I hopped on my bike to ride home on from school on this gorgeous evening. The sun illuminated everything in front of me, casting my shadow far in front of me along the bumpy pavement of Washington Avenue. I glided by Punch Pizza with its garage door up, looking at the people who were looking back at me, they dining halfway al fresco, me wishing I were dining on something. Snapping out of my reverie, I went through my compulsive check. See, ever since I began dental school, I walk out of the house the exact same way each day — wallet in my left pocket, keys in my right, phone in the change pocket on the right. I will do this check when walking, when idle, or when I’m leaving for anywhere. Turns out I unconsciously added a wedding ring check to the list.

My thoughts drifted as though floating along on a breeze, from hunger to my ring. I’m not wearing my wedding ring. I looked down at the pale circlet around my left ring finger. I’M NOT WEARING MY WEDDING RING. Oh, well I… I took it off to wash my hands in the bathroom. I TOOK IT OFF TO WASH MY HANDS IN THE BATHROOM.

I hauled ass. Took a hard right onto Ontario. Flew through a vacant parking lot, almost jumped a curve cutting through another lot. Tailed a car onto Delaware and gave it everything I had. Ran a stop sign through the construction zone and dodged pedestrians outside of Moos until I came to the main entrance. Considered trying to get my bike through the revolving door. Instead, locked up my bike. ALL OUT RAN through the first floor of the building to the restroom. Found my ring right where I had left it, for anyone who came off the street to take.

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I don’t really have the time to fully parse out “Solitude and Leadership” by William Deresiewicz at The American Scholar, but holy cow are there some good quotes in there. I’ll follow one of his trains of thought:

Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it. Not learning other people’s ideas, or memorizing a body of information, however much those may sometimes be useful. Developing your own ideas. In short, thinking for yourself. You simply cannot do that in bursts of 20 seconds at a time, constantly interrupted by Facebook messages or Twitter tweets, or fiddling with your iPod, or watching something on YouTube.

So, is this just an old guy offering the stereotypical reaction to these new technologies? I think, no:

It seems to me that Facebook and Twitter and YouTube—and just so you don’t think this is a generational thing, TV and radio and magazines and even newspapers, too—are all ultimately just an elaborate excuse to run away from yourself. To avoid the difficult and troubling questions that being human throws in your way. Am I doing the right thing with my life? Do I believe the things I was taught as a child? What do the words I live by—words like duty, honor, and country—really mean? Am I happy?

Is our technology-driven distraction truly a bad thing? How are we to understand its impact on our lives? What does Deresiewicz think we are missing out on? He’s quite clear:

Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.”

Now, look—I’m not really interested in piling on Twitter along with everyone else. I do think its a truly useful service, but in the context of this argument—the bombardment of other’s ideas—I do understand Deresiewicz’s point: to truly lead, we need a little space to think for ourselves… to form our own ideas. And finally, as a person who tends to value a few close connections over many looser connections with others, this point really made sense:

This is what we call thinking out loud, discovering what you believe in the course of articulating it. But it takes just as much time and just as much patience as solitude in the strict sense. And our new electronic world has disrupted it just as violently. Instead of having one or two true friends that we can sit and talk to for three hours at a time, we have 968 “friends” that we never actually talk to; instead we just bounce one-line messages off them a hundred times a day. This is not friendship, this is distraction.

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Using the statistical writing analysis tool, “I Write Like”, I found out that I write like David Foster Wallace. However, Stephen King also showed up when I pasted a different piece of my writing. Interesting.

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How facts backfire - The Boston Globe, by Joe Keohane:

Studies by other researchers have observed similar phenomena when addressing education, health care reform, immigration, affirmative action, gun control, and other issues that tend to attract strong partisan opinion. Kuklinski calls this sort of response the “I know I’m right” syndrome, and considers it a “potentially formidable problem” in a democratic system. “It implies not only that most people will resist correcting their factual beliefs,” he wrote, “but also that the very people who most need to correct them will be least likely to do so.”

Even more incredible than seeing a scientific verification of how obstinate people can be is the apparent relationship to how the person is currently feeling. If they’re happy, confident, at peace… they’ll consider new ideas:

Nyhan worked on one study in which he showed that people who were given a self-affirmation exercise were more likely to consider new information than people who had not. In other words, if you feel good about yourself, you’ll listen — and if you feel insecure or threatened, you won’t. This would also explain why demagogues benefit from keeping people agitated. The more threatened people feel, the less likely they are to listen to dissenting opinions, and the more easily controlled they are.

I believe that facts can eventually make a democracy head in the right direction, but their dissemination sure isn’t the catalyst for efficient change one would expect.

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In 2000, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great piece for the New Yorker called “The Art of Failure — Why some people choke and others panic.” The thesis here is that choking is a reversion to basic instruction — the mechanical, poorly-coordinated, unadaptable precepts from one’s basic instruction in a skill. Sports is a great example: as one choke’s, one shows less and less of the practiced grace that come with experience and more and more of the mechanical, simplistic movement characteristic of the novice. The second part of the thesis is this: panicking is a reversion not to basic instruction but to basic instinct. A panic surpasses all training and heads right into lizard-brain survival territory. Here’s a great quote:

But Steele says that when you look at the way black or female students perform under stereotype threat you don’t see the wild guessing of a panicked test taker. “What you tend to see is carefulness and second-guessing,” he explains. “When you go and interview them, you have the sense that when they are in the stereotype-threat condition they say to themselves, ‘Look, I’m going to be careful here. I’m not going to mess things up.’ Then, after having decided to take that strategy, they calm down and go through the test. But that’s not the way to succeed on a standardized test. The more you do that, the more you will get away from the intuitions that help you, the quick processing. They think they did well, and they are trying to do well. But they are not.” This is choking, not panicking. Garcia’s athletes and Steele’s students are like Novotna, not Kennedy. They failed because they were good at what they did: only those who care about how well they perform ever feel the pressure of stereotype threat. The usual prescription for failure—to work harder and take the test more seriously—would only make their problems worse.

This almost perfectly describes my problems taking exams in school. Let me explain.

I’ve found that tests have become easier as I’ve gotten further away from my brush with academic destruction — I remember more, I perform better. Why? Partly because of the incredible power of the computerized flashcard system I have slowly learned to use. Now, I realize that there is a hugely important attitude component: third year of dental school is easier because I continually tell myself that third year of dental school stakes are lower (because we’re in clinic) and because I tell myself, third year of dental school is easier.

These testing scenarios where the pressure to perform destroys one’s practiced abilities describes my experience on lab practicals so well. As I was cutting a tooth down to the tenth of a millimeter, all the practiced, thoughtless fluidity I tried so hard to cultivate went right out the window. My desire to be careful ruined my ability to succeed. Recently, up in clinic, I finally relaxed during an amalgam prep on a patient. The inferior alveolar nerve block went fine, the rubber dam placement was good, and I told myself “this is an easy prep.” I really believed it because, in a lot of ways, it was an easy prep. However, relaxing made the entire process go unbelievably smoothly. A lot of the reason it was easy was because I had convinced myself it was easy.

For me, my success in dentistry isn’t dependent just on gaining the hand-skills necessary to tackle a variety of experiences — it is equally important that I gain the confidence required to get out of my own way and let myself do good work.

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The centuries-old struggle to play in tune, by Jan Swafford:

There have been some 150 tuning systems put forth over the centuries, none of them pure. There is no perfection, only varying tastes in corruption. If you want your fifths nicely in tune, the thirds can’t be; if you want pure thirds, you have to put up with impure fifths. And no scale on a keyboard, not even good old C major, can be perfectly in tune.

Why the mess? As the article points out, if you tune up mathematically perfect fifths, the result is not what is expected — things quickly sound painfully out of tune. So, the art of tuning is approximating a mathematical relationship in the most pleasing way possible. The modern solution? Equal temperament:

Here the poison is distributed equally through the system: The distance between each interval is mathematically the same, so each interval is equally in, and slightly out of, tune. Nothing is perfect; nothing is terrible.

So, here’s the part I didn’t quite understand. I thought we couldn’t tune things using mathematically identical intervals, right? I mean, I just reiterated the article’s example about perfect fifths — if you tune them up through a few octaves, the resulting notes sound really flat!

BUT, the key (har) here is this: — every note shares a little of the off-key-ness because every note is the same distance apart from its immediate neighbor. You aren’t trying to make sure every eighth key on the keyboard is exactly a mathematical fifth, you’re trying to make sure that every key on the keyboard has “exactly the same frequency ratio as its neighbor”. NOW I get it!

Equal temperament is why you can transpose things on the piano, and they don’t sound terrible in that new key. It also allowed the development of jazz.

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In 1958, just after James Van Allen discovered his eponymous radiation belt about the earth, he agreed to work with the US military to attempt to disrupt it. More details at NPR, Exploding H-Bombs In Space:

In any case, says the science history professor, “this is the first occasion I’ve ever discovered where someone discovered something and immediately decided to blow it up.”

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Accelerating hard up the dark streets from the Ford Parkway Lifetime toward my apartment near I94, life felt perfect. I had just wrapped up another hard workout, and I was headed home to spend a lovely summer evening with my fiancée. It was late July, 2008. I remember the song I was listening to as the cool air whipped through the car: Cellophane Girl, by Graham Colton.

I thought I had it figured out, but was I ever wrong. Wow.

Now, I feel that I’ve got it figured back out. I’m likely mistaken, yet, the comfort of my naiveté is tremendous. The solace of limited understanding is a veneer, a faux finish, over our conscious minds — we don’t trouble ourselves with what lies underneath the surface; that is, the “whys” of life. Too many of these questions could make life unbearable. Too few, and you miss the richness of the world, the nuances that color everything.

Still, people find joy in ignorance. A quote from The Matrix:

You know, I know this steak doesn’t exist. I know that when I put it in my mouth, the Matrix is telling my brain that it is juicy and delicious. After nine years, you know what I realize?
Takes a bite of steak
Ignorance is bliss.

And still, people find joy in embracing these huge questions that underlie our very existence. A quote from Plato, Apology 37e-38a:

Perhaps someone might say, “Socrates, can you not go away from us and live quietly, without talking?” Now this is the hardest thing to make some of you believe. For if I say that such conduct would be disobedience to the god and that therefore I cannot keep quiet, you will think I am jesting and will not believe me; and if again I say that to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you will believe me still less. This is as I say, gentlemen, but it is not easy to convince you.

How to rectify the two views? The questioning, struggling, striving mind which never settles for a simple explanation seems always at odds with the mind that relaxes and soaks in the beauty of the moment.

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The University Recreation Center supplies the facilities for a variety of sporting events throughout the year. This past weekend, it hosted the 2010 USA Racquetball Junior Olympic Racquetball Championships. So, it’s not unusual to run into scampering quorums of teenagers who aren’t quite old enough for college. I had an encounter with one such group when leaving the Rec Center on Sunday.

The boldest of the group approached me, asking, “Hey man, you go here?”

“Yup.”

“How you like it?”

Not wanting to explain my graduate student status, all I came up with was: “It’s — well — I mean, I like it here.”

“Lots of programs?”

“Yeah, I mean they have a ton. You get a lot for your money. If I were you, I’d definitely go here.” The young man’s friends orbited slowly, listening to our conversation.

“The parties, how are the parties?”

“I — umm, well I don’t know. I hear they’re good?”

“Right. And man, how are the women? You know. The women.”

Holding up my left hand and smiling, I said “I wouldn’t know, I’m married.”

Hootin’ and hollerin’ “He’s married!! ooohh, you got him!”, the group bunched back together and wandered off. I laughed — it was fun talking to them. I think I like talking to strangers.

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From a review of Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor E. Frankl:

“Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is,” Frankl writes. “After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord’s Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.”

Thanks to Mykala, this book jumped to the top of my “next book to read” reading list.

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