Tag: Brain

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That is The Question

Every so often, the human race finds itself dealing with the Big Questions. “What is the greatest good?” “Paper or plastic?” “Does your chewing gum lose its flavor on the bedpost overnight?”

Now, it looks like we get to add another one to the list: “Yanny or Laurel?”

Umm – can we get back to the chewing gum?

If you’ve missed the latest minor craze on social media, welcome back to Earth and I hope you’ll take me with you when you leave again. Yanny or Laurel is a brief sound clip that dares to ask “How long will you listen to a bad recording that didn’t hit No. 1 on Billboard?” You push Play to hear a garbled word, decide if the speaker is saying “Laurel” or “Yanny” and then share your findings online to begin a calm, reasoned discussion of the matter.

OK, just kidding. You pop online to join the cheering section for your word of choice, often with an enthusiasm for the “obvious” choice that could get you on nine out of 10 American game shows. (Come back to “Jeopardy!” when you’ve calmed down a bit.)

The thing is, it’s actually not that hard to find the answer. Besides the fact that “Yanny” isn’t even a word (unless you’re misspelling Greek New Age musicians), it only takes a little hunting on the Web to read an account from the teens who started all this. It began when they played an online vocabulary page for the word “laurel,” realized each of them were hearing different tones, and sent it out to the world.

But that would be too easy. Like the “blue dress/gold dress” Facebook photo before this, Yanny or Laurel isn’t about learning the right answer. It’s about knowing what you heard and insisting on its rightness to the world.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

A lot of politics – heck, a lot of what passes for online discussion these days – seems to be a longer game of Yanny or Laurel. It doesn’t matter if facts can be found and myths can be busted in less time than it takes to ruin the Colorado Rockies’ pennant chances. What matters is picking your team, shouting your slogan, and remaining impervious to any attempts at reason or compromise.

Sure, it’s annoying – but only when those guys do it. It’s easy to fall into the same trap. Studies suggest that the wiring of our brains makes us want to fit in rather than break with the crowd – it’s easier and more satisfying to simply join the crowd of people who believe the same things we want to believe, than it is to examine those beliefs and see if they hold up.

It’s not inevitable. But like running marathons instead of watching six hours of YouTube, changing the habit takes work that’s usually uncomfortable and sometimes acutely painful. It takes curiosity and a willingness to ask the next question. Even with something that seems obvious. Especially then.

More than once, I’ve quoted the distinguished philosophers Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel: “Still a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” When we can beat that reflex, any question can become interesting. Even “Yanny or Laurel?” can start a long discussion on why some people hear certain tones, or whether we all experience the same reality.

It’s worthwhile. But it takes effort.

You can’t just rest on your Laurels.

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No Laughing Matter

Picture a driver whose wrists are handcuffed to the steering wheel. A short chain, at that, so no hand-over-hand turns. The gear shift is barely reachable, with the fingertips.

Now send that driver on a trip from Limon to Grand Junction. How much of a miracle will it be to make it? If and when the inevitable happens, how many will blame the driver? How many will see that the driver was largely a prisoner of his own car?

In the end, I think that’s where Robin Williams was. Careening off a mountain road in a vehicle he could not control.

The crash has left echoes in all our ears.

There’s been a lot said and written about Robin these days. Not surprising. For many of us, the brilliant comic and actor was one of the constant presences, always there, always doing something new, always on the move, like a lightning storm that had been distilled into a human body. Too much energy to be contained.

My own personal memory is of a performance he gave in London in the 1980s, part of a royal gala for Prince Charles and Princess Di. My family and I taped the show on TV and darned near wore it out, as we watched his hurricane of stand-up over and over again. The effects of playing rugby without pads. The difference between New York and London cab drivers. The sharks watching airline crash survivors bobbing on seat cushions. (“Oh, look, Tom, isn’t that nice? Canapés!”)

At one point, white-hot, he broke off his routine. Running beneath the royal box, he pointed upward, looked to the rest of the audience and stage-whispered “Are they laughing?”

Everyone broke up. Charles included.

But now I wonder. How much of that question lay at the heart of Robin’s own life? Are they laughing? Do they really like me or just the face I show? Does any of this matter?

Those can be uncomfortable questions even without a poisonous brain chemistry. But that is exactly what Robin Williams had.

I don’t have depression myself. Too many of my friends do, including some of the oldest friends I have in the world. From them and from a number of acquaintances, I have at least a second-hand idea, like a reporter in a war zone watching people in the line of fire.

And that’s what it is. A silent war against your own mind.

“Your brain is literally lying to you,” one online acquaintance said. Even when you realize that, he added, it’s still your brain and you still want to believe it.

That’s a terrifying thing to consider.

Mind you, I’m used to the idea that your own brain can ambush you. I’m epileptic. If someday my medication fails or it gets missed for too long, I can have a literal brainstorm. But that’s a sometimes thing, a sneak attack out of the bushes.

This is more insidious. This is the command center taken over by the enemy. When you can’t trust your own mind, your own perceptions and impulses, what do you do?

There are more tools than there used to be. I have friends who use medicine to fight the chemistry, who use cognitive-behavioral therapy to find a path through the labyrinth, who reach for reasons to even get out of bed in the morning: family, faith, pets.

“Unless brain transplants become a thing, I will always require medication,” one dear friend said. “But I’ll always need glasses, too, and that’s the context I try to keep it in.”

But among these tools, we also have one other thing. A society that doesn’t fully understand. A place where the glasses and the pills aren’t seen the same way, where people see depression as a personal failing instead of a mental illness.

Where it’s the driver’s fault for not sawing through the handcuffs in time.

Like many, I wish Robin Williams were still with us. But also like many, I hope his death gives more of us a chance to understand, to see, to ask questions and really listen to the answers. And by listening, to lift some of the stigma so that more people can get more help.

It takes all of us. Together, in understanding.

And that’s no joke.

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Backup Brain

  It sounds like a tabloid headline: The Internet Ate My Brain!

But that’s more or less what a new study comes down to. It claims that constant exposure to the Net has changed the way we think and especially the way we remember. After all, why bother trying to recall an obscure piece of information if a Google search can find it in five seconds?

“When people expect to have future access to information,” notes the report by Betsy Sparrow, Daniel Wegner and Jenny Liu, “they have lower rates of recall of the information itself, and enhanced recall instead for where to access it.”

Or, as the saying goes, there’s what I know and what I know how to look up. And given the chance, we tend to rely on the second.

And really, that’s not all that new.

Ask any married couple.

You know what I mean. Marriage confers a lot of benefits – a loving partner, a faithful friend, a chance to eat food that doesn’t come out of a colorful cardboard freezer box – but one of the greatest may be that it provides you with a second brain. This is invaluable when your original factory-issued cerebellum breaks down on a matter of crucial importance.

“Hon, what’s the name of the older guy in Sense and Sensibility? You know, the one we really like?”

“Alan Rickman?”

“Thank you.”

My parents are the all-time champs at this. They can keep a volley going for minutes at a time, rifling each other’s minds until they come up with the correct answer – or at least, an answer they can both agree on.

“Isn’t he the guy who was in …”

“No, I know who you’re thinking of. That’s the guy from the movie last week.”

“No, the guy in the movie last week was the one in that comedy, the one with the college student.”

“That wasn’t a guy, that was Emma Thompson.”

“No, the one WITH Emma Thompson.”

“Right, which is the one from …”

Major international summits have involved less discussion.

Really, for most of us, it’s a lot like searching the Net. You know you could find the answer in a book. There’s a good chance the book will be more accurate. But searching the backup brain is convenient. It’s familiar. And it only occasionally results in having to sleep on the couch.

If there’s any danger in the march of technology at all, it’s that we might have even less reason to talk to our spouses than before. As if 24-hour sports channels hadn’t done enough damage.

It sounds a lot like this move I saw once.

You know the one?

It had this guy …