, Jaak Panskepp and Kent Berridge, independently concluded that this area was more concerned with seeking or searching than pleasure. Berridge concludes that mammals have two separate systems, one for seeking and the other for liking, which is the brain’s real pleasure center. Emily Yoffe, the author of the Slate article that inspired the entry on Frontal Cortex, writes:

“But our brains are designed to more easily be stimulated than satisfied. “The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,” Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives. So nature imbued us with an unquenchable drive to discover, to explore. Stanford University neuroscientist Brian Knutson has been putting people in MRI scanners and looking inside their brains as they play an investing game. He has consistently found that the pictures inside our skulls show that the possibility of a payoff is much more stimulating than actually getting one.”

Dopamine, the well known neurotransmitter associated with the euphoric feeling and consistently tagged as being the reward drug, apparently has more effect in motivating us than in satisfying us. Rats that had their dopamine producing neurons destroyed, starved to death even when the food was right in front of them because they had lost the desire to reach for it. Berridge says that dopamine does not have satiety built into it. Rats who had dopamine flood their brains were quicker in navigating a maze to reach food than ordinary rats, but they were not any more satisfied than the ordinary rats once they found the food. Dopamine is also thought to be responsible for maintaining an internal sense of time. So, when an hour has gone by whilst surfing the web, you have dopamine to thank again. The neurotransmitter not only drives the seeking system in our brains, it also makes us lose time as we constantly stimulate ourselves following one hyperlink after the next. Novelty fuels dopamine and the next email has all the potential of being novel (it just might be the response from that gorgeous girl from the cafe agreeing to meet for dinner). Berridge says that like Pavlov’s dogs, we salivate at the ding announcing new mail.

Jonah Lehrer adds an interesting twist to this. This endless desire for curiosity doesn’t make us want to read Feynman’s Lectures on Physics or learn a new language or a skill. He says: “..we don’t treat all information equally. My salient fact is your irrelevant bit; your necessary detail is my triviality. Here’s the paradox of curiosity: I only want to know more about that which I already know about.” So, there we have it, a neurological explanation for why we develop a tic if we’re unplugged even for an instant.

Part 2: Software (or Culture)

Driving back from the library yesterday, I heard a brief segment from a program called “The Cambridge Forum” on NPR. The speaker was Carl Honore, a leading evangelist of the so called “Slow Movement”. He said something that I thought provided the cultural impetus for our behavior. Western culture (and thereby much of modern culture just about everywhere) has always thought of time as linear, of a line moving towards progress and betterment. Economics is a fundamental bedrock of modern culture. Everything we do, the way we want to be, who we want to be, is driven in part by a model of wanting more, of the philosophy that as homo economicus ‘more is better, greed is good’ (as quoted memorably by Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character in the movie Wall Street). With time being also a scarce quantity (limited by our lifetime), and the desire to make progress, we squeeze more and more into a given unit of time.

Carl Honore writes in his blog:
“…is unplugging now the ultimate luxury?

Of course, being online can be wonderful. We are hardwired to be curious and to connect and communicate. The problem is that in a world of limitless information and constant access to other people, we often don’t know when to stop.

Being “always on” is exhausting and superficial. It erodes our producitivity. It locks us into what one Microsoft research called a state of “continuous partial attention.”

Continuous partial attention. I found that a very apt description of how I find my state of mind, many times. The days I throw caution to the wind and just be completely with Maya, I feel invigorated. Her sense of wonder, her endless fascination with what we dismiss as ordinary, her complete lack of urgency (except when she’s hungry) and purposelessness make it much more refreshing if I don’t let trivia (sometimes work is trivia too) put me in a constant state of partial attention.

I ran into the slow movement via a book about Slow Food, the activity that unleashed the slow movement. I had nodded off reading the book (or so I remember) and didn’t pay any further attention to it. By visiting Carl Honore’s site and other sites associated with the Slow Movement, I see interesting insights and practices that maybe of benefit in helping fix this drug, the accelerating, unyielding desire for more.

“There is more to life than merely increasing its speed” – Mahatma Gandhi

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Of New Years And Their Resolutions

Posted on January 2, 2009
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On new year’s day, I awoke to a gray dawn. A gray that continued well into the afternoon, a gray that seemed portentous of the future of the coming year, given the global economic morass. A gray, I hope, not of the coming presidency.

A few days back, on NPR’s Science Friday, Ira Flatow interviewed a clinical psychologist, Dr. John Norcross about the nature of new year resolutions. I was astonished by Dr. Norcross’s statement that between 40 and 46 percent of those who make resolutions, succeed in keeping their resolution beyond six months. I had expected a far smaller number. Sure enough, a brief search revealed a December 2007 article in the British paper, The Telegraph, that another professor, a Dr. Richard Wiseman found that only 12 percent of the people were successful in keeping their resolution. Dr. Wiseman tracked about 3000 people who participated via the Internet – some 60 percent in the UK and the rest in the US – for around a year to arrive at his conclusion. Are the British worse off than their American counterparts in keeping resolutions ? Further search revealed a study published by Dr. Norcross in which when success was measured over a longer period, 2 years, the success rate to be only 19 percent. Dr. Wiseman’s experiment, by the way, is still open and you can join here.

I was struck by one of Dr. Wiseman advice’s: women and men must pursue different strategies, if they’re to be successful in their resolutions. He said that women were more likely to succeed when they revealed their resolutions to their social circle and were encouraged to not give up in the face of minor setbacks; men were more likely to succeed when their goals were simple and specific, rather than vague. His observation was that men are unrealistic about their expectations and so benefit from setting simple, specific goals. His mantra for succeeding in setting goals were:

  • Make only one resolution
  • Plan the resolution ahead of time. Don’t wait till the new year’s eve to come up with a goal.
  • Make new resolutions, don’t repeat previous resolutions as this will set you up for frustration
  • Men, be specific about your goals and keep them simple. Women, tell others about your resolution.
  • Make the goal personal such as being attractive to women rather than just losing weight.

What about Dr. Norcross ? What words of wisdom did he have for those who made new year resolutions ? He recommends the same set as the one Dr. Wiseman, except that he doesn’t provide any gender-specific advice. He advices publicizing your goal, keeping it simple and specific to everyone, not just a specific gender. He also recommends to not let a slip get in the way of keeping at the resolution. He quotes a study that observed that 71 percent of successful resolvers said that they felt even stronger about pursuing their goal after their first stumble. Finally, he recommends changing environments to break old habits, to not go to the bakery if you want to avoid eating sweets. Another fascinating statistic that he provides is that of those who tried to change but didn’t make a resolution, only 4 percent were successful at the end of six months. So, the chance of success increases tenfold if one makes a resolution compared to not making one!

In an article published back in 1992, in the American Psychologist, Dr. Norcross, suggests that there are five stages to making a change (what’s with this preoccupation with five in the psychology community ? five stages of change, five stages of grief ?): pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action and maintenance. Dr. Norcross suggests that those who make a resolution and make it public are well into the fourth stage of making a change and hence have a better chance of making a change compared to those who didn’t make a resolution. I suspect that for this to be true, people who make resolutions must be those who had them ready well before new year’s eve.

The brain physically changes when we learn new habits. The neurons in the prefrontal cortex and basal ganglia, two main actors in the learning process, show visible changes as new habits are acquired. The changes are so permanent, at least in the basal ganglia, that once acquired, they cannot be forgotten. They can lay dormant for a while, but when the right cues are provided, the old, long forgotten neuronal patterns fire again, and the prodigal son returns. Dr. Ann Graybiel and her team at MIT discovered this back in 2005. They also found that it was not possible to reverse the process i.e. to unlearn. The right cues caused the neurons that had changed in response to the learning to fire again. This explains why habits are so hard to break, why it is important to not recreate situations that cause the old habit to trigger again, to not go to the bakery if you to curb that sweet tooth.

The brain has two ways of processing inputs: a slow, conscious way and a fast, automatic way. As anyone who’s learnt a skill such as roller blading or downhill skiing knows, the initial motions are forced, slow and jerky while once the skill has been learned, the motion is smooth, fluid and automatic. Habit forming is slow, requires constant reinforcement in the form of rewards and constant attention. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive control, inhibiting a thought from conversion to action. But this requires self control or will power. An article published in April 2008 in the New York Times, says that willpower is like a muscle: there is only so much it can do before it fatigues. From the article:

The brain’s store of willpower is depleted when people control their thoughts, feelings or impulses, or when they modify their behavior in pursuit of goals. Psychologist Roy Baumeister and others have found that people who successfully accomplish one task requiring self-control are less persistent on a second, seemingly unrelated task.
…
For example, if you do not want to drink too much at a party, then on the way to the festivities, you should not deplete your willpower by window shopping for items you cannot afford. Taking an alternative route to avoid passing the store would be a better strategy.

This is one reason why new habits are so hard to form and why it is essential to keep the resolutions simple, specific and single. The good news of the same study, however, is that like muscles, willpower can be built up through exercise. A study speculates that even an exercise such as brushing your teeth with your other hand for two weeks can improve your willpower. And once willpower improves, it can be used to deal with more curbing other bad habits. The NYT article states that people who stuck to an exercise regimen for two months also reported reducing impulsive spending, alcohol and junk food consumption and smoking. While the reason for the increase in willpower with practice is not well understood, the article speculates:

Perhaps neurons in the frontal cortex, which is responsible for planning behavior, or in the anterior cingulate cortex, which is associated with cognitive control, use blood sugar more efficiently after repeated challenges. Or maybe one of the chemical messengers that neurons use to communicate with one another is produced in larger quantities after it has been used up repeatedly, thereby improving the brain’s willpower capacity.

I cannot remember if I ever practiced making new year’s resolutions. The Dalai Lama once said, “There is no world peace without inner peace”. Inner peace continues to be my every year’s resolution, every day’s resolution. I, for one, wish inner peace to all peoples in the coming year.

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Cycling and The Nature of Success

Posted on December 7, 2008
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Since September of ’97, I’ve been either cycling, using some form of public transportation or carpooling to work. Soon after coming to the US, I began to be exposed to the consequences of the much desired and flaunted American lifestyle, consequences such as loss of biodiversity, soil loss, pollution and global warming. I had started volunteering with this extremely unusual, far thinking and radical non-profit organization, Magic. Even as a child, I was struck by Gandhi’s integrity, was haunted by his line: “Be the change you want to see in the world”. Like him, I wanted to live a life in synchronicity with my thoughts. Working with the folks at Magic, I was face-to-face for the first time in my life, with people who seemed to possess the same kind of integrity. They were all extremely well-educated and most had been very successful in their professional lives. The founder had started transforming his life at the height of his success, disillusioned by the seeming good life that is so constantly projected as the root of true happiness in this country (and the world over). Here they were, now living without a car, bicycling everywhere they needed to go locally and rarely venturing beyond. It seemed to me that not driving a car would be the simplest way for me to start reducing my ecological footprint.

The first time I biked to work, I was still at this small company, going nowhere. The job had been initially interesting, but then petered out. The company was located in one of the few tall buildings in this area, the executives officed on the top floor of the building, with a spectacular view of the city of San Jose and the brown, brush-covered mountains of East Bay. During sunset, the mountains sometimes looked golden. One time, I had taken Shanthala to the top floor and we had stood there for a while, admiring the view. We were both still new to the country. She had been happy that I had found a job that had been substantially better than the one I had come to the US for. Now, six months later, I was looking for a job again. I was earning a fairly paltry sum and we barely managed to make ends meet. Shanthala was to start applying to residency programs very soon. In those days, it was not uncommon to apply to as many as 200 schools with the hope that you’d land at least one. We labored under some constraints on the choice of the school. Besides being a good school, it had to be in a place where I could find a job and the school had to sponsor Shanthala’s H1 visa, a rarity in a country where most residency programs only provided the J1 visa, a visa that required its applicant to return to the home country for two years or work in a underserved area of the US for three before they could convert their visa into something more permanent.

In any case, one early summer weekend evening, when daylight stretched to nine at night, I set out to bike to this workplace, about five miles away. I planned to follow the same route as my drive, along a busy expressway, but one that had a broad shoulder and dedicated bike lane. I was bushed by the time I arrived at the workplace. The parking lot was mostly deserted and I sat outside the building, collecting my breath, a little apprehensive about the bike back. Shanthala hadn’t yet learnt to drive and so I had no choice but to bike back. After a while, I got on the bike and started the journey back. I had to go over a highway overpass and as I huffed up the overpass, a car zipped closely by and switched lanes right in front of me, the driver honking at me as he deserted the expressway for the highway. I was startled by the honking, surprised by what I thought was rude behavior not practiced in this country. I got worried about going over this overpass everyday, especially during a busy weekday when people seem even less patient in their hurry to get home.

I didn’t bike to work again. I switched companies, but continued to drive to work. A friend finished his PhD and came to work for the same company, even moving into the same apartment complex as the one we lived in. Biking to work was a little farther now, about six and half miles. My friend had biked everywhere in the little university town he lived in before coming here and he was eager to continue the practice. So, in his company, I set out biking to work every day.

Soon after, Shanthala started her residency at Stanford University and became the primary driver. I was stuck with biking to work or sometimes carpooling with my biking partner. I found routes that were more bike friendly, that were less dangerous than the one I had first started using. Gradually, biking the six miles or so each way became easier. The office had showers in the same building and so changing after getting to work was not a problem.

A year or so later, we moved out of the apartment, to get closer to Stanford. There was a train station that I could bike to, about a mile and half away and take the train to a point from where a company shuttle would pick me up and drop me off at work. This was a convenient arrangement, only constrained by shuttle and train times. With little or no recourse to carpooling, I biked more often, come rain or come shine.

One day, I decided to bike all the way to work, a distance of about eleven miles. I was in better shape now and could do this much more easily compared to my rather paltry first effort. As the saying goes, the hardest part of any activity is getting started. Soon, I was biking one way to work, about two or three times a week, using the train for the other times. I biked when it was freezing, when it was pouring and on that summer day when record high temperatures were set. If it was raining badly before I started from work, I’d try and hitch a ride with a colleague and Shanthala would drop me to the train station the next day.

When we decided to put down our roots a little bit by buying a house, Shanthala was adamant that the house be close to public transportation. Without it, some days you’ll be tired or it’ll be pouring and you’ll not want to bike and very soon, we’ll end up owning two cars, she said. How wise she was. We eventually ended up getting a house just a few blocks from our old place. Meanwhile, the local public transportation started a light rail (a tram) service that started near where we lived and took me straight to work without requiring the use of a shuttle. As part of the expansion plans of the company, the local city council got my company to provide passes to its employees to encourage the use of public transportation. So, I was traveling to work free of cost. Laptops became more commonplace at work and I began to use the time in the train to continue working.

Not having a second car made it very easy to bike. This may seem counter-intuitive. After all, the classical wisdom is that the more choice we have, the better it is for us, the happier we are. But a lot of studies have begun to show that we actually get paralyzed when faced with a multitude of choices, that we’re actually more stressed in the presence of many choices. In one study, customers in a local food store were allowed to sample gourmet jams, which they could then purchase. In one case, customers were offered six different varieties to sample while in another, they were offered thirty. The study found that while more people decided to sample when there were thirty samples, the number of samples people tried were about the same as when there were only six samples. More interestingly, only about 3 percent of the people who sampled thirty items ended up purchasing something, compared to thirty percent who purchased something, when they were only six samples. Another study found that compared to people who had the choice of returning what they bought, the people who did not have that choice were more satisfied with their purchase. Books such as Barry Schwartz’s “Paradox of Choice” synthesize the research on this subject and present the information in a highly readable way. For those who want a glimpse of this without getting the book, there is an online video on the subject, part of the reputed TED series of lectures.

We became fast friends with one of our neighbors. They both consulted from home to spend more time with their kids. They had two cars, one of which rarely got used. There were days when I was so pressed for time at work, that I’d borrow their car to go to work. It takes me only 15 minutes one way if I drive while it takes 45 minutes if I take the light rail to get to work. So, it clearly saved me a lot of time on busy days. They were only a few such days, but still the luxury of having the option to borrow their car was advantageous.

I’d show up at customer meetings and company offsites in my bike. Everybody joked about how diligent I was with my biking. If the meetings stretched on late into the night, someone offered a ride home. If we had to go to a restaurant, people remembered that I biked and would offer me a ride to the restaurant.

Once I started working part time, my days at work became even more frenetic. A colleague at work who lives a few blocks from our house and with whom I had biked a few times, suggested that we carpool. So, for the past year and a half, I’ve mostly been carpooling to work. He prefers to get to work much later in the day than me, but almost always accommodates my meeting schedules and leaves early if I need to. The only condition he has is that I give him a wake up call. He says that he enjoys carpooling with me because of the conversations we have. The days he is unable to make it, I walk about twenty minutes to the light rail station. I usually get a ride home or Shanthala comes to the light rail station to pick me up. Two days ago, I was late for my meeting as I set out walking. It was cold and foggy. Our gardener offered to drop me off at the station, which I accepted. Once, Maya’s nanny dropped me off at the station.

I’m saved in this big world by unforseen
friends, or times when only a glance
from a passenger beside me, or just the tired
branch of a willow inclining toward earth,
may teach me how to join earth and sky. – William Stafford, Grace Abounding

Malcolm Gladwell is one of the rock stars of non-fiction. His previous two books, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink” are enormously popular. Just recently, his third book, “Outliers – The Story of Success” came out. The New York Times review of the book starts off with:

In 1984, a young man named Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto and moved to the United States to try his hand at journalism. Thanks to his uncommonly clear writing style and keen eye for a story, he quickly landed a job at The Washington Post. After less than a decade at The Post, he moved up to the pinnacle of literary journalism, The New Yorker. There, he wrote articles full of big ideas about the hidden patterns of ordinary life, which then became grist for two No. 1 best-selling books. In the vast world of nonfiction writing, he is as close to a singular talent as exists today.

Or at least that’s one version of the story of Malcolm Gladwell. Here is another:

In 1984, a young man named Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto and moved to the United States to try his hand at journalism. No one could know it then, but he arrived with nearly the perfect background for his time. His mother was a psychotherapist and his father a mathematician. Their professions pointed young Malcolm toward the behavioral sciences, whose popularity would explode in the 1990s. His mother also just happened to be a writer on the side. So unlike most children of mathematicians and therapists, he came to learn, as he would later recall, “that there is beauty in saying something clearly and simply.” As a journalist, he plumbed the behavioral research for optimistic lessons about the human condition, and he found an eager audience during the heady, proudly geeky ’90s. His first book, “The Tipping Point,” was published in March 2000, just days before the Nasdaq peaked.

These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, in that it gives individual characteristics — talent, hard work, Horatio Alger-like pluck — the starring role. The second version doesn’t necessarily deny these characteristics, but it does sublimate them. The protagonist is not a singularly talented person who took advantage of opportunities. He is instead a talented person who took advantage of singular opportunities.

Growing up, I was enamored by Ayn Rand’s protagonists, Howard Roark, Francisco D’Anconia, Hank Rearden and the hero of heroes, John Galt. I admired their independent spirit and brilliance. I bought into the myth of a “self-made man”. But as my story of biking illustrates, my success in persevering rests on my fortune of being the beneficiary of much kindness, from friends to strangers, of Shanthala’s wisdom in selecting a house so that we wouldn’t be forced to get a second car. We are rarely self-made men. While a lot depends on us, as much if not more depends on the ecosystem that we’re surrounded by. If we lived in a place where it snowed, if Shanthala had not argued for a house close to public transportation, if bicycle activists had not fought for a separate bike lane, if I had not met Magic, I may not have succeeded in avoiding buying a second car. I’m glad that there is a book by someone immensely popular dealing with this subject, of attempting to shatter the myth that many of us are made to grow up with. Gladwell writes:

“It is not the brightest who succeed, nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

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Parental Control

Posted on November 27, 2008
by


Since Maya was born, people have been constantly opining which one of us she looks most like. Some see in her the spitting image of my family’s characteristics, some see Shanthala in her, some say that she looks like me but her eyes are unlike either of us, Shanthala herself says that Maya’s chin is unlike either of us. Comments pass from her features to her skin color. She’s much fairer than either of you, some have said while others have said that she has Shanthala’s skin tone. And then they’re amazed at her height (she’s in the 95th percentile for her age and sex) and wonder where that characteristic came from.

Shanthala and I joke (with a hint of seriousness) about the roots of Maya’s seeming impatience or her easy, smiling nature. My parents compare her to my sister in terms of how easy she seems to be to care for. Many say that girls are easier to raise than boys. Maya had a lot of eczema till recently. While she never seemed bothered by it, Shanthala and her parents worried that her skin maybe as sensitive as Shanthala’s was and that she may suffer from skin irritations.

All this is boringly normal, this ongoing back-and-forth between who a child looks more like and which characteristic comes from whom. But it appears that the battle rages inside in very fascinating ways.

It is well understood that a child inherits half the genes from the biological mother and half from the biological father (in a world of donor eggs, donor sperms, surrogate mothers and adopted children, the simple terms mother and father have become too narrow to capture the reality). Typically both copies of the genes are active in the child. But in a less than one percentage of them, one of the copies is turned off. In some cases, it is the mother’s copy that is turned off and in some cases, it is the father’s. Wait, you say, isn’t this what I learned in school about dominant and recessive alleles ? About how blue eyes are a dominant gene over brown eyes and so gets expressed ? Isn’t this what you’re talking about ? Sure, this is true only if both copies differ from each other, not if they’re similar. Also, the discussion revolved around whether a particular gene was dominant over the other.

Here is where a newly discovered technique differs. In some small percentage of cases, the same gene sequence will express a different behavior in the offspring depending on which parent’s copy is turned off. For example, if the copy comes from the mother it produces blue eyes and if it comes from the father, it produces brown eyes (the color of the eyes is used for illustration, it is not a real example of this technique). This seems absurd. The same gene sequence should produce the same behavior, independent of the source of the gene. This mechanism of inheritance where the behavior is determined by which copy of the parent the gene comes from is called gene imprinting (or genomic imprinting) i.e. which parent’s imprint is retained in the offspring’s copy. It is now considered a separate process of inheritance compared to the classical Mendelian genetic inheritance.

But wait, gene imprinting gets even more interesting. In an interview with the magazine Edge, the evolutionary geneticist explains:

This is a complicated process because the imprint can be erased and reset. For example, the maternal genes in my body when I pass them on to my children are going to be paternal genes having paternal behavior. If my daughter passes on paternal genes to her children, even though she got the gene as a paternal gene from me it would be a maternal gene to her own offspring. Molecular biologists are particularly interested in understanding the nature of these imprints, and how it is possible to modify DNA in some way that is heritable but can then be reset.

This would be merely fascinating if it didn’t have startling consequences on the offspring. There are children who always smile and laugh, but sadly also have symptoms that are similar to those with severe autism and they mostly never learn to read or write. Some other children almost not nurse as infants forcing them to be tube fed but in a few years time, they develop an insatiable appetite and develop schizophrenia. The first suffer from a genetic disorder called Angelman syndrome and the latter suffer from a genetic disorder called Prader-Willi Syndrome, the first is caused by mutations to the paternal gene imprinting and the latter is caused by mutations to maternal gene imprinting. Many scientists now speculate gene imprinting to be the cause of many problems that plague us humans from asthma and diabetes to cancer. The reason for this is that one of the copies from the parent is bad, the other copy is present to be used. But in case of gene imprinting, the good copy is turned off and only the bad copy retained, making the offspring more susceptible to disorders.

In 1999, David Haig offered an intriguing hypothesis that suggested that in the battle for imprinting the child, each parental genome approached the union with a view that was beneficial to their side. Evolutionarily, for a mother, it is important to spread her efforts amongst all her children, striking a balance between putting all her eggs into a single child and spreading herself too thin by having too many of them. For a father on the other hand, it was more useful to ensure that his child got the most attention (and resources) from the mother compared to other children (biologically, monogamy is a culturally induced trance, and one that is frequently broken). Thus, mother’s side of the gene pool was growth moderation while the father’s side was growth promotion.

Interestingly, gene imprinting is not known in animals other than mammals. Platypus, for example, the earliest mammals, do not have any genes that are imprinted.

In a recent article in the science magazine, Discover, the excellent science writer, Carl Zimmer, explains all this and takes it one step further. He quotes the work of two evolutionary biologists, Bernard Crespi and Christopher Badcock, who suggest that “our minds too are shaped by this battle between the parental genes”. They hypothesize that autism and schizophrenia are the two faces of this evolutionary conflict between the parental genes expressed in the brain. Carl writes:

One of the most striking contrasts between autism and schizophrenia is how they affect the ability to understand others. Autistic people have a difficult time figuring out what other people are feeling. Schizophrenic people, on the other hand, sometimes do too good a job. They may come to believe that a refrigerator is talking to them, for example, or that people are conspiring against them.

Crespi and Badcock propose that these symptoms result from the genetic conflict. Empathetic children can see how frazzled they’re making their mothers and how much attention their siblings need. Maternal genes should therefore boost our abilities to get inside other people’s heads. Paternal genes, on the other hand, may benefit by reducing these distractions from the business of getting more resources from mothers.

Life is such a wondrous miracle. I’ve often times felt puzzled about how people can accept a simple explanation such as god when there are such fascinating explorations and reasons which can explain how this miracle actually happens. Most of the time, all goes well and we end up with a healthy, normal child. Most of the time. On this Thanksgiving Day, I want to offer thanks and express gratitude for the turns of time that have placed Shanthala and I where we are, with who we are and how we are. And of course for the healthy gift of life that almost didn’t happen, Maya.

References:
- Imprinted And More Equal, American Scientist, 2007
- GeneImprint: The main technical website that discusses everything pertaining to gene imprinting
- Alleles & Inheritance: A webpage discussing the difference between normal and imprinting inheritance

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