Creative Senior Moments Read online

  Some of us have a perfect memory of color: if shown a fabric sample under different lights, they can go to the store and find a sample of the exact same hue.

  What we perceive: some of us are sensitive to the least variation of mood of people they talk to; some never know what other people think.

  We vary on the most basic characteristics such as proprioception or the speed of inborn reflexes.

  These are only examples: the brain has thousands of little niches, so the probability that everybody is bright at something is extremely high. Kids should know this. Not that they can do anything they want, because it is not true, but that each person has a beautiful mind.

  Everybody has a beautiful mind and we are definitely not born equal.

  Narcissism

  I should have seen it coming. The first time I saw a mobile phone, about twenty-five years ago, I was very impressed: mobile phones were not cellular back then, they came with a heavy suitcase and looked like the army field phones. A person with a phone like this must have an important job and be able to answer in an emergency. That is what I thought.

  A middle aged man sitting next to me in the airport took a heavy phone out of his case, deployed a five foot antenna and said:

  “I am in the airport. The plane is on time.”

  I guess I had expected 007, I felt deflated.

  Similarly, when my friend Mr. Dulac, who had a small TV and electronic shop in the French town of Angouleme, installed a car phone for the first time, it was for a man who wanted to call his wife to tell her to open the garage door when he came home.

  Nowadays when I go to the grocery store, two people out of three are on their cell phone. I roll my cart next to them, and what do they say?

  “I am at Wal-Mart”, or “I am at Kroger’s” or they say: “I think that I’ll buy an Iceberg salad.”

  Then they go home and they Twitter the same message.

  What kills me is that I do not understand whom they are talking to. Does two thirds of the country talk to the 10% unemployed people we have? It does not make statistical sense. Who has the time to listen to this incessant chatter and to read all these Twitter and Facebook messages? What do these people DO?

  What kind of friends does this new generation have? All my friends work. They remodel houses, they teach, they are ex-military going back to school, they pave roads, they invest, they write books. Even if they do not have a job, they all work. Of course all of them, including my ex-students, are over forty years old.

  I think that if I called any of them to say that I am at the grocery store and considering, God forbid, buying an Iceberg salad, they would have me committed.

  Denial

  Alcohol and other drug use typically do not begin when a student enters a university setting. This was revealed in the First-Year Student Orientation Surveys at the University of Georgia. The surveys were distributed during the 2002 and 2004 summer orientation sessions at UGA. These examined parent perceptions of student use and actual student use of alcohol, tobacco and other drugs. The table below compares these parental perceptions and the actual student response.

  Incoming students reported using the following substances at least once in the year prior to attending UGA

  The Core Alcohol and Other Drug Survey was conducted in 2005. It revealed that 74.4% of UGA students under 21 years of age consumed alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs within the last 30 days and 44.3% of UGA students experienced peer pressure to drink or use drugs (University of Georgia Health Center, uhs.uga.edu).

  Bill Cosby said it well in one of his shows: “The only time a child tells the truth is when he is in pain.”

  Brain

  Our Subservient Brain

  Some people have the gift of guilt: they feel guilty about what they do, what they say, what they did not do, and even about what other people do. But mostly, and for most people, their brain is a dangerous pleaser. The brain is a pleaser because it looks for its own satisfaction, not the wellbeing of the person you are.

  Case in point.

  Many divorced people have a hard time paying for child support, not because they do not love their kid, but because they hate their spouse. Their brain says: “Why would I give anything to the bitch who did (whatever) to me?” It does not say naturally: “I am responsible for my own kids.” How frequently does this happen? Often. We have in Georgia a caseload of over 480, 000 child support cases for a population of children (under 18 years of age) of about 2.5 million. It shows that about 20 percent of kids have parents who listen to the pleasing brain instead of the voice of good sense.

  I knew a father who refused to have a regular job because he would have to pay child support: he had a miserable life. A lot of these reluctant parents want to be paid cash for odd jobs, so that do not pay taxes and child support. It does hurt their social security, it does hurt their child, and of course some of them end up in jail. It happened to another guy I knew. He was working next door as a maintenance worker. I knew he was a good dad, that is to say with the kids he had with his second wife, he had totally forgotten about the kids of the first one. He went to jail, he deserved it, but of course that did not help the children of either marriage.

  A father in Savannah was so distraught by the necessity to pay child support that he would say in public: “I would do anything for my daughter” whose picture had a prominent place in his office. He said that in front of the son he had from a first marriage: he could not resist resenting that child. The kid and I exchanged a knowing look, I did not know what else to do.

  Talking back to your own brain is a skill that should be taught in school.

  Case in point.

  The brain loves grandstanding. Why do we call pro-life people who do not care what happens to a child, providing he lives, and pro-choice people who generally think that they have no choice? Both sides have a similar pleasing brain: question of faith, says one; freedom of choice, says the other. It pleases the brain to have a moral standing, provided it does not cost the brain’s owner anything.

  You can listen for hours and hours to what our senators say on the subject, they never make a link with children’s welfare, on either side. As if having one million abused and neglected children every year had nothing to do with the issue. The social pressure on pregnant girls to have the child instead of an abortion does not yield good results in this country. “Once you have the child, you will love it “ yields horrible consequences. What happens to unloved children? Does either side care about it? What do we do about this? Nothing much. It is easier for both sides to discuss principles than to join forces to solve the real problem. Both sides disgust me.

  Case in point.

  We all know that what a dog likes best is to go out with us. Do you walk your dog, or is it that you do not have the time?

  Case in point.

  It is well known that rapists often tell themselves that they break into a home because they want to steal. And how many rapists say later, “She was asking for it?”

  What about stealing, cheating, and taking drugs? The most common excuse is that everybody does it. It is an argument that works well with teenagers, always eager to be accepted, to be like the others.

  Case in point.

  Stealing has multiple excuses provided by our fecund brain: from “the store can afford it,” to “my boss owes me,” or “I am only stealing from the rich”, or “It is a bank: it does not hurt anybody”. All that is invented by the pleasing brain.

  In Georgia, in terms of crime rate, burglary, larceny and auto theft make about 4 per cent of the population. Most of the people I visited in jail, or people I just talk to who have been in jail (when I lived on 37th street, most of my neighbors were in and out of jail), most of them had a very good reason and an even better story. They seldom said: I made a mistake. Note, by the way, that in Savannah, people do not say that they are just out of jail; they say that they have been staying in the country.

  Case in point.

  I have a
90-plus years old neighbor whose pettiness is astounding. And she never missed a Sunday in church, not that it did her any good. She describes herself as charming, generous, intelligent and wise. However, she always talks about her friends in a derogatory way and in the last ten years, she never found anything good to tell me about any of her own “friends.” Her narcissism has deprived my neighbor of common decency, and her subservient brain is complacent and complicit.

  Case in point.

  If you are very sad, your subservient brain will suggest that suicide is the solution. The brain does not protect itself: it is there to serve your whims.

  Talking back to your own brain is a skill that should be taught in school.

  Talking back to your own brain is a skill that should be taught in school.

  Talking back to your own brain is a skill that should be taught in school.

  Survival Skills

  This country was built by people who had good survival skills. These skills were transmitted by parents to children at a time when there was no school.

  Nowadays the basic skills we need are not so different, though they apply to the city jungle: we still need to learn how to handle a budget, especially if we are poor, and how to find a job, especially if we do not have a job.

  A number of jobless people around here, in Savannah GA, have very good working skills, mainly in housing jobs (electricians, plumbers, carpenters who have suffered from the economic downturn), and I am surprised to see how many of them have no survival skills at all. They do not know how to manage a smaller budget, what is the best time to show up for a job, how to dress for a job interview, when to ask for a letter of recommendation, or even how to manage food stamps.

  How come?

  Social Behavior

  Basic morality, if it is anywhere in the brain, sits in the frontal part, where we make decisions and control impulses and instincts such as violence. How do we know that? We know that social and ethical mental complex processes are controlled by the frontal part of the brain because if this part is injured or removed, the corresponding capacity disappears. It has indeed been observed that people who have frontal brain injuries often develop abnormal social behavior.

  There is some evidence arising from neuropsychological features and powerful methods of medical investigation, such as CT or MRI scans and Functional Resonance Magnetic Imaging. It seems that researchers observe smaller volumes of grey matter in the prefrontal cortex of asocial criminals compared to non-criminal or “normal people.” Similar results are observed for borderline personalities and with specific disorders resulting from alcoholism. There are also extraordinary differences between people who commit one murder and people who commit several murders: “Individuals who committed a single murder were characterized by executive dysfunction, lower intelligence, slower speed of information processing, and a higher frequency of developmental disorders (58%), relative to those charged and/or convicted of killing two or more people, who were characterized by a significantly higher rate of personality disorders (79%) and a lower rate of developmental disorders (34%). “

  The problem with this kind of finding is that we do not know what is the effect and what is the cause: does frontal neuronal activity lack in some people who are therefore asocial, or does frontal neuronal activity go dormant because asocial people do not use it?

  A claim has been made that pathological liars suffer brain deficiencies as well. I am less sure about this, because we would need a good scientific way to define a pathological liar and I am not sure we have one. All these are observations of volumes or quantities. It is interesting, but a bit crude. What we want is information about functions, but up to now, I have not seen many papers on neurotransmitters of morality!

  Here is my reasoning about all this: If you learn to run, you get better at it; if you learn to read, you get better at it. What about this: if you learn to care, you get better at it. My bet is that a large fraction of the criminals observed never got exercised at being better persons. I meet children every day who do just what they want to do, their otherwise good parents never tell them to care. Will their brain show deficiencies twenty years from now? I think yes, probably. Their capacity to control themselves and to care for others will be atrophied: it is due to lack of exercise. The idea that their lawyer will argue that it is the way they are born and they could not help it makes my blood boil. We should not allow children to stay selfish.

  Are there any known cases of people who are “born bad”? It is entirely possible, it is even probable but nobody knows that for sure; in the meantime, we should give all children a chance to exercise at being good people.

  Criminals rarely do volunteering work. Selfishness and low IQ rule our jails.

  I think that the American churches have become very complacent with children and do not accomplish the hard work they used to. Proof of it? Compare the number of young criminals in the Bible belt and in the rest of the country. Whose fault is that?

  Tolerance and compassion should be daily exercises. When they are not, greed takes over. There were over 24,500 active gangs in the United States in 2000. “The overall estimate of gang members across the United States has exceeded 750,000 in all survey years. “

  You will notice that the number of gang members is about equal to the number of abused children. Surely some abused children have a productive life, and some gang members are beloved preppies. But there is probably a good overlap of the two categories.

  Sources: M C Brower, B H Price, Neuropsychiatry of frontal lobe dysfunction in violent and criminal behaviour: a critical review J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2001;71:720-726 ( Dec.) Bassarath L., Neuroimaging studies of antisocial behaviour. Can J Psychiatry. 2001 Oct;46(8):728-32.

  Robert E. Hanlona, Leah H. Rubinc, Marie Jensend and Sarah Daousta, Neuropsychological Features of Indigent Murder Defendants and Death Row Inmates in Relation to Homicidal Aspects of Their Crimes, Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 2010 25(1):1-13.

  U.S. Department of Justice, National Youth Gangs Survey Trends from 1996 to 2000.by Arlen Egley Jr, 2002.

  We may not be far of finding more about this. Papers emerge about neurological pathways playing a role in sociability, trustworthiness, infidelity and homosexuality. In October 2005, the Journal of Comparative Neurology published a special issue entitled “The anatomy of the soul.” The issue did not live up to the title, but it was interesting.

  Human Rights

  Volatility of Human Rights

  In 1960, when I was twenty years old, I assumed that, mainly thanks to the Americans, human rights were here to stay: the Second World War had been tattered with so many horrific crimes that we would never see anything like it again. I thought racism was dead with the dragon.

  Little did I know that they were at the time two lynching a week in Georgia and in Alabama. American racism was a well-kept secret in Europe until Martin Luther King reached the world’s ears. Every country has well-kept secrets: I bet you don’t know that it always rains in Paris or that Belgium hosts the most dangerous conmen in the world.

  The same year, 1960, came my first shock: I was in the local grocery store, and an old lady in front of me was palming and bruising tomatoes one by one to pick the most juicy ones. It was not pleasant, but she was old, nobody said anything. When she left, the grocer told me with bitterness: “See, they did not burn all the Jews yet!”

  A part of me has suffered from traumatic stress disorder ever since, because it never stops. Everywhere I went I observed the same nonsense. One Protestant leader in Northern Ireland even told me: “Catholics do not make love like us.” If you thought it was only a racial prejudice, wake up: prejudice attacks all the people that belong to another group, and the attacks are always the same.

  Another fascinating example of racism without race is what happened to the French people born in Northern Africa.

  A large number of French people, about one million, had to leave Algeria in 1962 when Algeria became independe
nt from France. These French expatriates came back to France after over a century of presence in Algeria. They were French coming to France from French departments abroad, but they had developed their own culture: a local accent, local tastes in furniture, clothes and cooking, local customs like keeping a closer look on girls. With them came back Jewish settlers who had been in Algeria since they were expelled from Spain in the 15th century, and genuine Algerians called Harkis who had defended the French cause and were likely to be killed if they stayed in Algeria. Of course the Harkis and the Jews had a terrible deal. What about the French people from Algeria? Were they welcome back in their own country? Of course not. First, the political left treated them like colonialists –even though the majority was born in Algeria and still dirt-poor. The right wing treated them like intruders.

  Two generations later, my boss, a well known intelligent scientist, told me that as long he was in power no “Blackfoot” as French Algerian-born people were called, would ever work in our laboratory. He kept his word: my best students found good jobs only in the South of France. This is pure French people who hate pure French people.

  What about race? I lived 60 years in Belgium and in France, and it is only when I came to Savannah that I learned for the first time that I was “white.” Yes Georgia made a lot of progress, but race is still on the mind of everybody. I was even asked, in the middle of a somewhat philosophical conversation with two neighbors (one white, one black), what I was thinking “as a white person.” They were both curious. The question is so incongruous that I laughed: I only think as a person. The white guy was a racist of the real old school; over 85 years old and talking like a Klan member of the twenties. The black guy was a fast conman always in and out of jail. They were both good friends. The South passes my understanding.

  ***

  After decades of disappointment and intellectual misery, I came to make sense of all of this.