Hueys

Guess what? When it comes to the world of the Hueys, wherever they go, whatever they do, whatever they think and wear, it will be the same.

Like it or not, in the story written by Oliver Jeffers, the Hueys eat the same and look exactly the same.

By same, I mean the little cute Hueys look like a crowd of Dolly coming right out of cookie cutter. A robot way of living and seeing. My daughter exclaimed, "Oh my, I would be in great trouble calling my students if I were their teacher."

As I read picture book, I was drawn to the sheer joy of seeing how my daughter figured out the essence of the story herself. Amazing. She came up with the question and told me her answer.

"See daddy, I don't think we have to be the same. Chile and I aren't the same, but we're friends. Selina and I are different, too. Right?"

After writing hundreds of story pages for kids, Zilpha Keatley Snyder summed it up this way: "The answers aren't important really... What's important is - knowing all the questions."

Right brain

I attended a conference at Shinjuku last weekend. Since there wasn't much time for sightseeing, I decided to visit a bookstore that is open till night.

It's hard to limit yourself to the English session at a bookstore in Japan; it is either too small or nonexistent. Many readers may be having problem understanding Japanese book, as I did. But I'm fine with the children's books. Picture books make use of a universal language that connects us beyond country. "Just as the mode of the rational mind is words, the mode of emotions is nonverbal," writes Daniel Goleman. No surprise, then, that my daughter loves the story book that I bought even that is written in English but translated into Japanese. She likes the boy wearing a balaclava and rescuing a beached whale. A lot.

My daughter can read the expression and intuit the boy's emotion. We created a name for the boy, came up with our own ideas what the Japanese text should have meant, and laughed together.

And this is exactly what Paul Ekman has shown before, when he traveled to Japan, Argentina, Brazil and Chile, bringing along photos of faces in different expressions. Asians and South Americans interpreted the expressions the same way Americans did. Still, the psychologist wasn't sure if television could have influenced the common interpretations. Ekman went to the highlands of New Guinea and showed the same set of facial expression photos to tribesmen. The same.

Touching

Often, when I see patients and their families, I like to let them tell their stories that, for one reason or another, might help us see the big picture. And actually, many of those stories that doctors might have considered irrelevant may turn out, the more we listen, to be important.

But listening to their stories - important though it is - is not the only purpose. The benefits of story telling go well beyond that. The idea of narration is to let both parties go through the same journey. Trying to explain the anatomy jargon and medical facts, on the other hand, would sound like the voice of a brain in formaldehyde, talking to an angry family from a jar.

Listening to stories (instead of medical lecture) can be remarkable for many reasons, one of which is shown by my patient's mother yesterday. My patient didn't tell the story. She'd been struggling to find some way to let us know how she felt, but could not say a single word with tube sticking from her throat. She was dying. The story came from her mother. What did she say? The sort of voice that will sooner or later make you want to pull your hair out. It was like being a volcano, plugged and stoppered and unable to get rid of the boiling stuff inside. Nearly everything she said contradicts whatever professional knowledge we have.

I let her continue and didn't argue. Then with a little luck I heard her outrageous hatred towards one doctor, and then how she thought her daughter might have survived if she was seen instead by another good doctor. At once I realised she was referring the good doctor to my mentor. On this subject, I imagine, both of us will agree. No doubt, my mentor is a caring doctor with good knowledge. It's always gratifying to hear something positive out of a sad conversation. It would seem absurd to dismiss her praise for my mentor and move to another topic. We identified. We agreed. We talked about someone who had been taking care of her daughter for 20 years. I promised to convey her gratitude to my mentor, and asked her for more story of my mentor.

"Well, look," she said. "Many doctors don't bother to answer my daughter when she's sick with lupus. Many doctors don't even come close to see my daughter last month when she developed nasty skin problem. But he was not afraid of that. He examined my daughter's skin every morning, not even wearing gloves."

She's right. That is the way of doctoring. A touching way to heal.

Lever

Often when you step on the bathroom scale, what you have in mind is a figure about your size or a wish - oh, say - say ten pounds minus your usual size. Close your eyes, picture a magic figure and nine times out of ten it will be wrong when you look at the display.

Now think about the weighing scale with a lever that goes up and down like a seesaw. Though little known among young people on diet now, this scale was popular some thirty years ago. In case you have difficulty recognising such scale, go to the market and see how the old guys put the fruit or vegetable on one pan and add standard masses on the other pan until the beam is as close to a horizontal line as possible. The same applies to measuring our own body weight on the lever. Step on the base, and set the weight by moving a sliding weight to and from the fulcrum. Hmm... how about 120 pounds? And then the lever arm goes up. You must have taken too many muffins and cakes. So let's slide the weight to the right by one notch, waiting for that lever arm to fall again. Tap, tap. The lever arm moves, but just a little. Fine, let's move it by five notches, tap, tap, tap. The lever arm falls but then overshoots. Try again by going left.

Yeah, that's pretty similar to what we call diagnostic accuracy and calibration in guessing the true answer when doctors see patients. We come up first with an answer with somewhat fair confidence, and struggle around as we move back and forth. You don't have to move the sliding weight too much if you aren't confident in guessing your body weight. Go slow. In other words, zero in on the true answer bit by bit. Consider its similarity with doctors' search for an answer. The less confident a doctor is, the more diagnostic tests he will request. The catch is, doctors move the "sliding weight" but can't see the "lever" in real-world cases. That means shooting one after another, but without being told how far or how close one is from the bull's-eye. Which is why doctors' level of confidence won't be that sensitive to diagnostic accuracy and case difficulty - and definitely worse than the accuracy of guessing your body weight.

Candy

As mentioned few days ago, I found Ian McEwan's Sweet Tooth a breezy and good read.  If Candy Crush is enticing, Sweet Tooth is more entertaining. Oh, surely I exaggerate. But not much.

All right, I'm exaggerating because I never play Candy Crush.

It does seem an odd thing - it strikes me that this mobile game has been downloaded some 500 million times in the past year - that I have never spent one single minute on this popular gumdrop game. To be sure, the game has its own sweet tricks to get people hooked. Much as people with weakness should never try LSD or cannabis, I find it stupid to let a greedy toddler open a box of candy. Yes, I suppose I can't resist the temptation to keep renewing my lives in the Candy Crush game. To get around the sweet trick, I decided not to touch the candy at all.

And without strong mind to resist from getting addicted to Facebook or mobile games, I have never installed Facebook at my iPhone. So far, so good. Even with my recent addiction to Words with Friends, for example, I won't be able to play unless in front of my laptop computer. So far, this strategy works. So far.