Mind Hacks, one of the blogs I frequent, put out a link to this article by the British Psychological Society, asking a some leading psychologists to write a few words about the one thing that they still don’t understand about themselves. I found their words a mix of the interesting and mundane, some even disappointing. Some common themes echoed by more than one psychologist are:
Time Management: Why do we indulge in magical thinking (wishing will make it so) when it comes to taking on additional work or estimating how long any activity will take ? Why do we overcommit ?
Knowledge and Realization: Despite having published many articles on the subject, why do these psychologists fail to apply the conclusions of that research to their own lives ? As Norbert Schwarz puts it: “What makes the immediate experience so powerful that I fail to apply my own theorizing until some blogger asks a question that brings it to mind? “
The Nature of Individual Differences: Why are some of us better at some things and not others ? Have more self-control and discipline about some activities, but not others ? Why do two children growing up in the same household turn out so different ?
I was underwhelmed by the statement of Alison Gopnik, a leading developmental psychologist in the news recently:
“I’ve had three of my own children and spent my professional life thinking about children. And yet I still find my relation to my children deeply puzzling. Our love for children is so unlike any other human emotion. … We are totally devoted to them when they are little and yet the most we can expect in return when they grow up is that they regard us with bemused and tolerant affection. We are ambitious for them, we want them to thrive so badly. And yet we know that we have to grant them the autonomy to make their own mistakes.”
I was also puzzled by her statement: “I fell in love with my babies so quickly and profoundly, almost completely independently of their particular qualities. And yet 20 years later I was (more or less) happy to see them go – I had to be happy to see them go.”
That she could not be attribute this to culture surprised me. In India and many other non-First world countries, parents live in extended families with their children or at least close enough that they’re never far away from their children and they’re happy with that arrangement. And in the case of parents of immigrants like us, the sadness at not seeing their children and grandchildren frequently and being a more integrated part of our lives is as great as the distance that separates us, nay much greater.
A funny observation is made by Richard Wiseman: “My guess is that the creation of comedy will remain a mystery for centuries, although at some point in the not too distant future, I suspect someone will carry out functional MRI scans of comedians creating jokes, and claim to have identified the part of the brain responsible for producing humour. Now, that will be funny.”
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