Morality Is Not Solely A Human Condition

Self-recognition
 Ju was completely oblivious the last time I performed the mirror test on him with a dab of pink lipstick on his forehead. Fail! And get this, no matter how interested your child may be in his reflection, he may gesture at it, smile and laugh at it or reach out and touch it as if he were actually interacting with his reflection, he DOES NOT UNDERSTAND that it is himself in the mirror so long as he fails the mirror test. Trust me, I was fooled by Ju too.

It is difficult to get inside the head of a toddler without scientific inquiry and experimentation. Sure, Piaget did it by observing his kids, but Piaget was a psychologist who kept meticulous records which I doubt any common parent would care to replicate before  she declares proudly to others that her kid is so and so. It is the same with Ju's self awareness. That is why I do the experiment every month or two just to be sure. Apes are the only other species that recognises their reflection. 

Empathy

It is still too early to start on the experiments on morality, specifically what is fair and what is right or wrong since Ju cannot yet speak. But at 16 months, Ju is surprisingly empathetic. Some time ago, I decided to see if Ju could feel empathy. He could, by then, tell us with gestures that he was hurt (even though these days, I think he feigns pain to get some sympathy and attention). We would naturally go to his "rescue" and blow or stroke on the "wound" or hug him. So as I played with him one day, I pretended to hurt myself and I made a whole charade of wincing and grimacing and moaning in pain. The first time, he was taken aback and stopped to stare. Then as I said, "Oww! It hurts!" (in Mandarin) a few times, he reached out his hand to stroke my face. I was really surprised but he did it again the next time. He is more skeptical when Daniel tries it with him and needs a lot more convincing. It's either Daniel is not as good an actor or Ju doesn't believe that boys can feel pain. I don't have a means to test his understanding of gender yet, so I can't rule out either explanation.

The other clear evidence that Ju can feel empathy is when we read his picture books. In two books, there is a picture of someone hurt next to an ambulance. In "Busy Town", a flap book, we open the flap on the ambulance to see a little boy inside, with his arm in a cast and a paramedic tending to him. In the second, "Mein Puzzlebuch Tatutata", Grandma is lying on a stretcher with her leg in a cast. Of course when we read the book with Ju, we would describe the pictures to him, like "Look at Granny's leg, she's hurt. She needs to go to the hospital." Here's the interesting part, Ju gets visibly concerned and starts pointing to his leg, or to his arm (if it's the boy with the injured arm) and looking distressed. Now, EVERY time he sees the pictures, even before either Dan or I says a word, he gets really upset. He would wear a distressed look and point vigorously at the injured body part, then go "unhhh, unhhhh!" and point to his corresponding body part. He would not stop until we validate his concerns. We would say, "Brother's arm is in a cast, it's alright, he's going to the hospital now. Give Brother a kiss." And Ju would kiss the picture! He is also more fascinated by these scenes and would pay more attention and time to these compared to the others.

So Ju is almost 17 months old and he doesn't yet share or cooperate, not surpringly, since he still isn't self-aware. But he can feel empathy for others' pain. He shows concern and is visibly upset by the sight of someone in a cast (I haven't got any other books with pictures of crying kids). He may be reacting to the words and concept of "pain" and "hurt" since he has experienced these himself. Empathy is clearly a developmental milestone that every child hits (save in serial killers or children with disorders like autism) but it cannot be taught, I believe it either is there or it isn't. You could nurture it, of course, and some children have more of it than others.

Monkeys Are Moral Too

They really are, and we shouldn't be surprised, since we share more than 99% of our DNA with them. To think otherwise is sheer arrogance. Whether you belong to the essentialist camp (morality is given to us by God, for those of us who lack creativity; or it is intrinsic to human nature) or the social scientific one (morality is nurtured through socialisation and education), you can't deny that morality aids survival of the species in that it facilitates cooperation and social order - two key factors for survival of the group.

Frans de Waal, renowned primatologist, shows several experiments where monkeys clearly show empathy, cooperation and even a sense of fairness. At 13:00, the most amazing experiment of all reveals that Capuchian monkeys actually reject income inequality!

Speech By Bilahari Kausikan

This is a speech that Permanent Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Mr Bilahari Kausikan, made at his high school alma mater, Raffles Institution. The transcript is available on the school website and I am reproducing it here without edits. The reason is because I know Mr Kausikan in his capacity as Permanent Secretary, and have had the privilege of being on occasion, privy to his ideas and caustic comments. Mr Kausikan is one of the -- if not, the most astute, brilliant and erudite man I know. It's the civil service's privilege to have him steering its foreign policy, although I believe his profound sense of irony and sometimes brazen contempt for stupidity (and there is lots to go around) is mistaken for arrogance. Those who think so would know they are wrong after reading this speech, and he says a few things that all of us, no matter which branch of philosophy or ideology or fervency we may each espouse, should heed. For those of you who have less than a fleeting interest in existentialism, Mr Kausikan gets to his point in the middle of the speech, at which point you begin to understand why he chose to begin with a ramble about the meaning of life to a bunch of pubescent boys. Enjoy.

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SPEECH BY PS (FOREIGN AFFAIRS) BILAHARI KAUSIKAN AT RAFFLES INSTITUTION’S 189TH FOUNDER’S DAY ON 21 JULY 2012 (SATURDAY) AT 9 AM AT ALBERT HONG HALL, RAFFLES INSTITUTION

                  When your Principal, in a reckless act of folly, asked me to be Guest-of-Honour at this 189th Founder's Day, my first instinct was to do us both a favour and refuse. But I hesitated and in an instant was lost. The temptation to savour the irony was too great. For what I am about to say, I absolve her of all responsibility.

                  My comrades and I spent our six years in Raffles Institution waging insurgency against all established authority. At a very tender age one of our teachers told us we were all born to be hanged. And if that extreme did not come to pass -- perhaps I should say, has not yet come to pass -- several of us were at least caned. Our then Principal failed to achieve his dearest ambition of getting us all expelled only due to our dumb luck. So here I stand before you, living testimony to the role of chance and serendipity in life; a role more often than not, insufficiently acknowledged if not ignored, particularly by Singaporeans of a certain ilk. And that is my theme.

                 Eighty-five years ago an American writer by the name of Thornton Wilder published a short novel entitled The Bridge of San Luis Rey. The book has never been out of print, but deserves to be better known. The novel begins at noon on a certain day in 1714 when a bridge in Peru -- "the finest bridge in all Peru", writes Wilder -- inexplicably collapses and five people who happen at that moment to be crossing, plummet to their deaths. The tragedy is witnessed by a devout Franciscan monk, in Peru for missionary work among the natives, who immediately asks himself “Why did this happen to those five?” The monk is convinced that it was not a random event but some manifestation of God's Will for some greater end and vows to investigate to so as to prove to the natives the necessity of divine purpose. But his investigation runs afoul of the Inquisition and he is burnt at the stake.

                Wilder poses, but never directly answers, the question: “Is there a direction and meaning in lives beyond the individual's own will?” The point, of course, is that it could have been anyone of us on that metaphorical bridge. I do not think that there is any particular meaning, pattern or direction, divine or secular, in the drift of human events. History, as Winston Churchill is reported to have remarked, is just one damned thing after another. The innocent die young and the wicked flourish; and not necessarily in equal measure either because to the wicked the innocent are often prey.

                 The world is far too complex a place to be comprehended in any holistic way by the human mind. It is made up of too many moving parts interacting in too many unpredictable ways for human reason to grasp. I mean, of course, the social world: the world of human interactions, human relationships and human institutions; of love and hatred, politics and economics, war and peace, infused with emotions like anger, pity, joy and sorrow, and not the material world of rocks and stones and trees and the earth's diurnal course.

                 In the material world, the apple will always fall whether or not Newton was there to observe it. In the material world, all phenomena must ultimately conform to the laws of physics. In the material world, when we return to earth and ashes, we too will confirm to the laws of physics. But in the meantime we inhabit a social world of sentient beings who observe, think and respond so that our every effort to act or comprehend alters what we try to comprehend and every thought and action begets a never ending, ever shifting kaleidoscope of unpredictable possibilities that makes all social science an oxymoron.

                 Reason may distinguish man from beast, but the sum of the interactions of different reasons; of many logics, is only coincidentally and occasionally logical. That is why actions always have unintended consequences even if they are not always immediately apparent, and our best laid plans and most fervent hopes are constantly ambushed by chance and events.

                 Most things eventually fail. The shade of Ozymandias hovers unseen but omnipresent over every human enterprise, biding its time.The ancient Greeks advised us to call no man happy until he was dead. This is good advice. We can be reasonably certain of something only after it has occurred. The only true knowledge is historical, and even then there is always room for argument over interpretation. None of us ever sees or understands the same thing, no matter how conscientiously we try to observe or communicate.


                As I stand here speaking to you, at least three different things are occurring simultaneously: first, what I think; second, what I say to convey what I think which, whether because of the limitations of language or by design, will not always be the same as what I think: deception and self-deception are intrinsic parts of human nature; and third what you hear and understand of what I had intended to convey which is again not necessarily the same thing.

               One could call this, after the title of a short story by the Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa, the Rashomon phenomenon. It makes for a world without fixed meaning, which accentuates its fundamental incomprehensibility. A world in which the past can only be partially known, the present is largely unknown and the future certainly unknowable.

               None of us asked to be born. Yet having had life thrust upon us, we must, unless bent on suicide, nevertheless live. Although we can only, if dimly and darkly, know backwards, we have to live forwards. No one can live in a constant Hamlet-like state of existential doubt. We must profess a certainty that we do not necessarily feel. To keep the metaphysical horror of unfathomable meaninglessness at bay, we all, singly or collectively, consciously or unconsciously, adopt mental frameworks to simplify a complex reality in order to deal with it.

              Since the Enlightenment of the 17th Century, belief in Reason has replaced belief in God as the primary organizing mental framework of society. We are all the creatures of this western defined modernity and the most successful of the non-western countries, Singapore among them, are precisely those who have embraced it the most closely.

              Reason's children include law and justice, philosophy, literature and the arts, economics and other social sciences and even the very belief in reason, progress, technology and science. But the fundamental mode of thought that underpins these trappings of reason is still theological in that whether our belief is in Reason or in God, it is still mere belief and not epistemologically provable beyond all doubt. There is no end to philosophy any more than there can be an end to history.

              Stated in another way, none of Reason's children have an autonomous reality separate from our apprehensions of them. They are socially constructed artefacts; frameworks of ideas that we have chosen to believe in, in order to comprehend the world and comprehend in order live in a particular way. Their utility is thus purely instrumental. They are at best all only partially and contingently right which means, of course, that they are all also always at least partially wrong. That includes, by the way, the ideas I am presently expounding.

               I advance these arguments not to instil cynicism or despair but to suggest the possibility of liberation and hope. A rock is forever only a rock. But human beings are defined by their potentialities, and since there is no predetermined meaning to the unfolding of events, the potentialities are equally boundless. Were it not so, Singapore should not exist as a sovereign and independent country.
 
              The only meaning in life that can exist is that which we create for ourselves. And unless we want our lives to be merely a slow, selfish dying, we ought to try to create some meaning larger than ourselves. This is, to my mind, an absolute duty imposed by the human condition, even if we know that uncertainty and error are constants and that we are always writing on sand before the advancing tide. Our duties to our families, our friends and our country endure when even hope is dead.

              I am sure that by now many of you are harbouring a thought that you are too well brought up to speak out loud: this idiot exaggerates. Of course, I exaggerate. But only a little, and only for clarity's sake and not to distort or mislead. So let me restate my essential point in a different way.

              Do not confuse the depth of sincerity with which you or others hold an idea, or the number of people who sincerely hold an idea, with its validity. Sincerity is an over-rated virtue, if indeed it is a virtue. All of you may be suddenly seized with the sincere conviction that that pigs should fly. But pigs will nevertheless never sprout wings no matter how devoutly you hope for them to escape the surly bonds of earth.

              And if you, ignoring the possibility of error, sincerely believe that pigs ought to fly; or that God's Will has been revealed to you; or that you are one of the elect to whom the direction of History's cunning passages has been vouchsafed, then it is but a tiny step to being convinced that anyone who does not share your conviction is not just ignorant but evil. Then for the greater glory of PIGS or HISTORY or GOD, all spelt in capital letters, it is only a tinier further step to seeing it as your bounden DUTY, again spelt with capitals, to expunge the evil.

               And it all inevitably ends as Wilder's poor monk did, in flames at the stake. Rather than sincerity, if we want to do some trifling and ephemeral good or at least to minimize harm, we should approach life with an ironic and humane scepticism. Irony to ensure that we retain a sense of proportion and as ballast against the inevitability of unintended consequences: today's error being the correction of yesterday's error. Humanity so that we may empathize with logics other than our own, if only to better manoeuvre to impose our will because in a world of competing logics, if we hope to do any good, we cannot hope to do so by logic alone. And scepticism because the possibility of deception, our own self-deceptions if not those of others, casts constant shadows over every human action.

               I have chosen to dwell on this at what you may consider inordinate length, because Raffles Institution likes to consider itself unique. Ladies and Gentlemen, I am sorry to inform you that RI is no longer unique.

               You are now only one of a number of similar elite educational institutions from which will come a disproportionate number of scholarship recipients and a disproportionate number of leaders in the civil service, the professions, business, the Arts and the academy. And all these institutions are united by a certain sense of entitlement, possibly so profound as to be quite unconscious.

               I do not blame you for this. All of you are highly intelligent. You will be very well educated. And the odds are that you will be more than averagely successful in your careers. But understand that you will therefore also be more vulnerable to the curse of the highly intelligent, highly educated and highly successful: this curse is the illusion of certainty; the conviction of the omnipotence of your ideas.

               This is the delusion that your ideas or words are validated by mere virtue by being thought or uttered by you! YOU and not some lesser being. And the more intelligent and the more successful and the more highly educated, the deeper the delusion. "The learned", Adam Smith is reported to have said, “ignore the evidence of their senses to preserve the coherence of the ideas of their imagination.”

              Shortly after the 2008-2009 financial crisis, Alan Greenspan, the former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, a powerful and erudite man, confessed in testimony to a Senate. Hearing that his intellectual assumptions of a lifetime had been shaken and he was still trying to understand what happened. I do not know if he has since come to any conclusions. But it was clear that prior to the near global disaster, he had never even faintly contemplated the possibility that his beliefs may have been in error. We are all still paying the price for his certainties.

              Yours will be a generation that that will live through times of more than usual uncertainty. A global transition of power and ideas is underway. Transition to what, no one can yet say. We have no maps and will have to improvise our way forward the best we can. It will be a transition measured in decades and not just a few years, and it is your misfortune that it is occurring as the technology of the internet is making us solipsistic.

             The internet conflates and confuses our opinion with information and tempts us to immerse ourselves only in a circle of those who share and reinforce our own interests and views. It shortens attention spans and privileges the new and novel over any notion of lasting value. Social media like Facebook have perverted the common meaning of ‘friend’ and ‘like’ beyond all recognition. Only a solipsist or, what is much the same thing, a narcissist, would think that what he or she had for lunch would be of wider interest; and only those with vacuous minds would be interested. And this at a time when the safe navigation of uncharted waters requires a prudent modesty, openness and some minimal capacity for sustained thought. And yet the internet and its associated technologies is indispensible to modern life. We need it to prosper. But what its ultimate effects will be on society, on governance, on international relations, on the very way we think, no one yet knows.

               I certainly have no answers. As you, the anointed ones, ready yourselves to assume authority and responsibility under these challenging circumstances. I can do no more than to remind you of what Sir Olivier Cromwell wrote to the Synod of the Church of Scotland in 1650. He was trying to persuade the Scots not to embrace the Royalist cause of King Charles the Second and so avert civil war. Gentlemen, he wrote, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ” -- and I should explain that in the 17th Century the bowels were considered to be the seat of pity or the gentler emotions -- Gentlemen, Cromwell wrote, “I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken”.

              So, Ladies and Gentlemen of the 21st Century, I too beseech you from whatever portion of anatomy you consider most dear, think it possible that you may be mistaken.

              Before I conclude, you may wish to know how it all ended. Cromwell's advice was not heeded. Shortly thereafter, the third English Civil War broke out. This set in motion a historical trajectory of political, social and economic changes that led to modern Britain, the industrial revolution, the East India Company, Sir Stamford Raffles, the British Empire, the founding of Singapore and ultimately, you and I.

              And all because good advice fell on deaf years. What better way to appreciate the irony and contingency of events than to ponder what may have happened if Cromwell's advice was in fact taken and civil war avoided. And as you do so, consider also the possibility that you may be mistaken when you think you are mistaken.

             And with that final paradox I will end.

             Thank you for listening to me.
                                     

Was Ist Typisch Deutsch?

I came across this great video while trawling for free German lessons. I am amused, slightly appalled and more enlightened about how the Germans think about their nationality. Oh, and I learnt a new word: "punklicht und ordnung"!

Today's Lesson

Translation:

Family (from America): Thanks, Jesus, for this food

Jesus (from Mexico): You're welcome.

Happiness Revisited: Try Mental Discipline

I wrote about Dan Gilbert's thoughts on Impact Bias in an earlier post.  Today I am revisiting it after I found his thought-provoking and quite insightful lecture on TED. 

So if you have watched the 20minute or so lecture, you would pretty much know what it is that makes some people worry, fret, moan and some other people smile, rave and be in a state of seemingly unreal contentment. Gilbert's claim is it's all in your mind, to put it crudely. The Buddha and many other wise people have already said it so I shall not go further into how to be happy.

Instead, my thoughts are on a related question: how should I spend my time in such a way that makes me happy, i.e. what sort of work should I do that puts me in a happy state without having to manufacture synthetic happiness? I ask this because it's the question that bothers most people, not how to banish irreverent negative thoughts and make the "most" out of a bad situation, but how to LIVE life in such a way that you feel no negative feeling state at all and in fact would be happy.

And no, I don't count drugs as the answer. The answer has already been found. I believe it is Mikail Csiksentmihalyi's idea of flow. 

Flow is a concept that refers to a state of ecstasy (out of the everyday routine, not the drug-adduced state), of utter and intense concentration that seems like an out-of-body experience. Prof Csiksentmihalyi explains that when we are in a state of such intense concentration, existence is temporarily suspended. It makes sense. Recall when you were so wrapped up in a task that "time just flew" by. Of course time also flies when one is stressed and doing 100 things at the same time, it doesn't mean we're in flow, or in some state of nirvana.

Flow is best experienced when we are doing something that requires a lot of skill and involves a high degree of challenge. Think musician, performer, athlete, even CEOs, all of these categories of people were researched by Prof C's team. All of them described experiences of flow. Now consider the following table:

I borrowed this from Prof C's lecture since it wasn't so hard to replicate with a little Paint and Powerpoint.

I've been trying to get into the yellow area for over a decade. It's the answer to the questions: what is my calling, where do I fit in, what should I do with my life (other than my job which gives me a mediocre mental challenge and sufficient remuneration to sustain my current standard of living)?

At least a half dozen people have discussed this dilemma with me over the past year. The dilemma being the choice between the status quo which gives them little personal life satisfaction and doing something that would be meaningful, rewarding and satisfying. Here's the problem with the second choice: it's iffy.

We tend to glorify the alternative life we could be living, much like how Dan Gilbert describes people who think that they would be happier if they had the freedom to choose among many options. We put it on a pedestal, this more meaningful work we should be doing and like a deity we worship it as the ultimate goal, like nirvana or God. I'm not saying it isn't worth aiming for, this other more meaningful work we ought to all be doing. I'm saying most of us fail to understand its true nature or properties. Hence, we all seem to chase an illusion, because happiness, like this mysterious "calling" which is our place in the sun, is a chimera.

I believe the properties of each of our calling is in Prof Csiksentmihalyi's diagram. Look at each of the 8 feeling states and you could identify yourself in one of them at some time of your day or week or period of life. Most of the day, I find myself at Boredom (low on skill and challenge), so to occupy my mind, I trawl the Internet for mental stimulation -- no not porn -- which leads me to sites like Big Think, TED, New York Times and the like.  If you asked me when I last felt like I was being mentally challenged, when I had to use a fair amount of skill, I will tell you without hesitation that it was when I was teaching a class of undergraduates Sociology or Psychology.  It wasn't only that I had the opportunity to stretch my intellect, use my knowledge and disseminate ideas in a creative manner, it had also a lot to do with the feedback I was getting from the students and those with whom I was interacting. It was a two-way street and I often felt I was in flow if the class was going well, our discussions were animated and students were challenging me and visibly enjoying or benefiting from my input.

Of course there are moments of Arousal when I have a heavy workload and deadlines to meet, papers to grade, a presentation to prepare. But that's to be expected because my time-management and stress-management skills are being worked!  Truth be told, I don't get that a lot now, but I am getting more rewards on a different front. I am mostly in Control segment at work and once in a while, at arousal when I am placed in a new and challenging situation.  But it's rarely Flow. And how can I blame the work or the organization that I chose to join? No one should if they had made their choice with wide open eyes.

Now I am going to posit an idea that is more extreme. I believe that to get into the yellow bit, you don't have to go searching the mountain ranges of the Himalayas or quit your job to be a do-gooder (but go ahead if you feel a real passion for it). There is something to be said about being in a state which requires a lot of skill and where you are highly challenged. Technical training. Lots of it.

According to the wise professor, you can't be creative, you cannot change something into something that is better than what it was before, unless you have at least 10 years of technical training. 10 years.

I can immediately think of a dozen people who spent the last ten years doing 10 different things, much less just one. I recall now Amy Chua's much-misunderstood ethos that children need to work, work, work until they're good at something. Only when they're finally good at it will they enjoy it. (I.e. nobody ever enjoys anything until they are good at it, that's why permissive American parents could never raise kids who are musical virtuosos). I now see her point.  I can recall the days when I spent hours each day labouring over a painting, barely aware of the pain in my shoulder blades as I hunched over my easel with my pastel-stained fingers. The more I did it, the better my technique became and the more I enjoyed it. It was the same for the piano, in which I received only a short two years of formal training.

Alas, I never took these hobbies further than the short amount of time I used to attain moderate ability and skill. I was never encouraged to continue, (if I had, I would have become more proficient and obviously, would have received more encouragement to persevere) I stumbled on art at the ripe old age of 17, right before I was about to enter University to earn a general degree that would qualify me for....well, general administration. There was no way that I would have or could have taken the thing that could have given me flow to the next level toward success.

A Case For Mental Discipline
So what I am essentially arguing is that in order to do the sort of work that would allow you to achieve flow, one must first put in the mental discipline required to become really good at something. Cos no successful (I am thinking wildly successful people like Buffet, Gates and Patricia Kuhl whose work I talked about recently) person ever got to the pinnacle of their success without working really hard at something until they were really good at it. This not only takes perseverance but a lot of self-belief.

Self-belief, also known as "passion", that cliched term that every career expert or some other person dishing out free advice would tell you about being successful. It makes a sense that to be free of self-doubt or doubters allows you to do the work you love and believe in unhampered. Not everybody who is good at something becomes successful and not every successful person can attribute said success to his own personal merit. The difference, I think, lies in how far you're willing to go with your work, and self-belief goes a long way to fuel that journey. As I said, I felt alive and sometimes in flow when I was teaching, sharing knowledge, interacting with people who wanted to learn. Why didn't I keep on at it, you wonder? Well, a lot of organizations have this evil, uncompassionate feature called bureaucracy. It kills passion, devours the innate goodness and potential of its members and pretty much destroys any possibility of a compromise between getting what you need and doing what you love.

Is it ever too late to go back to that thing that you love to do which allows you to go into the yellow zone and take it to the next level, or even better, make it your life's work? Pragmatic people will say it would cost too much once you are in your 30s, maybe 40s. Not surprising, as how many successful people you know started their technical training at age 35 or 40? Yes, the occasional grandmother graduates with a PhD at age 65, but you can be sure she isn't going to embark on a 20 year career in academia. That sort of thing is more like a wish-fulfilment for people, the goal of education they never achieved in their youth. I am talking about finding what you love and doing it because you're good at it -- financial success notwithstanding -- every day of your life because that is the place where you experience the yellow, the flow. Not the job you're currently doing because it pays well enough.

The Yellow is Right In Front of You
So is it ever too late? Many friends lament to me how they wish they could find their "calling", the job that really made them feel they were doing something meaningful. I believe they genuinely want that. Most are in their early 20s. Some already do things they love and are passionate about, but would face immense personal and social doubt and angst if they were to make that their day job. "Too much risk", is a common refrain.

I sympathise with that. We live in a culture that exhorts entrepreneurship but regards failure as a dirty linen best left in the closet. It is a society that holds up banners congratulating "winners" but does the minimum to cultivate and nurture those who are trying to live their dreams. I think there is a danger in putting up too many goal posts and believing that those goal posts are typical symbols of "success" -- a property, a car, an annual turnover of 100 million. These are the goals that would never put you in the yellow zone, you can drive for hours in your Ferrari, but the furthest you get is the next traffic light.

Byron Katie told someone who was fretting over this question that you can live up to your full potential every day. She does it when she washes the dishes for example. I'm not being facetious here. I took that advice very seriously. I can't say that I felt ecstatic each time I washed a pan or ironed Daniel's shirts but I can say that it helped me understand that you can be good at anything for it to be meaningful, not just the things that society labels as useful or laudable. Mother Teresa, for example, is one of the worst examples of human compassion in the history of mankind, her organization is rife with corruption and inefficacy, but still she has come to be a ubiquitous symbol of compassion and charity.  Go figure. The things or people that society at large regard as successes are like the book covers that hide the real contents of the pages. You have to read a long time before you can see for yourself if you had correctly judged it by its cover.

In sum, flow is not happiness, but many find happiness in doing the things that give them flow. I am in the lower end of the yellow whenever I am in the few moments of pure focus and attention on my son, when I lose consciousness of everything as my hands skim the keyboard as if they were being directly commandeered by the score of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and when I am piecing together multiple ideas  into a coherent  opinion on this blog. I don't experience this all the time, and I am unafraid to admit I grapple with the "what could I be doing that's more meaningful?" question every day. But understanding the nature of flow has helped me conclude that the only way to live in the yellow is to keep doing the things I am good at without hoping for some magical trophy that reads "success" at the end of my endeavours.

I am going to end with this tremendously funny speech by Sir Ken Robinson because he is just so RIGHT. He talks about some of the stuff I've just gone about, and after you've listened to him, if you haven't gone to search for his 2006 talk, you would sit back and think: that's absolutely right.

How Babies Learn Language

I watched this TED talk by Patricia Kuhl about a year ago, or sometime while I was pregnant with Ju. I remember being fascinated by what development psychologists were discovering about babies and how they learn language, particularly foreign languages.  Dr Kuhl gave a more in-depth lecture at the University of Washington, available for view on Youtube, but the TED talk summarises her research findings in a short couple of minutes.

The Golden Window

In a nutshell, the facts are pretty indisputable: babies are able to discern all the sounds of all languages in the word up till a certain age -- 10-12 months. Kuhl posits that between 8 and 10 months, all babies begin to take rapid statistics of adults' speech and these statistics are then used in later stages for their speech development. But get this, after 10 to 12 months of age, babies' ability to detect other languages other than the one they are most exposed to (the mother or native tongue) drops significantly. 

The science is simple: after the 8 to 10 month window when babies are rapidly taking statistics of the sounds they hear in adults' speech, the ones who are NOT exposed to more than one language start to tune out the foreign language sounds in order to focus on the native language sounds. Kuhl experimented with American babies at age 7-8 months, testing their ability to discern Chinese language sounds. All the babies could do so.  Then, one set of babies were exposed to 12 sessions of 35 minutes of Chinese (over 12 weeks) during the critical window and another group (the control group) were not.  The babies that were not exposed to any Chinese lost their ability to discern the Chinese sounds but the exposed group of babies were able to discern the sounds!

Kuhl argues that as native language acquisition begins at the 7 to 10 month stage (where babies start to actively take speech statistics), foreign language acquisition declines because all the babies are hearing are one language, their native tongue, unless of course, they are being raised bilingual or multilingual.  This also explains why adults have a horrible time picking up foreign languages, particularly after their teens. The OPTIMAL age span for learning language is from age 0 to 7. After that it decreases slightly and then dips at purberty. After that, it's just downhill.

Putting Science To Practice

I have always been a fan of science and experimentation. In fact, I've been testing Ju for a couple of weeks on his object permanence cognition. (Still negative, if you're wondering) Anyway, Dr Kuhl's research really stoked my excitement about language learning and how I can possibly help Ju in our multilingual project. To refresh your memory, here's the map of Ju's linguistic inputs. I've added in what I consider an assessment of the degree of exposure: High Exposure is where he hears the language passively as well as actively spoken to him on a daily basis. Medium High refers to daily exposure at a somewhat lesser degree, maybe 1 to 3 hours.

Ju has had this type and degree of exposure since birth.  If the research is valid, then this is the crucial period where Ju is taking statistics, absorbing German, Chinese and English. Dr Kuhl explains that it is through "motherese" (the universal way that people speak to their kids, in a high pitch, repetitive way) that the babies are able to take their statistics. When we speak "motherese", our speech becomes slower, vowel sounds are extended ("Hiiiii Babyyyy!" instead of "Hi Baby!") and as a result, we produce better acoustics, our articulation of words and sentences is clearer, and hence these form the “little nuggets” that map your baby's brain as he absorbs the sounds.

Newsflash for those who think popping in a DVD with Chinese songs in bright, fun animation is going to help your child pick up Chinese.  The study also measured the effect of audio and audio/visual input on the babies. Result? No result. The babies who heard or watched a videorecording of the very same Chinese lessons given to the "exposed" group had no significant improvement in their ability to discern Chinese sounds.

Learning is SOCIAL, i.e. the social part of our brains are responsible for language acquisition.  Not surprising, since it was during constant exposure to my in-laws or other people while I was in Germany that my German improved at the most tremendous rate.  They don't recommend "immersion" for nothing.
So don't be lazy and take heart!  Every child can learn multiple languages and the best way to do it is through interaction. Throw away the DVDs and shut off the television and computer. Your child is like a piggy-bank with a supercomputer, the more you speak, read and expose him/her to languages, the more likely that one fine day the supercomputer will start churning out the very things you hoped to hear.

We Have Coffee

Amazon.de gets thumbs up for fast and reliable delivery of Daniel's Nespresso.

(Price: $358)

They get double thumbs up for sending us a second machine (which we didn't order). Two for the price of half in Singapore - awesome.

Satire: European Debt Crisis

Starbucks Goes Under

First Time Seen In Singapore

The last time a foreigner (read: white person from a developed nation) was charged for vandalism and sentenced to several excruciating whallops on his ass was back in the 90s when American teenaged punk Michael Fay went on a car-smashing rampage. President Bill Clinton actually stuck his head in our part of the boondocks and requested for leniency on the ratbastard. Well, in our part of the world, we take our ass-kickings seriously, but we take our diplomatic pow-wows even more seriously. So the Fay boy got his 6 whacks reduced to 4. Nobody went home happy (not least Fay himself), but you can't say we gave good ol' Bill the snub.
Earlier this month, two white dudes decided to test the limits of Singaporeans' immense complacency and spray-painted a subway car while it sat pretty in the depot. This flagrant act of artistic up-yours not only revealed that SMRT staff either lack sleep or interest in their own trains (the train was seen plying its usual route, see video, for several hours before a member of public decided to check if this was really a prank or some publicity stunt a-la Singpost), it exposed SMRT's security to ridicule -- the pranksters snipped a hole in the fence with a pair of garden variety shears.
The culprits are one Briton who has since fled our legalistic shores and a Swiss consultant (age 35) who was apprehended, charged, and since released on bail of $100,000. While the rest of the world ponders the fate of the Swiss-roll about to be creamed by the iron-fist of our Penal Code, Singaporeans are left to wonder which sucker is about to take the fall for this latest screw-up of idiotic proportions.
Of course they should also ponder the farcical lack of interest the public displayed in a normally drab MRT train rolling through the station wearing a spanking coat of grafitti.

You Have To Love Pandas

What I'm Reading

Excerpt of review by Alice Rawsthorn, July 8 2007, NYT

Why are brown eggs more expensive than white ones? Because the hens that lay them are bigger and tend to eat more. Why is it so hard to find taxis in the rain? Because many drivers stop work after hitting their daily fare targets, which they do faster in wet weather when more people use cabs. The grist of Frank's argument is that most business decisions are determined by the cost-benefit principle, whereby you only do something if the benefit gained is greater than the cost incurred. And the application of this principle exerts considerable influence on design.

A simple example is the over-complicated VCR. Why do manufacturers load them up with so many functions - most of which we seldom, if ever, use - that recording a television program is infuriatingly difficult? The answer is because it costs so little to add each function to a VCR that is cheaper to install them on every machine - just in case anyone wants them - than to "edit" models for different customers. Frank could have made an identical case against the over-complicated cellphone.

Other anomalies are historic. Take the positioning of buttons on clothes. Why are they on the right for men, and the left for women, especially since, for the 90 percent of the population who are right-handed, it's much easier to do up buttons from the right? It's because when buttons were introduced in the 17th century, they were affordable only by the wealthy. As rich men then dressed themselves, they did so from the right; whereas wealthy women were dressed by servants, who preferred to button them up from the left. The custom continues today, even though fewer women are dressed by servants, because there has been no incentive for the fashion industry to change it.

Or think of the seemingly illogical difference in size between the packaging of (identically sized) CDs and DVDs. This dates back to the 1980s, when retailers were replacing 12-inch, or 302-millimeter, vinyl LPs with CDs, and realized that there would be enough space in each old LP rack for two rows of CDs, if the cases were just under 5 inches high. Yet when DVDs came out in the 1990s, they were displayed alongside videocassettes, whose cases were more than 7 inches high, so DVD packaging was made to the same height.

The explanations for other everyday enigmas are vested in the present. Why, for instance, is milk stored in rectangular cartons, and soft drinks in round cans? It's because it's easier to hold a round can when downing a cola, whereas comfort isn't as important to us when we're pouring milk from a carton, as we don't hold them for as long. That's why manufacturers use rectangular milk cartons, which can be packed more efficiently as they occupy less space in pallets, trucks and shop shelves. There's also a financial incentive. Milk is stored in refrigerated cabinets, so the space it occupies is more expensive to operate than the open shelves occupied by soft drinks.

And why do some cars have fuel fillers on the left and others on the right? Because gas station pumps work from both sides, and if every car had a filler on the same side, motorists would have to queue for twice as long.

Le Grand Content

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