Applying culture as comfort to you

33

3 C h a p t e r

Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

Children are…“irrepressible taxonomizers.”

—Bloom (2009)

As you understand culture better not as a thing you have but as ways of thinking and doing that you share with others, you hopefully will come to the conclusion that we do culture more than we have culture. We do culture to ourselves and to others, even though we are almost completely unaware of the daily culture work we do. Therefore, it’s not so easy to figure out how we do culture. First, we need to know that what we’re doing is cultural not natural. The best approach I have found is to look for patterns, for regularities in what we think, say, and do. Culture is not idiosyncratic to individuals; it is shared. We do culture similarly to others, but we typically don’t think about what we do because it just comes to us “naturally.” To begin to get more of an awareness of what you do culturally, I’ll point you in a direction that should be pretty easy to grasp: doing social status. People are very attentive to how we stack up against each other, and thus it makes sense that we pay a lot of attention to how we show each other our social status. And, although people pretty much everywhere care about their social status, the hierarchies vary enormously from society to society and even within a society’s groups. Toddlers negotiate social status around different criteria than those that are important to elementary school–age kids; their criteria, in turn, differ from those of teens, young adults, working adults, and retirees. So, take a moment now and think of how you show others your social status. Do you pay attention to what you wear, with whom you interact, what you own, where you go on weekends, who you friend on Facebook, and so on? Most likely you do a lot of different things to negotiate your status and what you do varies depending on whom you’re with and where you are. So, for Planned Pause 3-1, think about the situations you have been in during the last 24 hours and respond to the following questions: What might you do in a similar circumstance now that you are more conscious about doing social status? What do others do to negotiate their social status that really bothers you? Why? Address these questions in the Planned Pause 3-1.

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34 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

As you negotiate your social status, this is just one of an enormous number of ways that you do culture in your everyday life. There are so many ways we all do culture that it would be almost impossible for us to be consciously aware of each of them; it would take up just too much brain power. Recall from Chapter 2 that our brains use a lot of energy already so it makes sense that we would look for ways to save energy. And this is exactly what hap- pens. As we learn culture in early life, we store in our minds not only what we do routinely so we don’t have to think about it, but we also store how to interpret others’ actions. This way we just respond appropriately without having to think about it. We have a very fitting phrase for this; we talk about doing what comes “naturally” even though it’s cultural. No wonder it’s so hard to understand culture; we usually don’t think consciously about what we do unless we feel cultural discomforts when we step beyond our normal, everyday expe- riences. When we attend someone else’s place of worship where the rituals are unfamiliar, travel far away from home, start a new job, or even have a meal at someone’s home where they eat different foods than we are used to, we feel ourselves having to cross out of our

P l a n n e d Pa u s e 3 - 1

“ T h e W a y s I D o M y s o c I a l s T a T u s ”

Instructions: People do different social statuses. We are not born knowing how to act male or female; act as a teenager or an adult; act out a race or ethnic or national iden- tity; act high class, working or middle class; act appropriately for a particular job or occupation, and so on.

Part 1: Choose one of your social statuses (sometimes referred to as “identities”) but not gender—which will be covered in another planned pause—and describe in detail the ways that you performed this status vis-à-vis others during a particular scenario or context you experienced in the past 24 hours.

Part 2: Now write another paragraph discussing how you could perform your chosen social status more effectively in the same context you described above. That is, if you could start that experience over, what might you do differently—knowing what you now know about culture as comfort?

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 35

cultural comfort zones. Yes, we like new experiences—we pay attention to what’s new—but not so much when they make us feel awkward, anxious, uncomfortable, or even stupid. New experiences can cause uneasiness and most of us dislike feeling this way.

Building Our Brains’ Cultural CirCuitry

We should not be blamed for avoiding cultural challenges (at least until you finish this book). It is actually very human to do so. And there is a physiological reason for this too. Scientists studying the brain know that it is contains billions of neurons, and each neuron can grow as many as 10,000 connections (called synapses) to other neurons. Multiply 100 billion or so neurons by 10,000 connections each and you get something like 40 quadrillion possible connections in our brains (Goleman 2006: 157; Ratey 2002: 9). We are not born with all those connections, however. We are born with almost all the neurons we will ever have, but not so with synapses. They multiply and connect based on our experiences in life. No wonder the brain grows incredibly fast early in life, more than doubling its size by age two and by almost another 50 percent by adulthood (Goleman 2006: 152). In just one area of the brain over a half million new synapses are produced in one second in babies between two and four months of age (Seung 2012: 107). This massive increase in synapse connections and lengthening of the neurons, etc. does take up space and space is not infinite even though young children’s skulls do grow. Fortunately there is a way to ensure that space is used effi- ciently. How? Well, the brain retains synapses that are most useful and prunes away those which are not. Neurons activated together over and over will grow tighter connections and these circuits will get stronger and stronger, becoming akin to highways versus narrow roads. Particularly important are the highway-like nerve bundles that connect different regions of the brain that function together—such as the various areas associated with language (Seung 2012). In other words, “neurons that fire together wire together.” However, connections that take up precious brain space without being used often enough get pruned; some estimate the loss at 20 billion (yes, billion) synapses pruned every day (Begley 2007: 76-7; Ratey 2001; Siegler 1996: 42). Pruning is an appropriate metaphor because the brain’s wiring looks quite similar to very bushy plants. The bushy foliage blocks sunlight from piercing the underbrush and allowing for new growth below. So, the brain’s infrequently used synapse connections can get in the way of those we need and those we may need to develop. The solu- tion is to prune away the clutter. Exactly how and why this takes place is still under study. At this point, however, the research definitely helps us understand better what we know through personal experience— that habits are easy to maintain and hard to change (just blame those neuron circuits!); that adults do not seem to learn nearly as quickly as children; and that trying to do something we could do well early in life but stopped at some point (like playing a sport or an instrument) takes time and effort in order to do well again.

There are other factors in our brain’s physiology that help explain why

Figure 3.1 The Rapidly Increasing Neural Connections in an Infant’s Brain.

At birth 3 months 24 months

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36 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

the patterns we acquire in early childhood become so deep and enduring—such as myelination—but detailing all this can get very technical. The main point to focus on is that our brains are most malleable as infants and young children. That does not mean, however, that “Old dogs can’t learn new tricks.” People often say this phrase, but it is inaccu- rate. A better phrase would be, “Old dogs can learn new tricks but it’s harder for an old dog than for a young dog.” Don’t ignore this hugely important point. We can and do continue to learn throughout life; we can and do build new synapses and even new brain circuits. We can also reconnect, rewire, re-emphasize (reweight) and even regenerate previously pruned synapses when needed such as after a brain injury (Seung 2012). Many books encourage us to keep our brains active by engaging with new people and participating in new activities as well as by eating right for the brain (e.g., Amen 1998; Begley 2007).

As you better understand the brain’s physiology you should also be gaining greater insight into why we tend to gravitate toward our cultural comforts. Even if we do continue to learn new tricks as we get older, we primarily just go along in life practicing our old tricks— our cultural competencies. We do not even have to think about doing them because they are so familiar they come to us “naturally.” As we learn cultural patterns, they become wired into our brains so that we can reproduce them as if flying a plane on autopilot. We are not aware of what we do as cultural unless and until we encounter people whose patterns differ. We notice the differences because our brains focus their computing power on what is new, while what is known has become automatic. So, as I stated at the beginning of this section of the book, we should not be blamed for avoiding situations involving cultural differences. Now that you know what causes “culture shock” you will hopefully become more empow- ered to deal with it differently. The next time you find yourself feeling discomforted, ask yourself to evaluate whether the discomfort arises from someone behaving in a way that does not fit your cultural comforts—your subconscious expectation for how life is patterned.

That so much of what we do culturally is not controlled consciously may be a hard fact to accept for some of you reading this book. We like to think of ourselves as largely in control of what we think and do but if you stop and think about it, you will be doing pre- cisely what in day-to-day life we basically cannot do—stop the action so we can process it consciously. Just image trying to concentrate on telling your legs to walk and you will get an idea of how important it is that so much of our cultural patterns are done on autopilot. We do not really process all information anew but process it categorically. This makes our brains efficient while simultaneously making culture seem almost magical. When trying to explain this to people, I find it useful to talk about the famous computer Watson. In 2011, a contest was held on the game show Jeopardy! between a computer named Watson, built by IBM, and the game’s best human contestants of all time. Watson defeated his adversaries handily. The computer won by searching 15 terabytes of stored information (encyclopedias, all websites on the Internet, digitized books, etc.) in a split second and comparing their information to the information in the Jeopardy! question. Watson didn’t know the right answer but could calculate what was statistically (categorically) the most likely answer. During the show, these statistics were shown to viewers. The computer occasionally came up with wrong answers. A case in point was Watson’s response “What is Toronto?” to a question under the category of “U.S. cities.” This is a mistake few human contestants would make, but Watson’s calculation was based on the clue not the category name.

Now, take this understanding of how Watson works and apply it to the human brain. Watson devoted all its computing power to one calculation at a time; people have to calculate many things simultaneously. Imagine you are walking down a busy sidewalk; your brain has to compute your physical movements in tandem with calculating many others’ movements

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 37

in order for you to avoid hitting them. As you do all this, you might also be talking to some- one. You’re talking and occasionally looking at that person to analyze her face and figure out what she’s feeling. This is a very realistic scenario and not even all that complicated for us humans. But think about the computing power it would take for your brain to figure all the things it needs to keep track of in a split second and continue to calculate all those things as you walk along for minutes or hours. It has to be very taxing. But do you feel exhausted from walking 10 minutes in this type of situation? Probably not—especially if you are used to it. If we are used to it, it means that the circuits in our brains for what we are doing have been strengthened through past experience. Practice makes perfect, so to speak. But where do we get the practice and how does that relate to emotions?

As you now know, we practice from our earliest moments of infancy, and as we repeat experiences they become stored in our brain as neural circuits. One of the most complex knowledge areas to learn is emotions, for there are numerous muscles in the human face that can convey thousands of different emotions. Quite a few years ago, cross-cultural psychologist Paul Ekman studied different peoples around the world to see what emo- tions everyone recognizes regardless of their cultural contexts; he photographed them with expressions on their faces and holding signs signifying those expressions in English. He then studied the characteristics of these expressions and found out that everyone can produce and understand a very short list of just a few universal emotions (see Ekman and Friesen 2003). Although this is an active field of study and so it is difficult to make conclusions, it seems that we are born with the ability to interpret these fundamental emotions such as surprise, fear and anger. But we have to learn through experience to interpret all the other emotions that people in our society express. In other words, the vast majority of facial expressions that convey emotion are cultural, not universal. Interpreting these emotions as they are expressed by the face, voice and body takes a lot of experience. So how do we learn to interpret this information so well? Recent research suggests that we may learn them much like Watson was programmed, that is, categorically. Computers using artificial intelligence like Watson are fed associations and then use those to make new inferences, or predictions. For example, two teenagers working on getting computers to recognize human emotions programmed

The Computer “Watson” Winning Jeopardy! Against Its Human Competitors.

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38 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

a computer by playing different sounds conveying anger, happiness, etc. and then told the computer which emotion was correct for each sound. The computer stored these associa- tions in memory, analyzing which sounds match to which emotion. (The computer was given patterns between particular sounds and the name of an emotional category such as “anger.”) Then the teen scientists played new sounds and asked the computer program to tell which emotion was being expressed. The computer had to see how similar the new sound was to those the teenagers had already coded for emotions. It had to figure out which category contained sounds closest to the new sound it had received. Their program works quite well. It is more reliable at figuring out emotions, albeit a very limited number of them, than other computer programs (Lichtenstein 2011).

If that example does not make complete sense to you, an easier example is how com- puters recognize handwriting. While people learn the same letters of the alphabet, they write them in a wide variety of ways. So a computer has to be trained that the printed letter “A” can appear as a capital letter or not. And even within those basic categories, the way the letter is written varies tremendously. Take capitals, for instance. Just by varying the font they can appear as A A A or . What does the computer look at to determine these are all the same letter? For the capital letter you can imagine the computer being programmed to find two slanted lines intersecting at the top with a horizontal line slicing between them. But what about the lower case letter? This one is more difficult because there are at least two different types of lower case typefaces including those that look/appear like this a (loop on the left side and straight line on the right) versus another group which look/appear like this (loop on the left

Research Shows that All People Can Produce and Interpret Certain Universal Emotions—For Example, Anger, Disgust, Surprise, Fear, Happiness, Contempt and Sadness. How Many of these Expressions Can You Find This Preschooler Making Successfully?

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 39

side but smaller than the other version and a line on the right that curls at the top toward the lower loop). These variations are just the tip of the iceberg because people write letters with a much wider degree of variation. When the computer encounters a hand-written address on an envelope (such as the letters the Postal Service has to process), then it must be able to process all that variation in a fraction of a second as it scans the address. The computer will make some mistakes, but most of the time it will be right. It doesn’t understand the writing, it just analyzes it statistically, categorically. That is, it must first separate written or typed words into letters and then it must match or categorize each letter based on examples stored in memory. The human brain must decipher writing as well. It may not operate exactly as a computer operates, but the brain does organize observations into categories too (Macrae & Bodenhausen 2000). In this case, our brains would not only have to figure out the letters and words we observe, but process their meaning as well. That is, we typically have a great deal of related information to calculate at any given time. And this is a major reason why conserving mental energy by storing experiences is so important. If every time we walked down a sidewalk while conversing and our brains calculated anew all the mental processes it takes to do that, we’d feel the strain of all that computing.

The fact that we can do so many things at the same time—and yet, compared to most other animals, depend less on inborn behavioral tendencies (instincts)—reflects the fact that we somehow store experiences in our brains. The more we draw on those experiences and those neural circuits, the stronger they get and the less we have to work to accomplish what we need to do. This is how we go from feeling nervous or uncomfortable when trying a new experience for the first time to feeling completely at ease after we have performed that action a number of times. The same is true with figuring out people; when we first meet someone we have to do extra work (although probably subconsciously) to calculate who this person is—including basics like gender, race, and age—but also more difficult information to find out, such as the person’s motivations and trustworthiness. If the person conforms to our unstated expectations, we usually feel comfortable with the person. Feeling comfortable does not in this case mean we like the person; it means we know this person well enough that we no longer have to calculate everything about him or her. Essentially, what we do is categorize the person without really thinking consciously about it and then stick with our categorization (Macrae & Bodenhausen 2000). Recall the phrase, “First impressions are hard to change”? Now you know why.

It is time to start explaining my second answer to why the brain matters to cultural comforts. This answer involves a bit more information about our brain’s structure. When we compare humans (and our closest genetic relatives, the apes) against other species, we find that the big distinction we higher primates have is in our neocortex. As illustrated in Figure 3.2, the neocortex is a thin (only a few millimeters thick) wrinkled sheet of tissue forming the surface of the cerebrum which, in turn, sits atop the cerebellum (Seung 2012). The newest addition to the brain, it is the squiggly, gray material that most diagrams of the brain show, the folded part of the brain that is divided into two hemispheres (left and right). Each hemisphere has four different areas called “lobes.” The lobes include the frontal (forehead to top of head), the temporal (lower side area over the ears), the occipital (back), and the parietal (area behind the frontal lobe, over the temporal lobe, and in front of the occipital lobe).

I’ll return to the neocortex in a moment, for this part of the brain is the most plastic; it is continually being shaped and reshaped during childhood and well into the third dec- ade of life. Think about babies you have known. Their heads grow incredibly fast during the first few months of life. So there is a lot of growth going on, much of which has to do with the neocortex. Why?

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40 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

As mentioned in Chapter 2, it turns out that human babies come into the world a bit too early gestationally. We could use some more time in the womb, especially for our organs like the brain to continue their development. If newborns’ heads grew any larger, however, they would not fit through the birth canal (Dunbar 2010). As illus- trated in Figure 3.3, the average baby’s head is larger than its mother’s birth canal, which is why giving birth is so painful for humans. That’s not true for our closest genetic cousins. Chimpan- zees, gorillas, and bonobos have less difficult births. Their birth canals are larger relative to their newborns’ heads. Why? It has to do with the fact that they use all four limbs to move while we walk upright. To walk upright requires shifts in the bones of the hip girdle, and this compresses the birth canal. Evolutionar-

ily, our ancestors started walking upright millions of years before our brains expanded. This fact is well documented, ever since the discoveries in East Africa of human ancestors’ fossil- ized footsteps and of the skeleton of “Lucy,” an ancient ancestor whose musculature showed that small-brained humans walked upright (Johanson & Edey 1981). Well, what was good for walking became a problem for giving birth. Human infants’ brains continue to grow so

Frontal lobe Parietal lobe

Occipital lobe

Temporal lobe

Figure 3.2 One Hemisphere of a Human Brain’s Cortex Showing Its Four Lobes; also Shown is the Cerebellum atop the Spinal Chord.

Chimp

Human

Inlet Midplane Outlet

Figure 3.3 Chimpanzees are our Closest Primate Relatives yet their Births are Much Less Painful. Here You Can Easily See Why. The Human Baby’s Head Barley Fits through the Birth Canal. If We Were Born with Heads Even a Little Bit Larger, Most Newborns and their Mothers Might Not Survive.

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 41

rapidly after they’re born because, in effect, they are continuing processes that should happen in the womb but cannot (Dunbar 2010).

So, babies are born with their brains still rap- idly growing and develop- ing; they can accommodate huge amounts of new information and there is a lot to learn. Even the cer- ebellum, a segment of the lower brain that is involved with body movement, is not completely formed. Consequently, newborn humans, unlike many other newborn mammals such as elephants, horses, and

chimpanzees, have to work harder to coordinate their motor activities. In other words, and as mentioned earlier in the chapter, babies have to learn hand–eye coordination; they have to learn how to lift and balance their heads; and they have to learn to sit up and then to walk. All of these take a toll on babies’ brains, requiring time and huge amounts of energy to process this information. Given that we learn motor skills at the same time we learn culture, even our body language becomes culturally inflected. We all learn to talk and walk, but we learn to do these as those around us do. They are part of our cultural competence learning. Just how babies learn these competencies is not fully known yet but research in this area is taking off.

Our brains are not only designed for cultural learning, but they also link—unavoidably— what is often referred to as “rational” learning (such as decision making, prioritizing, and analyzing) with emotions. This has everything to do with culture being felt as comfort and discomfort. Culture is emotional in part because some of our nerves have to pass from the neocortex through several parts of the limbic system (the hippocampus and amygdala in par- ticular) to the rest of the body. The almond-shaped amygdala and the ribbed hippocampus are located inside the cerebrum, between the neocortex and the brain stem, the part of the brain that connects to the spinal cord and thus to the body. This means that many neural pathways, the communication highways between body and brain, literally pass through the limbic system en route to the neocortex and back (Ramachandran 2011).

Although the relationship between culture and feeling is obviously quite complicated, the simple version of the story is that our deep-seated emotions and emotional memories processed by the limbic system affect the “rational” parts of our brain, and vice versa. These emotions not only affect how we behave, but also how we view others (Fiske 2004). In other words, rational and emotional are not biological opposites; rather, the neuron circuits con- nect the different regions of the brain associated with higher-order functions controlled by the frontal cortex to those associated with the emotions.

I like to think of it this way. No matter how rational we are, our emotions affect us. And no matter how well our senses work, the information they communicate to our brains

hippocampus

amygdala

The Brain’s Emotional & Memory Headquarters: the Amyg- dala and Hippocampus.

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42 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

is typically affected by our emotions too. If you think about it in the context of your own life, you’ll come up with examples. For instance, you smell something that evokes a power- ful but mysterious memory in you. For me, this occurs with certain cleaning products such as Lysol and Mr. Clean. I have strong, deep memories of a babysitter’s home where these products were used. I cannot separate the two. And since I did not like being at the babysit- ter’s, I also do not like to smell either of these cleaning products. On the other hand, often when we smell our comfort foods, we actually feel comforted just by the aroma. What are your comfort foods? (I love freshly baked chocolate chip cookies.) Can you link these to your childhood to help you understand what caused them to be your comfort foods? Looking at them now, are they healthy foods or some type of sweet, salty, or fatty treat? Take a moment to reflect upon your comfort foods, why you have come to associate them with comfort, and whether or not you’d choose them for your own children and why.

Learning to relate culture to feeling comfort is not that easy because culture is largely invisible to us until we encounter something different, something foreign. That wakes up our brains. Therefore, we tend to be more consciously aware of our cultural discomforts than our cultural comforts. Thus, it is really important to reflect now on how certain foods (as well as other products and customs) came to be comforting to you. Indeed, we should not underestimate the importance of emotion to culture. One of the reasons why we think we have culture is because we feel like culture is located deep down inside of us. Experi- ences frequently, if not always, become memories in association with emotion. Sometimes emotions can interfere with our thinking processes—particularly when they are the really strong emotions like fear, or hate. The military knows this well. It’s the primary reason behind training and chain of command. In perilous situations like warfare, soldiers’ emo- tions could overpower their ability to execute their orders and that could mean disaster for the mission. Among Navy SEALs, an elite U.S. military unit, there is a test that trainees must pass—although most fail—in order to become a SEAL. It involves submerging them in a pool with their ankles tied together and requiring them to keep their hands behind their

Sarah and Toddler Sophie Making a Comfort Food Together. What Foods Most Comfort You?

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 43

backs. They have to do a variety of tasks this way, including grabbing an object at the bottom of the pool with their teeth. The challenge is that they have to do these things while facing the very real possibility of drowning. The brain’s fear reaction systems thrust into high gear when we feel we are about to drown; it drowns out (note how appropriate this metaphor is!) the decision-making part of the brain, which “knows” how to solve the situation but loses function because it is overwhelmed by fear. SEALs have to go through rigorous training to ensure that their fear does not overpower their ability to handle their circumstances. Most never make it and have to join another part of the Navy.

For the military, memory is serious business; the neural circuits have to function accurately even if we do not think about them consciously. Military training is a good anal- ogy to culture in general. We do culturally appropriate things so routinely that we never think about them, at least not deliberately. It’s as if we have no awareness of them at all. We certainly don’t actively think about getting dressed as doing culture, but we do pay atten- tion to what clothing we put on. This makes sense when applying what I have been trying to communicate in this chapter:

• The human brain has more to do in comparison to other species because we rely least on genetically determined behavioral predispositions. This is our evolution- ary trade-off: species that learn more depend less on “hard-wired” behaviors, and vice versa.

• Learning means we have to take in a lot of information and rapidly calculate what is going on in order to respond appropriately. Some estimate that at any given second, our brains are processing as many as 11 million pieces of information (Wilson 2004). Early life is particularly taxing on the brain because babies have to learn motor skills at the same time as they learn spoken and body language (Gardner 1983). Psychologists, following the work of Jean Piaget, often refer to this as the sensorimotor stage of childhood. Piaget was among the first research- ers to appreciate the importance of routines, repeated behaviors, to learning in young children.

• No wonder the brain is a huge energy sinkhole, consuming twice as much energy in childhood as in adulthood (Meltzoff et al. 2009; Ratey 2002: 35).

• To save energy, our brains literally take shortcuts or, as we often refer to them when referencing people—stereotypes (Macrae, Miline, & Bodenhausen 1994). When we experience something for the first time, the brain records it physiologically in the form of synapse connections between neurons. The next time we encounter some- thing similar, the brain recognizes the pattern and jumps to the shortcut (what psy- chologists refer to as a “schema” and Piaget originally called a “schemata”). These shortcuts, stereotypes, biases or whatever we call them are powerful. Our brains jump to conclusions even before we recognize that we are observing something or someone (e.g., Greenwald & Krieger 2006). When we build these connections our brains make instant subconscious inferences from what we are experiencing to this bank of past experiences. When there is consistency, no problem. We are on autopilot and just involuntarily assume that these are the same. When there is inconsistency, however— what we experience does not fit the models we have built in our heads, then we pay attention. At least we pay more attention and sometimes the differences bring all this to our consciousness (Wilson 2004).

Brains, synapses, shortcuts, (sub)conscious—it’s quite a lot of abstraction, so here is a concrete example. A researcher had lunch at an Italian restaurant with her preschool-age

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44 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

son, his father, and another man. The 4-year-old noticed that he, his father, and the other man ate pizza whereas his mother ordered lasagna. On his way home in the car he announced that he had figured it out: “Men eat pizza and women don’t!” (Bjorklund 2000: 361). The boy took one experience and inferred from that to make a conclusion about gender overall. In his case, he came to the wrong general conclusion from his single observation. He ste- reotyped, but he was doing what children his age do—figuring out the patterns in people’s behaviors and applying them. After all, children learning culture are, in the words of one researcher, “irrepressible taxonomizers” (Bloom 2009: 11–12).

Cutting Pathways thrOugh the (Brain’s) FOrest OF exPerienCe

It is easy to see from this example how people come to stereotype subconsciously given that our experiences, exposure, and information is acquired in early childhood before we can really be aware of, let alone control, these processes. I point this out not to con- done stereotyping but, rather, to highlight how important the content of children’s early exposure is. However unfortunate the outcome may occasionally be, taking such neural shortcuts helps us to survive because it conserves brain energy. To calculate and recalcu- late the same information each time we encounter something similar is just not efficient. So we have evolved the ability to cut away quite a bit of the complexity by packaging it into routines, the rituals of everyday life, and these become physiologically registered in our brains as neural circuits. This is what research shows. What I argue additionally is that these same processes produce in us cultural comfort.

This is precisely how as young chil- dren we move quickly from the infinite cultural flexibility we are born with to the much more limited—but never com- pletely inflexible—set of cultural abilities we learn and use—our culture. And we use that more limited set over and over, making it feel more and more comfort- able. That is, since what we experience socially connects our brain’s neurons and then strengthens those connections with each repeat of the experience, we build our own cultural comfort zones. Because they are comfortable and our brains jump to these shortcuts, we tend to stay close to home culturally, repeating the same activi- ties over and over again until, without ever realizing it, we have dug deep cultural ruts. To really understand what this is about, think of learning culture as bushwhacking your way through a very thick forest with bushes and trees from the forest floor to the sky. Imagine a newborn as having to

Imagine How Tempting Taking the Path Would Be Instead of Cutting Your Own New Way Through This Forest of Experience.

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 45

cut through her way through this forest of experience. The first time she goes through it is a very difficult journey. She has to find her way through tall trees, thick underbrush, and a variety of strange creatures. She slashes her way to the best of her ability. (Think of this as the really hard work of analyzing new people and social contexts, looking for patterns while also having to pay close attention to walking so as not to trip.) The next time she attempts to go down the same path, she has less work to do because she’s already cut a path. The third and subsequent times she goes through this forest, she is likely to experiment less with possible routes than during her previous journeys. After all, she has worked hard to cut the path; to diverge from it would mean more work. (Think of this as the shortcuts represented by patterns. Even if she doesn’t encounter exactly the same experience, her brain will categorize it as belonging to a known pattern.) Subsequently, traveling down the same path becomes easier and easier until the path itself becomes worn and grooved. Without realizing it at all, she has not only cut a path through the forest, but the path has cut a rut into the ground that makes it difficult for her to get out, even if she wants or needs to get out. While she is in the rut, perhaps she is threatened by a flash flood (a metaphor for unplanned change), but the rut is too deep for her to escape when the water rushes in. In this case, she has become so culturally comfortable in her ways that she cannot change even when it is critical to her survival.

What about if she stays away from this forest (cultural context) for a long time and when she returns the path has grown thick again? She will have to work hard to cut a path where before she traveled effortlessly. This symbolizes how we can be culturally comfort- able in certain contexts or environments during eras in our lives but stop practicing these comforts and gradually lose these competencies. (Recall that the brain prunes connections that are not being used.) Merely think about how well you were able to fit in with your friends in elementary school but by high school you’d changed your behaviors. If you tried to go back to elementary school, you’d feel awkward and when you’ve been an adult for a while, it may be fun to reminisce about high school but you would likely have a hard time going back to the cultural comforts from that point in your life. That is, we continuously gain and lose cultural comforts but rarely perceive this as part of life—particularly when we think of culture as a possession that we get early in life and keep with us, largely unchanged, for the rest of our lives.

Cultural comfort, then, is analogous to cutting paths through the forest that, once cut, make us less likely to stray from them because it would take a lot more effort. Additionally, we tend not to leave comforts—though we can—because when we do we feel uncomfort- able, or even anxious or afraid. The more time we spend in our cultural comforts, the more we dig them deeper, making it more and more difficult to break out of them—even if we want to. I hope this and the material in this chapter explains more broadly why we think and do what we think and do. However, I do not want to imply that just because we grow up with our cultural comforts they are desirable or ethical. Conversely, this book is about explaining culture as comfort so that you also embrace discomfort, so you also push yourself and others you care about to expand your cultural comforts to include experiences that you have not had before. That is our evolutionary gift, yet we do not enjoy it as much as we could because we tend to prefer our comforts.

Cultural comfort is a predicament of being a cultural species. We cannot avoid cutting pathways though the thicket of cultural experience since we must cut them to survive during childhood. As children, we are not able to see what we have done (we are not conscious of learning culture) until the paths are so well worn that we follow them unthinkingly. Actu- ally, the analogy between learning culture and cutting paths through a forest should include

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46 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

another factor. Imagine now that you were dropped into a forest where the underbrush is very thick but where there are deeply grooved paths that your relatives had cut long before you arrived. Would you follow the paths or strike out on your own by cutting a new path? We have a name for such paths: traditions. We could try not to follow the traditional paths that our relatives have followed. However, this is very unlikely because when we arrive, we are led through the forest and along these well-worn paths by our caregivers who know the paths well and often obligate us to follow them. Completely without knowing it, we have traded the cultural flexibility we are born with for predictable, comfortable, yet more finite paths through life.

I view culture this way. While instincts are, to my way of thinking, the deeply rutted paths that we are given by Mother Nature, culture is about how people dig our own ruts in addition to those few we inherit. To repeat the phrase I use in Chapter 2, we build our own social order. As you have seen, there are perfectly good reasons for this. Our huge capacity for learning means we are highly adaptable to different climates and conditions. We arrive into the world with nearly infinite adaptability, but we also arrive nearly completely help- less. This obliges us to learn what others around us do and think, whether intentionally or not. As we learn, we participate actively in finding comfort and predictability in a world that otherwise would be enormously unpredictable, frightening, and difficult to understand. As we experience, we build neural pathways in our brains that make travel along these circuits easier with each additional trip. This human dilemma is helpful and limiting at the same time. It is helpful because the next time we come to the same crossroads, we do not have to do the really hard work of breaking open a new pathway. For example, when we meet a new person again, we draw on our previous encounters with that person and other similar people who enable us to shortcut the huge cognitive load on our brains involved in assessing that person. The third and subsequent times we meet that person, the cognitive shortcut (synapse connection) gets even faster. This is why first impressions are so deep and so hard to dislodge. Our brains categorize the new into the familiar, the new to normal to norm.

Figure 3.4 Can You Break Out of Your Cultural Ruts?

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 47

FrOm liFe’s rOutines tO nOrms tO nOrmal: Culture, traditiOn, and institutiOnalizatiOn

One of my favorite phrases about culture as comfort is to say, “It’s so cultural, it’s natural. It’s second nature.” Our language confuses us. In some ways, it prevents us from seeing that we internalize patterns and then conform to them as what is normal. Most of what we do day in and day out conforms to unwritten norms for how we should behave and think. What feels normal thus becomes normative, which, in many cases, is also viewed as moral. That is, it’s not just the way things usually are; it’s the way things should be. As we learn culture, we not only learn to take the peculiar practices of our people as normative (patterned), we also learn them as normal and correct. As we acquire culture we become, by necessity not by choice, ethnocentric. That is, we learn to see ourselves (ethnos) as if we were in the center (centric) of the world and everyone else were different. In many if not most cases,

P l a n n e d Pa u s e 3 - 2

M y c u l T u r a l r u T s — a n D h o W T o B r e a k o u T o f T h e M

Instructions: Think about the cultural ruts you have but avoid your personal bad habits. (Cultural ruts are shared.) Then answer the questions below.

Part 1: List at least two of your cultural ruts here. Explain each briefly.

Part 2: Select one of your cultural ruts. Plan a strategy for pulling yourself out of this cultural rut. Make sure that you apply the concepts from the book to your response.

So, it’s time to take a Planned Pause for you to think about your deepest cultural ruts, and write them down. Try to think beyond the obvious ones—the “bad habits” you have accumulated in life. They are important, but you are aware of them and many are personal habits not cultural comforts. Most of our cultural ruts escape our conscious attention, so that’s why I’d like you to think about what you normally ignore.

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48 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

seeing others as different and ourselves as in the center of our world produces judgments about others as not only different but strange and inferior (more on that in later chapters).

Our own ethnocentrism is thus very hard to see until we step beyond our cultural comforts. Take this example: On what side of the road do people drive in your country? If I ask this in many countries, people will respond by saying “the right side of the road.” What about people in England, the Bahamas, or Japan? If you have ever been there you know that they drive on the left side of the road, but it feels like it’s the wrong side if you are accustomed to living where people drive (and walk) on the right side. The reverse is true for those who grew up driving (and walking) on the left. Try to switch and your head will end up very confused. So many people get confused in London that in the central city each pedestrian crosswalk is labeled to remind visitors from right-side-driving countries to look to their right before crossing—the opposite of what their “instincts” tell them to do. This is a quick example of how norms are understood as normal. When we stay in our comfort zones, we rarely recognize this isomorphism; when we leave our comfort zones we find that what’s normal to us is very strange to another, hence this book’s subtitle: “Many Things You Know About Culture (But Might Not Realize).”

One of the great things that happens to us when we leave our comfort zones is that our awareness gets stimulated. Daily life is full of new things to witness, of differences. We suddenly observe the sounds, smells, and sights that in our own context we would ignore because they have been filed away as normative. If you’ve ever traveled somewhere that is very unlike your normal social contexts, you probably can relate to what I am saying. Remember, our brains are designed to pay attention to newness; when we encounter new- ness, our mind gets busy figuring out what’s going on. Some people thrive in new settings whereas others shy away from them; still others, like cultural anthropologists, are profes- sional outsiders. We expose ourselves regularly to discomfort zones; we learn by observing all that is new—because we perceive it as different—when we leave the tried and true for the

Crossing a Street in London: Visitors from Abroad Tend to Look Left and Easily Get Hit by Drivers Coming from the Right. Changing Deeply Ingrained Patterns is Hard Even When We Are Consciously Aware of Them.

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 49

untried and new. It’s a great technique because our data, almost literally, jumps out at us. The newness strikes us; we are aware of it because it does not fit the patterns we have internal- ized unconsciously. As we have seen before, this is how our brains work. We pay attention to newness, work hard to identify new patterns around us, and then store these away as cultural knowledge. When we encounter newness it is often a difficult task to understand what’s going on. For adults, this is often “discomforting” because we feel inadequate and often anxious, perhaps even stupid. Anthropologists studying different societies are often perceived by people we study as if we were children; we are treated as such because we do not know how to properly talk, act, and think in the unfamiliar culture. As I have discussed throughout this book, when individuals go against the cultural grain, it causes disruption and unease among members of that society. So a common way for cultural insiders to handle foreign anthropologists is to treat us as if we were children, people culturally accepted as those who are still learning the correct ways to think, talk, and behave.

Anthropologists are, of course, not the only people who confront cultural discomfort on a regular basis. You do too. No matter how tightly you stick to your comfort zones, you actually travel across cultural spaces all the time and do so nearly effortlessly. You are multicultural already; you start your day in the cultural comfort of your home and then you leave it for work, school, or some other activity. Each of these places involves practicing at least some different cultural norms than those you practice elsewhere. At home you have the privacy to do things that you probably would not dare do in public, so what’s normal for you at home is going to differ from what’s normal for you outside home. And at work or school you are likely to be subject to a series of rules and regulations that you are thank- ful you don’t have to abide by at home. There are also the peculiar traditions of different groups you might belong to. For example, if you are a man who never wears makeup in everyday life, you might feel completely normal painting your face the colors of a favorite sports team on game night.

Different contexts have different norms, and you don’t necessarily see them as strange or contradictory in the least. They are still normal—normal for you, that is, and for those with whom you share these contexts and their customs. I know of children of immigrants who daily cross and re-cross cultural comfort zone borders. As I discuss more thoroughly in Chapter 6, they leave home where they practice one language, eat certain comfort foods, and negotiate correctly their body language with everyone else. And they go to school, where they practice flawlessly another language, eat different comfort foods, and negotiate a com- pletely different yet also correct body language with their peers. Studies on such bilingual, bicultural individuals indicate that they are more culturally flexible than others who learn one language and don’t cross such significant cultural borders (Burns et al. 2003; Fennel et al. 2007). They may be more flexible, but we all flex. We alter our thinking and behavior based on the context in which we find ourselves. We can learn new tricks, but we need to put ourselves where we are exposed to them. That’s the hard part. We have this incredible cultural ability, but it comes with that need, that desire for comfort. Think of this cultural ability in terms of muscles. The more you flex your cultural muscles, the easier it becomes, but when you do not use the muscles, they atrophy.

Routines, norms, and comfort all coalesce in what we call our traditions. What are traditions? They are culturally specific ways of behaving and believing that are shared by people. The more people share traditions, the more people perpetuate them and the more likely they will live on across generations. Traditions can also be specific to families and are really important to a family’s sense of identity, of people belonging together. This is one reason why people are frequently emotional about traditions and treat them as possessions.

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50 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

They are like family secrets that, if shared, would no longer be special. Traditions not only are protected by families; they are among the most basic of building blocks for larger group- ings of people: neighborhoods and cities, ethnic associations and religious groups, nations and countries all claim and protect their traditions. An interesting thing about traditions is that they both foster a strong sense of belonging among those who practice them and they distinguish practitioners from people who do not share the tradition. They simultaneously create feelings of “us” and “them.” Because we do our traditions differently from yours, we know that you are different even more than we know that we are similar. If you start adopt- ing our traditions, we could welcome you into our tent—but this does not always happen. Often, when “others” become more like us, we feel we may “lose” our culture; we don’t feel as unique as we did before. Traditions are “things,” right? If they are things, then we can lose them, and as we lose them we lose our culture. Thinking this way is common but problematic because, once again, it treats culture as a thing (a possession) when we actually do culture (actions).

Since we give these rituals the label of traditions, we also think that they have deep roots. Such reasoning gives us the feeling of continuity over time even if the roots are truly shallow. You’ve probably heard people say something like, “We’ve been doing it this way since before anyone can remember” or “Their way of life has not changed in thousands of years.” Yet this is often more feeling than truth. For quite a few years now, social scientists have been documenting the fact that a really large percentage of seemingly old, deep tradi- tions are actually quite shallow (e.g., Anderson 1991; Barth 1975; Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983). Instead of just citing scholarship here, I think you’ll be more familiar with the famous Thanksgiving turkey tradition. According to this classic story, a woman is starting to cook her family’s Thanksgiving dinner. In her family the tradition is not to stuff the turkey (as is the case in many other families) but, rather, to cut the uncooked turkey in half and roast one half. She knows this is her family’s tradition, but why this odd tradition? So she asks her mother, who tells her, “I don’t know why. This is just the way my mother did it.” So the woman asks her grandmother and her grandmother tells her, “I don’t know why. That is just the way my mother did it.” Now the woman is lucky since her great- grandmother is still alive, so she asks her about the tradition. Her great-grandmother says, “I did that because my oven was too small to fit a whole turkey inside at one time.” The turkey tradition story illustrates in a fun way that traditions are invented and that many “deep” traditions are really shallow, yet we hold on to them fiercely. Why? It’s culture as comfort again. Traditions help us to reproduce the very cultural connections to others that make us feel connected. The key is not how deep or shallow these traditions are but, rather, how they help people feel community. Eating particular foods during these tradi- tions is important since, as we have seen, we acquire some of our comfort foods this way.

We are born capable of adopting any tradition; we learn the traditions of those people around us who practice them and we then reproduce them ourselves. Why? It’s tradition! Now that you can contextualize traditions as the paths others have cut for us, hopefully you can see, too, that traditions, while comforting, may not always be useful to keep practic- ing. Sometimes it is important to exercise more our cultural flexibility than our cultural comforts. A case in point is traditions that, while useful to build cultural comforts, are harmful to at least some individuals. Most every society has such traditions; in the United States fraternity hazing has been banned on many campuses owing to the occasional death or other physical/mental torment inflicted on initiates. Classic examples outside the United States are female genital mutilation and foot binding. Such traditions often persist despite efforts to stop them not because they cannot be halted quickly (foot binding in China is a

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 51

good example of an old tradition that ended rapidly), but because, among other reasons, so many people reproduce traditions day in and day out that we are invested in them and their cultural comforts.

conclusion

Childhood is the period in life when we most learn culture. We learn how to behave and think in ways that align with, and thus are intelligi- ble to, those with whom we interact. We learn through interactions, which we store as patterns in our brains; the more we follow these patterns, the more comfortable we are but the less flex- ible we become; we also become “us” and oth- ers become “them.” Because children are born dependent upon caregivers for their survival, they cannot stray too far from the caregivers’ customs, from relatives’ well-worn paths. Chil- dren are often thought of as rule-breakers, peo- ple whose “natural” tendency is to do what they want and thus have to be corralled into doing what their parents and society want. Quite the reverse is overwhelmingly true. Children look for, detect, and enforce rules more than they break them. It makes their lives more comfortable than when rules are unambiguous because in early life there are so many rules and so many people to learn about. Comfort arises through repeated sensory experiences that quickly become wired in our brains. These enable us to interpret what others do and also predict what they are likely to do. When we are able to predict what a person we interact with will do, albeit completely sub- consciously, we develop foundational trust. This type of trust is not the same as trusting that the person will be good to us. Rather, it’s the type of trust in such phrases as, “I trust that you will get your work done on time.” In other words, it’s predictability that is a foundation, I argue, for all types of more complex trusting, like trusting that someone will look out for our best interests and not tell our secrets.

When we feel culturally comfortable, we do not consciously link this comfort to predict- ability, but this association should now be easy to see. Think of the greater degree of comfort (ease) we feel when faced with natural disasters that are predictable—hurricanes, for example—versus those that give no warning, such as earthquakes and tornados. Another way to look at comfort

and predictability is by thinking about things that make us nervous, such as public speaking. When we practice our speech over and over, particu- larly if we do so in front of a friendly audience, we typically grow less frightened. Why? Because we have increased the predictability of the event. We cannot control all the circumstances of the event, but we can control at least some and this means we can feel more at ease.

A great irony of the human condition, however, is that as we learn the cultural patterns around us, we quickly lose a lot of the very flex- ibility to adapt to different and changing circum- stances that culture affords us, the flexibility that is our greatest evolutionary gift. For example, new- borns, though they already prefer the language of those they have listened to while in the womb, still pay attention to all sounds they hear. But by the end of their first year, they pay attention over- whelmingly to the sounds of what will become their native language(s) (Begley 2007; Eliot 1999; Gopnik 2009; Werker et al. 1981). We begin life with enormous flexibility and adaptability but as we adapt, we ineluctably lose this infinite pos- sibility (but great uncertainty) for the comforts of culture. And these comforts vary from people to people. That is, although the human condi- tion requires that we learn culture and that we learn culture in similar ways, what we learn varies tremendously, both within any given society and between societies. And this makes all the differ- ence—at least, if we believe that cultural learning ends with childhood. I do not see it that way, but I do recognize that the cultural pathways we walk as children make it more difficult and certainly more uncomfortable to walk new pathways later on. Well-worn paths become rutted so they take more effort to abandon. That said, it is not good to only emphasize the loss to our flexibility that typically occurs as we learn cultural competencies. We are still incredibly inventive; we create things we have never seen or heard all the time. We can and should continue to flex our cultural muscles. This, too, is our evolutionary heritage in culture.

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52 Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too

Much as young children do not merely memorize language, but use words and grammatical rules to create sentences they’ve never heard before, we take the building blocks of culture and build new cultural environments all the time. So culture is no straitjacket we put on early in life; however, culture is about comfort. The more comfort we need, the fewer risks we are likely to take.

Yes, culture is about comfort and about comfortable ruts, but this does not mean we are condemned to repeat the past. If culture remains a mystery to us or we treat it largely as some- thing we acquire and have to defend, then we will ignore the most incredible aspect of cul- ture—that we continue to experience and acquire new cultural competencies throughout life. We are all multicultural and we can improve upon our multicultural abilities. However, most of us have come to see ourselves as monocultural not multicultural. Others are multicultural (which means they don’t know who they really are) while we are monocultural, right? Before reading this book, didn’t you think of yourself as having one culture? The more we embrace our cultural flex- ibility, our continued capacity to learn new cul- tural practices, the more we empower ourselves culturally. To do so, we have to see culture as our learned, shared understanding of interrelation- ships. Even at very advanced ages, we can still build synapses when we expose ourselves to new ideas and new contexts or reconnect syn- apses that have been pruned (Begley 2007; Seung 2012). Even late in life, the brain still is doing the same games of scrutinizing what we encounter: Is it the same as before? Travel down the well-worn path. Different? Build a new path. What keeps the brain churning is newness. That means that throughout life we can continue to grow cultur- ally. We just have to be willing to take a few risks beyond our comfort zones.

It is the end of the chapters in which I have laid out the thesis of the whole book—that cul- ture is about comfort—so it is a good place to pause to check in with your understanding. Please stop reading and take a few moments to consider these questions: What does “culture as comfort” mean to you now? Does viewing culture from the perspective of comfort differ from how you thought about culture before? If so, how? What questions do you have that you’d like answered?

One question I anticipate that many of you might have is, “What about individual personali- ties? Aren’t they important to how we think and behave?” That is an important question, and I have not tried to be sneaky by avoiding the issue of personality. Obviously people do vary a lot by what we refer to as personality, although that term, much like culture, is shorthand for a com- plex concept (Holmes 2011; Sroufe et al. 2005). Personality certainly adds an additional layer of intricacy to understanding and predicting human behavior. However, whereas culture is the term we use to talk about what people share, person- ality is a term we use more to talk about how we differ as individuals despite sharing culture. People can have very different personalities and yet, when speaking with one another, share the same expectation about how far apart their faces should be from each other (an expectation that varies considerably around the world). So while it makes sense to talk about one person hav- ing a personality, it does not make sense to talk about only one person having a culture. Culture is definitely learned and shared. Personality, on the other hand, is both inherited genetically and affected by experience, but leans more toward the inherited side than does culture (e.g., Eysenck 2006; Holmes 2011). Both culture and personal- ity are affected by interacting with the environ- ment—nature and nurture.

Why, then, do we sometimes have trouble distinguishing between cultural similarities and personality similarities? There have been several attempts to understand groups of people as if they had personality types. For instance, years ago some anthropologists, referred to as the Culture and Personality School (e.g., Benedict 1959), tried to categorize peoples (they used the term “cultures”) according to personality types. They labeled some peoples as more restrained or more fun loving, for example. Decades later psychologist Geert Hofst- ede (1980) began somewhat similar work. Using large surveys conducted in many countries, he sought to identify certain widely distributed value orientations within populations (for instance, risk taking versus risk aversion and individual independence versus interdependence). Hofstede and others (e.g., Hofstede and McCrae 2004) who have pursued this type of research generalize their findings into what they call “national cultures.”

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Chapter 3 • Culture as Comfort Is the Way Our Brains Develop Too 53

While I understand these researchers’ objectives, I also see how their work can muddy the work of truly understanding culture—and that is the primary objective of this book.

If you are now at a point where you are beginning to feel like you understand culture better, then I am really pleased. I do not expect that any readers will immediately change their perspective because the “culture as thing” view is one that you’ve lived with all your life. Trans- formations often take time. They usually take a

lot of effort as well. Think of this book as taking you through a process that will, I hope, transform your thinking about culture. It is then a type of rite of passage, kind of like the rituals used to cel- ebrate children’s entry into adulthood. Rites of passage are a cultural tool to help people trans- form their customary ways of doing things and their social statuses. You’re in the middle stage. By the end of the book, I hope that you’ll have gone through this transformation and perma- nently leave behind your old view of culture.

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