The Social Animal (16 page)

Once again, he called it a day and went to bed. It turned out to be the smartest thing he could possibly do. There’s a controversy among scientists about what sleep accomplishes, but many researchers believe that during sleep the brain consolidates memories, organizes the things that have been learned that day, and reinforces the changes in the brain that have been ushered in by the previous day’s activity. The German scientist Jan Born gave a group of people a series of math problems and asked them to discover the rule necessary to solve them. The people who slept for eight hours between work sessions were twice as likely to solve the problems as those who worked straight through. Research by Robert Stickgold and others suggests that sleep improves memory by at least 15 percent.

Harold lay in bed after his night’s sleep, watching the sunlight shimmer off the treetops outside his window. His mind wandered, thinking about his day, his paper, his friends, and a random series of other things. In these sorts of early-morning states, people’s right-brain hemispheres are unusually active. That means his mind wandered over remote domains, not tightly focused on one thing. His mental state was loose and casual. Then something happened.

If scientists had his brain wired up at this moment, they would have noticed a jump in the alpha waves emanating from the right hemisphere. Joy Bhattacharya of the University of London has found that these waves jump about eight seconds before a person has the insight necessary to solve a puzzle. A second before an insight, according to Mark Jung-Beeman and John Kounios, the area that processes visual information goes dark, shutting out distraction. Three hundred milliseconds before insight there is a spike of gamma rhythm, the highest frequency produced by the brain. There is a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the right ear. This is an area, Jung-Beeman and Kounios argue, that draws together pieces of information from wildly different areas of the brain.

Harold experienced a blast of insight, his “Eureka!” moment. Something big had just burst forth from inside him. His eyes went wide. He felt an intense and instantaneous burst of ecstasy. Yes, that’s it! His mind had leaped across some uncharted void and integrated his thinking in a new way. He knew in an instant that he had solved his problem, that he had a theme for his paper, before he could even really say what the solution was. Patterns that had not fit together suddenly felt as if they did. It was a sensation more than a thought, a feeling of almost religious contact. As Robert Burton wrote in his book
On Being Certain
, “Feelings of
knowing
,
correctness
,
conviction
and
certainty
aren’t deliberate conclusions and conscious choices. They are mental sensations that
happen
to us.”

His core insight involved motivation. Why did Achilles risk his life? Why did the men at Thermopylae lay down theirs? What did Pericles seek for himself and for Athens? What does Harold seek for himself at school? Why does he want his team to win state championships?

The answer to all these questions is a Greek word he had come across in his reading:
thumos
. All his life Harold had been surrounded by people with a set of socially approved motivations: to make money, to get good grades, to get into a good college. But none of these really explained why Harold did what he did, or why the Greek heroes did what they did.

The ancient Greeks had a different motivational structure.
Thumos
was the desire for recognition, the desire to have people recognize your existence, not only now but for all time.
Thumos
included the desire for eternal fame—to attract admiration and to be worthy of admiration in a way that was deeper than mere celebrity. Harold’s culture didn’t really have a word for that desire, but this Greek word helped explain Harold to himself.

All his life, he had been playing games in his imagination. He had imagined himself as a boy winning the World Series, throwing the perfect pass, saving his favorite teachers from mortal peril. And in each fantasy, his triumph had been deliriously witnessed by family, friends, and the world around him. This fantasizing, in its childish way, was the product of
thumos
, the desire for recognition and union, which underlay the other drives for money and success.

The thymotic world was a more heroic world than the bourgeois, careerist one Harold saw all around him. In the modern world in which he lived, the common assumption is that all human beings are attached at the earliest and lowest level. All human beings are descended from common ancestors and share certain primitive traits. But the Greeks tended to assume the opposite, that human beings were united at the highest level: There are certain ideal essences, and the closer one is to taking possession of the eternal excellence, the closer one is to this common humanity.
Thumos
is the drive to rise up to those heights. It is the dream of the perfect success, when all that is best within oneself blends with all that is eternal in the universe in perfect synchronicity.

Harold’s insight consisted of taking the vocabulary of Greek motivation—
thumos, arete
, eros—and applying it to his life. Harold was really combining two idea spaces, making the Greek world more comprehensible to him and his own world more heroic.

He began furiously writing notes to himself for his paper, describing how the thymotic drive, this drive for recognition, explained all sorts of high-school behavior. He made connections he had never made before and mixed together old information in new ways. At times he felt as though the paper was writing itself. The words just poured out of him unbidden. When he was deeply in the rush of it, he almost felt like he didn’t exist. Only the task existed, and it was happening to him, not because of him.

Editing and polishing the paper was still not easy, but it came. Ms. Taylor was delighted by the product. It was a little overheated in places, and parts were painfully earnest. But Harold’s rapture came across in every paragraph. The process of writing this paper had taught him how to think. His insight gave him a new way to understand himself and his world.

Ms. Taylor had guided Harold through a method that had him surfing in and out of his unconscious, getting the conscious and unconscious processes to work together—first mastering core knowledge, then letting that knowledge marinate playfully in his mind, then willfully trying to impose order on it, then allowing the mind to consolidate and merge the data, then returning and returning until some magical insight popped into his consciousness, and then riding that insight to a finished product. The process was not easy, but each ounce of effort and each moment of frustration and struggle pushed the internal construction project another little step. By the end, he was seeing the world around him in a new way. There was, as the mathematician Henri Poincaré observed, “an unsuspected kinship ... between facts, long known, but wrongly believed to be strangers to one another.” Harold no longer had to work to apply qualities like
thumos
to the world around him; they simply became the automatic categories of his mind, the way he perceived new situations.

When he was in kindergarten and first grade, Harold struggled to learn to read, but then it came naturally to him. Suddenly reading wasn’t about piecing together words; he could concentrate on the meanings. As a senior in high school, he had similarly internalized some Greek thought, and now he could automatically apply it to his life moment by moment.

He would go off to college and he would sit in classes as required, but he understood those classes would be only the first stage of his learning. He would have to spend nights writing random thoughts in his journal. He would organize his thoughts on the floor. He would have to stew and struggle and then maybe a few times in his life, while taking a shower or walking to the grocery store, some insight would come to him and make all the difference. This would be his method for escaping passive institutional learning. This would be the way he would build for himself a mind that is not stuck in an inherited rut, but which jumps from vantage point to vantage point, applying different patterns to new situations to see what works and what doesn’t, what will go together and what will not, what is likely to emerge from the confusion of reality and what is not likely to emerge. This would be his path to wisdom and success.

NORMS

ERICA
,
WHO
WOULD
SPEND
SO
MUCH
OF
HER
LIFE
INTERTWINED
with Harold, started out in a very different place than he. At age ten, she almost got arrested.

She and her mom had moved into a friend’s apartment in a public-housing project. Their new neighborhood had a charter school called the New Hope School, which was in a new building, with new basketball hoops with nets, and with new art studios. The students wore elegant maroon and gray uniforms. Erica was desperate to go there.

Her mother took her down to the social welfare agency, and waited in a hallway for over an hour. When they finally got in, the caseworker told them that Erica couldn’t even qualify for the lottery to go there because she didn’t have legal residence in the neighborhood.

The social workers spent their days besieged by impossible requests. To make their lives manageable, they developed a brusque and peremptory way of talking. They kept their eyes focused down at their papers, and sped through the supplicants who came streaming through the doors. They spoke in municipal-government jargon that nobody else could understand and challenge. Their first instinct was always to say no.

The moms had no confidence in settings like that—in an office with people in business dress. Half the time, they couldn’t understand what the caseworker was saying and were afraid of revealing how little they knew about the rules. They put on a mask of apathy and sullenness to disguise their nervousness. Most of the time, they just accepted whatever judgment the caseworker rendered and went home. They’d make up some story to explain their humiliation for their friends later on.

Erica’s mom was following the pattern. They’d moved into this neighborhood three months before, but the truth is they had no legal status there. It was a friend’s apartment, and Erica’s mom didn’t want to raise a fuss about the school and risk getting evicted from her home. When the caseworker kept repeating that she had “no authorization” to be in the school district, Erica’s mom stood up and got ready to leave.

Erica refused to budge. She could already imagine the way her mom would be on the bus ride home—cursing the caseworker, spewing out all the anger she should have let loose right here in the office. Plus, the caseworker was a bitch—chewing gum, looking down on them. She’d barely looked up from her papers to make even a show of eye contact. She hadn’t even tried to smile.

Erica gripped the chair as her mom stood and headed toward the exit. “I wanna go to New Hope,” she said stubbornly.

“You have no legal residence in the district,” the caseworker repeated. “You have no authorization.”

“I wanna go to New Hope.” Erica had no argument, no logic, just some furious sense that her mother shouldn’t take this shit lying down. Her mother, now alarmed, pleaded with her to get up and leave. Erica wouldn’t go. She gripped the chair harder. Her mom tugged. Erica wouldn’t release. Her mom hissed at her in quiet fury, desperate not to make a scene. Erica wouldn’t budge. Her mom yanked her, and the chair fell over with Erica still in it.

“You want me to call the cops?” the caseworker hissed. “You want to go across the street?” The juvenile-detention center was across the street.

Erica held on and soon three or four people were tugging at her at once, including some sort of security guard. “I wanna go to New Hope!” She was crying now, her face a mask of tears and anger. Eventually they got her loose. The rent-a-cop screamed at her. Her mom took the furious little girl back home.

Her mom didn’t scold her or even say a word. They rode home silently. That night her mom washed Erica’s hair in the sink, and they talked sweetly about other things.

ERICA’S
MOTHER
,
AMY
, was the most downwardly mobile member of her family. Her parents had emigrated from China, and all her other relatives were doing well. But Amy suffered with recurrent long bouts of mania and depression. When her spirits were up, she had phenomenal energy and she’d be off doing the model-minority thing. In her early twenties she spent months each at several different colleges, training academies, and learning centers. She trained as a medical technician. She learned computer software in the hopes of becoming an IT professional. She would work two jobs and just plug away with a doggedness she said she’d inherited from her ancient Chinese peasant stock.

During these prosperous months, she’d take Erica out to the all-you-could-eat buffet at Golden Corral and buy her new clothing and shoes. She’d also try to run her life. She’d tell Erica what to wear and which of her friends she wasn’t permitted to see (most of them—they carried germs). She assigned Erica extra reading so she’d “run ahead” of the other children. Amy even taught her Chinese calligraphy, with brushes she’d kept packed away in the closet. There was a lightness and rhythm to her brushstrokes that Erica hadn’t known her mother possessed. “When you do calligraphy, you must think in a different way,” her mom would tell her. For a couple of years, Erica even took skating lessons.

But then there were the down times. Amy would go from slave driver to nullity in a matter of days, leaving Erica to play the role of mother. It was normal to find bottles of Bacardi and Manischewitz Cream and weed and mirrors with cocaine dust around the apartment. Amy wouldn’t shower or wear deodorant. Nothing at home would get done. When Erica was a baby, and depression struck, her mom would put Pepsi in her baby bottle just to get her to shut up. Later, she would feed her Cheerios for dinner. They’d go for days on a diet of bologna from the corner bodega. When she was nine, Erica learned how to call a cab so she could take her mother to the emergency room for what she told everybody were heart palpitations. She learned to live in the dark, because her mom would tape shut the curtains.