By Anthony Savoia
I grew up in Florida and spent a lot of time in the woods behind our house. We had an inside corner lot at the edge of a fairly new housing development, with only untouched Florida wood and grassland for miles behind our property.
Heaven on earth to any young boy, this seemingly vast wilderness lent itself to endless hours of making trails, exploring new territory and building forts, club houses and bridges across the drainage canals that criss-crossed the area. My childhood imagination would run wild there and I would dream of being one of the earliest settlers in that area and staking a claim to this new land where I could build a new life. I would think about Lewis and Clark and often wished I could have been part of those early explorations, seeing this untouched land for the first time. It was easy to imagine how much fun it would have been to be a great explorer.
Stories about expeditions and explorations both real and imagined still stir my curiosity. Science fiction shows about space travel where new planets and strange things are discovered still appeal to me today, and I know I’m not unique. Most of us can at least understand the fascination that drives the efforts of our own, modern-day trailblazers.
Dr. John Splettstoesser has 55 years experience in Antarctic exploration. He is now an onboard lecturer for a cruise line that specializes in Antarctic trips. He is often quoted as saying, "If a person embarks on a voyage with known itinerary and destination, he is a traveler. If the same person embarks on a journey where the itinerary and destination are not known, he is an explorer.”
This is a grand statement and the more one examines it, the more the truth of it becomes apparent.
Although Splettstoesser doesn’t specify what sorts of destinations a traveler should choose, today’s society has almost overwhelmingly decided that it’s a moot point. The way of the explorer is much more exciting and brings greater virtue and rewards than the way of a mere traveler.
Cancer survivor, Jerry White, wrote a report in which he urged people to, “put aside the mode of thinking that locks them into somebody else’s itinerary and open their minds to put on the explorer mentality. You just may be amazed and pleasantly surprised by where the journey leads you.”
The appeal of being an explorer is one that is easily embraced today. Applied to the grander scheme of life, rather than just specific instances of a particular situation, this becomes a very romantic ideal in the sense that it seems to inspire one to seek out the new and unproven rather than the old and ‘tired’ ways of the generations before it. But is it really as romantic as it sounds?
Many a marriage has foundered on the rocky shores of “exploration.” Without a clear destination, we justify abandoning our commitments in order to “find ourselves.” Because any and all destinations are equally open to us without regard to their worthiness or the worthiness of those things we might have to give up, we no longer have a steady path or a solid end in view. We find that we need to “discover who we are.”
Unfortunately, the problem with finding ourselves through exploration is simply this: we don’t know when we’ve arrived at our destination.
Is it really more fulfilling to be an explorer whose itinerary and destination is not known? Or is it better to know who we are and where we are going?
When we don’t stop to ask for directions
When and how did we come to accept that “finding ourselves” meant throwing away all the maps? The decade of the sixties often takes the blame. After all, it was a time when a young generation began questioning the moral and ethical cultures of the day by promoting the antithesis. Jumping from one ditch into another is a common mistake of youth; and in the sixties, youth demanded society must become more “progressive” (read: permissive). The goals were to ensure that society would enjoy freedom from oppression and intolerance, while advancing the cause of civilization through social reform. Speaking in generalities, the generation was out to find itself. Millions of youth in the “civilized” western world set out to find themselves by pushing the edges of moral and ethical boundaries. Free sex, rampant drug use and disrespect for established institutions were all part of this “self-exploration.”
But to really understand what happened, says Melanie Phillips, a staff writer for Britain’s Daily Mail, “you have to realize that "the sixties" didn't start in 1960.” In a 2004 essay entitled, The Peter Pan Establishment, she notes, “Following World War Two, the revulsion against Nazism turned into hostility towards all forms of repression. This fuelled the rise of the therapy culture, on the basis that suppressing any desire was harmful for the individual. The fact that this happened to be essential for civilization was unfortunately overlooked. No, what became sacrosanct was how we felt about ourselves.” Phillips calls it, “an agenda of radical self-centredness.”
The baby boomers aren’t the only ones with this agenda. According to popular Australian parenting coach, Michael Grose, “Now the years from 18 until 25 and beyond seem to have become a distinct stage of life, where young people seem to have lodged for a while, staving off the responsibilities of full adulthood. This phase has been dubbed the 'twixter' stage…their babyboomer parents don’t want to grow old – they don’t want to grow up."
Nicole Gordon, who writes for Colorado's Mountain Gazette takes issue with being labeled. “I won’t deny that the quarter-life crisis keeps myself and a lot of my twixter friends up at night,” she says. “I would love to find meaningful work that unites who I am with what I do. But I also find the whole thing offensive. The basic premise of labels like kidults, permakids and adultescents is condescending.” Gordon doesn’t believe the generation before hers is any more “adult” than her own. She makes an interesting point. “Why does one need a stable career, mortgage, spouse and children to be considered an adult?” she asks. “Are people who have these things somehow more responsible and mature than those who don’t? And do their lives really have any more clarity or sense of purpose than anyone else’s? Considering that our parents’ divorce rates top 50 percent, the average American household supposedly carries about $9,000 of debt and a recent survey reports that two-thirds of Americans dislike their jobs, I don’t think so.”
Maybe Gordon is right. Perhaps each generation is simply “exploring” on different continents—neither has the edge over the other, because neither generation has a clear destination in mind. Perhaps none of us can find ourselves precisely because we’re too self-centered. We’ve forgotten that humans are social beings—we aren’t islands. Finding ourselves requires shoring up the connections we have with others and honoring our commitments to them.
In other words: if you want to find yourself…you have to lose yourself first. But lose yourself how? In modern terms, losing oneself can actually be a self-centered proposition. One that doesn't allow for furthering interpersonal connections.
It often seems that when someone goes out to ‘find themselves’ they generally end up finding themselves divorced and alone or finding themselves in debt. If we don’t have a clear idea of the kind of person we want to be, we can “find ourselves” in all kinds of unpleasant situations. If we really think we have “lost ourselves,” it usually only means we’ve lost sight of our destination. Yet, the first thing we do is abandon everything that has been part of our “selves” because we seem to believe that these things distract us from seeing who we are. The reality is we do need to lose ourselves, but not in the ‘usual’ way. Instead, one gains more clarity and purpose by losing the focus on one’s “self” and turning one’s focus onto those around us. As we find and build our relationships, we find our real “selves,” and we regain our purpose.
There are times when focusing inward can actually be helpful, of course. It’s called self-examination, but it’s very different from the “agenda of self-centredness” that Phillips talks about. When we search ourselves to compare our “current” selves to our “destination” selves, this helps us make adjustments in the way we approach our relationships—not selfish adjustments, but adjustments aimed at raising the quality of life for those around us. The bonus is that when we raise the quality of life for those around us, our quality of life skyrockets alongside.
Searching our inner selves is about being rooted, grounded, planted. Knowing what our goal is, and pushing ourselves to reach it. It’s about finding out what we have inside of us that we can give to others. It’s not about pushing everyone else out of our lives so we can figure out what we ‘want’ life to give to us.
Choosing a Road
Our travels through this life are more fulfilling when we have a clear vision of what we expect of ourselves, and less fulfilling when we expect to find happiness in blind exploration and experimentation. But having a clear notion of where we want to end up doesn’t mean we’ll be trudging along a mind-numbingly boring, well-worn path. Robert Frost’s ‘Road Less Traveled’ illustrates that we don’t need to blaze new trails to experience fascinating, life-enriching choice.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The person Frost describes is not blindly exploring. There was a destination, but also a choice of paths, both of which had obviously been taken before. The individual is a self-described “traveler,” who realizes he may not ever be at the crossroads of this same choice again. This is the sort of choice we have when we decide on a career, or make a commitment to a marriage. When we are at crossroads like these, we ‘look down' our paths as far as we can before making such life-defining choices; and after making them, we are kept committed to the path because our destination is part of our identity. The clearer our view of our destination when we start out, the happier we’ll be in the end with the paths we’ve chosen to help us get there. Actually, in these post-modern times, just having a destination at all puts us on the ‘road less traveled by.’ And our commitment to it is what makes all the difference.
(Mr. Savoia died from the effects of Kidney Cancer in March of 2006.)
08 October 2006
17 September 2006
Through the Looking Glass: Mirror Neurons and Moral Nonsense
by Gina Stepp
Scanning the past week’s news, one gets the distinct impression there has been an unusually high number of “man’s inhumanity to man” stories. Darfur, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel. Kidnapped children, boys arrested for planning an attack on their school, and a murdered family in a Dallas suburb. A familiar question tugs at the edges of consciousness when we begin to feel the human experience is laden with these kinds of stories. Does the fact that there is so much cruelty to report speak to the lack of morality in human nature, or conversely to the presence of a moral conscience of some sort? This intriguing question was addressed by James Q. Wilson in his 1993 book, The Moral Sense, but it deserves revisiting in the light of more current understanding.
When considering why “bloodletting and savagery are news,” Wilson proposes, “There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual. If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair dealing.” The second answer is not far off the first: Wilson says misery is news because it is shocking to us. “We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters.” Wilson believes there is a “moral sense” in us that makes us able to empathize with one another. His book presents some very convincing arguments and is not devoid of science, but his problem, he admitted, was in finding hard scientific evidence to prove the existence of this “sense.”
Only three years after Wilson’s book was published, three Italian neuroscientists (Vittorio Gallese, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and Leonardo Fogassi) accidentally discovered something that could prove to be the scientific credence Wilson was looking for. During a study of monkey neurons and how they discharge while performing goal-related hand actions like picking up peanuts, the scientists found that the neurons also charged when the monkey observed one of the scientists performing the same action. After further studies, the scientists concluded that “to perceive an action is equivalent to internally simulating it. This enables the observer to use her/his own resources to experientially penetrate the world of the other by means of a direct, automatic, and unconscious process of simulation.” They called the responsible neurons “mirror neurons,” and extended their studies to explore the same phenomenon related to emotions. What the researchers described as the “activation of a neural mechanism shared by the observer and the observed to enable direct experiential understanding” is what the rest of us call “empathy.”
Other cognitive scientists have carried these studies even further and found that the mechanisms related to mirror neurons seem to be defective in autism—thus explaining the social impairments of people with that pathology.
Does this mean that mirror neurons and the resulting capability for empathy are, in some small part, the underpinning of our “moral sense”? Even if this is so—there must be more to learn. As human beings, our abilities to apply empathy go far beyond that of a monkey. While monkeys seem able to anticipate or empathize with “motor” activities that they themselves have experienced, human beings are capable in varying degrees of empathizing with others who experience things they themselves have not.
I say “in varying degrees” because there are obviously those amongst us whose abilities to empathize are impaired, even if not to the same degree as autistics. And this brings us back to the week’s news.
If man’s inhumanity to man is a reflection of his mirror neurons and a somehow impaired ability to empathize, there may still be hope for change. Neuroscientists now know that the brain is capable of developing new neurons at any age—a process known as “neurogenesis.” But the brain's plasticity is notable even in the absence of neurogenesis. Jeffrey Schwartz of UCLA, for example, has had considerable success in treating OCD patients by establishing new patterns of behaviour to replace old ones, thereby creating new connections between existing neurons.
Does this mean “old dogs” can be taught “new tricks”? Could new patterns of moral behaviour encourage the development of new neurons, even of new “mirror” neurons? Can we build on our basic "moral sense," become more “empathic," thereby reducing instances of man’s inhumanity to man? If so, maybe it’s time to think about which new behaviors might best replace the old. If not—we should simply resign ourselves to the status quo and ignore whatever feelings of disgust may be awakened by the inevitable headlines on CNN.
Scanning the past week’s news, one gets the distinct impression there has been an unusually high number of “man’s inhumanity to man” stories. Darfur, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel. Kidnapped children, boys arrested for planning an attack on their school, and a murdered family in a Dallas suburb. A familiar question tugs at the edges of consciousness when we begin to feel the human experience is laden with these kinds of stories. Does the fact that there is so much cruelty to report speak to the lack of morality in human nature, or conversely to the presence of a moral conscience of some sort? This intriguing question was addressed by James Q. Wilson in his 1993 book, The Moral Sense, but it deserves revisiting in the light of more current understanding.
When considering why “bloodletting and savagery are news,” Wilson proposes, “There are two answers. The first is that they are unusual. If daily life were simply a war of all against all, what would be newsworthy would be the occasional outbreak of compassion and decency, self-restraint and fair dealing.” The second answer is not far off the first: Wilson says misery is news because it is shocking to us. “We recoil in horror at pictures of starving children, death camp victims, and greedy looters.” Wilson believes there is a “moral sense” in us that makes us able to empathize with one another. His book presents some very convincing arguments and is not devoid of science, but his problem, he admitted, was in finding hard scientific evidence to prove the existence of this “sense.”
Only three years after Wilson’s book was published, three Italian neuroscientists (Vittorio Gallese, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and Leonardo Fogassi) accidentally discovered something that could prove to be the scientific credence Wilson was looking for. During a study of monkey neurons and how they discharge while performing goal-related hand actions like picking up peanuts, the scientists found that the neurons also charged when the monkey observed one of the scientists performing the same action. After further studies, the scientists concluded that “to perceive an action is equivalent to internally simulating it. This enables the observer to use her/his own resources to experientially penetrate the world of the other by means of a direct, automatic, and unconscious process of simulation.” They called the responsible neurons “mirror neurons,” and extended their studies to explore the same phenomenon related to emotions. What the researchers described as the “activation of a neural mechanism shared by the observer and the observed to enable direct experiential understanding” is what the rest of us call “empathy.”
Other cognitive scientists have carried these studies even further and found that the mechanisms related to mirror neurons seem to be defective in autism—thus explaining the social impairments of people with that pathology.
Does this mean that mirror neurons and the resulting capability for empathy are, in some small part, the underpinning of our “moral sense”? Even if this is so—there must be more to learn. As human beings, our abilities to apply empathy go far beyond that of a monkey. While monkeys seem able to anticipate or empathize with “motor” activities that they themselves have experienced, human beings are capable in varying degrees of empathizing with others who experience things they themselves have not.
I say “in varying degrees” because there are obviously those amongst us whose abilities to empathize are impaired, even if not to the same degree as autistics. And this brings us back to the week’s news.
If man’s inhumanity to man is a reflection of his mirror neurons and a somehow impaired ability to empathize, there may still be hope for change. Neuroscientists now know that the brain is capable of developing new neurons at any age—a process known as “neurogenesis.” But the brain's plasticity is notable even in the absence of neurogenesis. Jeffrey Schwartz of UCLA, for example, has had considerable success in treating OCD patients by establishing new patterns of behaviour to replace old ones, thereby creating new connections between existing neurons.
Does this mean “old dogs” can be taught “new tricks”? Could new patterns of moral behaviour encourage the development of new neurons, even of new “mirror” neurons? Can we build on our basic "moral sense," become more “empathic," thereby reducing instances of man’s inhumanity to man? If so, maybe it’s time to think about which new behaviors might best replace the old. If not—we should simply resign ourselves to the status quo and ignore whatever feelings of disgust may be awakened by the inevitable headlines on CNN.
25 August 2006
Dogged! Pluto Stripped of Planetary Status
by Gina Stepp
Christine Lavin’s folk albums have been enjoyed in our house since before my oldest child was born. Of course, if you aren't familiar with the singer, you may well wonder why her name opens an article purporting to discuss the latest news about Pluto. (You know – that heavenly body formerly known as a planet.) It’s not a complicated story really, but a little background information might help.
It all started back in 1996 when Lavin wrote a song entitled Planet X, her musings sparked by a USA Today article about the controversy surrounding Pluto’s planetary status. After a brief rhyming history of Pluto’s discovery and the scientific arguments over its importance, she asked the question,
But how are we going to deal with it
if science comes up with the proof
that Pluto was never a planet.
How do we handle this truth?
As the PhD's all disagree
we don't know yet who's wrong or who's right
but wherever you are, whatever you are,
Pluto, we know you're out there tonight.
We found the song (and the question) amusing, but we never really expected events to come to a head as they did this week when Pluto’s status was decided once and for all at a meeting in Prague of the International Astronomical Union. This, apparently, is the body that sets standards for the field of astronomy, which means they have always had the power to demote Pluto to a lowly Kuiper Belt object (KBO), Trans-Neptunal object (TNO), or even a “Plutino.” Plutinos, by the way, are objects that orbit the sun beyond Neptune. Most are much smaller than Pluto and are believed to be similar to comets, but they are defined by orbital patterns which resemble Pluto's. This of course makes it all a bit confusing. How does one imagine classifying Pluto among its own namesakes? And incidentally, are they going to have to rename plutonium now?
More to the point, why does the International Astronomical Union even care? Why all the fuss over a tiny frozen planet whose only real value to the universe was (thanks to a little help from Walt Disney) its ability to capture the imaginations of school-children on a planet more sure of its status a couple of billion miles away?
The truth is that Pluto was beginning to make the solar system seem a bit more complicated than the average astronomer likes. As more and more “bodies” are making themselves known at the edges of our solar system, Pluto has begun looking less and less like another planet, and more and more like the rest of the non-descript and far-flung debris littering space. This has resulted in increasing scientific disdain for the ninth planet, despite the fact that new discoveries reveal Pluto has at least three of its own moons, which would give any of the rest of us a great deal of significance if we could boast such a thing. Nevertheless, astronomers began to think that if they allowed Pluto to join the planetary club, the door might have to be opened to dozens or even hundreds more. At the very least, they would certainly have to admit a tenth body discovered last year which is even further from the sun than Pluto but seems to be slightly larger and has been popularly nicknamed "Xena." As long ago as 1996, Christine Lavin could see where all this was going:
and now 20 astronomy textbooks
refer to Pluto as less than a planet
I guess if Pluto showed up at a planet convention
the bouncer at the door might have to ban it.
On the other hand, the International Astronomical Union may have done Pluto a good turn. If the IAU had given Pluto the thumbs up and with it hundreds of other “planets,” one might imagine the beleaguered entity responding in Groucho Marx style, with the words:
“Please accept my resignation from the solar system. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”
Christine Lavin’s folk albums have been enjoyed in our house since before my oldest child was born. Of course, if you aren't familiar with the singer, you may well wonder why her name opens an article purporting to discuss the latest news about Pluto. (You know – that heavenly body formerly known as a planet.) It’s not a complicated story really, but a little background information might help.
It all started back in 1996 when Lavin wrote a song entitled Planet X, her musings sparked by a USA Today article about the controversy surrounding Pluto’s planetary status. After a brief rhyming history of Pluto’s discovery and the scientific arguments over its importance, she asked the question,
But how are we going to deal with it
if science comes up with the proof
that Pluto was never a planet.
How do we handle this truth?
As the PhD's all disagree
we don't know yet who's wrong or who's right
but wherever you are, whatever you are,
Pluto, we know you're out there tonight.
We found the song (and the question) amusing, but we never really expected events to come to a head as they did this week when Pluto’s status was decided once and for all at a meeting in Prague of the International Astronomical Union. This, apparently, is the body that sets standards for the field of astronomy, which means they have always had the power to demote Pluto to a lowly Kuiper Belt object (KBO), Trans-Neptunal object (TNO), or even a “Plutino.” Plutinos, by the way, are objects that orbit the sun beyond Neptune. Most are much smaller than Pluto and are believed to be similar to comets, but they are defined by orbital patterns which resemble Pluto's. This of course makes it all a bit confusing. How does one imagine classifying Pluto among its own namesakes? And incidentally, are they going to have to rename plutonium now?
More to the point, why does the International Astronomical Union even care? Why all the fuss over a tiny frozen planet whose only real value to the universe was (thanks to a little help from Walt Disney) its ability to capture the imaginations of school-children on a planet more sure of its status a couple of billion miles away?
The truth is that Pluto was beginning to make the solar system seem a bit more complicated than the average astronomer likes. As more and more “bodies” are making themselves known at the edges of our solar system, Pluto has begun looking less and less like another planet, and more and more like the rest of the non-descript and far-flung debris littering space. This has resulted in increasing scientific disdain for the ninth planet, despite the fact that new discoveries reveal Pluto has at least three of its own moons, which would give any of the rest of us a great deal of significance if we could boast such a thing. Nevertheless, astronomers began to think that if they allowed Pluto to join the planetary club, the door might have to be opened to dozens or even hundreds more. At the very least, they would certainly have to admit a tenth body discovered last year which is even further from the sun than Pluto but seems to be slightly larger and has been popularly nicknamed "Xena." As long ago as 1996, Christine Lavin could see where all this was going:
and now 20 astronomy textbooks
refer to Pluto as less than a planet
I guess if Pluto showed up at a planet convention
the bouncer at the door might have to ban it.
On the other hand, the International Astronomical Union may have done Pluto a good turn. If the IAU had given Pluto the thumbs up and with it hundreds of other “planets,” one might imagine the beleaguered entity responding in Groucho Marx style, with the words:
“Please accept my resignation from the solar system. I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member.”
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