“PREVIOUSLY NOBODY BELIEVED THIS COULD BE POSSIBLE.”
BY KRISTIN HOUSER / JANUARY 21 2020 (futurism.com)
A newly discovered immune cell could lead to the creation of a universal cancer treatment — a “Holy Grail” treatment that would work for all cancers, in all people.
The treatment leverages T-cells, a type of white blood cell that helps our bodies’ immune systems by scanning for and killing abnormal cells. For background, scientists have recently started harnessing that ability in the fight against cancer through a therapy called CAR-T, which involves removing T-cells from a patient’s blood and genetically engineering them to seek out and destroy cancer cells.
While promising, CAR-T has limitations. It’s patient-specific, works against only a small number of cancers, and isn’t effective against solid tumors, which comprise the majority of cancers.
On Monday, researchers from Cardiff University published a new study in the journal Nature Immunology detailing their discovery of a T-cell equipped with a new type of T-cell receptor (TCR) that recognizes a molecule called MR1.
This molecule appears on the surface of many types of cancer cells as well as healthy cells, but T-cells equipped with this TCR know to kill only cancer cells.
And not just the kind linked to a single type of cancer, either. When the Cardiff researchers equipped T-cells in lab tests with this new TCR, the cells killed lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells — all while ignoring healthy cells.
In another lab test, the team modified the T-cells of melanoma patients to express the newly discovered TCR and found that the cells could then target and destroy both that patient’s own cancer cells and the cancer cells of other patients.
The team has yet to test the modified T-cells in actual cancer patients, but when tested in mice injected with human cancers, the cells recognized the MR1 molecule and exhibited “encouraging” cancer-killing abilities, according to a Cardiff press release.
The Cardiff scientists now plan to conduct additional tests. If those goes as hoped, the treatment could be ready for patients within a few years, researcher Andrew Sewell said in the press release.
“Cancer-targeting via MR1-restricted T-cells is an exciting new frontier,” he added. “It raises the prospect of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ cancer treatment; a single type of T-cell that could be capable of destroying many different types of cancers across the population. Previously nobody believed this could be possible.”
“The Fourth Age not only discusses what the rise of A.I. will mean for us, it also forces readers to challenge their preconceptions. And it manages to do all this in a way that is both entertaining and engaging.” —The New York Times
As we approach a great turning point in history when technology is poised to redefine what it means to be human, The Fourth Age offers fascinating insight into AI, robotics, and their extraordinary implications for our species.
In The Fourth Age, Byron Reese makes the case that technology has reshaped humanity just three times in history:
– 100,000 years ago, we harnessed fire, which led to language.
– 10,000 years ago, we developed agriculture, which led to cities and warfare.
– 5,000 years ago, we invented the wheel and writing, which lead to the nation state.
We are now on the doorstep of a fourth change brought about by two technologies: AI and robotics. The Fourth Age provides extraordinary background information on how we got to this point, and how—rather than what—we should think about the topics we’ll soon all be facing: machine consciousness, automation, employment, creative computers, radical life extension, artificial life, AI ethics, the future of warfare, superintelligence, and the implications of extreme prosperity.
By asking questions like “Are you a machine?” and “Could a computer feel anything?”, Reese leads you through a discussion along the cutting edge in robotics and AI, and, provides a framework by which we can all understand, discuss, and act on the issues of the Fourth Age, and how they’ll transform humanity.
Turns out animal intelligence is not so different from our own
ILLUSTRATIONS BY BILL MAYER BY BRANDON KEIM | FEB 26 2019 (SierraClub.org)
IN MARCH 1996, STATE WILDLIFE OFFICIALS DELIVERED THREE ORPHANED BLACK BEARS to Ben Kilham’s door in Lyme, New Hampshire. Just seven weeks old, they weighed no more than four pounds apiece. They should have been inside their mother’s den, in the warmth between womb and world where each bear’s life begins. Instead, a logging operation had sent mom fleeing. So Kilham, a former wildlife biology student turned gunsmith and state-licensed bear rehabilitator, became their foster mother.
He bottle-nursed the cubs and fashioned a basket den in his guest bedroom. When spring arrived, Kilham walked the cubs in the woods, teaching them as best he could what to eat and introducing them to wild bears. He was protective, and also curious: Dyslexia had stifled his academic dreams of studying animal behavior, but a passion for wildlife remained. Fifteen months later, Kilham released the orphans into the wild. Two left the area, but one, whom he named Squirty, took up residence on the forested slopes of the White Mountains near Kilham’s home and rehabilitation facility.
Twenty-two years later, Squirty’s still in the neighborhood, and one early-October evening, Kilham drives me several miles up a dirt track to a clearing where she can be found. Squirty, who now weighs about 180 pounds, is there. So is her extended family, whom Kilham recognizes by sight. There’s one of her daughters, Demi, and granddaughter SQ2LO—her prosaic name signaling Kilham’s transition from curious to rigorous observer—and a great-granddaughter, Lightface. There are 22 bears altogether, the cubs gamboling, the rest waiting quietly around the clearing’s edges.
Kilham leaves me in his pickup truck and fetches two buckets of dried corn from its bed. Tall and slab-framed, he has an easygoing bulk that, cliché but inescapable, seems almost ursine as he pours a circuit of small piles. It’s not nearly enough to sustain the bears, but it’s a reliable snack that, like the bananas Jane Goodall provided when she began her chimpanzee studies, gives Kilham a chance to watch them. As the bears tuck in, he starts taking notes, just as he’s done most evenings for more than a decade.When a black bear in Upstate New York started opening the latest in bear-proof canisters, other local bears soon followed suit. Did she teach them?
Kilham’s observations collected while following radio-collared bears, along with genetic analyses of their identities, constitute one of the richest repositories of information ever gathered about black bears. Among his findings: Bears are quite social (the bears in Kilham’s meadow represent two distinct clans); they have a society of sorts, a matriarchy that in this case is governed by Squirty; they use a rich system of communication; they are highly self-aware; and, perhaps most surprising, they are governed by long-term relationships and rules of conduct.
Kilham thinks these dynamics reflect, and across evolutionary time have shaped, black bear intelligence—an intelligence comparable to that of chimpanzees and other great apes and sharing many properties with our own. “They’re like us,” he says. “They judge. They punish. They have gratitude and friendship. But because they’re bears, people see them in the light of conflict.” After a while, Squirty ambles over. “You look pretty good for 22,” he murmurs in response to her rumblings.
As I look at Squirty’s massive head through Kilham’s open door, I think of Flo, matriarch of the chimpanzee clan studied by Goodall when she arrived in Tanzania nearly 60 years ago. At the time, mainstream science mostly denied that animals could think and feel in meaningful ways. Claims of animal intelligence, ethologist Frans de Waal writes in his 2017 best-seller Are We Smart Enough to Know How Smart Animals Are?, were dismissed as “anthropomorphic, romantic, or unscientific.” Goodall’s findings of tool-making, alliance-forming, emotionally complicated chimps helped seed a revolution.
Nowadays, science overflows with such findings. A Google Scholar search for “animal” and “cognition” returns more than 190,000 publications in just the past five years as research has illuminated a menagerie of intelligence. Ravens can plan for the future and demonstrate a degree of self-control comparable to great apes’. Sperm whales engage in consensus-based decision-making during the course of their travels. Japanese great tits, songbirds related to chickadees, use syntax—a linguistic property long thought unique to human language—when they communicate. Experiments show that tiny zebra fish, a species used to model basic animal traits, possess detailed memories of events and can learn from one another. Many species possess emotions: Giraffes appear to grieve, bumblebees show signs of happiness, and crayfish can experience anxiety.
On and on the findings go, yet bears have remained in shadow. Though plenty is known about bears’ biology and ecological interactions—as well as how to regulate hunting seasons—science is just starting to pay attention to what’s going on in their heads. At any given moment, researchers are conducting long-term field studies or experimental tests on primate cognition—but Kilham is almost alone in his studies of bear intelligence. This research highlights an intriguing possibility: Could it be that much of North America is populated by hundreds of thousands of exceptionally intelligent nonhuman beings?
AMONG THE BEDROCK PROPERTIES of our own minds—minds encompassing the capacities of thought and feeling that constitute intelligence—is that of self-awareness, a sense of one’s self as distinct from others. Self-awareness is so integral to our own intelligence that it’s practically impossible to imagine its absence. Assessing it in animals, however, is contentious.
One common approach, developed by psychologist Gordon Gallup in the 1970s, involves observing whether animals recognize themselves in a mirror. Humans generally do this as toddlers, but only a few other species—among them bottlenose dolphins, some great apes, Asian elephants, and magpies—have passed the test. Since the mirror test detects only the forms of self-awareness closest to our own, researchers disagree about whether it is actually found far more broadly throughout the animal kingdom. But recognizing oneself is certainly a powerful ability.
Propped against a tree in Squirty’s clearing is a tall, wood-framed mirror. On this night, the bears ignore it—but that’s not always the case. In Kilham’s 2014 book, In the Company of Bears, and in the thesis that earned him a PhD in 2015 at the age of 63, he describes bears passing through the stages of recognition. They licked and sniffed the mirror to determine whether the reflection belonged to a stranger; looked behind it; mimed to their reflections, repeating the same actions over and over; and finally, as recognition dawned, inspected themselves. “Black bears passed all four levels of the mirror self-recognition test developed by Gallup,” Kilham wrote in his thesis—a landmark claim, though one that hasn’t yet passed the peer-review gauntlet required for publication in a scientific journal. A skeptic might argue that the bears merely became accustomed to their reflections without truly recognizing themselves.
Such scientific objections miss a larger point: For most of human history, animal self-awareness was taken for granted. Many so-called primitive societies believed animals “to have essentially the same sort of animating agency which man possesses,” writes anthropologist A. Irving Hallowell in Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere. “They have a language of their own, . . . have forms of social or tribal organization, and live a life which is parallel in other respects to that of human societies.” If that sounds too anthropomorphic—indeed unscientific—it’s worth considering that early humans knew animals with a detailed intimacy now reserved for pets.
Bears merited a special veneration. Samis in northern Scandinavia spoke of “the old man with the fur garment.” The Yakuts of northeastern Asia called brown bears “beloved uncle” and “grandfather.” The Abenaki tribes of southern Quebec and western New England would have called Squirty “cousin.”
Ancient peoples even learned from bears. In the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, linguist Valeria Kolosova and colleagues related that Eurasian languages contain more than 1,200 plant names derived from bears: bearberries and bear’s garlic and bear’s cabbage and so on. “The Native American ‘pharmacopoeia’ was replete with plants they derived from watching bears collect herbs, berries, and roots,” Kolosova’s team wrote.
In Europe, however, aversion eventually replaced reverence. Agrarian societies treated bears as competitors rather than fellow denizens. They symbolized wildness—and much as so-called wildlands and wild people were subjugated and exploited, so were bears. During the Middle Ages, bear torturing was a common public entertainment, and the animals’ very intelligence became a tool of degradation as they were turned into circus performers. Meanwhile, Christian scholars portrayed animals as inferior to humans, who were, according to the Bible, fashioned in God’s image. Theologian Thomas Aquinas characterized animals as “without intellect” and controlled by instincts as thoughtless “as the upwards motion of fire.” Such prejudices went on to shape Enlightenment thought. French philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, a foundational figure in the emergence of modern science, likened animals to wind-up toys: Though animated, they were unthinkingly mechanical.
Not all scientists were so close-minded. Notable among them was Charles Darwin, whose The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals argued that evolution applied to mental properties as well as anatomical traits. (Bears appear in a footnote to Darwin’s discussion of frowns as expressions of mental concentration.) Yet even as evolutionary theory ascended, claims of animal intelligence foundered. Scientists who theorized about animal intelligence were rebuked for relying on anecdotes. Sometimes the rebukes were fair, though one could speculate that animal intelligence was instinctively uncomfortable for societies founded on narratives of uninhabited wilderness awaiting a civilizing touch.
Biases against animal intelligence were transplanted to North America, where in the United States and Canada nature would become the domain of hunting-and-fishing-focused wildlife management and, later, conservation biology. Animal intelligence was not high on either discipline’s research agenda. Behaviorism, a theory that viewed animals as little more than Cartesian machines, dominated the academy. “Other species,” wrote behaviorist B.F. Skinner in 1974, are “conscious in the sense of being under stimulus control.”
By the time scientists started taking animal thoughts and feelings seriously again, it was more common to travel to Africa to study chimps than to ask questions about the bears outside town.
IT ALSO DOESN’T HELP THAT BEARS, big and powerful and expensive to care for, are ill-suited to captive study. “No universities are going to have a bear lab like they would have a rat or dog or primate lab,” says Gordon Burghardt, an ethologist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. “And the people who you think would be really interested in bears, their concern is how to manage them for hunters.”
Now renowned for his pioneering research on animal play and reptile cognition, Burghardt in the mid-1970s studied the intelligence of two captive orphaned black bear cubs. “These animals are very intelligent,” he says. “They’re up there with chimpanzees in many cognitive capacities.” The cubs grew up quickly, though, and few researchers followed in his path.
Subsequent observations often came from people outside academia. Among them were the late Charlie Russell, a Canadian naturalist who raised brown bear cubs on Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula; Steve Stringham, one of Burghardt’s students, who now runs wildlife tours in Alaska; the late Else Poulsen, a zookeeper who wrote about bear emotion; Lynn Rogers, formerly a Minnesota state wildlife biologist, who now hosts bear behavior seminars; and Bill Kilham.
Common to these figures are their lives in unusual proximity to bears. To Barbara Smuts, a researcher at the University of Michigan who has studied social relationships in baboons, chimpanzees, and dolphins, that familiarity outweighs Kilham’s long-standing lack of institutional credentials. “He has a tremendous feeling for the bears,” she says. “That shouldn’t be dismissed just because it can’t be quantified. He’s a true naturalist.”
Kilham’s early experiences with Squirty and other cubs led to meeting yet more bears. With permission from the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department, he radio-collared and followed dozens and eventually established the feeding site where we sit as darkness falls. Tonight it’s mostly quiet. The adults are already conserving energy for winter. The cubs are restive, though, and two who’ve scaled a tree begin to moan. “They want their mother,” Kilham says and begins to translate the scene for me. “Here she comes. She manages them with gulps and chirps”—he mimics the bear sounds—”and she wants them to come down. She’ll sit at the base of the tree and gulp, and they’ll come down. She wants them to walk her way, so she’ll gulp and walk away. It’s a syntax between body language and gulp. But she has to teach them the meaning of those sounds. It’s not instinctive.”
Just that fleeting interaction packs a lot of cognition. Mom, by Kilham’s account, understands her cubs’ mental state and communicates intentionally rather than reflexively voicing arousal. She uses a syntax that recombines and reorders “words” and teaches her cubs their meaning. But do mom’s vocalizations reveal what’s known as “theory of mind”—an ability to reason about the intentions of other individuals, which many scientists still consider unique to humans? How can Kilham be sure about the mother’s intent?
It’s just one anecdote, but illustrative and intriguing nevertheless (and it’s one of many). Even Jane Goodall’s original work, says Ellen Furlong, director of the Comparative Cognition Lab at Illinois Wesleyan University, “wasn’t some gold-star standard of cognitive research. But it was groundbreaking—a really important place to start.”
In assessing claims of intelligence in creatures whose behaviors are suggestive but not yet well studied, Furlong advises considering the animals’ ecological niche and life history. These shape the capacities of every lineage. Black bears are generalist omnivores, eating a rich variety of foods and adapting readily to local conditions, a lifestyle thought to nourish cognitive flexibility. Another great influence on black bears, Kilham says, is their sociality.
It’s a word seldom applied to bears. Besides descriptions of mother-and-cub relations and grizzlies feeding together on salmon runs, bears are usually depicted as solitary. It’s quite the opposite, argues Kilham. He’s observed, as did Lynn Rogers, that black bears encounter each other frequently and sometimes congregate around food. And because Kilham has run genetic identifications on the bears living near his rehabilitation center, he can also trace their family trees. He’s identified a matrilineal hierarchy with Squirty on top, presiding over an extended family with overlapping home ranges that stretch for miles.
In addition to Squirty’s kin, another clan is represented in the clearing. Kilham points out two descendants of Moose, an elder bear who allowed Squirty to live in her territory when Kilham released Squirty as a young orphan. Squirty now shares with Moose’s clan, and that isn’t coincidental, Kilham says. She’s returning Moose’s generosity—not because there’s some genetically hardwired program governing the exchange but out of obligation. It’s the sort of relationship that social hierarchy and intentional communication and self-awareness make possible. Favors are given and later returned.
Often this involves food. Squirty’s home range is rich in red oak; Moose’s clan lives in a beech-rich territory. When there’s a bumper crop of acorns, Squirty allows nonrelated bears access to her terrain; when acorns fail to set but the beeches are bursting, Moose’s clan follows suit. It makes more sense than fighting to control their individual territories. “They think highly of those who share with them,” Kilham believes, “and remember them for their lifetimes.”
When, in the early 1970s, evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers first theorized how such a system of exchange could evolve, it was dubbed “reciprocal altruism” and hailed as a window into the origins of human society. Perhaps black bears are another such window.
PERHAPS. It’s important to recall that all of this is still just a theory. Nevertheless, Kilham’s claims have heft. Richard Wrangham, one of the world’s foremost primatologists, has visited with Kilham and calls In the Company of Bears “a brilliant revelation.” The esteemed biologist and conservationist George Schaller, who sat on Kilham’s dissertation committee, credits Kilham with “not trying to humanize bears but trying to describe exactly what they do and think as bears.“
Ellen Furlong says that Kilham’s findings should prompt cognitive scientists “to get in there and tease apart the mechanisms and the behaviors.” Although the rigorous experiments performed with well-studied animals like ravens and jays—string-pulling tests of causal reasoning, food-hiding tasks that gauge a bird’s awareness of what others know—are rarely done with bears, there are a few such studies. Most of them come from Jennifer Vonk, a comparative psychologist at Oakland University in Michigan and head of the school’s Laboratory of Cognitive Origins. Vonk previously worked at the University of Southern Mississippi, near a small zoo that kept four black bears. She trained them to use a touch-screen interface, which let her perform various experiments. She could test number sense, for example, by presenting a bear with two sets of dots, then rewarding it with a snack for selecting the greater quantity. Then, to be sure the bear actually counted dots rather than gauging surface area, Vonk tweaked the dots’ size, presenting arrays that contrasted a few large dots with many tiny points. Indeed, the bears could discern quantities.
In another set of experiments, Vonk tested whether bears could discriminate between images belonging to different conceptual categories: primates and hooved animals, carnivores and herbivores, animals and landscapes. In a study published in Animal Cognition, Vonk described a bear at the Detroit Zoo recognizing photos of objects—a football, a shovel, a watering can—that the bear had previously seen, and also recognizing objects first encountered in photos. Such tasks sound rudimentary, but they’re not meant to encapsulate intelligence. They identify potentials: numeracy, concept formation, abstraction. Black bears “appear to display cognitive abilities commensurate with those of the great apes,” Vonk wrote in another journal, Animal Behavior and Cognition.
Anecdotes open up further lines of inquiry. Kilham describes how bears climb oaks in midsummer to examine budding acorns, as if checking what autumn’s crop will bring. Might they be making long-term plans? Researchers in Russia have documented brown bears eating clay, ostensibly to prevent diarrhea caused by a salmon-rich diet. How did they learn that? When a black bear in Upstate New York started opening the latest in bear-proof canisters, other local bears soon followed suit. Did she teach them?
Such questions don’t even touch on emotions, which are notoriously difficult to study empirically; until recently, talk of animal feelings was considered unscientific. That’s no longer the case, Furlong says, and emotions are now recognized as a basic, widespread evolutionary adaptation. “We’ll be learning more about emotion,” she says, “but we’re just at the cusp of beginning to move in that direction.”
In her book Carnivore Minds, psychologist and ecologist Gay A. Bradshaw, best known for documenting social breakdown among African elephants that saw family members killed, suggests that bears may also be deeply affected by death. It’s just a hypothesis, but it’s worth investigating. Lynn Rogers, whose thousands of bear video clips are being collated by Gordon Burghardt, describes a bear rushing to her dead brother’s side even as other bears ignored him. The sister bear sniffed her brother “for the longest time,” recalls Rogers, then dragged the body 50 feet before finally walking away with a last backward glance.
THE DAY AFTER I VISIT Squirty’s meadow, Kilham’s sister Phoebe, who oversees day-to-day care at the Kilham Bear Center, takes me on a tour of the surrounding woods. She points out a duckweed-covered wallow where bears cool on hot summer days—they approach it using a stiff-legged gait that leaves especially deep, individually identifiable tracks—and a nearby red pine marked at bear height by a palimpsest of scratches. These tracks and scratches, as well as scent deposits, are part of the ursine communication repertoire. They don’t just vocalize and gesture; they leave messages. Phoebe likens the scratches to hobo signs.
Seen through this lens, a bear’s landscape is a place inscribed with the etchings of society. That would make the woods something we might call a neighborhood rather than mere habitat; it might prompt us to consider the residents as thinking, feeling individuals as opposed to mere creatures. Chris Darimont, a conservation scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, has suggested that people should view wildlife habitat issues in a new light: Environmental degradation isn’t just about animal population trends; it’s also about animals’ lived experience of hardship. When a bulldozer clears a wood to make way for human residences, it destroys many homes first. Darimont also emphasizes that, when considering animals and our ethical relations to them, it’s enough to know that they suffer. Compassion isn’t contingent on intelligence.
Fair enough—yet it does seem that intelligence, however measured, adds to the moral calculus. Few of us would equate the plight of a stranded jellyfish with that of a beached whale. What sort of ethical regard, then, is owed to a bear?
For starters, we should strive to replace our culture’s fear of bears with a spirit of understanding and respect. Such respect is incompatible with killing bears for sport or profit—and while outlawing bear hunting is an unlikely event in many places, nonhunters should be represented on the state committees that regulate hunting. They can give voice to those who don’t speak in human tongues.
And hunting isn’t the only threat to bears: Equally important is how to live with them. No bear should die because someone didn’t secure their trash. Maybe we should spend a small fraction of the nation’s many billions of public infrastructure dollars on bear-proof canisters, as a gesture of neighborly generosity. And what happens when our efforts at coexistence prove insufficient and we accidentally harm or kill bears? We then have an obligation to care for the casualties, to show them compassion, just as the Kilhams have done for decades.
Phoebe takes me to feed the cubs. It’s been a bad year: Trees in the region produced few nuts and bears are wandering far in search of food. Many mothers have been hit by cars or have ventured onto the property of trigger-happy landowners.
By late autumn, the center will house 60 orphans, but on this day, there are nine. As we approach, all but one retreat to the security of the trees. The lone greeter is named Trebo. Knee high, with a striking white crescent on her chest, she was found in spring after an ice storm. “She’s the boss,” Phoebe says. “If she says we have to go, we have to go.” Trebo presses up against Phoebe, sniffing her legs and then my own, and calls out, but the other bears stay hidden.
After a while, a male cub appears and makes a short run toward us. “That’s a false charge,” Phoebe explains. “He’s not mad. It just means ‘move along.'”
As we walk away, though, the male cub follows, seemingly reluctant to say goodbye. It’s considered a challenge, so I try not to look in his eyes. But I can’t help being captivated by their depth.
This article appeared in the March/April 2019 edition with the headline “Does a Bear Think in the Woods?”
Intelligence All Around Us
For much of modern history, people have considered human intelligence to be radically unlike that of any other animal. A growing body of research shows that, in fact, many of our mental capacities are common among other species.
Forward-Looking Chickadees Each autumn, black-capped chickadees prepare a winter larder by stashing thousands of seeds in bark crevices. Whether they actively plan for the coming months or simply follow instinct’s imperatives—or both—is an open question, but experiments by psychologists Miranda Feeney and David Sherry at the University of Western Ontario show that chickadees engage in “anticipatory cognition.” They use their memories to go back and forth in time.
Playful Alligators Play is more than a fun way of passing time. It’s a vehicle for social lessons in fairness and for learning about the physical properties of objects, how one’s own body moves, and how to think creatively. Even alligators play; ethologist Vladimir Dinets has documented them frolicking beneath falling water and riding on one another’s backs.
Emotional Bees When people feel happy, they’re more likely to take chances. When they’re sad, they tend to play it safe. The same holds for bees. Following a simulated attack on their hive, honeybees are reluctant to investigate an ambiguously bittersweet smell; they behave pessimistically. Conversely, researchers found that after a tasty syrup snack, bumblebees quickly follow that bittersweet scent. They’re optimistic—and, as reported in Science, a dopamine-blocking drug reverses their behavior. The neurotransmitters involved in regulating our emotions also regulate theirs.
Caring Rats Labels like “pest” and “vermin” make it easy to avoid thinking about Norway rats as individuals—no small irony, since research on their lab-bound kin has taught us more about the rat mind than we know about that of probably any other nonhuman animal. But rats are quite sensitive. Peggy Mason, a University of Chicago neurobiologist, found them so distressed by the discomfort of trapped friends that they ignored chocolate in their haste to help.
Mindful Sunfish Until recently, conventional wisdom said that fish can’t even feel pain. Today, however, fish cognition research is flourishing, and old assumptions are being overturned. Fish behaviors may reflect considerable intelligence: Studies show that bluegill sunfish recognize their children, remember fish they’ve met before, and modulate interactions according to memories of past encounters.
Communicating Crows American crows trapped by students of John Marzluff, a corvid cognition expert at the University of Washington, scolded the researchers for months after being released. So, for that matter, did crows that were not trapped. The birds learned from their peers about the untrustworthy humans. These findings hint at the social dynamics shaping crow cognition. They live, as do we, in fission-fusion societies, moving between different groups—family, feeding flock, teeming autumn roosts—with whom they share information and negotiate relationships.
One of Harvard’s most famous professors to ever live was William James. Having studied medicine and biology, he was first appointed as an instructor in physiology. From there, he went on to teach anatomy, before he established himself as a preeminent psychologist and philosopher.
In the world of philosophy, William James is most famous for championing the theory of pragmatism; the idea that truth isn’t about hard logic or metaphysics, but that truth is what works in the real world. It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that he dedicated much of his life to the study of psychology, a field he laid the groundwork for in his book The Principles of Psychology.
Among many other things, he was the first psychologist to claim that our core traits don’t change much across time. In The Principles, he wrote, “In most of us, by the age of thirty, the character has set like plaster, and will never soften again.” Much subsequent evidence has shown this observation to be largely true. Genes play a huge role, and the environment, too, makes its case, and after the first few decades of life, people stop changing their inner core in meaningful ways. Whether or not change is possible is one thing, but it does seem true that most people are happy to stick with what they have grown comfortable with.
There are two things we can be sure of in life: for one, change itself, and secondly, uncertainty. When we are born, we don’t know much. In fact, we are incredibly needy, and without parents and caretakers, babies would have no chance of survival. Over time, however, we learn, and we develop our mental model of the world. The cultural stories and the physical incentives around us mold our minds and our behaviors until we form an initial concept of self. We learn to avoid danger, seek rewards, and see ourselves through the eyes of others.
For the most part, growing up, we know that we don’t know much. Our bodies are also changing so fast that change itself is evident. And we are okay with it, mostly because we still have other people who protect us from facing the downsides that uncertainty and change offer. At some point, however, when we leave the safety of our parents and our caretakers’ nests, we are thrown into the world, and suddenly we actually have to face uncertainty and change ourselves. This is a time of maturity.
Humans innately crave stability and security, and when we are faced with making sense of a complex, changing world, one which our parents can no longer protect us from, the only source of stability grows from within — our inner self and its behaviors become a center of safety. After decades of experience, they have learned how to weather the trials and tribulations of life, and so, they decide that it’s time to settle down and continue to use these same habit patterns for whatever the future has to offer us.
When we are young and growing rapidly, most of our time is spent in exploration mode. We seek new adventures. We spend a lot of time doing leisure activities, playing around to see what we like and what we don’t like. Once the threshold of maturity is crossed, however, once we have learned our preferences, once we have come to terms with ourselves, we start to move into exploitation mode. This is a stage that we tend to stay in for the next few decades of life. Rather than exploring new habits and new likes and dislikes, we settle down and we double down on what we already have.
So far, so good. In this sense, there is nothing to fear about James’ claim, and for most of us, this is as it should be. This is the basic definition of what it means to grow into an adult. If you have done the work to know who you are and what you want, it makes sense to just zone in and focus.
Around the time of maturity, there is, however, something else that sneaks up on us that isn’t quite as beneficial for us in the long run. That something is seriousness. Seriousness often looks and feels and behaves like maturity and adulthood, which is why it is so dangerous, but it’s an entirely different beast, one that inhibits growth rather than supports it.
Maturity says: I am ready to take responsibility for myself. It’s the part of our character that has figured out how to manage our emotional landscape and can reconcile it with the world as it pursues what it wants. Seriousness says: I know what is best. It’s the part of our character that thinks that it has the world figured out, and then attempts to control it based on a limited perspective rather than working with it as it moves along. Maturity is about having developed the habit patterns that support your growth as a person in a complex world in your chosen direction. Seriousness is about trying to enforce your belief systems onto other people because you know best.
You can be mature while still retaining your ability to keep an open mind. Seriousness, by default, is rigid and closed-minded. The former has personal preferences, while the latter dresses judgments up as facts.
When we are young, much of what we learn is learned through play. Evolutionarily, we play because it teaches us about our physical surroundings, our social norms, and our cognitive capacities in a low-cost way. Although the point of play isn’t to learn, learning is a natural result of play. It’s a state in which our mind is open to the stimuli of the world — a non-judgmental kind of flow and engagement. There is no right or wrong way to play — it’s a constant negotiation with the present moment.
Seriousness is the precise opposite of this. It’s a pure state of judgment confined by preexisting boundaries of what the wearer of the mask assumes is right and wrong, without any consideration of the fact that it may be lacking complete information in an incomprehensible world. The base of seriousness is the dread of uncertainty. Deep down it knows that it doesn’t know much and is terrified of it. Rather than continuing the state of play into mature adulthood, it instead doubles down on what brings it comfort.
Ultimately, seriousness is no way to live if growth and challenge and truth is what one is after. Maturity may harden some of our habits, but it can generally be fluid enough to respond to things, good and bad, in ways that are diverse, keeping itself open to learning new things. William James, even as he wrote those words about character hardening knew this, because even in his own life, he did some of his best work in his later years. He only did so, however, because he never fell into the trap of closing his mind.
One of my favorite quotes of his comes from The Varieties of Religious Experience, where he wrote:
“Good-humor is a philosophic state of mind; it seems to say to Nature that we take her no more seriously than she takes us. I maintain that one should always talk of philosophy with a smile.”
In doing this, in taking this approach himself, James’ chose to play, just like we played when we learned how to walk, how to talk, and how to socialize. The common tragedy of adulthood isn’t necessarily that we forget to play — it’s perhaps the most natural thing that we can do as human beings. Rather, it’s that we convince ourselves that it just isn’t a thing we are supposed to do as we age. We stop looking at work as play. We stop treating our interactions with friends and loved ones as play. We stop making time to play.
The cost of all this is that our mind becomes rigid. It forgets how to open up to new information, new stimuli. But the beauty is that it can learn to do so at any time, as long as it is willing to face the underlying uncertainty. The road leading there is precisely where the gift waits.Personal Growth
Playing at the intersection of science, art, and philosophy. Trying to be less wrong. I share my more intimate thoughts at www.designluck.com/community.
Over the course of three years, I’ve moved house close to a dozen times. Most people experience moving house as a stressful event. Initially, I was no different. But I’ve learned to love it for one reason: It forced me to think about my possessions.
When I moved to London from The Netherlands in 2014, it was the first time I took the time to get rid of almost everything I owned.
No, I didn’t get rid of my things because I read The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up or watched something about Minimalism. I just did it for practical reasons. Mainly because of:
You see, it’s not about ‘needing’ things. Because let’s be honest, do you really need ten pairs of shoes? Or how about those two coffee machines that are sitting on your kitchen counter? And that iPad that’s catching dust on your desk?
I’m not perfect at that department. A while back I bought a pair of Jordan 11 Space Jam. It was the 20th-anniversary edition of that shoe. When the original came out in 1996, I wanted that shoe so bad. In fact, everyone in my basketball team idolized that shoe for years. And for years, I couldn’t buy it because we didn’t have the money for it.
Nike Jordan 11 Space Jam (named after the movie). My favorite shoes growing up.
But when Nike decided to relaunch it in December 2016, I knew it: “This time I’m buying those shoes!”
It’s a sentimental thing. I could have easily said to myself that I don’t ‘need’ those shoes. That they are way too expensive. And that I’m probably never going to wear them.
All those things are true. To date, I’ve worn those shoes three times. I’ve spent more time looking at them than actually walking in them. I even displayed the box for a while in my office. Does that make me a mindless consumer? Sure. But it’s more than that. The shoes represent a story.
The story of a young kid who wanted something but could never get it because they had no money. And when he grew up, made his own money, he decided to buy it because he could. Sometimes, you don’t need another reason.
But I don’t have many wants like that. Because it’s not about what you own, it’s about what you want. And if you want less, you own less. Stoic philosopher Epictetus said it best:
“Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
Say Goodbye to ‘Things’
Over the years, I’ve become more comfortable with saying goodbye to things: To memories, dreams, goals, people, etc.
You need to get used to it. When my grandmother passed away two years ago, I was surprised with the calm demeanor of my grandfather. I asked him: “Are you not upset?” He said he was sad. But he also told me that as you age, you’re forced to say goodbye to people you love.
That’s not something anyone likes. But it’s a part of life. And as weird as it sounds, you get more comfortable with it.
In The Netherlands, the most used platitude is, “Het leven gaat verder.” Which translates to, “Life moves on.”
And that’s reality.
However, we don’t accept that reality easily. Most of us gradually learn that no matter what happens, you have to move on. But you can also train yourself to become better at saying goodbye to things.
The easiest way to do that is to rid yourself of material possessions. I’ve found that you can get very attached to stuff that doesn’t live. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a shoe or a person, we can get attached to both.
“Nobody really owns anything. We give back our bodies at the end of our lives. We own our thoughts, but everything else is just borrowed. We use it for a while, then pass it on. Everything.”
That doesn’t mean you can’t accumulate things over a lifetime. That’s not realistic, and most importantly, it’s boring. Who says you can’t have more than one pair of shoes? Most of my friends have children, and one of them recently said this after he read something about minimalism:
“The idea of owning a few things sounds nice. But it doesn’t work when you’re married and have two kids.”
Most of us are too busy living life to think about our possessions every single day. I also don’t think it’s worthwhile to always think about things like:
“Should I buy this?”
“Do we need this?”
That requires too much brainpower. Instead, I prefer to do my work, spend time with my friends and family, or go to the gym. I don’t want to think about possessions too much. When I see something I truly like, I buy it—because that doesn’t happen often, that strategy works well. The good thing is that I don’t have to overthink things.
And get rid of things when they take up space you need.
That’s it. Last week I donated a bunch of clothes and shoes to charity. I also had some old electronics that I brought to a place that recycles that stuff. And I also threw a lot of useless things I don’t need in the trash.
I have to tell you, it feels good. If I don’t use something for a long time, it goes out the door. But decluttering your life is more than getting rid of unnecessary stuff. It’s about freeing up space in your mind.
Decluttering is also an exercise to cope better with loss. Somehow, we have to keep reminding ourselves that everything is borrowed.
So, what’s catching dust at your home? It’s time to roll up your sleeves, grab it by the head, throw it out and say: “Goodbye. I never owned you anyway.”
This article was originally published on August 24, 2017, by Darius Foroux, and is republished here with permission.
Darius Foroux writes about productivity, habits, decision making, and personal finance.
G. Allen Johnson – January 8, 2020 (Datebook.SFChronicle.com)
Clyde (Bradley Whitford, left), Joseph (Peter Dinklage) and Leon (Walton Goggins) play the title roles in Jon Avnet’s “Three Christs.”Photo: IFC Films
If you think a movie about three schizophrenic patients who each believe themselves to be Jesus Christ sounds dreadful, you’re on the money. It’s actually painful at times to see actors of such quality as Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford struggle through their underwritten, cliched roles in Jon Avnet’s “Three Christs.”
Those three aren’t the only victims. Richard Gere, so great just the year before this film was made in “Norman: The Moderate Rise and Tragic Fall of a New York Fixer,” is inert as the psychologist treating these patients, and poor Julianna Margulies as his wife is simply wasted. It’s easy to see why the film has been stashed on the proverbial shelf for the 2½ years since its debut at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The irony of all this is that the real-life case is a worthy project for a film that would treat psychology and schizophrenia in a realistic and educational way. “The Three Christs of Ypsilanti” is a classic but controversial psychology study written in 1964 by Milton Rokeach, describing his attempt to rehabilitate the three men by having them interact in their own support group. The hope is that they would help each other cure their delusions.
But that’s not what happened. Rokeach was manipulative and dishonest with the men, and the graduate students who assisted him came to view the project as terribly immoral. Even Rokeach apologized later, saying that he did not cure any of the men, but “it did cure me of my godlike delusion that I could manipulate them out of their beliefs.”
Such a morally challenged situation could make for a great movie, filled with ethical dilemmas, but “Three Christs” is not that movie. It’s more like “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”-lite, with the patients quirky and alternately annoying/lovable instead of realistic, mentally challenged human beings.
Instead, Gere is Dr. Alan Stone, a fictional character — and we later find out that’s not his real name (see, he goes by another name too; thus he has something in common with his Christs). Set, like the real-life case, in 1959 Ypsilanti, Mich., the film presents Stone as a hero and a visionary who is against such standard psychological treatments of the time as electroshock therapy and lobotomies. He butts heads with doctors at the facility, including his chief detractor, Dr. Orbus (Kevin Pollak).
His graduate assistant is a young woman, Becky (Charlotte Hope), who is sometimes left alone with these mentally disturbed male patients, which doesn’t seem like a good idea. In fact, the doctors in those movie do a lot of dumb things that anyone with common sense wouldn’t do. In one scene, Dr. Orbus agrees to take one of the Christs to the top of a church bell tower to see the view. Yes, by all means, take an unpredictable schizophrenic several stories up to look out an open window.
There are also seemingly random scenes that suggest there was much trimmed away in the editing room (the running time at the Toronto premiere was 117 minutes; the version I saw was seven minutes shorter). At one point, it appears that Dr. Stone and Becky will have an affair, or at least explore some type of attraction. There’s a scene in which his wife comes home drunk, apparently not for the first time, but her potential alcoholism isn’t mentioned again.
Just an odd mess of a movie. That you feel anything at all is a tribute to the acting talent of Dinklage and Goggins, who occasionally make us care.
“Three Christs”: Starring Richard Gere, Peter Dinklage, Walton Goggins and Bradley Whitford. Directed by Jon Avnet. (R. 110 minutes.)
G. Allen Johnson is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: ajohnson@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @BRfilmsAllen
We live in a world where real men eat meat. Studies show that across continents and cultures, men eat substantially more meat than women. Men are ten times more likely to kill animals for sport, and in cultures that hunt for subsistence, men do almost all of the killing and most of the eating. Research has consistently shown that men are half as likely as women to go vegan or vegetarian — this should be no surprise to anyone, given how frequently men deride vegetarianism as effeminate and associated with homosexuality. Though the homophobia is disappointing, the mental image of a man consuming sausage to prove his heterosexuality is an amusing one.
Male meat consumption is, in part, driven by insecurity. Bias evaluations show that male vegans — significantly more so than female vegans — are viewed as socially threatening. Psychological research suggests that a primary reason men eat meat is that it makes them “feel like real men.” One recent study demonstrated that when men have low self-esteem surrounding their manhood, they are likely to increase their red meat consumption to compensate. Frozen steak for a bruised eye, cooked steak for a bruised ego. How manly.
Some men have taken this to extremes. The controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson, known for insisting that our culture’s “masculine spirit is under assault,” has gone so far as to adopt an all-beef diet. Yes, you read that right: The only thing Dr. Peterson eats is beef. It’s as if he is trying to compensate for our collective emasculation all on his own.
He does this to himself ostensibly for health reasons. Peterson insists that any deviation from beef devastates his body. For example, he claims that when he cheated on the diet with a sip of apple cider, he did not sleep at all for 25 days. If true, this would mean he inadvertently beat the world record for sleeplessness by two weeks. Despite explicit warnings from experts, others have followed suit, and the carnivore diet is suddenly quite stylish among so-called men’s rights activists.
In both behavior and opinion, meat is the elixir of the real man. It is at once a sign of manliness and a source of it. Abstaining from meat is despised as feminine, and eating nothing but meat is heroically masculine. Fruits and vegetables are for wimps; real men order steak, extra bloody.
Eating meat is bad for animals, the planet, and humanity — and, despite what they may think, it’s especially bad for the men themselves.
If we replace “meat” with any other food item, the absurdity of our circumstance becomes obvious. Imagine, for a moment, if men felt the same way about cantaloupes. Imagine if we lived in a world where men arbitrarily coveted cantaloupes as a source of masculine energy. Imagine if men prepared bowls of cantaloupe to comfort themselves whenever their manhood was questioned. Imagine if men who chose not to eat cantaloupes were viewed as feminine and meek, and men who consumed all-cantaloupe diets were admired as alpha males. We live at the same heights of insanity, we’re just too acclimated to notice our altitude.
This bizarre male obsession with meat might seem to be a harmless expression of fragility, but it has real consequences. Meat consumption is the number one cause of animal cruelty worldwide, and eating animals is a contributing factor to climate change, world hunger, antibiotics resistance, deforestation, worker exploitation, indigenous land theft, pollution, mass extinction, water usage, zoonotic diseases — I could go on. If cantaloupes were causing these problems, would they still be on the shelves?
Eating meat is bad for animals, the planet, and humanity — and, despite what they may think, it’s especially bad for the men themselves. Vegans and vegetarians have a lower risk of heart disease, lower overall cancer rates, lower cholesterol, lower blood pressure, lower rates of hypertension, lower rates of type 2 diabetes, and a lower BMI than omnivores. Vegans overall are leaner than meat-eaters, and they live longer.
Does the patina of manliness that comes with refusing to be vegan justify the consequences?
If we look closer at the data, we see that the more meat you eat, the worse it gets. Research links increased red meat consumption with heart disease, diabetes, and increased total mortality. The United Nations has identified red meat as a probable carcinogen, and processed red meat as a definite one. Steaks are the new cigarettes — they make you look manly until you look sickly.
Ironically, meat isn’t even good for the traits we usually define as masculine. Testosterone levels — perhaps more than any other measurable, physical trait — are synonymous with masculinity in the popular imagination. This is understandable since testosterone is what causes males to develop deeper voices, facial hair, increased muscular strength, as well as higher sperm production and sex drive; if anything physical can be called “manly,” testosterone can. And yet, despite what one might expect, vegans have higher testosterone than meat-eaters: A large study published in the British Journal of Cancer showed that vegan men have 13% higher testosterone levels than omnivorous ones. From a hormonal perspective, vegan men are the manliest on earth.
Despite this evidence, Dr. Shawn Baker — a famous advocate of Jordan Peterson’s carnivore diet, who has made a career out of attacking vegans online — has proudly suggested that an all-meat diet may increase testosterone. And in the past, he has argued that the drop in American male testosterone levels since the 1970s is possibly caused by the corresponding reduction in red meat intake over that same interval.
He has since stopped making this argument, and it’s no mystery why. Baker recently took a blood test that showed his own testosterone levels had plummeted on an all-meat diet. It turns out, eating dead animals wasn’t the best thing for his manhood. He reacted in a blog post as follows:
I tested a early am testosterone back in January low and behold, it was shockingly low!! 227 ng/dL. This falls below the normal range of 270–1070. How can this be as you are a big strong, lean guy who supposedly has excellent sexual function (I checked and I do). So how is this possible?
The typos, pronoun shifts, and grammar mistakes are his, not mine. Baker found this result persuasive, but not in the way you would think — these results convinced him to take the unorthodox position that low testosterone can actually be a good thing. I suppose all evidence supports your argument if you start from your conclusion.
From a cultural perspective, people may view meat as an aid to virility; from a biological perspective, it is quite the opposite. Trying to increase one’s masculinity by consuming meat is like trying to gain weight by running marathons.
High testosterone isn’t the only masculine benefit of veganism. As you’ve likely seen on social media, rather flashy experiments in the recent Game Changers documentary demonstrated that a plant-based diet allows men to have significantly longer, harder erections; animal products had the opposite effect. A more scientific (albeit less entertaining) randomized controlled trial showed that reducing cholesterol and saturated fat intake — nutrients omnipresent in animal products, and virtually absent from a plant-based diet — can help cure erectile dysfunction. If men like Baker actually have the “excellent sexual function” they boast about on the internet, they do so despite their diet, not because of it.
Unless you want to include obesity, early death, low testosterone, and impotence in your definition of masculinity, excluding meat is far more manly than choking it down. From a cultural perspective, people may view meat as an aid to virility; from a biological perspective, it is quite the opposite. Trying to increase one’s masculinity by consuming meat is like trying to gain weight by running marathons.
Itwould be better for animals, the planet, humanity, and men themselves if they stopped intertwining their masculinity with meat. And as we’ve shown, it would also be far more consistent with the available data for men to attach their masculinity to fruits and vegetables instead.
Many individuals in the vegan movement recognize this and are attempting to associate veganism with masculinity to make the practice more palatable for males. Entire blogs have popped up dedicated solely to this project, and vegans have written books with titles like Meat is for Pussies. Most famously, the Game Changers documentary worked hard to leverage conventional ideas about masculinity in favor of the vegan cause, displaying veganism as a lifestyle of physical strength, aggression, power, and virility. In all of these projects, the message is clear: Real men go vegan.
This persuasion through emasculation fails to address the deeper problem: That men care more about their masculinity than their morality. We should not ask or care what is masculine; we should only ask what is moral.
The opening lines of the trailer are telling.
Though these projects may serve the greater good, and while I understand the impulse behind them, I can’t help but feel that this persuasion through emasculation fails to address the deeper problem: That men care more about their masculinity than their morality. We should not ask or care what is masculine; we should only ask what is moral. Meat consumption fuels a chain of cruelty and violence, and it exacerbates a nightmarish laundry list of environmental and humanitarian issues. We cannot afford to tolerate trivial questions of masculinity in conversations of such importance.
Perhaps, some vegans might argue, the importance of the issue is what justifies the appeal to masculinity in the first place. After all, if veganism is indeed so morally superior, should we not use every tool at our disposal to help spread it? Inasmuch as the appeal is effective, I agree. But we cannot honestly pretend there is no trade-off here: By appealing to a man’s masculinity, instead of his morality, we validate him putting his priorities in that order.
In my own life, I have never prioritized masculinity, and it has allowed me to avoid much of the attendant nonsense. This attitude came about only through coincidences of birth, as my parents didn’t care much about enforcing traditional gender roles. I remember going to school wearing my older sister’s Uggs and my mom’s knock-off Peuterey jacket, and my parents never suggested I dress differently. I’m a little embarrassed by such fashion choices now, but certainly not because they were feminine.
I normally might have been bullied into conformity by my peers in middle school, but my luck continued: I hit a growth spurt in seventh and eighth grade that turned me into a 6-foot-tall 14-year-old. I soon became a local boxing champion, winning the New England middleweight belt for my age group. In the eyes of adolescents, physical dominance makes you manly by default, and so growing up, I was free to do whatever I wanted.
We should all want this same freedom for every man. In our social interactions, we should stop policing the behavior of young men to conform with some arbitrary masculine ideal.
I used this social freedom to dye my hair pink, perform in plays and musicals, wear drag at events, and get my ear pierced without asking or caring which was the “gay side.” These are the sorts of frivolous liberties that come with not caring, for which many young men are too riddled with anxiety.
Perhaps most importantly, though, I have always felt free to do the right thing even when it wasn’t the manly thing. I’ve been able to diffuse most confrontations without escalating to violence — though violence is almost always seen as masculine, it is rarely morally justified. When my fiancée took a job making over three times as much money as me, I celebrated her success. (Most men feel anxious when their wives succeed professionally. Frankly, we should view this as a widespread form of insanity.) And, of course, I’ve felt free to go vegan, even if it means some people will call me a “soy boy.” Caring about animals may not be the manliest thing in the world, but I couldn’t care less if it were.
We should give men space to grow up, and learn to find more important things to worry about than the gender implications of a food item.
We should all want this same freedom for every man. In our social interactions, we should stop policing the behavior of young men to conform with some arbitrary masculine ideal. We should test our young men against moral standards rather than masculine ones — and, in cases where ethics are irrelevant, we should let men be as masculine or as feminine as they would like to be. We should permit men to dress how they please, and teach men to be proud of their wives’ careers instead of jealous of them. We should give men space to grow up, and learn to find more important things to worry about than the gender implications of a food item. We should want these things not just for their own sake, but for the sake of the humans and other animals with whom they share the world.
The Venn diagram of what is masculine and what is moral is not a perfect circle. Sometimes, stereotypically masculine characteristics such as bravery and aggressiveness will be necessary to do the right thing; other times, stereotypically feminine traits such as gentleness and empathy will be far more facultative to a better world. One should be open to whatever the best course of action is, regardless of where it falls on this imagined spectrum.
Our goal as humans should not be to merely align our behavioral decisions with the stereotypes of whatever sex or gender we happen to be. Instead, we should seek to behave in a way that reduces meaningless misery and brings joy to ourselves and the lives of others.Tenderly
A friendly + radical vegan magazine dedicated to living well with kindness towards animals, care for the planet, and justice for all.
I walked into his office, a defeated salesman on the verge of quitting. Two hours later, I joined his mentorship program and signed a loan commitment for $12,500.
Nobody had ever made me feel like I was a man of such importance and stature. I strutted out the door, feeling like I owned the world.
But it didn’t start out that way.
I had stepped into his office hesitantly, intimidated by his display of success. The walls sported pictures of his skiing exploits from all over the world. His desk featured the requisite man with Mercedes photo. All of the trinkets on display looked like museum pieces.
I was barely able to pay my bills. This guy had achieved it all. I hadn’t earned the right to occupy his airspace. What the hell was I doing there?
It took him one minute to relieve my unease.
He invited me to sit.
“Just one sec,” he said.
Then he turned off his cell phone and placed it in his desk drawer. He called his assistant and told her not to interrupt him unless there was a family emergency.
He took out a fresh notepad and pen and sat across from me. We exchanged brief introductions, and then he opened with, “Tell me about your struggles.”
He scribbled notes furiously as I spoke. When I stopped, he shot back with, “That’s interesting. Can you tell me more?”
He’d throw in other questions (what he’d call reversals), not to frame the conversation but to keep me talking. The one or two times he wanted to change the direction of the discussion, he’d first ask permission.
By the time we had finished, he had filled up four pages of handwritten notes. He summarized his conclusions on a giant whiteboard. He labeled it “Barry’s Action Plan To Hit $250K.” I told him my goal was 100K, but he responded, “After hearing your story, you’re capable of so much more.”
And then he sold me on his mentorship program by pointing out what he had written on his whiteboard.
Fourteen years later, I consider it the smartest investment of my life. It was an insane amount of money for me. And I’m still amazed at how he sold me. He had barely said a word, but I had never felt so important, so revered by someone outside my family.
How to make someone feel extraordinary
A few weeks after my mentorship began, he broke down his three-step approach to relationship building.
Demonstrate your interest in them.
The most important lesson he taught me was that demonstrations persuade more than words.
When I walked into his office for that first meeting, he never said, “I’m going to give you my undivided attention.”
Instead, he communicated with his actions. He wanted me to see him turn off his phone and place it in a drawer. His assistant already knew not to interrupt him, but the demonstration mattered. Even the selection of a clean notepad was by design.
I saw all this and concluded; he’s treating me like I’m a dignitary.
But your actions alone, only make up half the demonstration equation.
You also show interest through your body language. Slumped shoulders and lethargic movement signals disinterest. Sharp movements, good posture, and smiles show sincere desire and anticipation about what they have to say.
Imagine meeting a friend for coffee. She greets you with a frown. She checks her phone every time you speak and breaks eye-contact to stare at the table next to you. But she tells you she’s super interested in what you have to say. Hard to believe, right?
If you want someone to know you’re interested in them, don’t say it. Let them conclude it from the actions you take and the body language you exhibit.
Use reversals to keep them talking about themselves.
The Dale Carnegie disciples recommend asking questions. My mentor had his own take on the power of questions. He preferred reversals — brief statements or questions that keep the focus on the other person.
Think of it as a game of Tennis where one player does just enough to keep the rally going. Reversals keep the conversation moving without forcing it into directions your counterpart might resist. It gives them a feeling of control, which makes them more comfortable and more likely to open up to you.
Variations on these reversals will cover most of your needs.
How so? I didn’t see that coming.
Really? Tell me more… If you’re comfortable.
Curious, how did that make you feel?
That’s interesting, and then what?
Why is that? If you don’t mind me asking.
And? Don’t stop now. I need to hear the rest.
That makes sense. What else?
Notice how there’s a transition statement before or after each question.
When you shoot back with just a question, it comes across as harsh, even with the right tonality. The transition statement buffers the question and makes the conversation feel natural.
If you need to move the conversation in a new direction, always ask permission and give the other person the freedom to decline.
Show someone they’re capable of more than they believe.
I was once part of a clique where one of our friends always took it upon herself to raise the spirits of everyone she met. She’d profess her confidence in their abilities and praise them for their excellence. The problem was, she often had no basis for making these assertions.
Her intentions were kind, but the praise was disingenuous. My mentor had made it feel sincere because he did his homework first.
He learned about me, summarized his findings, pointed out my strengths, and explained how he would help me hone them. Only then did he tell me I was capable of more than I believed.
“You should quadruple your income goal, perhaps more.” The proof was there. I had to believe it.
Had he not gone through the prerequisite of learning about me, he could not have given me a realistic vision of achieving that goal.
To make someone believe they’re capable of achieving more than they believe, you must do the hard work of discovery first. Without learning the truth first, your praise is just bullshit.
A tool for everyday life
These strategies might seem simple and obvious. You might even use them on occasion. But it takes practice and consistency to deploy them in a way that makes someone feel extraordinary.
Your actions, not words, demonstrate a desire to learn about someone.
Whenever possible, use reversals to gather information and keep the conversation focused on them.
Use that knowledge to point out the greatness they never knew they possessed.
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware. The real struggle is not between East and West, or capitalism and communism, but between education and propaganda. And pressing forward honor reality.”
–Martin Buber
Martin Buber (February 8, 1878 – June 13, 1965) was an Austrian philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I–Thou relationship and the I–It relationship. Wikipedia
In the final years of the eighteenth century, the radical political philosopher and novelist William Godwin (March 3, 1756–April 7, 1836) entered into a pioneering marriage of equals with another radical political philosopher and novelist: Mary Wollstonecraft, founding mother of what later ages termed feminism. While Wollstonecraft was pregnant with their daughter — future Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, a Romantic radical in her own unexampled right — Godwin began channeling their nightly conversations about how to raise happy, intelligent, and morally elevated children in a series of essays later published as The Enquirer: Reflections on Education, Manners, and Literature (public library) — a title that gives it a deceptive air of politeness and dated propriety; it is in fact a radical work, scandalous to Georgian and Victorian sensibilities, centuries ahead of its time, anticipating the conclusions of modern social science and psychology, neither of which existed as a formal field of study in Godwin’s time, about some of the fundamentals of optimal parenting.
William Godwin. Portrait by James Northcote. (National Portrait Gallery, London.)
Godwin writes:
The true object of education, like that of every other moral process, is the generation of happiness. Happiness to the individual in the first place. If individuals were universally happy, the species would be happy.
At the heart of this happiness-generating education, Godwin places the importance of instilling in children an early love of literature, which would “inspire habits of industry and observation” that by young adulthood would ferment into “a mind well regulated, active, and prepared to learn.” Although his language is bound in the era’s biases — an era far predating Ursula K. Le Guin’s brilliant unsexing of man as the universal pronoun — Godwin’s ideas soar with timelessness, on the wings of poetically articulated truth:
There is perhaps nothing that has a greater tendency to decide favourably or unfavourably respecting a man’s future intellect, than the question whether or not he be impressed with an early taste for reading… He that loves reading, has every thing within his reach. He has but to desire; and he may possess himself of every species of wisdom to judge, and power to perform.
He considers how books not only enrich us with the wisdom of the ideas contained in them, but also sprinkle upon us some the splendor of mind that originated them, producing in us a quickening of both sense and sensibility:
Books gratify and excite our curiosity in innumerable ways. They force us to reflect. They hurry us from point to point. They present direct ideas of various kinds, and they suggest indirect ones. In a well-written book we are presented with the maturest reflections, or the happiest flights, of a mind of uncommon excellence. It is impossible that we can be much accustomed to such companions, without attaining some resemblance of them. When I read Thomson, I become Thomson; when I read Milton, I become Milton. I find myself a sort of intellectual camelion, assuming the colour of the substances on which I rest. He that revels in a well-chosen library, has innumerable dishes, and all of admirable flavour. His taste is rendered so acute, as easily to distinguish the nicest shades of difference. His mind becomes ductile, susceptible to every impression, and gaining new refinement from them all. His varieties of thinking baffle calculation, and his powers, whether of reason or fancy, become eminently vigorous.
Having thus outlined the invaluable lifelong benefits of reading, Godwin endeavors to lay out the elementals of raising a reader. Building on the most central, most radical ethos of his Enquirer essays — the countercultural idea that children ought to be treated not as subjects to authoritarian rule but as equal citizens of life, endowed with intellect and sensitivity, and must be granted the dignity of truth rather than being bamboozled with hypocrisies and shielded from the world’s disquieting realities — he writes:
The child should early begin in some degree to live in the world, that is, with his species; so should he do as to the books he is to read. It is not good, that he should be shut up for ever in imaginary scenes, and that, familiar with the apothegms of philosophers, and the maxims of scientifical and elevated morality, he should be wholly ignorant of the perverseness of the human heart, and the springs that regulate the conduct of mankind. Trust him in a certain degree with himself. Suffer him in some instances to select his own course of reading… Suffer him to wander in the wilds of literature.
In consonance with what every wholehearted reader knows — that we bring ourselves to the books we read and what we take out of them depends on what we bring — Godwin adds:
The impression we derive from a book, depends much less upon its real contents, than upon the temper of mind and preparation with which we read it.
Complement with A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader — an illustrated collection of testaments to Godwin’s impassioned insistence on the life-shaping value of reading by 121 of the most visionary humans of our own time — then revisit Rebecca Solnit, modern-day cultural descendant of Mary Wollstonecraft, on how books solace, empower, and transform us.
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