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Rand Shrugged

Posted on November 1, 2009
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I was studying for my Bachelor’s degree in Electronics and Communication in a (then) second-rate college in little provincial town called Davangere. I don’t remember who it was that suggested I read Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. They thought I might enjoy it.

Fountainhead became the most influential book of my life till then. I had never read anything like it. I had never come across a character as idealistic as Howard Roark. He became my hero, my role model, even more so than John Galt of Ayn Rand’s magnum opus, “Atlas Shrugged”. Here was a hero who was a hero not because he could kill better than others, but was exceptionally good at what he did and brooked no criticism from the lesser mortals. His integrity was an outgrowth of his brilliance. He was loved by a brilliant, beautiful, bold woman called Dominique Francon precisely because of his brains and his integrity. She didn’t care how he looked.

I fell for Ayn Rand, hook, line and sinker. I couldn’t get enough of her books. I devoured just about everything she had written, fiction and non-fiction. I shared her condemnation of the role of government and her denunciation of its attempts to reduce the rights of brilliant individuals. We, bright people, owed nothing to nobody. We were who we were only by the dint of our brilliance.

Based on my conviction of her ideals, I refused to take scholarship money offered by the state government for completing my bachelor’s degree project. I was pleased with how well I had executed the project but felt that there was nothing innovative about it and so was unworthy of any scholarship. That they would choose to sponsor my project was a reflection of how incompetent the government was, I felt. And how inefficiently the taxpayer money was used.

My project mates were aghast as was just about everybody else who heard my stance. They called me crazy. One of my project mates said that he’d take all the government money for himself if I didn’t want it or that he’d split it with the other project mate. I told him that I’d fight him tooth and nail, if he tried it. The project I had chosen had little capital expenditure needed and I told him that I’d spend all that money out of my own pocket, but wouldn’t accept government funds. Only Shanthala said that if I felt that strongly about not taking government money, I should stick to my guns. In my fantasies, I was Howard Roark, and she Dominique Francon.

I carried Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged everywhere with me. I read them both, cover to cover, at least thrice. I reread my favorite pieces several times. My love and admiration of America knew no bounds, mostly on account of her books.

Fast forward a few years. When attempting to read Fountainhead again, I was struck this time by how one dimensional the characters were. They were almost completely flawless. If they had a flaw, it was that they either were less perfect than the hero. They were not humans. I also began to see the number of ways in which others played a role in my being where I was. This whole “I owe nobody nothing” started seeming shallow and illusory. Being brilliant at my job seemed insufficient grounds to be a good human being. Capitalism was not what it was made out to be.

Today, Rand remains the first writer who demonstrated the power of ideas to me, but her ideas themselves do not speak to me. At least not a great deal of it.

This week, two biographies of Ayn Rand were released and reviewed by NYT. The better one, according to the critics, is Anne Heller’s “Ayn Rand and the World She Made”. Reading one of the reviews, i was struck by the following paragraph:

“Rand’s particular intellectual contribution, the thing that makes her so popular and so American, is the way she managed to mass market elitism — to convince so many people, especially young people, that they could be geniuses without being in any concrete way distinguished. Or, rather, that they could distinguish themselves by the ardor of their commitment to Rand’s teaching. The very form of her novels makes the same point: they are as cartoonish and sexed-up as any best seller, yet they are constantly suggesting that the reader who appreciates them is one of the elect.”

I was not the only one to be so taken by Ayn Rand and her ideas. According to the article, she’s enjoying a resurgence in the wake of Obama’s administration. Alan Greenspan was one of her ardent admirers. Atlas Shrugged was named as the most influential book, second only to the Bible, by the readers of a poll conducted by the American Library of Congress in the 1990s.

Reading the reviews of her books, I was thrown back to those heady days of my youth and the spell she had cast with her words.

Shanthala had never cared much for Ayn Rand. She read the Fountainhead eagerly and expressed her surprise at why I had liked it so much. She liked the book, but was not spellbound as I was. In return, she offered me Harper Lee’s “To Kill A Mockingbird”. This is my all time favorite book, she said. This is the one I’ll keep returning to over the years. Disappointed as I was with her less than enthusiastic response to Fountainhead, I curiously read her recommendation. I could barely finish it. I told her that I couldn’t believe how she could see anything heroic in Atticus Finch, the father of the protagonist. I was even more aghast at my love for her. Was I right about her, I wondered, if she could find Atticus more heroic than Roark or Galt ?

Several years later, I reread the book. I couldn’t believe how I could not have admired Atticus Finch. He leapfrogged over Roark and Galt with ease and remains in my pantheon of most uplifting, heroic  characters in literature. As for Roark and Galt, they joined the pantheon of Superman and Phantom, cartoon heroes that I admired back when I was child. They didn’t make the leap from boyhood to manhood.

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Lying

Posted on August 29, 2009
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“All kids lie. Almost all kids will experiment with lying at least by the age of four. And if they start when they’re younger, you might think, oh no, my kid’s lacking morality. Actually, it’s a sign of their nascent intelligence because it’s more complicated to hold in your head, as a child, the truth and an alternative reality and then try to sustain that alternative reality.”

Wouldn’t it be parent heaven if the kids listened to us as they grew up ? That we didn’t have to deal with the self-assertion and rebellion of the terrible twos ? That we didn’t have to worry what are our children lying about ? That there were no sibling rivalry ? That we didn’t have to deal with being alienated during the teenage angst ?

From an evolutionary perspective, each of these stages have a reason for their existence. Sometime between years 1 and 2, a child begins to understand that what she wants is not necessarily what her caregivers want her to have. She begins to learn that she is a different individual than her caregiver. Till then, usually the baby and the caregiver are one, with the caregiver tending to just about every thing the child demands.

With co-author Ashley Merryman, Po Bronson – whose article on praising kids I wrote about a few entries ago – explores some of these issues in a new book called “Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children”.

Po Bronson says that teaching kids that telling the truth doesn’t always have negative repercussions is better at curbing lying than telling them that they would be punished if they lied. He says in an interview on NPR (National Public Radio):

“Well, 78 percent of American parents think that their teenagers can tell them anything. But the teens completely disagree, because while the average teen might be lying to their parents about 12 of the 36 common topics, even the teens who lie the least are still lying. They’re lying about five topics out of the 36.

Parents today imagine that there’s a tradeoff between being strict and being permissive and that the benefit of some permissiveness is honesty, that you’re going to hear the truth and not be kept in the dark. So you’ll be able to help. The science says that those permissive parents do not hear more truth from their kids.

And the best way to hear truth from kids is to set a few rules, consistently enforce them and then this is one that’s going to sound controversial, Robert, parents who negotiate occasionally with their teens. We need to see that some arguing with parents, a moderate amount of argument is actually a good thing, not a bad thing. That arguing is a sign of respect, not of disrespect.

Because to the teenager, they have two choices: telling the truth and leading to an argument or just outright lying. Arguing over the actual rules is a better alternative and very different thing than arguing over your authority as a parent to set rules at all.”

White lies are a fundamental fabric of our contemporary society. Children, who learn so much by imitating, can’t distinguish between the social white lie that we so casually utter and the lie that we get so upset with them about. What’s worse is we initiate them into the habit of lying. “Don’t ask for more even if you’re hungry, it’s not polite”.

A recent book on lying called “The Liar In Your Life” by Robert Feldman delves into this habit of lying. The startling fact is how much we lie and are lied to and how difficult it is for us to separate fact from fiction. Based on his research, Feldman concludes that most people lie at least thrice in a 10 minute conversation (other studies which have concluded similarly). He also says that most people don’t know that they’re lying and that his participants had to watch the videotapes of their conversations to realize how much they were lying. “It’s nice to meet you”, “How are you”, lies roll off our tongue thick and fast. And we’re not alone. The animal kingdom is replete with deception. That most of us seem to gravitate almost naturally towards that right amount of lying that make us good spouses, good citizens without tipping overboard into sociopaths is a sign to me that deception has deep biological roots.

Lying has more beneficial advantages than just being a social grease. Studies have shown that depressed people are far more honest about themselves and what they can control than non-depressed people. “Fake it till you feel it” or “Fake it till you make it” are gospel among those who teach courses on succeeding, building self-confidence or building hard-to-build new habits such as exercising. Placebos have been known to work in place of real medicine.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we ought to lie all the time. Trust is a key element in any good relationship. Cry wolf too much and no one will believe you and you’ll become somewhat of a social pariah. Feldman says that lying is much more easier and permissible in contemporary culture. For example, a study by Josephson Institute, a non-profit studying ethical issues, found that 64% of students cheated during a test, up from 60% in 2006. We live in a culture where the pressure to succeed, to be overachievers, is relentless and starts just about immediately after birth. We speak with awe everytime our little one reaches a milestone faster than the average. “Oh, my daughter started speaking when she was 10 months old”, “She has the vocabulary of a five year old” and on and on and on. Lying is one way to blow off some of that pressure. Credit card debt is another lie, an illusion that we have more than we really do, driven by a desire to acquire material artifacts in larger numbers than ever before in history, with a view that with their acquisition, comes happiness. Dealing with honesty also requires time and commitment, two items in scarce quantity in our lives today. No wonder our culture encourages and eases deception.

As a parent, these questions and issues take on a larger relevance and urgency than when I was not a parent. Learning to encourage honesty by not shooting the messenger, actively encouraging debate and disagreement, but also promoting conflict resolution may benefit Maya. But books like Po Bronson’s seem to raise doubts on folklore such as permissive parents will hear more of the truth from their kids.

Honesty, is such a lonely word
Everyone is so untrue
Honesty, is hardly ever heard
And mostly what I need from you – Billy Joel

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Animal Minds

Posted on August 11, 2009
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There are many books that address animal behavior and attempt to explain them. I was disappointed by many of them, because they didn’t seem rigorous in their approach to the explanation and many other explanations seemed possible. Some others were not as well written and easy to put down. The one book that illuminated the landscape brilliantly, was well written and consequently is the one that I highly recommend to anyone interested in animal minds (and baby minds) is Marc Hauser’s “Wild Minds: What Animals Really Think”. While I think the book seems a tad too certain about the results analyzed and I remain skeptical of some of the conclusions drawn, it nevertheless remains a book I deem worthy of curling up with.

I had read the book a while back and I remembered it again when I was writing the entry “Birdbrain” on my blog. I stopped at the local library to jot these few passages from the book that will hopefully be tantalizing enough for a reader of this blog to get the book. If nothing else, the few passages I’ve selected will hopefully illuminate the kind of thinking that is required to attempt an answer to what animals think.

“I will show how insights from evolutionary theory and cognitive science have begun to revolutionize our understanding of animal minds. Animals do have thoughts and emotions. To understand what animals think and feel (italics are the authors), however, we must look at the environments in which they evolved. All animals are equipped with a set of mental tools for solving ecological and social problems. Some of the tools for thinking are universal, shared by insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, including humans. The universal toolkit provides animals with a basic capacity to recognize objects, count and navigate. Divergence from the universal toolkit occurs when species confront unique ecological or social problems”.
…
The only way to understand how and what animals think is to evaluate their behavior in light of both universal and specialized toolkits, mechanisms of the mind designed to solve problems. And the only way to evaluate the validity of this approach is to test our intuitions about animal minds with systematic observations and well-controlled experiments”.

Later in the book, he provides an example of such evaluation. He mentions an observation that he made back in 1987, in a forest in Uganda, while observing three chimps, a mother, a son and her one year old infant daughter. The son departed after feeding on a tree, leaping onto a tree some distance away. The mother followed, but the daughter did not, staying back, screaming. After waiting a while, the mother went back to the daughter and swinging the tree back and forth, managed to reach the tree the son had jumped on to. She then made herself a bridge between the tree where her daughter was and the one where her son was. The daughter felt safe crawling on her mother to reach the other tree. Hauser writes after describing this scene:

“What I witnessed was magical and immediately invoked a suite of questions concerning maternal care. How often do chimpanzees create natural bridges ? Do they create a mental image of their body bridging a gap in the trees before actually stretching across the canopy ? Do they create bridges for any yearling, juvenile, or adult in need ? How does an individual recognize another in need ? Does a mother empathize with her daughter when she is stuck behind, screaming ? Would she empathize with an unrelated yearling frozen in the same position ? To address these questions, we would need to make additional observations. The insistence on replication is not a silly scientific ritual, performed by priests in white lab coats. It is a tool for understanding whether an event is common or rare, and why it occurred.”

The book is filled with such interesting anecdotes, questions raised by these anecdotes, further studies designed to answer these questions and conclusions. He writes in the prologue:

“The following series of questions and answers will inform our discussion.

  • Do animals think ? Are animals conscious ? Are some animals more intelligent than others ?

I think these are unhelpful questions because they are vague, relying on general concepts that are often defined on the basis of what humans do. In this spirit, I will generally avoid using the words, “think”, “conscious” and “intelligent”. Instead, I will ask about mental phenomena that are more precisely specified.
……

  • Do animals have emotions ?
  • Do animals communicate ?
  • Are animals guided by instinct ?
  • Do animals have rules by which they abide, and sometimes break ?”

And finally, here is why this book may be of interest to people interested in baby minds:

“In contrast to most books on animal thought and emotion, the ideas I develop here depend critically on recent findings in the neurosciences and studies of human infant development. Studies of the brain, which can be explained without technical jargon, are critical for our exploration of the animal mind and its evolution. Several authors claim that animal thought is limited or nonexistent because animals lack language. … I argue that language is not necessary for certain kinds of thought, and that the most profitable comparison among species is between animals and human infants.”

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Robert Sapolsky

Posted on July 27, 2009
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I was thirteen when I sank my teeth into my first science book, George Gamow’s classic, “One, Two Three,…Infinity”. A friend of my father, taking pity on my Erich Von Daniken collection, loaned the book to me. “Read real science, Dinesh”, he said. “Why ? What is wrong with what Daniken says ?”, I bristled. I had just discovered godlessness and thought that he wanted to brainwash me back into godliness. I picked up Gamow with some skepticism. Though a little hard to follow, the writing grabbed me like a thriller. Soon, I was poring over Isaac Asimov’s non-fiction works. His book “The Collapsing Universe” made a lasting impression. Black holes and big bang and universes that collapsed only to be reborn again! Far more fascinating than those mythologies I was raised with, I thought, because the wonder was of the real kind, not the believing kind.

Till I turned 22, my existence was defined by the limits imposed by small provincial towns of the 70′s and 80′s India, towns that my father found himself transfered to. One such constraint was the complete lack of a decent bookstore. Pulp fiction for adults and some Enid Blyton for kids marked the boundaries of literacy. Once I graduated past Enid Blyton, I found nothing to bridge the chasm between her and James Hadley Chase. And forget about non-fiction works. In those backwaters, I couldn’t even create a list of books that I wanted to read! The public libraries in most of these towns was filled with “classics”, rows upon empty, dusty rows of books that hardly interested the general populace. Any denizens were usually older people finding ways to kill time or maybe some college students looking for textbooks to borrow or reference. Only when we went to Bangalore could I attempt to quench this hunger for books. Gangaram’s Book Bureau, located conveniently on Bangalore’s main thoroughfare, M.G. Road, became a favorite haunt. Once inside, I found myself so half-crazed from this hunger for books that the rows and rows of books only made me dizzy. Like a starving man who finds himself in front of a sumptuous buffet, I ran from row to row. Which one to pick, which one to reject. So many to read, so little money to buy, so little time to decide. The experience was simultaneously intensely exciting and painful.

Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” and “Dragons of Eden”, Bertrand Russell’s “ABC of Relativity”, Gary Zukav’s “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters” and Fritjof Capra’s “Tao of Physics” are the science books that I most remember from those days. Physics and cosmology were worthy of reading as I moved swiftly past the biology titles.

As I grew older, I moved away from these works into reading more about history and politics. My political awakening came rather late in my life, well past my thirties. The lack of political discussions in my house (The emergency Indira Gandhi declared unconstitutionally barely got mentioned) probably contributed to this singular lack of interest in politics. As I grew older still, my interest swung back to science, but this time to biological sciences such as evolution and cognitive science, how we became who we are and what keeps us here. Melvin Konner’s classic work, “The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit” got me started down this current road.

In this realm, I encountered several lucid expositors. Carl Zimmer, Matt Ridley, V.S. Ramachandran, Michael Ruse and Daniel Gilbert easily come to mind. To read just about anything written by these folks, I consider a worthy use of my time. Robert Sapolsky is the most recent addition to this pantheon. I had heard of Sapolsky’s work “Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers” while helping prepare the coursework for the course at Stanford University taught by the non-profit organization I volunteer with, Magic. Being all the rage at the time, I never managed to get a copy from the local public library. A couple of years went by and a month or so ago, looking for some other book, I ran into Sapolsky’s “Monkeyluv and Other Essays On Our Lives As Animals”. Right from the start, the book reached out and grabbed me. Wonderfully witty writing, lucid explanations of complex subjects and a wonderful choice of subjects made him delectably unputdownable. While we stayed at our friend’s place for a month, I ran into his other book, “The Trouble With Testosterone” which only solidified his reputation with me. Writing such as his, makes me envious, makes me want to stop writing in disgust. What’s the point of writing when you have such talented people, I ask myself sometimes.

Here are some samples of his writing:

“As a scientist doing scads of important research, I am busy, very busy. What with all those midnight experiments in the lab, all that eureka-ing, I hardly have time to read the journals. Nonetheless, I stopped everything to thorougly study the May 10, 1999 issue of People magazine, the double special issue, “The 50 Most Beautiful People in the World”. It was fabulous. In addition to full-color spreads and helpful grooming tips, the editors of People have gone after one of the central, pressing issues of our time. “Nature or Nurture ?”

“As most newlyweds quickly learn, intimate relationships, even the most blissful, can buzz with tension. Couples typically find themselves struggling over money, in-laws, ex-lovers, and how much the woman’s placenta should grow when she is eventually pregnant. That last one’s a killer.”

“We all have encountered Reinhold Neibuhr’s serenity prayer at some point: ‘God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference’. Behavioral biology is often the scientific pursuit of that prayer.”

Each essay starts with some mundane observation and then dives deeper to reveal some brilliant nugget of biological research.

In all of biology, evolution and instinct are top dog these days, taking over years of rule by behaviorism. A lot of science is reductionism, the attempt to understand large, complex systems by breaking them down into smaller, more understandable subcomponents. The attempt to define all physical laws using quantum mechanics is one example of such a method. In biology, sequencing the human genome is considered by many scientific and lay people to be the key to understanding human behavior. “Gene for happiness” found, reads one headline while another proclaims, “The God Gene found”. We’re nothing more than the sum of our genes. If a cause has a strong genetic component, there is squat the environment can do, so the proclamation goes. In both “Monkeyluv” and “The Trouble with Testosterone”, Sapolsky eviscerates this mania and style of thinking (The New Scientist had a similar article about taking a more nuanced approach to Dawkins’ Selfish Gene and Extended Phenotype metaphors).

“One of the most important concepts in all of biology is that you can’t really ever state what the effect is of a particular gene, or what the effect is of a particular environment. You can only consider how a particular gene and a particular environment interact. Gene/environment interactions are so important that you can’t be taught the biologist secret handshake until you use the phrase in conversation at least once a day”, he writes in Monkeyluv, in the introduction to one of the three threads than runs through the book. The second important thread that the book deals with is the “intertwining of our brains and bodies, their mutual capcity to regulate each other”. The final subject addressed in the book is the intertwining effects of biology and culture on each other. Meaty subjects, but dispatched with wit, erudition and lucidity.

“The Trouble With Testosterone” is a collection of 17 essays on “the biology of the human predicament” dealing with some aspect or the other of human behavior and the roots of such behavior in the animal kingdom. Some of the essays such as “Beelzebub’s SAT Score” and “The Dangers of Fallen Souffles in the Developing World” are more cultural and political than they are biological and except for Beelzebub, I found every one of the essays eye opening at some level.

Sapolsky teaches at Stanford University and is an active researcher unlike many other science popularizers. He continues to publish scientific papers while writing remarkably erudite works for laypeople. Talking about his writing style, he says that he never took a course in writing. He says that he honed his writing skills in Africa where he spent countless months of lonely existence studying the life of baboons. To counter the loneliness, he took to writing letters to his friends, family and colleagues back home, explaining the discoveries of the day. Writing the same thing, over and over again, helped him to whittle down the inessential and find ways to write the same thing differently each time. He commutes from San Francisco every day via public transport which takes up two hours of his day. He uses this time to spend writing, a time that is protected, regular and accessible.

I can’t recommend his books enough.

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Frenetic Existence

Posted on July 20, 2009
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Wednesday, July 15.

Went to bed early last night, woke up early this morning, had a half hour of solitude before Maya woke up. fed her and put a new diaper when she woke up and she fell asleep immediately, had an undisturbed shower and shave, checked email and got the first meeting canceled as the agenda was not clear. Maya woke up for good. She was in great spirits as she was not hungry and had a good full 10 hours of sleep. This is going to be a beautiful day, I thought to myself. And then the wheels started coming off.

When we had moved to our friend’s house in Palo Alto, I offered Ginez a choice: to either come at 8:30 so that I could catch a bus to the train station or to come at 8:45 so that she could drop me at the station. She preferred to drop me off at the station as it gave her fifteen more minutes of sleep.

8:38. Ginez called to say that she was stuck in traffic. A car was on fire on the freeway and after getting off the highway, the internal expressway was also a giant parking lot. She was at least 15 minutes away. This set off a domino in my head. 15 minutes late meant that I’d probably not get to the train station on time which meant that I’d miss the company shuttle to work which meant taking the light rail. Taking the light rail meant changing trains to reach my office, which meant that I maybe at work only by 10:15 or so instead of 9:30. Was I glad that I had canceled my meeting at 9:30 ? Nay. I was a little anxious that I’d be late.

8:42: I called Ginez to ask her where she was. She had come up to Middlefield Road and said she’d take that exit to come home. I asked her to hurry.

8:47 I was getting a little nervous. I had no meeting till at least 11. Why was I in a tizzy ? I diapered Maya, picked up my backpack and went outside to wait for Ginez.

8:50. I called Ginez again. She was at Alma and Churchill. She said even these residential roads were choked. She asked if I could come to the corner of El Camino and Park Ave to make up for the lost time. I said yes and started hurriedly walking with Maya in my arms.

8:55 Got to the corner of El Camino and Park. No Ginez. Called her again. She said that she was getting onto El Camino and that she’d be there in a minute or so.

8:57 Ginez is at the light, waiting for the U turn. With no traffic on my side of the road, I hurry across the road, strap Maya in and get inside. Ginez is apologetic, saying that she starts early enough to avoid traffic delays, but that today was really bad. I tell her not to worry, that if I miss the train, I miss it, that it is not the end of the world.

8:58 The light changes and we hurry to Palo Alto Caltrain station. I’m quite confident now that I’ll miss the train. We’ve only 3 minutes left. I imagine jumping into the waiting train just as the door are about to close, without validating my ticket. What will I tell the conductor if they ask for tickets, I wonder.

9:02 As we pull into the station, I see the train on the platform with the doors shut. I think, OK, I’ve missed it. As I get out, I realize that it’s the northbound train. I leap for joy. I can still catch my train. I see the southbound train pulling in. I leap out, wish Ginez a good day, don’t even kiss Maya goodbye and start running. Time enough to validate the ticket, I think.

9:03 I get into the train along with a horde of others. I hear an announcement that the train will not stop till Santa Clara. I’m surprised, then relieved that maybe this is the earlier train. I get out along with others, some looking confused as they check their watches. I hurry up to the conductor, who doesn’t even look at me as he says “The Mountain View train is right behind”. I guess a lot of folks have already asked him the question.

9:05 I call Ginez and tell her that the trains are all delayed, that the commute is messed up everywhere today. I wonder if the company shuttle will wait for me as I pace the platform. I call a friend in India to say hello. They’re watching a thriller. I hang up. I notice that the northbound train hasn’t yet moved. I look down the tracks and see another train, up ahead, stopped. Stuck due to engine trouble, I think. I pity the northbound commuters.

9:10 No sign of the train that is “right behind”. People start pulling out their cell phones and start rescheduling their day.

9:20 A southbound train pulls in. I get in and seat myself. I hear an announcement that this train will stop at all stations between here and San Jose. I’m surprised. What train is this, I wonder. I hope that the company shuttle is still waiting for me. That the driver would’ve noticed the previous train zip by without stopping and realized that he had to wait some more. I hope their policy is to wait for the train, and not give up within a few minutes or so and depart.

9:30 I arrive at Mountain View station, am glad to see the company shuttle still waiting. Rush to it, get in, greet the driver and settle down, happy that I’ll be at work before 10.

Why did I have to rush about like a headless chicken, when I knew that I had no meeting till 11 ? Habit ? Just the pace of modern life ? My own personality ? As I was doing this mindless jiggle, a part of me was observing me doing it and telling me, rather gently, that I had no reason to act this way. But the part that seemed in control, went about anyway.

A growing chorus of voice say that modern psychology is looking for the problem in the wrong place or in the wrong person. They evince that psychology asks people to learn to cope with the existing system rather than realizing that the existing system is broken and that is the reason so many people need psychological help. It is a continuation of the Western philosophy that elevates the individual and free will above that of the society that the individual is a part of.

The modern world is in a sense, a world gone mad. When the founding fathers of the US spoke of everyone’s right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, I think they emphasized happiness, not the pursuit. But pursuit is what we’ve decided we’re after, happiness be damned. Why do we indulge in such behavior ? It is as cliche as cliche can be that many on their deathbed say, “I wish I had spent more time with my family”. We watch movies such as the brilliant American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, but never succeed to apply the lessons to our life. The Revolutionary Road is as good a movie about the madness of the American Dream as any I’ve seen. Despite a chance to get out of the humdrum of existence, an existence so boring that it kills all joy, the male protagonist allows himself to be sucked back into the rat race with devastating consequences. As I watched the movie, I recognized that given the right circumstances, I could be that character played so well by Leonardo di Caprio (and Kate Winslet deserved an Oscar for her performance in this movie, not The Reader). Yes, we’ve somewhat out of the rat race today, having opted to work part time, for less money and to stay at home caring for Maya. But still in experiences like the one that started off this entry, I betray the deeply ingrained habit.

As I was sitting in the train, my mind also went back to a book that I had recently read, Alan Lightman’s “The Diagnosis”. Not highly recommended, but the initial chapter was a riveting description of the madness that is modern life. A man on his way to work on a beautiful summer morning loses his memory. His memory returns a few days later, but his entire body starts to go numb. He is sucked into the medical establishment with its plethora of tests to determine the cause of his numbness. A scene in the waiting room at his doctor’s room, I also consider brilliant. Almost the entire first chapter is available online at Random House’s website.

Why do we do this ? The reasons are probably many and complex. But one factor that I had not considered occurred to me when I ran across an interesting article over at Mind Hacks, another neuroscience blog that I track every now and then. The article talks about a recent experiment concerning the reward circuit in our brains. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that is commonly associated with pleasure, and with reward. We’re animals seeking rewarding activities. Unlike the popular myth however, researchers are finding that as much dopamine is released on the expectation of a reward as on a real reward. The article described an experiment conducted on people involved in a gambling game. The study found that near misses (you almost hit jackpot) released about as much dopamine as real wins, but the overall experience was awful. In other words, dopamine was released even when the outcome was not pleasurable.

All this is fine, you say. What has this got to do with why we pursue modern life despite knowledge of its ills ? Let me quote directly from the article:

Interestingly, although near-misses were experienced as aversive they increased the desire to play the game but only when the person had some perception of control, by choosing what the ‘lucky’ picture would be.

Of course, like choosing ‘heads or tails’, it’s only an illusion of control because the outcome is random anyway.

But because of reward expectancy the dopamine system is most active when we think we can control the outcome and modify our strategy next time, even if that sense of control is completely false.

In other words, we run the treadmill because we think we can change the outcome. Something special, something unique about us, our situation, our spouses, our children, our work that will change the typical outcome .

In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day. – W.H Auden

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