Evolutionary Psychology | Periscope Depth

From the Blog

Sep

up onto the banks of this hard land

Posted by Perich at 9:13 am

Our ancestors were hunters and foragers. The kind of hunger that we call “starving” today (as in “Mom, I’m -”), they lived with every waking hour. They followed herds of animals that were faster, stronger and better armed than they were and they died if they weren’t smarter. For the first ninety thousand years of its existence, the human race knew only one song and that was keep moving.

Fast forward ninety thousand years to this Tuesday, when my email at work was so slow that I couldn’t use it. I would click on a message with a file attachment and count one, two, three, four, five, six before it opened. The message, that is, not the file. Opening a file merited a trip to the water cooler.

“You have eighteen thousand emails in your inbox,” someone said. “Try deleting a few.”

Humans can’t visualize eighteen thousand of something. Hell, we have a hard time with more than seven. We’re descended from a species that never saw a thousand of anything useful. I didn’t intend to have eighteen thousand emails in my inbox. It might have been eighteen hundred or eighteen million.

Apparently my work email doesn’t have a limit on inbox size. Every other company I’ve ever worked for dinged me when my inbox got too big. I used to find this insanely frustrating. Cloud computing!, I would yell at Outlook. Web 2.0! Paperless office! Cheap bandwidth! Agile management! I’d do this at least once a month, angrily archiving and wishing for more storage all the while.

I never realized that the limits were there to help me. If you don’t think of limits as helpful, try searching through eighteen thousand emails.

Limits force me to be lean. I have to be ruthless with my inbox. If it’s older than a month, archive it. If my name isn’t in the “To:” field, ignore it. If I can’t find it, ask the person to reforward it. This reduces the time that Outlook has to spend churning for something.

Limits reduce my processing time. Before, if I wanted to find an old email, I had to search through eighteen thousand. Now, I know an email is either in my inbox or my archive. I can search my inbox in a few seconds. And if more than half of my queries take a few seconds, rather than minutes, that makes me more efficient.

This isn’t accidental. Humans evolved to make the most of limited resources, including the energy available for our brains. A flock of birds takes off from the trees; you want to waste valuable calories counting each of them? Is there that much difference between a flock of two hundred and a flock of one hundred and ninety-seven? It’s a flock. It’s a whole mess of birds. Move on.

Every now and then I think about cutting back. When I’m not at work, I’m writing. When I’m not writing, I’m blogging, either for this little soapbox or for Overthinking It. When I’m not blogging, I’m at jiu-jitsu. When I’m not at jiu-jitsu, I’m piecing together a social life. Sometimes I eat; sometimes I sleep. And sometimes the stress of answering a hundred little bells makes me want to punch the sun out of the sky.

But I do my best work when I’m cornered. When every hour of the day is spoken for, I have to use my time wisely. I’m ruthless with my minutes. I write like I’m hungry and I hustle like I’m broke. Even if my job does pay me a princely salary, I keep moving as if it doesn’t. I fill my days with the stuff that would be a second job or a night shift. I try not to let comfort catch up with me.

Milennia ago, my great-nth grandfather stood somewhere in Africa and wondered if there was a number higher than eighteen thousand. The fact that I’m here means he didn’t waste too much time wondering. I owe it to him to do the same. Ignore the numbers. Pick up the pace. Get lean and stay ruthless. Keep moving.

Jun

your former glories and all your stories

Posted by Perich at 11:03 am

Guys, I figured it out. One of the key dilemmas of human experience. The question of why the artists we discover in our youth – our turbulent adolescence, the college years where we develop our critical stance – seem so much better to us than the artists who start their careers when we’re old. “Today’s music is crap,” say the old, but when the old were young, the last generation’s elderly said the same. Whence this paradox? Why is it so hard for a mature audience to appreciate new sounds? Why do we look so fondly on the art of our past?

Anyhow, I figured it out. It’s cool. No problem. Listen: we stay in love with the artists of our youth because they’re older than us, and it’s really hard to respect anyone who’s younger than us.

I was thinking about this through the lens of music, but it works for any representational, composed art: literature, film, etc. I fell in love with Pearl Jam, Led Zeppelin and The Who as a kid. While I’m no longer the obsessive fan I once was, the type of sound they produced – grungy, fuzzy rock full of passion – still resonates with me. That’s what I seek out. The sort of rock that’s popular today, like that yearning Doughtry crap, does nothing for me. But if I’m being honest with myself, I must admit that were I a teenager today, that’s probably the crap I’d like. And it’s not just rock music. I still like Republica and can’t stand Far East Movement, even though they’re the same act in all the ways that matter.

The reason is because Eddie Vedder et al are older than me. And they always will be.

This doesn’t mean I love every rock band that’s older than me. You’ll never see me at a Patti Smith concert. But it means I’m highly unlikely to love a rock band that’s made up of people younger than me. Those kids! What do they know?

This is weird because it works even for acts whom I’ve outlived. I’m older now than Biggie, Tupac, Cobain or Hendrix ever were, but they were older than me when I first started listening to them. So they will always be older than me, even though I’ve survived them, like Tommy Lee Jones’s father in No Country for Old Men.

Why is this? I’d guess because composed representational art (music, literature, film) is a way of experiencing something vicariously. As a species, we survive and adapt because we can share experience. We’re not limited to what we see or touch ourselves. We can also integrate the experience of others and, if we take it seriously, learn from it.

What makes us take someone else’s experience seriously? Age helps. It’s not a guarantee – the disrespect of the young for the old is documented better than lunar eclipses – but it helps. Even young punks look up to slightly older punks for social cues.

If composed representational art is another form of experience, then it makes sense that we find the art made by artists we consider “older” more respectable. We can still enjoy the art of the young, but it often lacks the emotional resonance we find in the artists we admired in our youth.

Of course, this is all half-baked evolutionary psychology, so it’s probably wrong. But it explains why I keep “discovering” artists from my childhood – Kate Bush, Siouxsie and the Banshees – and why contemporary pop is so much hollow ringing.

Dec

brooklin, shaolin, queensbridge down to long island

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 2:49 pm

I’ve had this anecdote in my back pocket for a bit, wondering what it meant. I’ll tell it anyway.

About a month ago I was working the heavy bag in the fitness center near my office. I try to go at a reasonable clip for the first set. Then I get some water and work elbows and knees for my second set. Third set I just pummel the bag until I can’t keep my arms up. I vary this routine pretty regularly, depending on energy level and my cardio needs for the day.

I do my first set and get some water. Coming back, I see a big guy who’d been jumping rope a few yards away at the bag. He’s throwing a few practice punches at the bag without gloves on, in that way that people do. I think nothing of it.

“When you throw a punch,” he says, as I step back up to the bag, “you want to make sure you step into it.”

Realizing he’s talking to me, I nod. I’m still catching my breath after the first set, so I couldn’t say anything yet even if I wanted to.

“Think of it like turning a corner,” he says, pantomiming the motion slowly.

“You mean like this?” I ask, and snap off a jab without really looking at.

“Yeah!” he says. Then: “So you’ve seen this before?”

“You know that jiu-jitsu school around the corner on Arlington Street?”

“Yeah.”

“I teach there.”

His eyes widen; his hands go up; he stumbles backwards. “Whoa, hey.”

“No, no, it’s cool!” I smile the most disarming smile I have. But the conversation has passed us by.

# # #

Any gym – any collection of guys being athletic – has a certain amount of implied status involved. Large corporate fitness centers avoid outright posturing: nobody calling anybody “shrimp” or “peewee” or any other 1950s-era insults. But you remain conscious of who’s doing your workout better than you.

I have never been the alpha male, except perhaps in the smallest and most trivial of social circles. I accept that. Running at the head of the pack eats up a lot of energy. When someone confronts me for purposes of status – crazy homeless people snarling obscenities in my face, aggressive drivers veering into my lane – I get baffled before I get defensive. What are you doing?, I wonder. Why waste your time on me? I’m no threat to you. I’m no threat to anybody.

Maybe I should change that, though.

When I told some stranger in the gym thanks, I actually do know how to throw a punch, I didn’t mean to step up in defense of my status. But clearly that’s what was going on. I’ve thought about this over in the months since it happened and concluded the following: if he’d meant it as purely charitable advice, mentioning my prior experience would have opened up the conversation (“oh, really? how long have you been studying there?”, etc). Instead, the word “jiu-jitsu” shut it down.

And I’m positive the guy didn’t even mean it as a threat – the proverbial sand kicked at the beach, the elbow in the ribs while shouldering through a crowd. He just thought he knew something I didn’t and that I’d be grateful for the lesson. That’s the insidious nature of evolution, of course: we operate on instincts that carried us through the hunter-gatherer environment, but just make us assholes in civilized society. He didn’t mean to be a jerk. I didn’t interpret him as a jerk. But the defensive posture gave it away.

So I guess I do have a limit that I will bounce back on when pressed. I don’t consciously go out and troll the streets for status. But I will actively defend what little I have.

# # #

Plus, for all I know I might have been throwing shitty jabs that day.

Jul

the coldest blood runs through my veins; you know my name

Posted by Professor Coldheart at 7:00 am

I am an absolute, unapologetic sucker for revenge films.

Friends have heard me defend The Patriot, which is not a good movie at all. But come on! Mel Gibson looks up from the cooling corpse of his next-oldest son, grabs a handful of rifles from his burning house, and recruits his next two oldest sons to sprint through the woods and ambush the British! He charges out of the woods screaming with a hatchet! And all for revenge!

I liked Man on Fire, even in spite of Tony Scott’s camera antics. Sure, everyone in the film had two settings – histrionic or cold. Sure, the pacing left something to be desired. But come on! Denzel Washington loses his client’s daughter in a firefight. So after getting enough blood back in his body to stumble out of bed, what does he vow?

“I’m gonna kill ‘em. Anyone that was involved. Anybody who profited from it. Anybody who opens their eyes at me.”

And I got similarly excited about Taken, a movie so apparently mediocre that it’ll never get a domestic release (it opened in France in February of this year). The few critics who saw it described it as “paint by numbers.” It looks pretty formulaic (note that none of the protagonists have a last name).

But come on! Tell me you wouldn’t want to growl this into a live telephone:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sGGRS_UaPY]

Jack Bauer. Batman. Inigo Montoya. Jason Bourne. Dirty Harry. People who get beat down, lose the ones they love, and then come back in a blaze of indignation. Why does that speak to me? Why do I get such a primal, unavoidable kick out of that?

I think it speaks to that fundamental animal rage which all of us – who share more than 95% of our DNA with animals – carry. The “laugh in triumph over a defeated foe” that Orwell talks about: the brutal, pre-rational appeal of nationalism. We want to kill, and we want our killing to be sanctioned by a moral code. He hurt my family, therefore it’s okay if I cut off his fingers. He killed my wife, so it’s all right if I slaughter everyone he knows and burn his house to the ground. No impartial jury or outside observer would think that’s a proportional or fair response – but come on! I’m the Good Guy, so my savagery makes me driven. They’re the Bad Guys; their savagery makes them subhuman.

But ultimately, in stories like that, the tissue-thin distinction between Good Guys and Bad Guys suggests more than it divides. We don’t cheer the Good Guy because he did the right thing by stabbing the Bad Guy in the top of the skull. We cheer the Good Guy because he totally fucking killed that dude! Did you see that? We identify with him because he has his reasons – they took my job, they hurt my family, whatever – but that’s secondary^*. The chaotic, reptilian roar of victory after bashing someone’s neck seals the deal.

So my love of revenge arises from evolved instincts. I think that’s okay. I recognize and acknowledge it. Indulging in fantasy never hurt anyone, provided you keep it private. It’s the difference between GTA 3 and Columbine. It’s the difference between watching a Briana Banks movie and actually trying to fuck the babysitter. So long as I never take a drunken swing at a bouncer for wrongs real or imagined, I think I’ll be fine.

We all have instincts that we did not choose making decisions for us. I try to stay informed about mine.

^* Think about it: if maiming in pursuit of revenge makes him noble, wouldn’t taking the extra effort to keep his family safe in the first place be really noble?