Expectant cats, rodents, birds, and dogs develop a marvelous burst of manic energy to ready their "nests" just prior to childbirth. This may mean nothing to you, but means a lot to me.
By a quirk of evolutionary fate, human beings are often proud of being different from even our closest cousins in that chimps don't have the ability to reason. Hard as it is for us to imagine, nevertheless, the nesting instinct encoded in the nucleotides of our feathered or four-legged friends of the animal kingdom has been sealed in our DNA, too. There is simply no reasoning when the compelling nesting urge catches us.
I came to accept this shared nesting flurry among all members of the animal kingdom when we're expecting the arrival of our baby. My wife and I – oops, to be honest, the former – clean every crevice of the home, put together cribs without assistance, climb the ladder, go through all our cabinets, set up the baby's room, and do everything at an astoundingly effective tempo. Yeah, yeah. I know you might rightly scratch your heads, but I'm talking about Olympic gold level. Incredible.
Pregnancy folk lore and old wives tales have it that hammer and nails are strictly forbidden at home throughout the pregnancy. I couldn't see why that matters. In fact, I nearly lost my temper when the worker suggested not to carry out decoration last month. Call it superstition if you wish. Not that there will be anything wrong with your baby, I should emphasize, if you break the taboo. After I had shrugged off the spasm of temper tantrums, I started to think about the wisdom of the folklore. Well, it could have been meant to give us a brake to the nesting instinct.
Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 23, 2009
Lecture
I have been giving a number of lectures recently. This is not to say that lecture is effective teaching. It almost never is. Some people like me, I have to say, don't do well during lectures and quickly doze off.
As far as education is concerned, nonetheless, lectures are forever the default mode and practicum little more than a footnote. Indeed, nearly 80 percent of college courses are simply lectures by professors, in a way that you may have been sleeping through most of the time. Only a saint wouldn't sleep during a lecture. Correction: only a dead saint wouldn't sleep in front of a bloody boring lecturer (and it's hard to see how I can be anything else).
Did I mention the guilty lecturer (who has no excuse not to)? To please myself and make the students feel less miserable, I decided to put up my first PowerPoint slide quoting Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard. By the end of a lecture, according to his book Our Underachieving Colleges, a student remembers just less than half of what was taught. Only a week later, that number is down to a stunning rate of 20%.
As far as education is concerned, nonetheless, lectures are forever the default mode and practicum little more than a footnote. Indeed, nearly 80 percent of college courses are simply lectures by professors, in a way that you may have been sleeping through most of the time. Only a saint wouldn't sleep during a lecture. Correction: only a dead saint wouldn't sleep in front of a bloody boring lecturer (and it's hard to see how I can be anything else).
Did I mention the guilty lecturer (who has no excuse not to)? To please myself and make the students feel less miserable, I decided to put up my first PowerPoint slide quoting Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard. By the end of a lecture, according to his book Our Underachieving Colleges, a student remembers just less than half of what was taught. Only a week later, that number is down to a stunning rate of 20%.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Taxi
Of all teachings given by the emotion intelligence guru Daniel Goleman, none is more important than that of the almond-shaped amygdala in an area of the human brain called the limbic system. Disgust, fear and anger, it is said time and again, come from the amygdala which acts like a central alarm system calling for a full-fledged "fight or flight" response.
My recent lectures in Beijing brought back the nineteen-year-old memory of my first (this is my second) visit of Beijing. As so often happened to tourists in mainland China, I found my amygdala sending messages of apprehension, making me edgy and easily startled, say, on a bus or at the train station. I am not sure if you've heard those stories of tourists being mugged and robbed of their kidneys, but I was stupefied to imagine myself coming back with single kidney.
The extent to which our neural circuitry overwhelms us with fear is no news to us. Fear and anger, on the other hand, can be reshaped or relearned. After attending the dialysis conference in Beijing, I traveled around on my last day there. When I went aboard a bus yesterday, I found out there wasn't conductor. That means I had to tender the exact fare – which I didn't have. It seemed clear to me that I should get changes with the passengers on the bus. I tried it sheepishly with my ten-yuan renminbi banknote. You can imagine how nervous I must have been as my Mandarin skill won't allow me to utter more than a few simple sentences. In hindsight, I realized that I had undoubtedly made myself look stupid enough, and I was thrilled when the passenger volunteered to pay for me!
When I headed for the airport in the evening, I took a taxi. I ended up paying 70 yuan while the taxi meter stated 60 yuan. Only a foolhardy gambler would bet that I didn't protest when I had been shortchanged. But no, I didn't. Just why I didn't fly into a fury and quarrel with the taxi driver, to be sure, had nothing to do with my poor Mandarin. Good mood, which lasted after the pleasant experience on the bus in the morning, had probably got my amygdala rewired, short-circuiting the path to irritability and hostility.
A postscript to my story of taxi ride: It is not the case that I was shortchanged, I reckoned afterwards, because the extra ten yuan went to the toll fee.
My recent lectures in Beijing brought back the nineteen-year-old memory of my first (this is my second) visit of Beijing. As so often happened to tourists in mainland China, I found my amygdala sending messages of apprehension, making me edgy and easily startled, say, on a bus or at the train station. I am not sure if you've heard those stories of tourists being mugged and robbed of their kidneys, but I was stupefied to imagine myself coming back with single kidney.
The extent to which our neural circuitry overwhelms us with fear is no news to us. Fear and anger, on the other hand, can be reshaped or relearned. After attending the dialysis conference in Beijing, I traveled around on my last day there. When I went aboard a bus yesterday, I found out there wasn't conductor. That means I had to tender the exact fare – which I didn't have. It seemed clear to me that I should get changes with the passengers on the bus. I tried it sheepishly with my ten-yuan renminbi banknote. You can imagine how nervous I must have been as my Mandarin skill won't allow me to utter more than a few simple sentences. In hindsight, I realized that I had undoubtedly made myself look stupid enough, and I was thrilled when the passenger volunteered to pay for me!
When I headed for the airport in the evening, I took a taxi. I ended up paying 70 yuan while the taxi meter stated 60 yuan. Only a foolhardy gambler would bet that I didn't protest when I had been shortchanged. But no, I didn't. Just why I didn't fly into a fury and quarrel with the taxi driver, to be sure, had nothing to do with my poor Mandarin. Good mood, which lasted after the pleasant experience on the bus in the morning, had probably got my amygdala rewired, short-circuiting the path to irritability and hostility.
A postscript to my story of taxi ride: It is not the case that I was shortchanged, I reckoned afterwards, because the extra ten yuan went to the toll fee.
Emotion
This month, a special issue of Science magazine published over 10 papers, written by a total of 47 authors from 10 countries, covering the discovery of an extraordinary 4.4 million-year-old hominid fossil skeleton known as Ardipithecus ramidus.
Of course, I don't have a whiff of paleoanthropology knowledge to discuss how our ancestors ended up walking on two legs. Still, I must admit, evolution is always a fascinating subject. I've been reading recently about the evolutionary root of our emotional life. I am impressed by the way Daniel Goleman chronicles how our primitive brain evolved to have new layers of brain cells endowed with intellect and emotion. It is not that we have improved a lot in terms of emotional intelligence when compared with our ancestors – trust me, we haven't – but many of us are doing not enough.
An account by a subject in one of the very first scientific studies of anger done in 1899 captures the heart of it:
Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would never return. It was a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely lanes, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure.
The same had certainly happened to me. Once, during my teen years, my mother broke my table tennis racket. That made my hair stand like porcupine quills. Alas, I behaved exactly like what that child did – and, remember, back in 1899. My eyes watered. My heart took flight. I exploded. I grabbed my bag and stepped out of the door: I wasn't coming back. The cooling-down walk left me feeling less angry, not more. The memory of this maiden runaway from home has stayed with me for close to thirty years. Seeing how the history repeats itself – so much so that the narrative looks exactly the same with my own – speaks to a sense of déjà vu. And let's face it, we are no better than our ancestors a century ago.
Of course, I don't have a whiff of paleoanthropology knowledge to discuss how our ancestors ended up walking on two legs. Still, I must admit, evolution is always a fascinating subject. I've been reading recently about the evolutionary root of our emotional life. I am impressed by the way Daniel Goleman chronicles how our primitive brain evolved to have new layers of brain cells endowed with intellect and emotion. It is not that we have improved a lot in terms of emotional intelligence when compared with our ancestors – trust me, we haven't – but many of us are doing not enough.
An account by a subject in one of the very first scientific studies of anger done in 1899 captures the heart of it:
Once when I was about 13, in an angry fit, I walked out of the house vowing I would never return. It was a beautiful summer day, and I walked far along lovely lanes, till gradually the stillness and beauty calmed and soothed me, and after some hours I returned repentant and almost melted. Since then when I am angry, I do this if I can, and find it the best cure.
The same had certainly happened to me. Once, during my teen years, my mother broke my table tennis racket. That made my hair stand like porcupine quills. Alas, I behaved exactly like what that child did – and, remember, back in 1899. My eyes watered. My heart took flight. I exploded. I grabbed my bag and stepped out of the door: I wasn't coming back. The cooling-down walk left me feeling less angry, not more. The memory of this maiden runaway from home has stayed with me for close to thirty years. Seeing how the history repeats itself – so much so that the narrative looks exactly the same with my own – speaks to a sense of déjà vu. And let's face it, we are no better than our ancestors a century ago.
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Grief
Of all the diseases doctors need to be afraid of, spontaneous fracture of an aging Littmann Cardiology II stethoscope is near the bottom of the list. Unless, that is, the stethoscope belongs to you who are seeing patients.
It was a busy Friday afternoon, with packed schedules including unit meeting and clinic, and many patients were coming in from the emergency room. This time, I thought I could feel my stomach tighten when I heard a painful yell of my stethoscope tubing, which was broken into two pieces. When I put my finger on the tubing, it felt as if I were examining a shoulder dislocation with a palpable gap.
Bleakness massed around me quickly, much faster than it had when a senior soccer player found out he had to hang up his boots. I paused and tried to count to ten but only got to two. I breathed in. And I breathed out. Then I breathed a huge sigh of relief. "A retired stethoscope shouldn't ruin my day," I told myself. A broken stethoscope is the psychological equivalent of milk teeth which are beginning to fall out. They simply signify, so to speak, a developmental milestone. My stethoscope is to step down after serving me (and my patients) for more than a decade.
With that in mind, I learned to make peace with the grief reaction while moving on to see my next patient.
It was a busy Friday afternoon, with packed schedules including unit meeting and clinic, and many patients were coming in from the emergency room. This time, I thought I could feel my stomach tighten when I heard a painful yell of my stethoscope tubing, which was broken into two pieces. When I put my finger on the tubing, it felt as if I were examining a shoulder dislocation with a palpable gap.
Bleakness massed around me quickly, much faster than it had when a senior soccer player found out he had to hang up his boots. I paused and tried to count to ten but only got to two. I breathed in. And I breathed out. Then I breathed a huge sigh of relief. "A retired stethoscope shouldn't ruin my day," I told myself. A broken stethoscope is the psychological equivalent of milk teeth which are beginning to fall out. They simply signify, so to speak, a developmental milestone. My stethoscope is to step down after serving me (and my patients) for more than a decade.
With that in mind, I learned to make peace with the grief reaction while moving on to see my next patient.
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