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Death of A Language

Posted on July 29, 2010
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“Last speaker of ancient language dies”.

Flashback to February this year. I was on my way back to the US from India. Seating myself in the plane, the above headline scrolled past on the display in front of my seat. The article refered to a language, Bo, spoken by some tribals on India’s Andaman Islands. The languages spoken on the islands are considered to be almost 70,000 years old and are theorized to have African roots. Professor Anvita Abbi, a leading linguist is quoted as saying: “(her death was) a loss for intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages, because they had lost ‘a vital piece of the jigsaw’. It is generally believed that all Andamanese languages might be the last representatives of those languages which go back to pre-Neolithic times.”

The last speaker was a 85 year old woman, a survivor of the recent Tsunami that ravaged the islands. The BBC story says: “”She was often very lonely and had to learn an Andamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people. But throughout her life she had a very good sense of humour and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious”. What might’ve gone through her mind as she lived those years knowing that with her would die the language. Only last week, I read a short story by the acclaimed Australian author, David Malouf, titled “The Only Speaker of His Tongue”. He writes:

“Now to the remotest dark, far back in each ordinary moment of our speaking, even in gossip and the rigamarole of love words and children’s games, into the lives of our fathers, to share with them the single instant of all our seeing and making, all our long history of doing and being. When I think of of my tongue being no longer alive in the mouths of men a chill goes over me that is deeper than my own death, since it is the gathered death of all my kind.”

Even before Maya was born, Shanthala had started campaigning for Maya to speak Kannada. She insisted that we speak as much Kannada as possible when we’re with Maya. I, a self-proclaimed global denizen, was a little skeptical of this goal. After all, Shanthala and I spoke to each other mostly in English, especially when we had to discuss something complicated. I thought in English. Having been raised in different linguistic lands during my childhood and adolescence, I was barely conversant in Kannada, my mother tongue. I read it with difficulty and my vocabulary was limited to the few words needed to get by on the street. Why should we insist on Maya speaking or learning Kannada when we didn’t ? I asked. She’d imitate us anyway and thereby speak mostly a mixture of Kannada and English, more English than Kannada. Duh! That is why I want us to speak Kannada more, said Shanthala.

To me, the primary purpose of language seemed to be about getting past our separateness, to communicate. Here in the US, Shanthala and I have not sought out Kannada-speaking friends, we’ve not joined groups for Kannada speakers or done anything to sustain the language part of our upbringing. It seemed impractical to insist that Maya learn a language that she’d not hear outside the house (and even that, only when her parents discussed simple subjects). We have friends in India whose kids, despite living in Bngalore and having Kannada spoken almost exclusively in the house, have switched to speaking only in English. It all seemed a losing battle to me. With so many battles to pick from, why pick a sure-fire loser ? But, as Maya grew, so did my fluency in Kannada. Maya’s first word, “Agua”, was that of a Californian, in Spanish. But, Maya came up with her own Creole, constructing sentences that are a mixture of English, Kannada and Spanish, picking the words that were easiest for her to say in each language. “Leche beka”, she says (Leche is Spanish for milk and beka is “want” in Kannada. In Kannada, “beka” is actually a question, “do you want”, for which the answer is “beku”, I want. But having only heard the questioning form of the verb, Maya uses beka to mean I want).

The end of Bo has stayed with me all this time. The main reason may have had something to do with my (then recent) experience in India. It began with my purchases of the English translations of some major local literary works. I purchased House of Kanooru by the popular and acclaimed Kuvempu. The blurb at the back said that the book documented the life of a group of people in the highlands of Coorg, a famous and distinctive part of Southern Karnataka, a life that was fast disappearing, if not already extinct. The foreword by the distinguished playwright, Girish Karnad, lent the translation some heft, I thought. The other book that I purchased was the translation of an autobiography in Gujrati by a Dalit, titled The Whole Truth and Nothing But the Truth: A Dalit’s Life by N. Kesharshivam. The introduction by the author was written in simple English that I felt (in my patronising way, I suppose) had the right voice and tone for such a tome. I thought that these would help fill the gaping hole in my awareness of India.

Alas! The translations were awful, to say the least. The House of Kanooru seemed transliterated rather than translated. Some of the phrasing and sentences that might have read well in Kannada read horribly in English, with awkward, anachronistic phrasing and choice of words. I can’t recall the exact phrases, but I remember something like “When the beautiful damsel saw her consort, she felt like she was cavorting in the heavens”. Somewhere within the first 20 pages, my goodwill died and I gave up on the book. No wonder, Kuvempu is virtually unknown outside the pages of Kannada (even though he’s a recipient of India’s prestigious Jnanapith Award). The autobiography was equally bad. One particularly unskilled sentence stood out: “So, at the fag end of my life, at the end of my youth, I became a Class 1 Officer”. When I packed for my return, I was happy to leave these books behind.

Over the years, as I watched writers in various languages other than English win the Nobel Prize, I wondered at the paucity of Indians in that list. Prizes for works in English such as the Booker Prize or the Pulitzer Prize have had their share of Indians recently, but we didn’t figure in the Nobel Prize (yes, I know that awards are an opinion and Gandhi never won the Nobel Peace Prize while Kissinger did). I had wondered if poor translations were the primary reason why they haven’t become more universally known. Not all translations are this bad, I suppose. When I read Rabindranath Tagore’s Short Stories or even his famous Gitanjali, the work which won him the Nobel Prize, I was struck by how beautiful the English translation was. They had been translated by Englishmen in the early years of the past century.

Back to book purchases. I wanted to buy books in Kannada for Maya. Maya was not yet two and if the books were made of regular, adult book paper, she rent them into the waste paper basket in short order. In the US, many infant and toddler books (called board books) are made of thick cardboard making it difficult for the toddlers to damage them. In Bangalore, I could hardly find board books in Kannada. A search for even basic Kannada alphabet books was surprising in its paucity. In the US, there are a million books on the English alphabet, presenting the information in entertaining, eye-catching ways. The only toddler-proof books that I encountered in India were in English. In India, usually only the not so well healed read non-English books to their infants. They cannot afford to buy board books, which are more expensive to make, thereby forming a vicious cycle from which only the loss of the language is the winner.

This is how a language dies, I thought to myself. And was reminded of this again as the headline chronicling the extinction scrolled up the display screen in front of my seat.

There are about 6800 known languages in the world remaining (as of 1999), 96% of which are spoken by only 4% of the world’s population. 51 languages have only one speaker left and 5,000 languages have less than 100,000 speakers.

In “How Language Works” by David Crystal (a link to the chapter is here), writes that there are many reasons why a language dies, from the violence of natural calamities and genocides to the seeming benevolence of cultural assimilation. The most potent force for the past 500 years however has been cultural assimilation.

The author speaks of three stages in the death of a language by cultural assimilation. The first is the enormous pressure – economic, social and political – to speak the dominant language. Crystal writes: “‘To achieve a better quality of life’ is a commonly stated reason why someone decides to learn the dominant language”. The second stage is the ascent of bilingualism as people build a bridge between the old and the new languages, crossing back and forth between them. The final stage is when a new generation increasingly adept in the new language uses less and less of the old one, until at last the bridge to the old falls down in disrepair. Crystal writes: “This is often accompanied by a feeling of shame about using the old language, on the part of the parents as well as their children. Parents use the old language less and less to their children, or in front of their children.”

I’ve lived these stages. Growing up, my father looked down upon speaking in Kannada, listening to Kannada or Hindi songs or watching movies in the vernacular. He was not unusual in this regard. He only wanted his son to grow up with as many opportunities as possible, opportunities that shrank dramatically if I wasn’t fluent in English. And now, if Maya grows up in the US, her children, if not her, will surely know next to nothing of Kannada.

But why should we care if a language dies ? Is it important ? Surely, if the language were useful, it’d have survived.

One utilitarian argument is that each language is a repository of vast, accumulated knowledge. In a recently published article, “In Defense of Difference”, the authors, Maywa Montenegro & Terry Glavin, write:

“The way Maffi (Luisa Maffi is a linguist and anthropologist) tells the story, she was interviewing Tzeltal Mayan people waiting in line at a medical clinic in the village of Tenejapa when she met a man who had walked for hours, carrying his two-year-old daughter, who was suffering from diarrhea. It turned out that the man had only a dim memory of the “grasshopper leg herb” that was once well known as a perfectly effective diarrhea remedy in the Tzeltal ethnomedical pharmacopeia. Because he’d nearly forgotten the words for the herb, he’d lost almost any trace of the herb’s utility, or even of its existence.”

Besides loss of knowledge, there is also the loss of ways of thinking and being. Malouf writes that each language is: “a whole alternative universe, since the world as we know it is in the last resort the words through which we imagine and name it”. Imagine if you will the following scenario. As the world moves increasingly towards nuclear families, imagine that we will lose all the Asian languages. With that loss, it’s possible that we’d lose the knowledge that once, societies existed that valued the social web so much that they had specific words to express the relationship between two human beings instead of everyone being an uncle, auntie or a cousin.

Another reason, the basic premise of the article “In Defense of Difference”, is that with increasing homogeneity and a loss in diversity comes a reduction in resilience. After all, it is diversity that accounts for much beauty and resilience in the natural world. Complex systems and ecologies thrive in the presence of diversity and homogeneous systems vanish when catastrophic events occur. I haven’t encountered this idea as applied to language before and so can only speculate that it rings true because of the analogy with the natural world.

Yet another reason it seems to me has nothing to do with utility, but is similar to preservation of Van Goghs and Mona Lisa and the Dead Sea Scrolls. They are precious heirlooms. And the people who speak those languages are often interested in preserving their language, if they can be supported in their efforts. The preservation of art and culture that we take for granted come at a pretty high price, one that we discount easily when it comes to Mona Lisa, but object when it comes to something like the Bo language.

The face of the last speaker of the Bo language has stayed with me since February. I wanted to write it up, but for some reason or the other, couldn’t find the words. Then yesterday, I ran across a buzz in the online world over articles written opposing the viewpoints of “In Defense of Difference”. I learnt of the buzz and the article via the excellent blog, Neuroanthropology. In “Language Extinction Ain’t No Big Thing ?”, the author is furious at an entry by another blogger, Razib Khan, who writes the blog, The Gene Expression, hosted at the Discover science magazine. Khan wrote “Linguistic Diversity = Poverty”. In slightly longer words, rich Western intellectuals and liberals like to keep alive things like exotic languages like Bo while the people who speak those languages want to escape them because it is a cause for poverty.

In one way, I suppose Khan’s argument is not very different from what David Crystal said. But Khan makes other false arguments (some which have the malodor of social darwinism (eg: “First, we’re not talking about the extinction of English, French, or Cantonese. We’re talking about the extinction of languages with a few thousand to a dozen or so speakers”) and overall, makes a specious case according to Neuroanthropology. I haven’t read Khan’s original posts, primarily because I had been put off by his writing earlier on some other topics that now elude me. The article on Neuroanthropology is long (almost 10,000 words), but fascinating and comprehensive in its coverage of why preservation of language is important, what is being done and why arguments such as Khan’s are incorrect. I highly recommend putting aside some time to read it.

As any reader of my blog will know by now, these are weighty matters and I don’t dwell on them for the sake of intellectual stimulation. These are matters which have a bearing on the world we leave behind for our children.

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw – Losing A Language, W.S. Merwin

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The New Poet Laureate

Posted on July 5, 2010
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W.S. Merwin is the new US Poet Laureate. He will be the 17th since the post was first established in 1937.

As I read this announcement, I wondered at the possible archaicness of the position. Do poets matter anymore ? What do poet laureates do anyway ? Isn’t this an ancient custom cast down from the centuries when getting monarchy to provide you with a stipend and a title was the only way for an artist to survive ? Weren’t these people then supposed to compose works in praise of the kingdom and monarchy ? What do the modern poet laureates do ? Are they supposed to compose works in praise of the country and the president ?

In the US, the position is associated with the Library of Congress. Why does the world’s largest library appoint a poet laureate ? The Library of Congress is the research arm of the Congress, the federal bastion of cultural heritage. So, by appointing a poet laureate, the Library is actually appointing a poet of the people (the Congress being elected by the people). The US poet laureate is actually called “Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry” unlike the UK equivalent which is just “Poet Laureate”. Also unlike the British counterpart on which the role was originally modelled, US poet laureates are not appointed for life, but annually, though many serve for a few years.

The US poet laureates don’t have much to do when it comes to specifics. According to the job description: “The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress serves as the nation’s official lightning rod for the poetic impulse of Americans. During his or her term, the Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry.” The unspecified job description apparently so confused William Carlos Williams, that he never showed up. According to a fascinating article about the job, published in the LA Times back in 1991, another poet laureate, Anthony Hecht, complained that all he got were letters from the public demanding to know how they could get published. Mark Strand, the poet laureate interviewed for the LA Times article says: “… there isn’t much popular interest in poetry, or good literature. The junk people read is appalling. What’s her name . . . Danielle Steel? She couldn’t write her way out of a paper bag. Her use of language is a joke. She’s just symptomatic, though, of a lot that’s going on at the sub-literary level of the culture. Unfortunately, even with the title of poet laureate, there’s not much I can do about it.”

US poet laureates are paid $35,000 a year, a sum funded by the foundation of a philanthropist, Archer M. Huntington, rather than us taxpayers. The stipend started in 1985 and has not changed since, though the newer laureates are given an additional $5,000 for travel expenses. Most poets today earn their living from their daytime jobs teaching at a university.

US poet laureates are not required to compose any works in praise of government works or officials. Robert Penn Warren, the first to hold the title of Poet Laureate (after it was changed in 1985 from the old ‘Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress’) explicitly declared his disinclination to write “any poems to the greater glory of Ronald and Nancy Reagan.”. But Howard Nemerov volunteered odes on the 200th anniversary of the Congress and launch of the space shuttle, Atlantis. Billy Collins, the poet laureate from 2001-2003, famous for his anti-war protest during the Iraq War, was asked to compose a poem to be read in front of a special joint session of the Congress after 9/11. Poets are not even invited to read at US Presidential inaugurations. Only three US presidents – Kennedy, Clinton and Obama – have asked poets to read at their inauguration, and those poets were not even poet laureates at the time.

That said, the poem that launched my reading poetry to Maya, came from an anthology edited by Robert Hass, from his column in Washington Post during his tenure as poet laureate. The Library of Congress website says: “Each Laureate brings a different emphasis to the position. Joseph Brodsky initiated the idea of providing poetry in airports, supermarkets and hotel rooms. Maxine Kumin started a popular series of poetry workshops for women at the Library of Congress. Gwendolyn Brooks met with elementary school students to encourage them to write poetry. Rita Dove brought together writers to explore the African diaspora through the eyes of its artists. She also championed children’s poetry and jazz with poetry events. Robert Hass organized the “Watershed” conference that brought together noted novelists, poets and storytellers to talk about writing, nature and community.”

According to the NYT article which announced the news of Merwin’s appointment, Merwin said that, “he wants to emphasize his ‘great sympathy with native people and the languages and literature of native peoples,’ and his ‘lifelong concern with the environment’”.

I’m glad for that emphasis. The Native Americans, the people of the First Nations (as they’re called in Canada), are people without a voice. Their names, their languages, their culture have vanished or are heading rapidly in that direction. When I was in Banff and looking at the mountains, I was struck once again, by how little of the original names the mountains remain , how so many of the mountains are named after the immigrants to the New World. One very impressive mountain is even named after an Egyptian pharoah!

The stars emerge one
by one into the names
that were last found for them
far back in other
darkness no one remembers
by watchers whose own
names were forgotten
later in the dark                         – from Nocturne, W.S. Merwin

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Culture and Parenting In Kidspeak

Posted on September 30, 2009
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The intersection of culture with parenting has been on my mind ever since Maya was born. I’ve written about it a few times already. Today, I read an article on NYT titled Parents Need to Tune In and Engage a Young Child With Talk that once again reminded me of it. The article exhorts parents to engage verbally with their children, because it is good for the children’s language development. If we don’t talk to our kids, they’ll miss out on social and verbal cues and this negatively impacts development. Some quotes from the article:

“‘Talk to your baby whenever you have the chance,’ the American Medical Association advises parents.”
…
“Help expand your child’s vocabulary by talking about what is done with various objects or why a particular food helps to build healthy bodies.”
…
“Count the steps as you go up or down. My twin grandsons’ math skills flourished long before they could speak in sentences because they live in a third-floor walk-up.”
…
“And you can’t introduce books too early. I remember my niece at 3 months paying rapt attention as her mother “read” picture books to her, pointing out objects, their colors and what the characters were doing.”

I was left thinking that if I didn’t talk or read to Maya all the time, she’d be somehow deficient in her verbal and social skills as she grew up. I think that if I hadn’t read as much as I have, I’d feel the pressure to talk to her all the time. And if I didn’t, I’d feel less of a parent, that I’d somehow failed her.

To get a different perspective, let’s turn to Meredith Small’s “Kids: How Biology and Culture Shape The Way We Raise Our Children”, her excellent follow-up to the brilliant, insightful, “Our Babies, Ourselves”, which I’ve written about before.

Small says that anthropologists and other scientists who have studied children and language acquisition across cultures have found that children employ a variety of strategies to start speaking, and that all these strategies work fine. Some examples of these differences:

  • The Gusii of Northern Kenya think that spending as much time as the Westerners do, talking to the children, molds the children to be selfish and self-centered adults. Recognizing from experience that children speak fine without talking to them incessantly, they don’t spend much time talking to them, but carry their children everywhere and thus immerse them in a sea of adult interactions all the time.
  • Similarly, the Kaluli people of New Guinea live in a non-literate society and instead of talking to the child, face the baby towards others and speak for the non-verbal baby in a three-way conversation. Again, the baby is carried everywhere and is awash in conversations all the time.

In the 1950s, when behaviorism ruled the roost, linguists believed that speaking was a learned ability, that children learned to speak by listening to others. Then along came Noam Chomsky who revolutionized linguistics with a convincing argument that language is innate, biological and that we’re hard-wired from birth to speak. Steven Pinker, a leading linguist and science writer says that children instinctively know things about language that no one could have taught them. For example, Patricia Kuhl, a major figure in the study of language acquisition has conducted research that demonstrate that infants as young as 18 weeks are sophisticated in the visual aspects of speech. An infant is shown say two pictures with identical faces, but one making a silent “aah” vowel sound and another making a silent “eee” vowel sound. The infant is then made to hear one of the two vowel sounds i.e. “aah” or “eee”. Infants are shown to stare longer at the picture that corresponds to the vowel sound they’re hearing. Another example that kids know about language without being taught is the ease with which they construct plurals of new words.

While there are several theories about why we as a species acquired language, the predominant one is that language is a tool for socialization, one that takes the place of grooming that other apes use. This theory is borne out by observations that the key for an infant to acquire language is to be exposed to it. And not any exposure will do, it has to be live adults communicating. It cannot be a TV or DVD edutainment program that purports to teach the infants new words or new languages. Andrew Meltzoff, another prominent researcher in the field of infant development is quoted in Parenting Inc.: “From what I’ve seen of the science, there isn’t a tape in the world that can teach a nine-month old baby how to read. It goes against everything we know about the evolution of language in human behavior”.

It is well known that children from rich verbal enviroments tend to possess a larger vocabulary. But this comes at a much later stage in development. Statements such as: “And you can’t introduce books too early. I remember my niece at 3 months paying rapt attention as her mother “read” picture books to her, pointing out objects, their colors and what the characters were doing.” from the NYT article are without basis, according to current research.

But environment does play a critical role in language development. A tragic example of failed language development due to a severely malnourished environment comes from the sad story of a child named Genie. She was locked in a room alone, chained to a potty chair, from the age of 18 months by her mentally retarded father. She was never spoken to or allowed to speak. She eventually escaped from this prison with the help of her (also mentally challenged) mother, when she was thirteen years old. Despite being exposed to language at this stage, her verbal skills never progressed beyond that of a child. Five word sentences is the most that she can make. Stories such as Genie’s sear my mind.

Language is a prism that affects how we view the world and how we construct the world, said Edward Sapir, an anthropologist cum linguist. This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and after spending some time in the dustbin, is undergoing a revival thanks to the new work conducted by linguists such as Sara Boroditsky. Small agrees with this hypothesis and says that a society’s idea of identity informs the form of verbal coaching that occurs. In Western societies where an individual is considered paramount, nuclear families give rise to the dyadic conversations discussed in the NYT article. Among the Kaluli, an egalitarian society, life is considered to be a multifaceted interaction and so mothers involve children indirectly in conversations with others rather than talking one-on-one with them.

As a reflection of societal norms, language is one important way children learn about gender and status norms sanctioned by the culture. Small says that studies have shown that in the West, fathers speak differently to the children compared to the mothers. About thirty percent of a father’s speech consists of imperatives such as “Do this” or “Don’t do that” and speak that way more with boys than girls. Western mothers tend to talk in longer sentences to the children and talk the same way with both boys and girls. Children mimiced the adults with boys tending to use imperatives and commands. One study found that two year olds were aware of this gender-specific use of language.

When we went to the pediatrician for Maya’s 15th month checkup, she didn’t seem too pleased that Maya didn’t speak any legible words. Despite our nonchalance at this news, Shanthala and I were a little concerned if Maya had any problems. Articles such as the one in NYT exacerbate the concern by throwing guilt into the mix. I remember asking several parents at what age their kids spoke and resting easy when one of them said that their son spoke only when he was two.

In such a culture, books such as Judith Rich Harris’ “Nurture Shock” which I’ve written about earlier, make sense. A lot of culture gets passed on as gospel by the medical association. It is not that parents don’t matter, it is that the issues over which the parenting style is considered paramount are not so.

The NYT article quotes a speech and language specialist, Randi Jacoby: “Reward your little one’s communicative attempts with your heightened attention to his/her conversation. Be prepared to put down your cellphone and look them squarely in the eye as they share their thoughts with you.”

Now, that is something I can agree with. Not because it benefits the verbal development of the child, but because we teach them that when conversing, paying full attention and listening is important, that talking to a person, a child, is more important than talking on a cell phone. Given how facile it is to be focused on the cell phone or the laptop, being mindful of interacting fully with the child may set a tone for how they listen and talk, not how soon they talk.

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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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The Changed Geography Of Childhood

Posted on July 10, 2009
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Writing the entry on Maya’s romps in the park, I pondered again about the nature of childhood of Maya’s generation. Shanthala often reminisces of her carefree childhood when home was a revolving door from school to playground. I hear others speak similarly of their childhood, people growing up in countries far flung from India, countries like Spain, Italy and even the US.

My father likes to say that he is quite modern in his outlook. In some ways, he’s probably ahead of his time. Unlike my peers, I spent most of my childhood alone, reading or playing by myself. We lived inside textile mill compounds, sometimes the only family. Even if there were other families living in the company quarters, other kids would not play as easily with me either because my father was the head honcho or because they were not my age. My time with my friends was controled by my parents to once a month outings at their place or ours usually for a few hours only. Similarly, my activities outside of school with peers were completely governed by my parents.

Left to my own devices, I hardly indulged in any form of physical activity, prefering instead to slouch in a corner with my books. Over time, I became quite fat, acquiring that brahmin belly. A friend’s mother would often joke that my belly entered their house well before I did. Even at school, I prefered to cook up some excuse to get out of the P.T (physical training) class.

My childhood fits perfectly with how most kids are raised these days in the US. They are chaperoned from activity to activity, are rarely allowed any time without adult supervision and lead cloistered lives. A friend once commented that in this country, parents are more chaffeurs than parents, spending entire weekends driving kids from activity or birthday party to another. Shanthala often says how much she hates orchestrating time for kids to play with each other, those play dates. It is unusual to see kids playing out in the streets by themselves.

This article in Boston Globe, published in January 2008, is one of many articles that I found on the net when I searched for any data on how little kids played outside these days. Here is an excerpt from the article:

‘Roger Hart knows this wistful territory better than anyone. In 1972, as a graduate student at Clark University, the young researcher set out to understand the geography of childhood. He journeyed to a not-so-exotic locale — a village in Vermont — and spent two years tracking the movements of a species that, remarkably, had never been closely studied in its natural environment: the human child. (At the time, says Hart, “we knew more about the ecology of baboons than the ecology of children.”) Running, playing, and digging in the dirt with packs of kids from 5 to 12 years old, he discovered that virtually all of them had outdoor places they considered their own, where they went to hide, reflect, or commune with nature.

When Hart returned to the same town two years ago, to repeat his research and learn how childhood has changed in 36 years, he discovered a universe transformed in a single generation. The children had moved indoors, and the intricate, outdoor play-world they had once invented and inhabited on their own was gone. In the wake of the shift he found nagging questions about its effects on children’s creativity and independence. Now 60 and a professor of environmental psychology at the City University of New York, Hart is working on a film and a book about his research, tentatively titled “Childhood Revisited.”‘

The article goes on to say how his study indicates that kids these days have a hard time spending time on their own, inventing activities to keep themselves occupied. I remembered how a friend’s child, raised in the US, had a hard time finding something to do on his own in the absence of a computer or TV. He kept saying how bored he was. An article in LA Times about this subject (from May 2008) states a University of Michigan finding that between 1981 and 1997, “3- to 5-year-olds lost an average of 501 minutes of unstructured playtime each week; 6- to 8-year-olds lost an average of 228 minutes. (On the other hand, kids now do more organized activities and have more homework, the lucky devils!) And forget about walking to school alone. Today’s kids don’t walk much at all (adding to the childhood obesity problem).”

There is no dearth of articles that bemoan this new geography of childhood, of time with computers and TV and almost complete lack of unstructured, adult-free time. For example, this article talks about a national movement called “No Child Left Inside”, inspired by a book called “Last Child In The Woods” by a Richard Louv. An excerpt from the article:

‘Louv tagged the term “nature deficit disorder,” the physical, psychological and emotional conditions that result from society’s increasing alienation from nature. Obesity, stress and attention disorders are just some of its manifestations. Louv’s book has triggered a national conversation about the issue, even sparked federal legislation to help fund local programs and the development of school curriculums. It is the springboard for groups all over the country who are working to get youth outside more.’

The article speaks of how the latest edition of Oxford Junior Dictionary cut out terms such as: beaver, dandelion, heron, magpie, clover, otter and others, and substituted Blackberry, blog, MP3 player, voicemail and broadband. It is quite well-known that kids today can identify brands far better than they can identify flora and fauna.

Other articles speak of how kids in day care spend less time outdoors compared to kids not in day care. The causes vary from the personality of the day care supervisors (if they don’t enjoy being outside, they tend to not take kids outside) to the nature of groups (if one kid comes ill-prepared to be outside, such as not having the appropriate clothing, the entire class doesn’t go).

Why this massive shift in a single generation ? The factors are many. Fear is a large factor. Most parents are terrified that their kids will be abducted and/or killed by homicidal maniacs or pedophiles if left to play by themselves. Litigation is another factor according to this article published in 2006. The structure of our lives is another factor. We live in suburbs, in communities where neighbors hardly know each other and so parents prefer to drive their kids to their friends’ houses or to common meeting points. Another issue is the increased urge to enroll kids into every possible activity, to not deprive the kids of possible benefits and to provide a competitive edge. It is also far easier to plonk kids in front of the TV or the computer compared to taking them out to a park.

Many articles speak of the effects of this retreat from the outside and the lack of unsupervised time. They speak of increased risk of obesity (physical activity is one factor, not the only factor of course), diabetes and heart diseases. Some articles also highlight that play and unsupervised time itself is critical. A representative for the American Academy of Pediatrics’, Dr. Kenneth Ginsburg testified to Congress in 2006, “Play allows children to create and explore a world they can master, conquering their fears while practicing adult roles. … Play helps children develop new competencies … and the resiliency they will need to face future challenges.” But here’s the catch: Those benefits aren’t realized when some helpful adult is hovering over kids the whole time.” Then there is the possibility that all this alienation from nature will make kids immune to issues such as loss of biodiversity and open spaces.

People who look at me today may ask, “Well, it doesn’t seem that your physical inactivity during your childhood has prevented you from becoming physically fit and healthy in your later ages. So why all this hoopla ? Let’s give the parents a break”. What they don’t see is the struggle I grow through every time I have to lace up for a run. I have to fight with myself from giving all those excuses to not run each time. And as some of the articles state, the issue is more than just health. And I don’t think I’m just blaming parents or the modern life. In our drive to acquire the trappings of a successful life, I fear that we’re forgetting how to live, we’re withdrawing or opting out of making decisions that may lead to greater benefits systemically, for us and our future generations.

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