Hyperbole

Not so long ago, really - four days ago when I was leaving for Japan - I read the book The Art of Thinking Clearly at the airport bookstore and learned about planning fantasy. In brief, it's the illusion of grandiosity when we make plans. How often do we allow this idea of grandiosity to go rampage at the buffet dinner? If there's an Olympics for that kind of fantasy, I should have been awarded a thousand world-class gold medals.

Now imagine your teacher gives you an assignment and lets you decide the length of that paper and fix up the deadline to hand in the final script. The temptation is oh so great. You might have known that you'd failed to hand in term papers in due course, but you guess you're better this time. Your - I should say our - tendency always is to come up with an exaggerated goal. Plus, we make wrong estimation how quick we can achieve the goal. We promise way more than we can deliver. We set the alarm clock at such unrealistic hour that we sleep through it. We have a natural penchant for the rose-tinted spectacles.

If I'm candid, I do not believe the lesson of planning fantasy made me worry one jot about how easy I fall prey to the fantasy. You can bet I still have that fantasy. That's the reason I have been kicking myself to finish as many items on my to-do list as possible during the last four days. The good news is I did manage to complete a peer review for a medical journal, write few magazine and newsletter articles, reply a number of unreturned e-mails at my hotel room.

"Not bad," I congratulated myself and packed my luggage (before checking out tomorrow). Then I remembered that I'd brought two books and few magazines for this trip. Oh drats, I didn't even finish one book.

Guess the second book will just have to wait till next trip.

Never mind, I tried to find a crumb of comfort by reminding myself that the title of that unfinished book is The Slow Fix.

Thursday

In many ways, going to academic conference is a good way to learn: the program usually runs the gamut from basic science (like zebrafish) to patient care (that we do now and then). The downside is that some lectures aren't attractive and there's a day's worth of activity outside the conference venue.

This week, I'm attending a conference in Tokyo. Thinking of all the Tokyo's top sights mentioned in Lonely Planet, I knew pretty well the reason of some empty chairs in the conference hall. Many of the sights are impossible to miss, I know. But when it comes to the courage that students are traditionally supposed to be born with to skip class, I'm a little lacking.

I hadn't meant to leave the conference hall until the cows come home. That I stayed late led me to feel both irrationally proud and profoundly tired. Unfortunately, most museums in Japan close at five (and with the last entry around half hour before closing). After that, I picked up the program book and handy guide, figuring out the next move. That is when I found out Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography opens till eight on Thursday. And it's Thursday today.

I'd be mad not to call this luck.

Chameleon Effect

Call myself professional on one hand, and I teach my students to learn from waitresses on the other.

It does make sense.

After my recent lesson from the waitress, I went on to read more on the waitresses' strategic mimicry, and how mimicry increases the odds to build rapport and move others. To me, the answer that the waitress also doesn't want her customer to wait is trying to attune, to enhance liking, to get inside the head of the customer, to draw the map showing we're in the same boat. Unbeknownst to her customer, the two parties had been led to go in synch with each other at the drop of a hat, sharing common ground.

If you aren't convinced, you might not have heard the experiment of verbal mimicry. And if you'll let me, I'd like to tell you a little bit about how that experiment works. Just think: When was the last time you went to a restaurant and made order for your dinner? How did the waitress answer? In an experiment of customer behavioural patterns, sixty groups of customers like you, without their awareness, were randomly served by two types of waitresses. In the mimicry condition, waitresses repeated all orders from the drinks to the cheque. Word for word. In the non-mimicry condition, the orders were not repeated, but the waitress made clear that she understood the order by words like "okay" or "coming up!"

At the end of the day, the mimicking waitresses earned a whopping 70 percent more tips. I repeat: 70 percent more.

What is the lesson for doctors? Well, I'll let you decide.

We Too

Sometimes the line between the professional and unskilled job is blurry.

Tonight I went to order takeaway dinner. Quite a number of people were waiting outside the cafeteria. Most of us, it turns out, were there because domestic maids don't usually work on Sunday. Getting a table is tricky and may not be easy on Sunday evening. And yet it's practical. It's visceral. I wasn't surprised when the customers grumbled about the long wait.

"Heck, it's quite a bit of waiting for my turn," one of them shouted, hungry and cantankerous, "but we're just looking for a table for two. Why so?"

The scene is pretty familiar to me. It's the same as waiting at any emergency room in public hospitals - okay, not exactly the same, because it happens seven days a week in hospital instead of on Sunday. I'd expect the waitress to talk back and piss them off. That's very much what we heard in the emergency rooms. But, to my surprise, there's a flip side to the story at the cafeteria tonight. "I wish, too," answered the waitress, "that you don't have to wait. If only those people finished their meal earlier and left."

A real professional way to talk to the customers in a queue, I thought on my way home with the takeaway dinner.

Secret

What happened when a hundred-year-old man climbed out of the window (in his slippers) and disappeared? Go read Jonas Jonasson's novel and you will find out the man set off in his pee-slippers (so called because men of his age rarely pee further than their shoes) and unravelled one story after another.

But what if a four-year-old climbed out of the bed and disappeared?

Ah, a mystery.

That four-year-old turned out to be Jasmine's cousin. We were celebrating the Easter holiday in a hotel at Discovery Bay. And then the two kids entertained themselves by falling under the spell of jumping around the hotel bed. They simply forgot to go out and let every parent feel good about the decision to book a hotel and - you have to admit - any hotel with beds to jump on will do.

A silly but incredible idea. The kids jumped from one bed to the next. The last drops of a hundred-year-old man's urine might not quite make it to the toilet bowl, but it isn't difficult for a four-year-old kid to jump and land exactly on the bed next to one another. Halfway through the jumping, they - only the kids, not you - could hear the roar of crocodiles underneath. Hungry crocs they were too.

"Be careful, Aaron and Jasmine."

"Of course, we will, unless anyone of you want to be the dim sum of the crocs."

Over the first hour, if not more, of arriving at the hotel, dads and mums usually have plenty of time to read and relax. We were having tea and coffee when things turned out a bit different. I heard a sound louder than a crocodile's roar, and the next thing I knew, Jasmine's cousin was lying next to the coffee table and crying. We could never imagine how this could have happened.

"Interesting," my sister said, and meant the opposite.

In the end, we gave up our attempts to solve the mystery, and settled for soothing the pain of Jasmine's cousin.

Three days later, during her bedtime story session, Jasmine disclosed that her cousin was trying to rescue few cats from the crocodiles' breakfast plate when he lost his balance (and his face). That's a secret.

This could be brilliant, I thought, for her to keep the secret. Disclosing openly the story of a Humpty Dumpty firefighter would be a faux pas and definitely embarrass her cousin.

Whodunnit

Let's pretend that you're the mummy. You have two little girls. One of them breaks fifteen cups as she is coming into the dining room, the other breaks one cup as she is trying to get some jam while you are not there. Which of them would you punish more severely?

I didn't make up this story myself. That's the way the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget explored the child's understanding of morality. This story comes from my recent reading Teaching Right from Wrong: 40 Things You Can Do to Raise a Moral Child.

See what happens when Piaget conducted an interview with seven-year-old Constance:

Constance: The one who broke the fifteen cups...
Piaget: Have you ever broken anything?
Constance: A cup.
Piaget: How?
Constance: I wanted to wipe it, and I let it drop.
Piaget: What else have you broken?
Constance: Another time, a plate.
Piaget: How?
Constance: I took it to play with.
Piaget: Which was the naughtier thing to do?
Constance: The plate, because I oughtn't have taken it.
Piaget: And how about the cup?
Constance: That was less naughty because I wanted to wipe it.
Piaget: Which were you punished most for, the cup or the plates?
Constance: For the plate.
Piaget: Listen, I am going to tell you two more stories. A little girl is wiping the cups. She is putting them away, wiping them with a cloth, and she broke five cups. Another little girl is playing with some plates. She breaks a plate. Which of them is naughtier?
Constance: The girl who broke the five cups.

Suddenly I began to see parallels everywhere.

Let me explain.

Not too long ago, I signed an apology letter to the family of a patient who died in our hospital, saying sorry for our intern doctor who didn't turn up to certify death until an hour after the patient had his last breath. Hmmmm... Let's think about another scenario - and that is a real one, too - in which an intern doctor went to vertify that his patient was dead ten minutes before patient's electrocardiogram went completely flat. The nurse was a bit concerned with the occasional waveform displayed on the electrocardiogram paper, pointing out the waves that might imply few heartbeats. The doctor was less eager to wait for the electrocardiogram's going dead than the death of the patient. "Don't worry, can't we see that the electrocardiogram is abnormal enough? It will go flat pretty soon."

So that was that. Let's count. Sixty minutes' delay and a gap of ten minutes. Which of them would you punish more?

Genius

Close your eyes. Picture a scene inside a cooking school. Odds are you will see students learning how to chop vegetables, make bagels, wash dish, or prepare a kitchen. Perhaps even more bottom job.
 

Isn't it the right way to learn cooking? It's hard to think of better ways to learn.
 

Impractical ways of learning, such as staying in library chock-full of French culinary books, are funny when you think about it. Silly, in fact.

However, I repeat, we are in a funny society where silly things are more often than not. So when I heard about a real funny cooking school, I am not surprised at all. That school - in case you're interested to know - pays great efforts to improve the safety. Before the students learn the ropes of being a cook, they are taught safety first. They have to attend fire drills, infection control class, and data privacy ordinance lecture. The school head keeps wondering how one could do without those certificates.

After the monumental achievement (of getting those certificates), I suppose, the students will move on to learn cooking. But wait. The school head gets pretty upset about the kitchen accidents. Two students cut their fingers when they were preparing carrots last year. No more bare knives in the kitchen cupboard. Not any more. After lengthy discussion, the cooking school decides to introduce a knife with special safety design like Swiss Army knife. Here's how it works: using a digital lock, the knife won't unfold until you've keyed in the user-defined password. Truly otherworldly and brilliant.

Did the students find the new knife a success story? Alas, I never get the answer from the students because it has been decided that students are not granted access to the password at the cooking school. Not any more. Not until they graduate and become a chef. But what if they could go back to the traditional knife and learn the knife skills? No. Those knives are unsafe and banned in the school. Period.

This scenario probably sounds bizarre to you. Of course it does — you've never been studying or teaching in that school. Pity those, like me, who have to.