by Andrew Lynn
It can also mean thinking about something on a different level entirely. A distinguishing feature between mental construals, for example, is level of abstraction. It is possible to shift thinking on any particular occasion to a higher level of abstraction: this allows us to capture the general meaning of an event by reference to broad class of examples. It is equally possible to shift thinking down to a lower level of abstraction, enabling us to think about the concrete features that render events unique. We can shift to a higher, more abstract level by asking ‘why-type’ questions (why do you like this?) or by categorizing objects and events (a dog is a canine); we can shift to a lower, more concrete level by asking ‘how-type’ questions (how do you do this?) or by finding exemplars of general categories (a small black poodle is a kind of dog).
In each case, the effects can be profound. The evidence shows that when we are thinking about chocolate in odd or novel ways, for example, we actually like it less and find it less tasty than if we think about its sensory aspects. When we are able to shift our thinking to a higher, more abstract level, similar results are obtained: thinking abstractly, we prefer and are far more likely to choose, if offered, an apple over a candy bar. What is striking is that all that is required to do this is to categorize – to think about on a more abstract plane – a series of items that may be totally unrelated to health or dieting. There is something in the very act of shifting our thought to this higher, more abstract level that empowers self-control, irrespective of its particular context.15
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Successful creators often have the most idiosyncratic – one might say indulgent – rituals. Hemingway wrote standing up. Ben Franklin wrote in the bathtub. Balzac ate a big meal at five in the evening, slept until midnight, then got up to write at a small desk in his room for sixteen hours, drinking endless cups of coffee. ‘Schiller kept rotten apples in the desk; Shelley and Rousseau remained bareheaded in the sunshine; Boussuet worked in a cold room with his head wrapped in furs; Grétry and Schiller immersed their feet in ice-cold water; . . . Guido Reni could paint, and de Musset could write poetry, only when dressed in magnificent style; . . . The aesthetician, Baumgarten, advised poets seeking inspiration to ride on horseback, to drink wine in moderation, and provided they were chaste, to look at beautiful women.’16
Yet creators are also notable for discipline and regimentation. Marcel Proust worked in absolute silence. Toni Morrison wrote in a motel room; E. B. White in a cabin by the shore.17 B. F. Skinner, the great behaviouralist psychologist, wrote Schedules of Reinforcement with C. B. Ferster in a room dedicated to writing. They wrote between 9 am and lunchtime only – and would not work in the afternoon even if they wanted to. There would be no visitors, no phone calls, no warm up or inactive periods, and no private conversations.18
This chapter has suggested that the apparent contradiction between idiosyncratic self-indulgence and monkish self-restraint may in fact be no true contradiction at all. In each case, the creator ensures that energy is preserved for the creative task, in the first case by reducing unnecessary self-restraint and in the latter case by eliminating unnecessary distraction. Each creator adopts the particular course that serves his or her purposes best.
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Let’s look once again at Picasso, only this time from the perspective of a full lifetime.
Well before Guernica, Picasso had learned how to cultivate a habit that was maximally effective for him. In his early years, during what was called his blue period, he entered into a relationship with Fernande Olivier, a lady who has been described as ‘a passive, sensual creature, a true harem flower’. They lived together, short of cash, in the rundown Parisian tenement and haven for bohemian artists known as the Bateau-Lavoir. This was a time of terrible poverty for the struggling artist and his young lover. On winter days when they had no coal left for the stove, they would huddle together in bed; at other times they would live off the food that had been left at their door by anonymous well-wishers.
Yet this was also leading to a period of tremendous creativity – so much so that Gertrude Stein called the number of pictures painted from 1904 to 1906 ‘incredible’. And it was also the period in which Picasso laid down his basic working system. In broad terms it was simple – the night for painting, and the day for sleep and pleasure:
He had chosen this curious division of time because at night he could be sure of working in peace. Thus he painted by the light of his big oil lamp and went to bed only at dawn. At four in the afternoon he got up, had his breakfast, took a bath – the water for his tub had been heating on the stove – and then received his friends in the studio, or, on fine days, on the square which served as a common room for the tenants of the Bateau. In the evening he generally went out for dinner with them. … At ten o’clock at night, whatever the company, he would get up from table and go home to start work. His friends were used to his timetable and respected his sleep in the morning, leaving strangers who came and woke him up to suffer the onslaught of his fury.
And some fury it was: when several German artists came up to tell Picasso how much they admired him, they were greeted with revolver shots and hurried back over the Seine without knowing what had happened to them.19
Picasso didn’t just organize his periods of work and rest over the course of a day – he also did this over the course of his lifetime, and to great effect. Prior to the next great period of creativity, Picasso took himself away from Paris back to a place of total seclusion. The particular location he chose was the remote little village of Gosol, in the Spanish Pyrenees close to the Andorra valley, which is over four thousand feet above sea level and could only be reached by mule or on foot. In a long summer stay, Picasso did a great deal of work, drawing peasants and filling notebooks with sketches, the primitive setting inspiring a new, simplified style. It was the beginning of his Cubist period of multi-view figures and natural forms presented in geometric states, which would give rise, most famously, to Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in 1907. The stimulus to his creative flow was so dramatic that he finished the portrait of Gertrude Stein – which hitherto had he had worked at in vain in over eighty sittings – in a few sessions in the new style. Only Stein was unimpressed: ‘It doesn’t look like me!’ she exclaimed. ‘You’ll see,’ replied Picasso. ‘One day you’ll end up looking like your portrait.’ And that (as his biographer says) is what happened.20
Where Picasso was really able to channel his energies was in his capacity to bring his life into his art. While it is widely known that his life falls into several phases, it is less well known that ‘each new epoch blossoms with paintings of a new woman – not a sitter or a model, but a mistress – each of whom is touted to have served Picasso as an incandescent, albeit temporary, muse’.21 For the Rose Period there is Fernande Olivier, for Cubism comes Eva Gouel, for his post-war neoclassicism comes Olga Khokhlova, and for surrealism, Marie-Therese Walter. Picasso painted each of them in his characteristic style of the period, merging and harmonizing artistic and personal interests to the fullest extent. Another of his lovers, Dora Maar, was depicted at once full-face and in profile, with lopsided features and asymmetric eyes. When asked how he could deal so harshly with a beautiful face, he could only answer: ‘For me, she is the weeping woman. For years I gave her a tortured appearance, not out of sadism, and without any pleasure on my part, but in obedience to a vision that had imposed itself on me.’22 Dora Maar can in fact be seen in the screaming, weeping woman holding a dead child in Guernica.
Picasso was the arch self-regulator. He shows what can be achieved not just by adapting rhythms of life so as to be minimally depleting, but also by channeling his interests and inclinations into his work. This is definitively not just a question of ‘letting go’. It is a careful marshaling of desires and drives and making them the underpinning of one’s mission. Picasso wasn’t productive simply because he did what he wanted – he was productive because he knew how to find what he wanted in what he was actually doing.
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If a resource is valuable and limited, then one obvious conclusion is that it should be employed selectively and not frittered away. It should be called upon with prudence and saved for when it is most needed.
We need, one might say, to ‘get monkish’ – to eliminate distractions or reduce them to a minimum. Modern life requires incessant self-regulation and choice making, from simply dealing with traffic to navigating the many potential faux pas of the workplace. Whereas hitherto we may have prided ourselves on our hard-earned skills in keeping ourselves well organized and controlled, it may be that all this time we have been making costly withdrawals on a limited supply of energy. The more we can do to keep those withdrawals light and sparse, the better.
On the other hand, insofar as to get things done we sometimes do need to battle against ourselves, those battles need to be picked – and timed – carefully. Let go and indulge when it can be done without harm. We should recognize that at those moments when we need to be at peak performance, we shouldn’t be trying to score little victories of self-control against ourselves.
And at the deepest level, we need to reflect and turn in upon ourselves to find out what psychological ‘trash’ we are carrying around that itself is bearing upon our limited energy and sapping it away for no good reason. Racial bias, for example, has been shown to draw on this same resource, causing reductions in cognitive performance.23 Why burden ourselves with that – to our own detriment?
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Modern science cannot take sole credit for recognizing the perils of an errant mind. One of Buddhism’s greatest teachings, for example, is that a man is not his thoughts and feelings, nor a woman hers. The true self is the quiet watcher of all these swirls and eddies of the mind. Clarity can be established when the true self is able to detach itself from the contents of the mind and observe them dispassionately, whereas confusion occurs when the true self confuses itself with these mental contents. Buddhism provides practical methods of dealing with these problems – mindfulness and the stilling of thoughts – that are both elegant and time-tested.24
Where the Buddhist texts speak of mindfulness and stilling of thoughts, the contemporary psychological research speaks of self-regulation and cognitive transformation. Nevertheless, the similarity between the ancient wisdom and modern science is striking. Both recognize and communicate the following as basic truths: that the exercise of self-control is not an easy or trouble-free process; that energy is thus consumed; and there are better and more sophisticated ways than simply making the effort of holding back.
Both the ancient wisdom and modern science tend, in fact, to offer the same fundamental guidance. That is this: the road to enlightened self-regulation or self-control comes through the mind acting on the mind, not to repress – but to re-imagine, reinterpret, and reframe. It is to grasp that the way the mind works is not fixed; that we can choose the way we construe objects and events; and that this is the path to the kind of freedom that really matters.
3
Social Influence
What American Gothic Tells Us
Consider the image below.
This is, of course, Grant Wood’s American Gothic.1 The painting, which was first exhibited in 1930 at The Art Institute of Chicago, brought Wood instant recognition. It has since gone on to become a foundation stone of the American self-imagination. Even today, critics debate whether it was intended as a satire at the expense of the repression and priggishness of middle America – something that Wood denied – or whether it was meant as a tribute to the simple moral virtues of rural people.
What concerns us at the moment, though, is one aspect of American Gothic in particular. What Wood has managed to capture so superbly is the way that the faces of this couple – who have, no doubt, lived together as husband and wife for a quarter of a century or more – have converged. The man is obviously somewhat older than the woman; his eyes are shadowed and his skin bears the marks of the years. Apart from that, their faces are eerily similar. Their equally large, domed foreheads dominate the picture; each gazes out unblinkingly, with eyes wide open and only the barest traces of eyelids. Both have thin, puckered lips; both hold their heads stiffly erect. They could almost be brother and sister. And that may be why the painting is so haunting to some people – it holds the remote and unpalatable possibility of incest and inbreeding.
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There is, however, good reason to think that the phenomenon of facial convergence has another (and altogether more wholesome) origin, in what psychologists call ‘the chameleon effect’. The chameleon effect refers to the reflex mimicry of gestures, postures, and facial expressions of other people with whom we are interacting. Just as chameleons adapt the colour of their skin to match the colour of the environment they are in, so we adapt our expressions and gestures to match those of whomever we happen to be interacting with. What is more, psychologists now believe that this is an automatic reaction. If the person you are interacting with smiles, you will be more likely to smile in return. If they rub their face, you will be more likely to rub your face. If they wiggle their foot, you will be that much more likely to wiggle your foot too. And none of this depends on any conscious strategy to ingratiate yourself or curry favour. It will just happen.
That’s why the faces of partners come to resemble each other over the years, according to the psychologist Robert Zajonc and his colleagues. Zajonc got hold of photographs of couples in their first year of marriage and again after twenty-five years of married life. He cropped the photos and had any extraneous non-facial material removed. The photographs were then shown to a test group of over one hundred participants, who were asked to indicate how similar the faces appeared and what they thought the likelihood was that the individuals depicted were married to each other. The results showed that couples became more similar facially after twenty-five years of marriage. The researchers ruled out the possibility of environmental factors (e.g., climate or socioeconomic position) causing the difference by taking all their couples from the same part of the American Midwest and ensuring that they were matched on other socioeconomic variables. They then ruled out the possibility of diet causing the similarity by means of an additional study. In the end they concluded that the most likely explanation was that couples had been mimicking each other’s facial expressions, with the effect that repeated imitation over the years had left similar facial lines – the chameleon effect.2
Why Fat Friends Make You Fat
The profound effects that our social contacts can have on our general wellbeing have been forcefully illustrated in research from Harvard Medical School on the causes of obesity.3 It’s well known, of course, that obesity has been on the rise over the course of the last several decades – in the United States alone, for example, the prevalence of obesity has risen from 23 percent to 33 percent in recent years, and fully 66 percent of adults are overweight. This is commonly attributed to poor diet and lack of exercise – which no doubt have their part to play. But this can only be part of the answer, because poor diet and lack of exercise are also choices, and there must also be reasons why people make those choices.
Is there something in a person’s social contacts that might make them more susceptible to obesity?
The research evaluated a network of more than twelve thousand people who underwent repeated measurements over a period of thirty-two years. It focused on clusters of obese persons within the network and looked at the association between the weight gain of individuals and the weight gain among that individual’s social contacts. It also examined the dependence of that association on the nature of the social ties involved – friendship, sibling, marital, etc. – as well as gender and geographic distance.
If you had been one of those 12,067 individuals included in the study, you would no doubt have been shocked by the degree to which your physical shape is determined merely by your social contacts. In all of the examinations, from 1971 to 2003, the risk of your becoming obese would have increased by 45 percent if you we
re connected to another obese person in the network by one degree of separation – if you had an obese friend, for instance, or your partner or sibling was obese. Even more surprising would be the fact that your chance of becoming obese would increase even at two or three degrees of separation – at two degrees of separation, the risk increased by about 20 percent, and at three degrees of separation by about 10 percent. Your odds of becoming obese would increase even if the only obese person you knew was your partner’s brother, or (even more remotely) your sister’s husband’s best friend.
Admittedly, there was some variation in the results. In general, those with obese friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese themselves, but this includes friendships reported by one partner only (i.e., non-mutual friendships); when the friendship is truly mutual, the increased likelihood of obesity shoots up to 171 percent. The phenomenon is, additionally, more likely to occur among same-sex friends, and most likely of all to occur among same-sex male friends. You would be 40 percent more likely to become obese if your sibling became obese, and you would be 37 percent more likely to become obese if your spouse became obese. Smoking and geographic distance (as opposed to social distance) made no difference.
The burning question is: why? Are we seeing here the chameleon effect ‘writ large’ – unconscious imitation of behaviour, much like husband and wife over many decades unconsciously imitate each other’s facial expressions? The difficulty, of course, is that the ‘contagion’ of obesity is unaffected by geographical distance; it is social distance that matters. More likely, then, that contagion takes place through the shifting of norms about the acceptability of being overweight. We observe changes in those around us and tend to accept those changes occurring to ourselves. Imperceptibly, we gain weight.