My future self runs from the mistakes of my past self
This post originally appeared April 19, 2019
My first encounter with the word “hysteresis” was ten years ago when I was editing a particularly difficult electrical engineering feature. That story was one of my favourite I’ve ever worked on, the wild first-person account of the researcher who had unearthed an ancient prediction of a fourth circuit design element, foretold by the laws of mathematical symmetry to augment the holy trinity of electrical circuit design elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor.
Wait! Don’t go! What distinguished this fourth mythical element – today known as the “memristor” – from its workaday siblings was its behaviour, which depended more on its history than on any particular stimulus hitting it at any given moment. This tendency is called hysteresis, and the makers of memristors hope it will make the computers of the future capable of more human behaviours.
But what did that actually mean? Even after months of editing this thing with several of the world’s best electrical engineers at my disposal, I couldn’t wrap my head around the concept. They explained it to me every way they could, including comparing it to the behaviour of a synapse: the connections between neurons can become stronger or weaker depending on the number of electrical signals they’ve traded in the past. They sent me this graph of a bowtie.
Pinched hysteresis loop, courtesy of R. Stanley Williams
It was unedifying. I finished the edit without ever coming to grips with the meaning of hysteresis. But over the next decade, thoughts of that maddening bowtie would come to me unbidden. I couldn’t get it out of my head. It gnawed at me because, even though the math was far beyond anything I could handle, there was something familiar itching just under the surface of that shape.
Cameron: Yes! Let us! Although I don’t know if it will be a real fight this time, like all of our other very vicious fights. Would it be fair to say we are united in feeling slightly beaten down?
Helen: Oh goodness yes. If there is a winner in this fight, it is definitely the coronavirus. We have been doing this for omg-how-is-it-almost two years now, and I am so done. Except I’m not, because you can still get the thing and give it to other people and kill them, so I’m still wearing my mask and being cautious about what I do and whatnot. But mentally, I am DONE.
Cameron: Done, yet carrying on. Is there anything that’s helping you with the carrying-on part?
Helen: For me, the answer to surviving a pandemic seems to be: Crafts. I’m not sure I can even count all of the crafts I have taken up over the last two years. Embroidery was first. Then I got a stand mixer and started baking (a lot). Then…yeah like I said, I’m not sure I can count. The most recent hobby is whole wheat sourdough bread, so I’m about two years behind everyone else on that one.
Cameron: I did the sourdough thing early on and I had maybe one–maybe two–successful loaves, and then I did one that turned into a seriously sticky mess that dripped all over the floor.
Helen: Oh, no!! Did you try any other hobbies? How do you deal with being slightly-to-severely beaten down?
Cameron: Ahhh. . . some days better than others? I guess when I’m doing a good job dealing, it has something to do with being where I am right now and somehow going. . . deep into that? . This is also something I feel like I have to relearn every day. Like, I’ve been running, which has been great, and I got all inspired and signed up for this run up north. . . but as it got closer, I realized that . . . what did I realize, Helen? . . .
Helen: Running is the worst and nobody should ever do it?
Cameron: Oooh, is this our argument?
Helen: No, arguing about running is boring. I don’t like running. I’m glad you like running!
Cameron: I think I had this idea that either I was going to meet a friend and do the run, or my family was going to come and we would go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, or there would be something fun about it. That’s it! It initially sounded FUN. But as it got closer, various things happened (coronavirus) so that I was just going to go by myself, which meant driving by myself, and staying in a hotel by myself, and eating by myself–and usually, this does sound fun, but with all the various restrictions and uncertainties involved in this, it started to sound NOT FUN. So I thought, what would be fun? (Thank you, Catherine Price!) Instead, I planned out a long trail run near where I live. It was beautiful, and my family brought me snacks about halfway, and one of my kids ran with me for part of it. It just made me appreciate being here, and my family (and my own shower and bed), and it was FUN! Where was I going with that? Being here? Being present?
Helen: Is this about place?
Cameron: Maybe?
Helen: Part of my coping is definitely hobbies. But another part is paying attention to what’s around me. I have learned so many bird songs in the last two years, and have noticed so many more behaviors by the squirrels and birds and bugs. And of course there were the cicadas, my favorite biological event.
Cameron: I think maybe I keep imagining the end (what we keep thinking is the end) of the pandemic, and I forget something about place because other places look so shiny, and then it takes my brain a while to catch up and remember that it really helps to pay attention to things?
Helen: It took me a while this winter to realize that omicron was creating another pandemic winter, and what I needed to do was go back to my coping skills from January 2021 – teaching knitting and doing art on Zoom with friends.
Cameron: Yes. I think I have this idea that someday I will not need coping skills any more–but I guess I will always need them even if/when it’s not a pandemic.
Helen: I think sometimes about the stuff from the pandemic that I want to hold onto after the pandemic. If a post-pandemic time ever arrives. Those things include: Having a ton of unscheduled time at home. In pre-pandemic times, I was doing stuff all the time. I like stuff! There’s so much great stuff to do! I live in a city! With a thriving theater scene! And so much music of all kinds! And I know approximately one million people, many of whom I like, and I make plans to see them! And somehow, through putting all of these wonderful things on my calendar, I ended up with no time to stay home, get bored, and learn how to sew.
Cameron: I agree. Also I know we both agree that staying home and getting bored are low-level pandemic problems.
Helen: There’s so much death. Nine hundred thousand people, in this country. The ways the pandemic is kind of crummy for me are nothing compared to how a lot of people are suffering. Also, though, it’s somehow happening to me, too, and this is how I’m experiencing it: A lot of isolation and a lot of crafts.
Cameron: 900,000 people! It’s a whole huge city of people. And they’re all gone.
Helen: It’s so many people. And each of them had so many people who loved them. It’s awful.
Helen: What’s the next phase of your pandemic?
Cameron: So, I got a mandolin. I’m not even sure why, I just really thought a mandolin would make me feel better and that the mandolin would be the answer to my musical lacklusterness. I’m sure it would be if I actually practiced. I recently got a hanger, so I can hang it in my shed and, I hope, just pick it up, mess around, and put it back.
Helen: Ugh, practicing is the worst. I took piano for years and never got the hang of it. Same with voice. I love singing with people, but I don’t know how to practice.
Cameron: I have the same problem with musical instruments! I know a little bit of a few different instruments, but I have never really known how to practice. It’s actually been really inspiring to see my oldest kid learning to play the violin. He really does it for fun! (Is this a theme?) He just picks up his violin and maybe plays a song–even part of a song–and then sets it down and does something else. But he does that multiple times a day! And he is really amazing after doing that for–well, he started taking lessons in February 2020, so it’s really been a pandemic practice. There’s something about those small increments adding up. And this is reminding me of your daily drawing practice.
Helen: Yeah, that’s the thing I always tell people about drawing: Did you know, if you practice something, you get better at it?!?!? Someone should have told me this years ago! (Everyone told me this. About everything. My whole life.)
Cameron: One thing that the violin teacher says is not to use the word practice. Just use the word play. Because that’s what you’re doing. Is there some way we could tie that into pandemic living? I mean, if we could only practice pandemic living for 15 minutes a day I’m sure we’d be great at it.
Helen: That’s such good advice! What a wise teacher. Maybe this is the connection: You can live in the pandemic as if you’re waiting for your regular life to come back, or you can play. For you, playing is doing a long run near home with your family’s support, and for me, playing is picking up every baking- and fiber-related hobby that catches my attention?
Cameron: Yes!
Helen: Ok, we’ve learned the lesson of the pandemic. Now can it end?
Cameron: If we concede that coronavirus has won, will it go away?
Helen: Worth a try. Ok, pandemic. We’re conceding. Maybe by the time this goes online the whole thing will be done.
Somehow I always knew there was something about my dad’s heart. I’m not sure exactly what I knew, but I did know that he didn’t eat certain things, like eggs and bacon, and ate other things, like canned tuna and low-fat cheese and margarine. (It was the eighties.) He enrolled in a cholesterol study. Bottles of liquid meals appeared in the fridge, all autumn-colored: pale orange and green and brown.
I knew enough—or at least, worried enough—to read the sign at the waterpark where we’d climbed up to the top of the slide. I was small, and scared, but I told him he shouldn’t go down. It wasn’t good for people with heart problems. The heart seemed like a frightening thing, or at least unruly, ready to misbehave at any minute, something that constantly needed watching.
I feel less watchful now, but I do find myself drawn to any information about the heart. To the blue whale, its 400-pound heart as big as a Harley-Davidson, working to its edge. When it dives, it drops its heart rate from around 30 beats per minute to four.
I find how we talk about the heart fascinating, too. We are disheartened, we have lost heart, and it is hard to go on. The hearts of those we love are sweet. The ones we don’t, or who don’t love us, we call heartless. A different way of being without a heart. There are many creatures that never have a heart at all. The sea cucumbers, the jellies, the sea stars, the flatworms. And then there are the cephalopods, which have three. Two hearts do their work for the gills, the other sends blue blood swooshing to the organs. An octopus’s organ-focused heart even stops while it swims.
Hearts seem like small animals. They leap and flutter and sink. They can be heavy, they can be light. In Etruscan shrews, they can race along at 1,500 beats per minute. The lowest heart rate observed during a blue whale’s dive was two beats per minute.
Beat.
Count slowly to 30.
Beat.
If you think of someone who is all heart, do you imagine them as a four-chambered organ, the size of a fist? Does it surprise you that dogs’ hearts make up a bigger portion of their mass than almost all other animals?
And then there are trees. They have no wet engine, but the central column of wood that supports them is called the duramen, the heartwood. It will not falter if the surrounding layers of living tissue and the bark keep it safe. This heart is at the center of things, even though in most of us it sits slightly to the left. We can transplant hearts back into the body’s soil.
The heart of the matter, the heart of the problem. We get to the heart of it. We steal hearts and we take heart and we wear them on our sleeves. We open our hearts, we close them. Inside, the valves open and close, too, letting blood rush in and rush back out again. Although we have only one, we can lose them again and again. I sometimes imagine hearts scattered about the world like lost socks. Where do they all gather? Is there somewhere that they find each other, scattered in the gutter or clumped at the storm drain?
Wherever they go, they contain both movement and sound, a marker of time, if time is something that can be marked. The clock before there was a clock. Maybe hearts are time themselves. We don’t know how many heartbeats we have, but there is this one, and this one, and this one. Sometimes they murmur. Sometimes they pound.
It is better, though, if it is not always steady. Better to have a tripping rhythm that speeds up and slows down with every breath. A new type of pacemaker will even listen to the heart and follow its irregular lead, a willing dance partner from tango to foxtrot to TikTok mashup. The heart might march to the beat of its own drum, but when people sing together in groups, their breathing and their heartbeats start to synchronize.
It was my dad’s heart in the end. It stopped, and then it was restarted, but the rest of him never resurfaced alongside it, and then, eventually, it stopped too. It is easy to say it was his heart, because it feels like it’s all of our hearts, always up to something: aching and soaring, growing cold, starting to thaw. A zebrafish can repair its own heart, but to fix our hearts, sometimes we need each other. We need someone whose heart goes out to our lost ones and brings them skipping back home.
In recent months, I’ve spent most of my time in Bremen, a coastal fishing village just down the peninsula from Damariscotta, Maine. Often my husband joins me. Bremen is Maine the way you think of it–our neighbors haul lobsters, dredge clams, pull kelp, and farm oysters. There’s an emergency doc who doubles as a vet up one road, and a fiber artist married to a blacksmith down another. And of course, there is nature.
Our back yard rolls down to a little lake that’s busy with small mouth bass and perch. The beavers build dens the size of igloos, and on summer evenings the loons kick up a fuss like a pack wet diapered toddlers. In winter the lake freezes mirror solid, and ice fishers huddle for hours pulling up pickerel to leave like an offering for birds of prey.
It’s as good a place as any to wait out the plague years. That’s no secret to aspiring builders who circle like vultures, swooping down with their checkbooks to bid up the price of land. Still, it’s mostly quiet and just far enough “away” that it’s easy to overlook what’s going on outside our brackish bubble, the closed schools and shuttered businesses, the crowded, frantic hospitals, the airline passengers gone mad with impotent rage.
Still, we got our shots and boosters, wear masks and worry, especially about the children getting lost in the viral stampede. What will become of them, we wonder, growing up in a world where grownups bicker over inconvenience and distort medical reality to suit their “truth”?
Last week we drove to Boston, to see our grandchildren, Avery, a yellow haired girl just turned 4 and Aiden, a brown-haired boy whose second birthday comes in April. Avery met us at the door dressed in snow pants, mittens and a miniature N95, fully armed for our sledding date. Aiden was a few steps behind, no mask yet, and his mom still struggling with his boots. The struggle proved futile, and it was decided Aiden would remain warm and dry at home with his mom.
Avery selected a few choice snacks from the pantry as I extracted two flying saucers from a tangled heap in the garage. When all was finally ready, we trudged the half mile or so through the snow to the sliding hill, already thick with tots and pre-teens. Nearly every one of these eager thrill seekers—even the pre-teens—came protected by a guardian who hovered by his or her side at the top of the hill, then scuttled to the bottom to assure a safe landing. I found this odd: the hill’s vertical drop was no more than 50 feet, and so gradual that some sledders had to push themselves through the last few yards. That was fine by me: my granddaughter was on the younger side, and no daredevil. I helped her get settled on the saucer, pointed her in a roughly downhill direction and wished her luck.
But just before launch time, a guardian leapt into her path, frantically waving and booming “stop.” We froze.
Ann Finkbeiner: My son died, as did my husband; and so did parents and grandparents whom I loved dearly. I’ve written articles and LWON posts about grief, plus a book. So I consider myself a kind of expert, the kind who knows what she’s lived and read and what other people tell her. But I’ve never done any science to find out whether what I know is wrong. Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor is that kind of expert.
She’s a psychologist who’s studied what goes on in the human mind, and who’s crossed scientific disciplines to do neuroscience about what goes on in the human brain. I interviewed Dr. O’Connor a year or so ago and was impressed not only by what she knew about the mind and the brain, but also about the nature of grief itself and its connection to love. Also she listens hard. And she’s written a very readable, thorough, kind book called The Grieving Brain.
So. Now. Dr. O’Connor. What got you interested in this field of the grieving brain? Because it’s not exactly a field, is it.
Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor: I have been interested for a long time in how we physically encode the world. For grief, I imagined that part of that encoding took place in the brain–when someone is “lost”, how does the brain understand that information? What neural connections change, or epigenetic proteins are added, or do the waves of electrical activity “up there” change their pattern? This seemed like a big enough question that I could spend an entire career on it.
And if I’m also honest, not so much as a scientist but as a person, when my mom died when I was in graduate school, I realized that I could talk to people about death (and therefore grief), and this was pretty unusual. It meant that by engaging other people in such an important part of their lives, my own work felt meaningful, and talking about grief was something that not many people (even psychologists) were willing to do. So studying grief felt like a unique contribution I could make, even though, as you say, grief in the brain wasn’t really a field. Although I hope that is changing.
Ann: So when you ask how the brain encodes “lost,” you’re asking what happens in the brain when you can’t find the person any more or the person is gone, dead. And you learned to give brain scans (functional MRI’s, fMRI’s) to find the parts of the brain that are busy as you grieve. But that’s neuroscience and your PhD is in psychology, which is the field that normally studies grief. Almost no one else does that, both psychology and neuroscience, mind and brain both, right? What did you find?
Mary-Frances: A few of us around the world have studied grief in the mind and brain (Joseph Goveas at Medical College of Wisconsin, Richard Bryant at University of New South Wales, Australia), although I suppose no one else has grief as the sole topic of their neuroscience research. And what I have found in just one study can’t really tell us enough about what the brain is doing during grief and grieving.
Ann: So the question of what the brain does while grieving is a field that’s relatively new and still has no real answers. But you must have a partial answer, right?
Mary-Frances: Indeed. One thing is, the parts of the brain important in grief are also involved in reward. We know that reward is important in creating a bond with a loved one, like a partner or a child. In one of my own neuroimaging studies, those who report the most yearning for their deceased loved one also show the most activation in the nucleus accumbens–a key node in the brain’s reward network. It’s interesting that there wasn’t a correlation between how “good” or “bad” the bereaved participants felt, but with how much of that yearning motivation they reported.
Ann: So regardless of how people felt, the more they yearned to see their dead again, the more the brain’s reward system lit up. That took me a while to understand but I think I do: the feeling of yearning, of wanting someone to please come back please, is run by the same part of the brain that runs rewards, the things that make you feel good. It’s really nice, isn’t it, that the person you’re missing also made/makes you feel good. Sad but nice. So what else does neuroscience say about grief?
Look, no one is trying to get a dick joke into the human genome. If it happens, it won’t be by design. No one even really thought it was a possibility until the late 1990s, when the physical chemistry professor Paul W. May was having a beer with some other science friends and they got around to talking about funny molecules. Everyone knew about the ring-shaped molecule called Arsole. It didn’t take long to conjure up several more funny science terms. May began to collect these, and soon had so many that he turned the collection into a blog. By 2008 the blog had become a book. (NB: both blog and book are written in Comic Sans. And he commits to the bit. Main text, table of contents, acknowledgments, and references – all Comic Sans. References!) The book has a whole separate section on gene names, and here you will find some of the spiciest names in science. By the time the book was published, however, some of them were already out of date – the Human Genome Nomenclature Committee had begun to take a keen interest in what geneticists were calling their new genes, and by 2006 had put the kibosh on 10 names deemed the most offensive. But if they thought their work was done, they didn’t know how much stranger it could get.
This post originally published in May of 2015, which, considering the age of the Bering Land Bridge, wasn’t that long ago.
During the Cold War, a U.S. Air Force telecommunications network was erected in Western Alaska, a series of gray metal radio-towers like obelisks on a hilltop over the town of Nome. Each points a different direction, meant to bounce tropospheric messages from the Russian border to the US. Last used in 1985, the network has been abandoned.
I visited the White Alice site one summer, gathering qivuit, the soft winter fur of muskox, which hangs in branches of overgrown shrub-willow around the radio towers. In low summer light and a stiff mountain breeze from the west, I rubbed qivuit between my fingers. It smelled of earth and musk. I’d run into muskox as I walked up here. They were grazing in the willows, and I startled one as I climbed through the vegetation. Rather, it startled me. I parted branches and found myself about 8 feet from the thick-horned head and a drape of winter fur molting in the willows. The animal looked up, flared two dark, wet nostrils, and went back to grazing. It seemed so unfazed, I snapped off the picture below and backtracked around it. Continue reading →
A letter from Charles Darwin to Charles Lyell, which basically sums up half of my journal entries: “But I am very poorly today & very stupid & hate everybody & everything.”
The first journal I remember writing in was a black, wide-ruled, spiral-bound notebook. I was in first grade, and had somehow associated keeping a journal with being mature, so I started to write about what happened to me every day: notable moments in school, who I played with on the weekends. By 3rd grade, I’d upgraded to a pink book with a little brass lock to keep out all the riff-raff. (I had no siblings, and I doubt I wrote anything in there I wouldn’t want my parents to know, besides maybe who I had a crush on, so I’m not sure why I was so concerned about privacy.) You can tell my middle school journals by the colorful gel pens I used, my letters becoming loopier to imitate the cool girls’ handwriting. By high school, I’d filled countless notebooks with my idle musings and doodles. I decorated my journals’ covers with magazine clippings, photos of my friends, inside jokes. I carried them everywhere, furiously scribbling in them during study hall, chemistry, French class.
Then, the internet happened. I set up shop on LiveJournal, then DeadJournal, and a little-known LiveJournal clone called Caleida. For the first time, I wasn’t just writing for myself; I was writing to an audience. Mostly, my readers were friends from school or summer camp, but I ended up making some friends on the site who I still only know from the LJ era. LiveJournal died; we all moved on to Tumblr. I made friends there, too, some of whom are now professional writers. Somewhere along the way, I stopped journaling for me, and started writing words for a living.
I didn’t think anything of it until I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. A younger me would’ve sworn it off as too woo-woo, not “evidence-based,” but in the middle of a creative rut, I followed her advice more carefully than any physical regimen I’d ever been prescribed. (Sorry, physical therapists: I almost never follow through on doing the preventative exercises I know will be good for me.) I took myself on artist’s dates to the bookshop and to the bay, and I allowed myself the joy of scooping up a monkey puzzle tree branch to sit in my office, just for the fun of it. Perhaps most importantly, I started doing Cameron’s vaunted “morning pages.” For the uninitiated, this is just journaling, but with a few rules: it must be first thing, it must be longhand, and it does not have to be good.
I am here to sing the praises of the morning pages. There are studies, I know, of why this is an effective practice, but I offer you no statistics, and no guarantees. All I know is that now that I’ve returned to journalling, I am kicking myself for abandoning it for so many years. It feels like those will be the “dark years,” full of stray thoughts and fleeting moments forgotten, unless I happened to take a photo of what was going on at the time. The ability to go back and read what I’ve written in past years is so calming, now that I know how everything turned out: it was all fine. And the routine of writing each morning with the same pen in the same corner with the same mug of coffee adds a comforting predictability to my day, a place I know I can process whatever happened yesterday, or in my dreams. I can sort out the detritus floating around in my head before I sit down and try to do anything, and I can get to the root of what is really bugging me by writing brutal, ugly words I know (or at least hope) no one will read but me — and I will always understand.
