Exuberance: The Passion for Life

by Kay Redfield Jamison

  Samuel Barondes, a molecular biologist and psychiatrist at the University of California—San Francisco, speculates, like Gajdusek and Watson, that some types of exuberant states overlap with mild forms of mania. “To me,” he says, “there are two kinds of happiness: a euphoric type of serenity that I became well acquainted with through formal meditation, and which I can now call up at will; and a euphoric type of excitement and anticipation which is what I think of as exuberance. I’m not sure where to draw the line between exuberance and hypomania, but I think the most important difference is in the area of judgment and self-observation. As I think of it, exuberance is still monitored by judgment. In a state of exuberance, judgment is put on hold—but is not turned off completely. In hypomania judgment is napping, but still wakes up periodically to check things out. In mania, judgment is out like a light.”

  Barondes, who studies the genetics of behavior and psychopathology, believes that exuberance is determined by the environment as well as heredity. “My father was quite exuberant,” he says, “and I think I learned some of this from him (and inherited some via his DNA). My father explicitly recommended exuberance as well as serenity. We talked a lot about these matters. Having been raised as an Orthodox Jew of the scholarly and self-questioning type (rather than the more exuberant Hassidic type) has tempered my exuberance very little. I think you can teach people to be a little bit more or less exuberant. But it remains difficult to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear.” (Most of those I interviewed expressed similar views, namely, that it may be possible to influence the level of exuberance expressed, but not the underlying capacity for it. The child psychologist Ellen Winner, for example, believes that exuberance is inborn. “I think that the environment can kill it,” she says, “but I don’t think the environment can create it.”)

  Barondes, like many, believes that exuberance entices scientists toward discovery and helps overcome obstacles. It is, he says, the engine that drives discoveries. “When you feel exuberant”—he characterizes exuberance as “enthusiasm, energy, motivation, optimism, anticipation of wonderful things, and a great deal of pleasure”—“you believe you have a good chance of doing something new and important and exciting. You downplay obstacles and personal limitations, anticipate the joy of doing something special and worthwhile. Exuberance increases risk taking, innovative thinking, and the anticipation of success.”

  Judgment is critical to separating genuine discovery from deluded enthusiasm. Pipe dreams and obsession must be sorted out from meaningful scientific contributions. Barondes makes this clear: “There is, of course, in all creative activities, a need for a period of sober reflection and corrective skepticism to evaluate the fruits of a period of exuberance. Good scientists get their juice from exuberance, but the judgment that keeps operating in this state is more permissive than scientists can afford. The seemingly great discoveries that are facilitated by exuberance need to be checked by the cold, hard standards that science demands.”

  Two astrophysicists whom I interviewed at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, both well known among their colleagues for their exuberance, generally concurred with the biologists’ descriptions of exuberance and agreed with them about its importance in their scientific work. They also underscored its potential problems. Robert Farquhar, an expert in orbital mechanics, is internationally recognized for his brilliance in plotting complex routes through space by “gravity assist” techniques and calculating trajectories for missions to comets and asteroids. Farquhar, says one colleague succinctly, “is a genius with celestial pinball.” He was mission director for the Near Earth Asteroid Rendevous (NEAR) spacecraft, which initially orbited and then, in early 2001, actually landed on the asteroid Eros. It was the first time a spacecraft had landed on an asteroid or any other small body (Eros, 200 million miles from Earth, is only twenty-one miles long and eight miles wide). Asteroid #5256 is named Farquhar in his honor.

  Farquhar says of himself that he is “a classic case study in exuberance. I’m always this way. I can’t understand why they pay me to do what I love.” He is convinced that exuberance is innate—“It’s in you; you either have it or you don’t; it is something you carry from cradle to grave”—and that there is a strong link between creativity and exuberance. “If I didn’t get very excited by things,” he says, “I don’t think I would be very creative. My intuitive notions usually have a pretty good feel. Exuberance keeps you going through other people’s mistakes. If a computer calculation indicates I’m wrong, my enthusiasm keeps me believing in my own calculations. And it is not unusual for the early computer runs to be wrong.” When NASA officials, wary of risking the outcome of the highly successful Eros mission, cautioned against landing the NEAR spacecraft on the asteroid because the landing had not been part of the original flight plan, Farquhar eventually won out. “The bureaucrats didn’t want me to risk landing on the asteroid,” he says with disbelief. “Why risk failure in an otherwise incredibly successful mission? But I thought that was crazy! How could anyone not want to see what it would be like to land on an asteroid? Bureaucrats drive me nuts.”

  Like most exuberant people, he sees exuberance as a source of resilience. “You don’t sit around and mope, though it may take you a day to regroup. Then you’re right back, already working on the next project.” Competitiveness—the race to be first and best—is another important component of the link between high energy and enthusiasm. “I’m a very competitive person,” he acknowledges, “I like to win. I was really exuberant when I beat the competition [for a NASA proposal to explore comets]. I had sketched out my ideas, then others ran the computer models. I was pretty damned happy when I found out I had the correct solution. I felt great, I never forgot that one. If you get excited you are more motivated and more competitive. You are motivated to work extra hours. Competition makes everything happen.”

  Farquhar’s exuberance, like that of other scientists, is contagious. He loves comets. “It’s incredible, exploring the unknown, the nuclei of comets. I love comets, I love the history of comets. Each comet has its own personality, they’re not dull like asteroids. Comets are dynamic, mysterious, beautiful.” For Farquhar, there are few disadvantages to being so exuberant except for those times when “you get all excited and then find out your ideas weren’t as good as you thought. There is always a low period after a period of exuberance.” And, he adds, “people who aren’t as exuberant as you are get really irritated with you.”

  Farquhar’s colleague at the Hopkins Applied Physics Lab, Andrew Cheng, is even more exuberant than Farquhar. Cheng, a planetary scientist and physicist, inhabits an office as chaotic as Farquhar’s is well-organized. Everywhere you look are piles of papers, scientific journals, videotapes, plastic shopping bags bearing the NASA logo, and books about Uranus, Saturn, Pluto and Charon, and Jupiter. His file cabinets are covered with yellow Post-it notes, and a stuffed Sylvester the Cat sits on top of his computer. When he comes into his office he is moving fast, talking fast, and still bubbling over from a meeting about flying airplanes to Mars.

  Exuberance, Cheng makes clear, is an indispensable part of his scientific life. “It keeps me alive. I like to have fun, I don’t like boredom. Exuberance is necessary, you have to have enthusiasm. Any kind of work involves a lot of tedium, menial tasks, boring tasks. Exuberance allows you to see beyond, to see the goal. You need that kind of emotional makeup to push through the work, to pursue really difficult things. Exuberance stops you from getting discouraged, or not starting in the first place. Science is working out ideas. The majority of ideas don’t work out, there are a lot of dead ends. You need to have an exuberant makeup to prevent getting discouraged. Exuberance reduces stress levels.” Exuberance also allows you to handle rejection, Cheng points out. “For example, if you put in a big proposal to NASA and it gets rejected, you need resiliency to pick yourself up after that. I have a natural tendency toward exuberance, I am naturally inclined to plunge into things. But rough times always come.” Work, he empha
sizes, is inherently stressful. “Stepping back, relaxing, enjoying, not getting all wound up or spinning your wheels, this keeps you from wearing yourself out.

  “It is hard for me to empty my mind,” Cheng explains. “Exuberance helps in focusing on the task, otherwise I am scattered everywhere else. If I am intensely involved or absorbed I can go for hours. I don’t want to stop. You have to make work feel like play, you have to find out what’s pleasurable. Exuberant people get excited to do things that have not been done before, to measure things that have not been measured before.” Exuberance, he believes, is innate: “It can’t really be learned, but it can be influenced.” When asked specifically what he feels like at his most exuberant, Cheng describes the experience in terms of the intensity of war: “It’s like soldiers in war. When people have been in combat they describe the experience as the most intense they have ever had. The defining moment. The most they have ever felt alive. Exuberance during scientific work is the most intensely experienced time. It is an emotional high, like euphoria; the outside world doesn’t exist. It is moment to moment, one hundred percent absorption, like a religious experience.”

  Cheng, like Robert Gallo and Carleton Gajdusek, emphasizes the contagious nature of enthusiasm in interacting with other scientists. Exuberance, he states, “gives you the ability to get other people excited. This is especially important in [space] missions or other projects, to inspire a team of people who are on a tight budget, to get them committed in the same way you are. Also, because science is supported by the American public, you need to be able to communicate to them why you are excited.”

  Resilience, Cheng believes, is a vital benefit of exuberance. He talks about the ebbs and flows of scientific creativity, and how exuberance restores life when intensely productive times are followed by fallow ones: “I just had an article [about the asteroid Eros] in Science and now I’m experiencing a kind of postpartum depression. There’s a very uncomfortable time: What’s next? I haven’t made a commitment to a new idea or a new project; it’s very similar to clinical depression, it’s hard to focus. But inevitably I will get wrapped up in something new.” Having said this, he went over to his computer and showed me close-up shots of the asteroid’s surface. With each one he became more and more animated. “Look at those flat-bottomed craters!” he yelped in delight. “They look like they have been lubricated by fluids, but you can’t have fluids on an asteroid. So I’m beginning to get intrigued. I’m moving on to this.” He goes back to his computer, waving his arms about with great gusto. “It looks like mud flows but it can’t be mud flows. Great!” He pauses briefly to shift gears. “There’s another project I’m beginning to get interested in, it’s this airplane-to-Mars thing. Anyone would find that great! So you start getting interested again. And you get excited.”

  More than any scientist I interviewed, Andrew Cheng also articulated the perils of great enthusiasms. As someone who rates himself as a “ten” on a ten-point scale, he made it clear that exuberance has not always served him well. “I have suffered from exuberance, from being scattered, a lack of focus,” he says. Conflicting enthusiasms caused him to switch scientific fields several times, from high-energy astrophysics to space physics, to particles and fields, and finally to planetary science. (His various professional fields have honored him in many ways, however; among other things, Asteroid #8257 is named Andycheng.) Much like Gajdusek, who observed that exuberant people run the risk of being regarded as pas sérieux, Cheng reflects that “very exuberant scientists, such as Carl Sagan, make themselves vulnerable to ridicule. Too much exuberance turns other scientists off. Scientists are natural skeptics, they want to see behind the flash and drama. Show me the data, show me the calculations.” An excitable person, he acknowledges, “may not get it right. Many make lots of mistakes.”

  Exuberance also presents the danger of overcommitment: “You don’t focus sufficiently on a task, don’t get things done, there are too many projects. You get excited. And you start forgetting meetings and ignoring your other responsibilities. And you start getting other people mad at you. If you’re working on a mission, you can’t do this. You need to work toward a launch date and those deadlines aren’t flexible. Planets have to be aligned just right. You have only one correct date for a launch.”

  Cheng, despite his acute sensitivity to the drawbacks of exuberance, is a thoughtful advocate on its behalf. He draws parallels between emotional and cosmic exploration: exuberance takes you on journeys you would not otherwise take. “People need to be absorbed in something outside of themselves, something important. Exploration, like exuberance, lets people go out of and then back into their everyday lives. It makes life more interesting, life more worth living. The immediate benefit of going to Mars or to an asteroid is that it gets people excited. It is part of what defines the character of a country, that you are exploring, leading the way. It keeps a country, like a person, from stagnating.”

  I was interested in looking at the role exuberance plays not only in the lives of basic scientists, such as astrophysicists and molecular biologists, but also in those of scientists who do their work in the field. For this I turned to three women whose scientific work and writings I have greatly admired over the years: the elephant biologists Katy Payne and Joyce Poole, and the naturalist Hope Ryden.

  Katy Payne, a research associate in the Bioacoustics Research Program of Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology, is best known for her studies of the complex and changing songs of humpback whales, as well as for discovering that elephants communicate by infrasound. She was brought up on a farm in Ithaca, New York, and recollects a childhood of books and music, and of parsnips, pigs, apple pies, pumpkins, and White Leghorn hens. Nature was her teacher, and before long she was questioning back. As a young girl, for example, she wondered whether she could tell maple trees apart by the taste of their syrup. Dipping her fingers into the syrup buckets hanging from the trees, she tested the idea, and she has kept on questioning and testing things ever since.

  Like Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, she describes an ecstatic response to nature in her childhood: “I remember my first encounter with myself, on a high day in late summer,” she writes in her hauntingly beautiful memoir, Silent Thunder. “Standing alone in a field where wildness crowded up yellow and green against our garden and house, I said out loud, ‘This is the happiest day of my life and I’m eleven.’ I raised my skinny arms to the blue sky and noticed them, and my ragged cuffs, and a mass of golden flowers that was hanging over me. Their color against the sky made my heart leap. Since then I have seen the same yellows, green and blue in van Gogh’s harvest paintings and heard the same hurrahing in Hopkins’s harvest poem, but my hurrahing, that made me inside out with exuberance, was for wildness.”

  Payne, who is a Quaker, quotes a Quaker saying that “the water tastes of the pipes” to illustrate her belief that “there is no such thing as an indifferent observer.” Certainly, she is someone who has been profoundly influenced by sounds and pipes. She recalls hearing the chords from a pipe organ when she was thirteen years old: “The organ was alive. In a powerful combination of voices it was introducing the great chorus that opens the second half of Bach’s Passion According to St. Matthew.… The organist pulled out the great stop and the air around me began to shudder and throb.” Years later, sitting beside the elephant enclosure at an Oregon zoo, she heard a “faint rumble … like the feeling of thunder but there had been no thunder,” and suddenly she remembered the church organ and wondered, Were the elephants calling to each other in infrasound? Payne and her colleagues carried out acoustical studies, which established that the elephants were, in fact, communicating with sounds too low for humans to hear. Their discovery revolutionized the field of elephant communication. Payne has carried out other important studies of African elephants since, including research on how elephants organize their societies over long distances; together with Joyce Poole, she is compiling an elephant dictionary. She and another colleague are using acoustic tech
niques to monitor the health and behavior patterns of forest elephants in the Central African Republic and Ghana.

  Payne is a great advocate for science: “Happy fishermen,” she says of herself and her fellow biologists, “we stand together on the pier casting and reeling, mesmerized by a certain shimmer visible from this or that angle, enchanted by the concentric rings here and there, imagining things just below the dimpled surface. If something leaps into the air, we all lift eyebrows together as if we were one great being with one eyebrow—that? Is it alone, or part of a school? What else lies below?”

  When I asked Payne about exuberance, she replied: “Moods in general, and exuberance as a stage in a mood, play a huge role in my life as a biologist as well as in the rest of my life.” She defines exuberance as “part of a continuum (enthusiasm—exuberance—ecstasy) and I [see] my life as a biologist as part of a continuum that includes the artistic side of my life as well: for an observer, the two are inseparable. The moment of intense observation of any kind of truth or beauty is a peak experience: I sense myself as a part of what I am seeing, hearing, feeling, smelling and therefore have no doubts about it; all boundaries evaporate and all desire for control, which is after all irrelevant when one is living the truth. Part of why I love reality is that I know that nobody can ever understand it fully … the full answer is never at hand: everything is always evolving … my favorite feelings about what is unknown stem in part from this sense of beauty, and of the presence of steady, life-giving things around me, and these in turn stem partly from the river of happiness in which I am fortunate enough to swim at times. I really understand why people with manic-depressive illness don’t want to curb the flow … the definition of illness must be arbitrary in any case, because the value of moods also has its continuum.”