I Was So Much Older Then...

“It is never too late to have a happy childhood.”
~ Tom Robbins

In the past two weeks I’ve read two autobiographies. Both are exceptionally well written and absorbing; I recommend them. The first is Wait Till Next Year by Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. The second is The Center of the Universe by former advertising executive Nancy Bachrach. Although the two books are about American women growing up in the Northeastern U.S. at approximately the same time, the experiences they describe could not be more different.

Goodwin’s Irish Catholic father, Michael Francis Aloysius Kearns, was a bank examiner. As he began rising through the ranks in his career, he moved his wife and three daughters from Brooklyn to Rockville Center, Long Island. It was the kind of neighborhood where houses were close together and Catholics, Protestants and Jews were able to blend in a true community. (Racial integration was a fait accomplis in local schools, but still a few years away in the neighborhood.) Children played with one another and parents socialized with their neighbors. Whenever young Doris’s mother, who suffered from a severe heart condition, was hospitalized, neighborhood moms stepped in and formed a localized social safety net. The only real division came during baseball season, when the families divided themselves into three camps: supporters of the Yankees, the Giants and the Kearns family’s great passion, the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Although she tells her story with considerable wit, Nancy Bachrach’s childhood in Providence, Rhode Island was anything but carefree and supportive. Her father was a tinkerer and inventor of things that were going to make the family rich…but somehow just added to their debts. He was also a self-styled Mr. Fix-it whose jury-rigging filled the Bachrach home with booby traps and ultimately led to disaster. Mr. Fix-it’s illusions extended to the effect his wife was having on their three children. When Nancy Bachrach was growing up, her mother was a towering, terrifying woman who combined brilliance and great charm with severe mental illness — so severe, she required periodic treatments with a “rain hat,” which was the family’s shorthand for electro-convulsive therapy. The maternal family tree seems to have been crowded with people with a slippery grip on reality, as well as with gangsters, gamblers and grifters. Nurturers were few and far between.

Reading two such different stories in close succession, I found myself repeatedly thinking about the unpredictability of life. When little Doris Kearns was growing up on Long Island, my own family lived less than 20 miles away. Yet our communities were very different. Where I lived, the houses were farther apart and adult neighbors rarely spoke to one another. I wonder — has anyone ever done a study on the effect of yard size on community cohesion? Nancy Bachrach and I worked in the same company for quite a few years and collaborated on projects several times. Let's just say this book explains a lot.

“There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in.”
~ Deepak Chopra

Oh, Nevermind: Mind Over Body

“See, the human mind is kind of like...a piñata. When it breaks open, there's a lot of surprises inside. Once you get the piñata perspective, you see that losing your mind can be a peak experience.”
~ Jane Wagner

When I signed up for a lecture titled “Health: The Surprising New Science on the Power of Mind Over Body” by Catherine Sanderson, I was hoping the emphasis would be on real science, not New Age theories, and I wasn’t disappointed. Sanderson is an adjunct professor in the Department of Psychology at Amherst College. She lives at the intersection of social psychology/personality and the body.

Professor Sanderson’s first topic was food — specifically, the way the appearance of food influences our appetites. One experiment involved an “endless soup bowl.” The bowl automatically refilled itself as people ate…and ate…and ate without realizing they were consuming more than one bowl. In another experiment, a group of hungry students walked into a classroom that smelled like chocolate brownies, but when they saw that the brownies were shaped to resemble dog food, they lost their appetites. Diet tip!

Speaking of dieting, considerable research has been done among the group of lab rats known as college students. Professor Sanderson described a phenomenon known as “tray gazing” — the way female students in Amherst's college cafeteria scope out what’s on other people’s trays. A large percentage of young women would have you believe they live on salads. The truth is, the public salad is often followed by cookie-gorging back in the dorm room. Another, more disturbing study found that young women believe the ideal weight for a 5’7” woman is 100 lbs. — a height-weight combo that meets the clinical criteria for anorexia.

And then there's love, sex and attraction. Did you know that men who watch a lot of porn find real women less attractive? Well now you do. Another interesting finding: most of us think of ourselves as more attractive than we actually are; only depressed people see themselves realistically. As Professor Sanderson put it, “Psychologically healthy people are delusional.”

Professor Sanderson is an extremely engaging speaker with a good sense of humor. She spent several hilarious minutes on the way increasing your heartbeat can lead to all sorts of unintended consequences — including marriage. That topic is well worth its own blog post and will get one, soon.

For now, let me leave you with Professor Sanderson's list of six things we can all do to improve ourselves.

• Eat mindfully. Pay attention to portion size. Also pay attention to whether you’re actually hungry — we are all prey to the seduction of yummy-looking or -smelling food. 

• Beware of false food norms. Most of us eat more than we claim.

• Buy the generic brand — but put it in a brand-name bottle. You’ll feel better.
  

• Get a dog. People with dogs live longer. (Sorry, cats just don’t have that effect…possibly because you don’t have to go out and walk them.)

• Extend your self-delusion to your loved ones: see them through rose-colored glasses.

• If you want to improve your sex life, get your heart racing.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.”
~ John Milton

Teachers and Their Audiences

“Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand.”
~ Chinese Proverb

Every few months an outfit called One Day University brings some of the country’s top college professors to midtown Manhattan to impart a little knowledge. The audience is composed entirely of adults and includes a high percentage of people of retirement age. As for the teachers, most are breathtakingly gifted, but one or two usually have a bad day.

At last Saturday’s session, three of the five classes were brilliant, inspiring and a whole lot of fun. I'll be writing about those in the next few days. For now, I want to focus on the two that went less well and what would have made them better.

Dr. David Helfand is the chair of the Department of Astronomy at Columbia University and co-director of the Columbia Astrophysics Laboratory. The title of his talk was “Is There Intelligent Life in the Universe?” — a question that suggested not a definitive yes or no answer, but a partly scientific, partly philosophical discussion enlivened by, who knows, Hubble telescope photos. By the time Dr. Helfand took the stage, the room was packed and primed.

Dr. Helfand — tall, bearded and rather jolly — has an engaging, informal manner that undoubtedly makes him a popular figure in the Columbia University pantheon. He is an astrophysicist who would be fun to have a drink with. And yet…and yet...these gifts could not save him from a fundamental flaw in the design of his lecture.

A few minutes into his presentation Dr. Helfand introduced a lengthy mathematical formula, explaining that this string of terms was the recipe for a scientific guesstimate of the number of planets that might contain sentient, communicating life forms. Fair enough; he's a physicist and formulas are his grammar. The problem was, Dr. Helfand framed his entire presentation around a step-by-step demonstration of the formula. No matter how amusingly a formula is presented, it is still math. Very quickly, the needle on the incomprehension meter moved to the right, eyes began glazing over and people began to tune out. Ten or 15 minutes into the presentation, the first few audience members stood up and left. About halfway through, the man in the row behind me began snoring loudly. Most people stayed through the end, but it was tough going. I happen to be a fan of astrophysical concepts — but not of mathematical computation — and felt myself leaning into the presentation as if into a strong wind.

The problem with Dr. Helfand's lecture is obvious: people were expecting Carl Sagan and instead got a math lesson. To reach a general audience, Dr. Helfand needs to start over. Astrophysics isn't simply to about numbers. It's also about the awe-inspiring scale, drama and beauty of the universe. Tell us about that, Dr. Helfand, and tell it in visual — not mathematical — language.

“More important than the curriculum is the question of the methods of teaching and the spirit in which the teaching is given.”
~ Bertrand Russell

Sherwin Nuland is Yale faculty member, an award-winning author and a retired surgeon. As is abundantly clear in this TED talk in which he recounts his epic battle with depression, he can be a tremendously compelling speaker. But on Saturday, when Dr. Nuland's subject was Leonardo DaVinci, he was off his game. Dr. Nuland idolizes DaVinci and his presentation came most alive when discussing DaVinci’s obsession with anatomy, an area Dr. Nuland clearly knows quite a bit about. Problems surfaced when he ventured into his theories about the Mona Lisa’s smile (he believes she was pregnant) and Leonardo’s sexuality (he thinks he was virtually celibate). While I have no doubt that Dr. Nuland has good evidence for his theories, he hasn't found an engaging way to discuss them.

Most puzzling, Dr. Nuland spent several minutes discussing the shocked looks on the faces of the people in DaVinci’s The Last Supper — without ever showing the painting.

If I were rewriting this lecture for Dr. Nuland, this is what I would recommend. Focus on the area where Dr. Nuland's life dovetails with DaVinci's: human anatomy. Bring it alive with storytelling. And— since we're talking about Leonardo —show a few more pictures!

“I have come to believe that a great teacher is a great artist and that there are as few as there are any other great artists. Teaching might even be the greatest of the arts since the medium is the human mind and spirit.”
~ John Steinbeck