Lips

When it comes to censorship, all writers develop skills to minimise risk of accusations. 

Susan Conley, an author who grew up in Maine and lived in Beijing for more than two years, has shown us the style of mealy-mouthed language. In her memoir The Foremost Good Fortune, there are many occasions for touching the "Three T's and the One F" (Tibet, Taiwan, Tiananmen, and Falun Gong), but she prefers to dodge touching the taboo subjects. 

Instead, Conley writes a candid story of her breast cancer during her stay in Beijing. Subjects like mastectomy, mortality, and median survival are better go unsaid. Behind these uncomfortable subjects, Conley faces the difficulty of walking on eggshells. 

Should Conley mention the Camel Lights she smoked in high school? Can she? And what about the answer for her chance of being alive in ten years? And the odds to see her two boys graduate from high school? What about her boy's watching her armpit skin change after radiation? She nodded after her son suggested, "Mum, you've got to put sunscreen on there." For many subjects, Susan Conley chooses to keep her mouth shut. 

Silent tears are mean't to be wiped, not to be heard.

Capsaicin

If the mention of David Julius doesn't ring any bells, it's safe to say you're new to the field of nociceptor or physiology.

If you haven't heard of David Julius, you should at least think about him next time you have wasabi or chilli pepper. He received the Nobel Prize after discovering the first capsaicin receptor – a protein called TRPV1. The compound capsaicin unlocks the secrets what makes chilli pepper "hot". When TRPV1 or capsaicin receptor is activated, a burning sensation results. 

We now realise TRPV1 receptors are abundant in the mouth, lips, throat and tongue; that explains the "burning" sensation of chilli pepper. In the meantime, capsaicinoid molecule is hydrophobic and not water-soluble. If you want to quench the burning by fetching a water jug or a beer, it is unlikely to work. So, a good solution is to reach for milk as it contains the lipophilic casein, which is an important key to remove the lipid-like capsaicins. 

David Julius then showed that mice lacking the gene for the TRPV1 ion channel were impervious to both hot peppers and heat. The same applies to birds, whose TRPV1 channel is not activated by capsaicin. The good news for birds (and chilli pepper, for that matter) is that they can consume chilli pepper seeds unharmed and disperse the viable seeds. 

What about other mammals like squirrels? They do respond to capsaicin in the same way as humans. Therefore, you can coat bird food like nuts with chilli powder dust (or Tabasco sauce) to keep squirrels away from the bird dining table.   

Kingdom

At first glance, the novel Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi seems to be about animal optogenetics study carried out by Gifty, who is a gifted researcher with two papers in Nature and one in Cell.

As I go through the chapters, arranged in a back-and-forth structure, the story turns out to be more than a neural circuit experiment for the reward-seeking behaviour of mice. Gifty is one of three black PhD candidates in the entire American medical school, and one of five women in a laboratory of twenty-eight. Unsurprisingly, she has a hard time to overcome the stigma and self-doubt as a black immigrant from Ghana. 

And that's why I think the word Kingdom comes to appear in the novel's title. Her family are the only black people at the church. Gifty can't figure out why her kindergarten classmate says black people can't be princess, why black women were four times more likely to die from childbirth, and whether black people are biologically more given to drugs or crime. 

Gifty is puzzled – so much so that she has to check if the God of America is the same as the God of Ghana.

Positions

Finding common ground, even between the most divided Americans, according to the filmmaker Steven Spielberg, is not only possible, but necessary.

I have also learned this mediation skill from a good friend of mine. Spielberg mentioned recently that America hasn't been this divided since the Civil War. And yet, even before Abraham Lincoln's presidency and Civil War, Lincohn wrote, "Discourgage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser – in fees, expenses, and waste of time."   

If you've ever heard about what neuroscientists call dichotomous thinking, you'll know how human beings are wired to all-or-nothing or black-and-white thinking. We see this in our everyday lives, often in toxic ways: believing one training doctor is either a good guy or a villain. When pressed, we push toward the extremes and refuse to budge. Although we hate to admit it, the fear of nuance in opinion often pushes us to join one extreme camp or another. 

That is a trap we should keep telling ourselves not to fall into. Occasionally, there is the realm of reasonableness, somewhere between two polarised extremes, as taught by Steven Collis.   

Metacognition

So many of us crack jokes, even though some are bad. Be warned, dad jokes are known for inviting eye-rolls rather than big laughs. 

First, a confession. My daughter would be the first to verify the last statement.

Which is to say: the gap of rating for jokes can be huge. I have heard about Dunning-Kruger effect for quite some time. Not until I read The Psychology of Effective Studying did I realise the seminal works of Kruger and Dunning come from a series of jokes. 

In their first experiment, they asked psychology undergraduates to review 30 different jokes that had been pre-rated for humour by a panel of professional comedians. The undergraduates' task was to rate how funny they thought the jokes were. Next, they were to predict how well they thought they could gauge the quality o the jokes in relation to their peers.

When it came to rating performance, there skill varied quite a lot. There was nothing peculiar about that. The oddity is that individuals with the least competence at rating the quality of the jokes turned out to overestimate their ability. The truth is, the more incompetent participants were, the more deluded they were about their competence. 

The findings of Kruger and Dunning were persistent, and were not confined to joke quality rating. Not once. Not twice. But repeatedly. The same pattern of results was shown for tests of logical and grammatical ability in several subsequent experiments.

The key takeaway for me is to try my best not to tell dad jokes on the coming Father's Day. 

Dunning and Kruger

"A little learning is a dang'rous thing; drink deep or taste not."

Those were the words from the eighteenth-century English poet Alexander Pope. Steven Collis, a law professor at the University of Texas, could never forget them after he walked through a large wooden door with those words etched in stone in the frieze. He saw those words, day after day, week after week, month after month, when he studied law at school.

Don't get me wrong. We aren't talking about drinking booze. Alexander Pope referred to drinking from the Pierian Springs, a fountain source of knowledge in Greek mythology. It may sound a little nutty, but isn't it true that learning a small amount about a subject tends to surge to a "beginner's bubble" of overconfidence?

In the very beginning, we might have started out with a level of humility and caution. That's when we are completely naive. But then, quickly after we learn a small amount about a subject, we become novices who tend to overestimate our ability or knowledge. 

That's known as Dunning-Kruger effect. As Steven Collis details in his book Habits of a Peace Maker, we should all remind ourselves how little we know and how much we still can learn about a subject.

Glaswegian

Every time I fly, I try to select and bring at least one book to match the theme.

Scottish writing is so prolific that there're abundant choices for my Glasgow trip. Shuggie Bain, the debut Booker Prize-winning novel by Douglas Stuart, is my pick. 

This novel opens in the early 1990s with a teenager Shuggie Bain beginning his shift at a supermarket deli and daydreaming his going to the hairdressing college on the Southside of Glasgow. He got hired for the job because he was underaged, justifying a lower-than-full-adult wage. 

The next few chapters bring us back to 1981, at the city's low point during the Margaret Thatcher years. Shuggie Bain was a boy of ten at that time, barely thriving in a dysfunctional family. He had no toys because his severely alcoholic mother had spent all money on lager. Shuggie collected the empty cans from around the house as his toys.

Shuggie's mother was even more obsessed with the cans. Nobody else in the world is as attached or addicted to lager cans as an alcoholic. To calm her shakes, Shuggie's mother would shuffle around the couch looking for hidden quarter bottles or half-finished cans. On her knees, she pulled all the empty grocery bags out from underneath the kitchen sink till she was certain there were no more cans.

There are few things more terrifying than the unshakable urge to drink. No other known substance comes close to alcohol in damaging our health in recorded history. Shuggie Bain is a book that reminds us there is no safe level of drinking. Read that sentence again if you need to.