It’s an improvement. But I was still blindsided by my interaction with the baby-group mother. What was I doing wrong?
“Hamlet,” Simon says.
I ask him to clarify.
“Neurotic people think that life is like Hamlet, where they are Hamlet, and everyone is looking at them and judging their psyche in a good or a bad way,” he explains. In fact, everyone is his own Hamlet and views other people as minor characters in his personal drama. Most people don’t evaluate everything you say in a constant referendum on your character. Even when they do pay attention, how you come across isn’t terribly important to them. They’re busy worrying about the protagonist in their own drama: themselves.
“You make much less of an impression on people than you think, because you’re not the most important character in their story,” he says.
Simon tells me about a long-ago girlfriend who made a presentation to his journalism class. For the first thirty seconds of the presentation, she was so nervous that she froze. She finally stammered a few sentences, then she left the room in shame.
Afterward, she came to Simon’s room in tears, convinced that their classmates would forever think she was an idiot. Simon replied with an early version of his Hamlet speech.
“I said, ‘Nobody’s thinking about you. They’re all thinking about their own talk, and who they fancy, and their own problems. Everyone’s forgotten your talk. Nobody cares.’” Apparently, she was relieved.
I listen hard as Simon describes this scene, and think of other girlfriends he has mentioned over the years, including the one who had never heard of either Stalin or Chairman Mao. Suddenly, I realize my husband has a type: he likes his women, including me, to be a little bit clueless.
When I tell this to Simon, he immediately denies it. I think I’ve caught him by surprise, both because I had the insight and because it’s true.
* * *
—
My other insight is that, in my quest to see the world more clearly, I don’t need to depend entirely on my husband. There are world-renowned specialists in exactly this skill. Some are doctors.
There’s a tradition of physicians as expert seers. The writer Arthur Conan Doyle was a doctor before he created Sherlock Holmes, the detective who can deduce a man’s profession just by studying his hands or notice the crucial missing element of a setting. When Holmes’s sidekick, Watson, marvels at this ability, Holmes scolds him, saying, “You see, but you do not observe.”
Another expert seer is a real-life dermatologist named Irwin Braverman.
Braverman, who’s now in his eighties, is an emeritus professor of dermatology at the Yale School of Medicine. In 1998 he and a Yale museum curator developed a course that helps medical students become more perceptive. The course is now required for Yale’s first-year medical students, and it’s taught at more than seventy medical schools around the world. The New York Police Department and Scotland Yard have used versions of it, too.
Growing up in Boston in the 1930s, Braverman didn’t plan to spend his life looking at skin. He dreamt of becoming an architect or an archaeologist.
“I’m a visual person,” he tells me by phone from New Haven. “I enjoyed going to museums and looking at paintings. Ever since I was a kid, I enjoyed looking at things.”
Braverman’s family—Esperanto-speaking Russian Jewish immigrants—vetoed both professions. “My uncle said to me, he never heard of a Jewish architect or an archaeologist in 1930 or 1940, which was true. My parents said, doctor, lawyer, businessperson, maybe journalism.”
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Braverman liked working in a laboratory. So he picked medicine and eventually specialized in dermatology, where “90 percent of the time it’s a visual diagnosis,” he says. In dermatology, just by looking at someone’s skin from the outside, you can detect diseases that are happening deep inside of them. (In his forties, Braverman authored a classic medical school textbook called Skin Signs of Systemic Disease.)
After he’d been teaching and seeing patients for many years, Braverman realized that his students were very good at memorizing information, but they weren’t very good observers. They would look at slides of various rashes, then glance at a patient to see which slide he matched. But medicine isn’t just about memorizing slides. “At least once a day I see something new I haven’t seen before,” he explains.
And students sometimes had trouble describing skin lesions, or they overlooked other important features of the patient. They might only look at what’s flagrantly “abnormal.” Or they would limit their attention to the patient’s main complaint, but not take the time to examine everything else about him. “Sometimes in those normal features there are clues that actually tell you what this is all about,” he says.
Like Sherlock Holmes, Braverman eventually realized what was missing from many of his students. They lacked a skill that a good physician has, and that he himself had acquired over years of seeing patients: you look very hard at a person or an image and keep looking at it until you see more and more. You don’t just glance at something. You keep going back and forth over it until you’ve mined it for all there is to see. It’s an intensive way of looking that Braverman calls “visually analyzing.”
Like Simon, Braverman listens hard, too. “If you listen carefully and let the patient talk, usually the answer is in the history,” he tells me. “What is the person saying? How is he saying it? What is he not saying?” Clues sometimes emerge at the end of an appointment, as an afterthought, when the patient casually mentions—for instance—that she’s just been hiking in the countryside and hopes she wasn’t bitten by a tick.
Braverman concluded that the solution to his students’ shortcomings lay not in medicine, but in his old passion—art. He began taking first-year medical students to look at nineteenth-century oil paintings at the Yale Center for British Art. In one exercise, students spend fifteen to thirty minutes looking at a single painting, usually of people. Then they describe all of its features to the class. After that, they use these observations to interpret what’s happening in the painting.
Typically, a few students in each class don’t become better observers, even with practice. And a few are already so skilled at seeing, they don’t need any help. But most students are somewhere in the middle. With training, they get better at visually analyzing the paintings. And afterward, their ability to observe skin problems improves, too.
“The students come away, they say, ‘I realize I only look at things superficially. I come to conclusions before I’ve seen everything,’” Braverman says. “Anyone can benefit from this. It’s not just a doctor thing.”
I’m very taken by the idea that as you keep looking at things, you see more and more in them. This seems like a signature quality of the forties. By this age, you’ve seen that there isn’t an infinite variety of people, problems and situations. Many of these recur. The world seems, at once, less infinite and unpredictable, and yet even more interesting. You look at the same things you’ve seen many times before and see new layers in them.
It’s what Arthur Schopenhauer said: “The first forty years provide the text, the next thirty provide the commentary.”
I’m too busy to go to a museum and stare at paintings, but I take Braverman’s lesson to heart. I want to keep looking at things until I see more and more in them. As an experiment, I decide to rigorously observe the person I have the most contact with: myself. I’m still not keen to visually analyze my own face in the mirror, but I begin keeping lists of the things I do and don’t like.
Things I Like:
Improv.
Own goals. (That’s when, in soccer, you accidentally kick the ball into your own goal.)
Hoop earrings.
Croutons in soup.
Lesbians.
Sweaters.
Dresses that come with belts.
The metallic first sip of a cold can of Perrier.
The word “shimmy.”
The word “boobies.”
Baths.
Irish accents.
Tea with milk.
The fact that when someone in Germany has two PhDs, she’s called “Frau Doktor Doktor.”
Justice.
Jokes.
Understanding a joke in another language.
The fact that at his 1968 trial for conspiracy, Abbie Hoffman spoke to the judge in what sounded like gibberish but turned out to be Yiddish. (He called the judge “a front man for the WASP power elite.”)
The fact that when archivists at the University of Texas were going through Isaac Bashevis Singer’s papers, they found half a sandwich.
Coffee in the morning.
Having the whole day ahead of me.
Cake.
Salad.
Spotting lettuce in someone’s teeth.
Noticing that someone bites his nails.
Deciding that someone is shifty.
Detecting that someone’s handbag is a fake.
Being less nervous than the other person.
Knowing the subtext, but not saying it.
Having time to scrutinize a fashionable woman, unnoticed.
Short nails.
Sharpened pencils.
The first glass of champagne.
The moment when you stop texting and call.
Getting back from vacation.
My counterfactual life in which I hang out with comedians and curse.
Having something great to read.
Having written something.
Pancakes.
Confidence.
Thai food with beer.
Finding out that someone else comes from Miami.
A feeling of shared understanding.
Singing show tunes with friends.
Things I Don’t Like:
Small spaces.
Clutch purses.
Sweetened soy sauce.
Meanness.
Rejection.
Surprise parties.
Suspense.
People who complain about jet lag.
People who get angry when you mistake the gender of their pet.
People who say they “don’t need nature.”
People who want you to plan their visit.
People who walk into your home and immediately ask for your WiFi code.
People you can’t trust.
Injustice.
Suffering.
My own prejudice.
Hipster couples who aren’t attractive.
Hipster couples who are.
Ardent atheists.
Voicemail.
The word “middle-aged.”
Indifference.
Rushing.
Waiting for someone who’s late.
You know you have a fortysomething mind when . . .
You’ve spent forty-eight hours trying to think of a word.
That word was “hemorrhoids.”
You no longer leave conversations wondering what just happened.
When you speak to people in their twenties, you feel a gap in confidence and experience that you wouldn’t want to have to bridge again.
When you speak to people in their sixties, they don’t feel the same way about you.
You’ve learned that when you worry less about what other people think, you can pick up an astonishing amount of information about them.
19
how to think in french
ANOTHER TOPIC I’VE BEEN LOOKING AT, over and over, is my own country. It helps that I’m living outside of America and comparing myself to people from other places. I’m starting to suspect that my issues might be cultural.
I have an epiphany about America when a friend whose family moved from Seoul to California when she was small says her Korean parents often complain that she lacks nunchi. Nunchi (rhymes with “moon-chi”) literally means “eye measure” in Korean. It’s the ability to notice things well. People with nunchi can pick up on unspoken signals and infer other peoples’ states of mind. They’re good at reading situations and social cues.
There’s no exact English translation. When my friend Rebecca’s kids are making a commotion in a quiet restaurant one night, she just scolds them to “read the room.” (They don’t.)
Apparently, Korean parents often complain that their American-raised offspring lack nunchi. This skill, which goes by various names, is a prized quality in East Asian countries. “The requirement is to ‘read’ the other’s mind,” the psychologists Hazel Rose Markus and Shinobu Kitayama write in their landmark 1991 paper, “Culture and the Self.” This requires “the willingness and ability to feel and think what others are feeling and thinking, to absorb this information without being told, and then to help others satisfy their wishes and realize their goals.”
In America there’s a different emphasis. Instead of tuning in to other people, we’re encouraged to tune in to our own feelings and preferences and to express these. “American culture neither assumes nor values such overt connectedness among individuals,” Markus and Kitayama write. In the US, “Individuals seek to maintain their independence from others by attending to the self and by discovering and expressing their unique individual attributes.”
This starts from birth. When writing about parenting, I notice that Americans—including me—assume that each child has his own unique sleep needs and his own taste in food. We’re suspicious of day care because an institution can’t possibly accommodate our child’s unique rhythms and preferences. If a toddler doesn’t like rice, oranges or avocados, it’s his right to express this. We want schools to emphasize self-expression, too.
Researchers find that by the time they’re adults, Americans and East Asians actually perceive the world differently. A metastudy concluded that, in general, East Asians are “high context,” believing that in order to understand a situation, and the behavior of any individual in it, you must consider the interaction of all the different parties. And since a lot of information is conveyed nonverbally, it’s crucial to pay close attention to subtle unspoken clues. In other words, you need nunchi to figure out what’s happening.
Researchers say that Americans are typically “low context.” We focus on individual actors and their choices, not on what everyone in a situation is doing. And the individual actor we focus on the most is ourselves. Instead of clueing in to other people’s emotional states, we clue in to our own unique preferences, asking questions like, What kind of foods do I like? What’s my personal sense of style? Am I self-actualizing?
This can make some conversations resemble a succession of self-promotional monologues. At a gathering recently, I asked an American woman what her job was. She responded with a ten-minute speech describing her entire professional history. She was following the cultural imperative to express herself, and didn’t realize that everyone was getting bored.
No wonder Korean parents worry that their American-raised offspring lack nunchi. We’re not trained to listen carefully to others and to pick up nonverbal clues. French people “often complain that Americans are ‘boring,’ that Americans respond to the slightest question with a ‘lecture,’” anthropologist Raymonde Carroll writes in Cultural Misunderstandings. A 2014 American study led by a psychologist at Yeshiva University found
that when researchers crossed two unrelated instant-message conversations, as many as 42 percent of the participants didn’t even notice.
In other words, my cluelessness isn’t entirely my own fault. I can’t even blame my parents. It’s part of being an American.
* * *
—
One needn’t be Asian to have nunchi, of course. And this ability comes in different varieties. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, was apparently skilled at reading signals from other countries—he had geopolitical nunchi—but he was terrible at reading individuals. (His wife had interpersonal nunchi. She would sit in on meetings, then explain the dynamics to him afterward.) A woman I knew in college had a kind of nunchi transference. She told me that when she walks past another person, “sometimes I feel like I am them.”
My British husband has classic nunchi, and I can see that our daughter, Bean, inherited it from him. While fetching her from a summer sports camp, I chat with two teenagers who are getting ready to play soccer. They seem friendly, but Bean keeps yanking me to leave.
There Are No Grown-ups Page 15
