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How Nurture Shapes Experieince and Experience Shapes Your Brain
In developmental circles, nurture has become a label for life experiences that occur after conception. Experience or nurture dramatically alters the information entering your nervous system - you and I literally see what we are taught to see. Our experience of the world and the signals we allow into conscious awareness can easily be limited by past experience and even by a simple, in the moment, switch in focus. A well-known experiment illustrates this and, of course, can be seen on YouTube. A videotape of about ten people, divided evenly into black and white shirts and throwing a white ball amongst themselves is shown to an audience who is instructed to count the number of times people in white shirts catch the ball. As the audience dutifully focuses on the white shirts, a funny thing happens. A person dressed in a dark, gorilla suit walks through the group from one side to another. At the end of a minute or so, the audience is asked how many people saw 11 catches, then 12, then 15 etc. And finally, as the audience is proudly reporting their scores, the question is asked, “how many people saw the gorilla”. About half the people who watch the tape miss the gorilla all together! 50%, 1 in every two people did not see a 200 - pound man walking in a gorilla suit through a small group of people.
If you have not seen the video, let me be clear. This is not like where’s Waldo – where the gorilla is a small part of a very large chaotic picture. This is a small group of people, each clear and well defined, and an obvious gorilla in their midst. In the debriefing afterwards, most people are simply shocked at their ability to screen out blatant information simply by being prompted to focus on something else. Imagine how this plays out socially when we are taught to focus on specific characteristics in individuals or groups. The experiment raises intriguing questions. How much of the world is each of us missing and how do we build a global human community when the human nervous system is built to screen out and prioritize information?
25 Years ago, I saw this with my own eyes – or I should say, I didn’t see this with my own eyes. I had traveled to Tanzania to work in a hospital at the foot of Mount Kilimanjaro. In Moshi, the largest mountain in Africa was an omnipresent god, the center of life. When I arrived, the skies were overcast and the mountain peaks hidden behind thick, white, clouds. For days, I walked the dirt roads of Moshi peering into the sky trying to see the mountain. Finally, on my fourth day, the skies cleared and I looked and looked for the mountain but still could not see it. Eventually, I realized that my focus was wrong – in my small world, the peaks of really big mountains, like the White Mountains of New Hampshire, are seen where the clouds begin. The famous snow peaks of Kilimanjaro soar almost five miles into the sky and even though I was staring right at the snow covered top I could not see it. My brain had been trained to see white puffy images at this level as clouds. Period. When my brain finally adjusted to this new reality, the enormity and majesty of the mountain took my breath away.
Selective Attention Limits Your Ability to See
I could not see a massive mountain right before my eyes, just as the participants viewing the ball toss experiment could not see a life size gorilla walking deliberately through a small crowd of people - this mental process is called selective attention and it is a normal and natural part of the way our brains work. Since this is a natural part of how human beings perceive the world, the task of learning how to bridge difference becomes even more complicated. How do we notice and attend to difference when we might not even see it? In the Hollywood movie, Maid in Manhatten, Jennifer Lopez plays Marissa, a single Latino mom, supporting her mother and son by working as a maid in a high end, New York hotel. Ralph Fienes (aka Voldemort) plays Chris, a dapper, upper class, politician staying in the hotel while campaigning for the Senate. The first time their paths cross she is cleaning his hotel bathroom. He distractedly enters the bathrooom and starts to pee before noticing that Marissa is in the room. The scene is dramatic - she is crouched on the floor, cleaning; he is standing at the urinal, towering over her. Marissa’s maid uniform identifies her as a member of the lower, working class. Having little experience with members of a lower class, Chris barely registers the awkward interaction. Later in the movie, Chris again runs into Marissa, but this time she is decked out in an expensive suit from one of the wealthy hotel guests (how she got it is a long story). In her maid uniform, Marissa was well camouflaged, blending in with the other incidental things in the bathroom, but when she put on the Gucci suit she suddenly looked more familiar and comfortable to Chris. Seeing her for the first time, he is immediately smitten. Their brief affair ends when the wealthy owner of the clothes Marissa borrowed reports her to management. Visibly confused and upset, Chris, asks Marissa if any of it was real. She retells the story of their first meeting in the bathroom when he didn’t notice her at all. He counters with the argument that he was distracted and embarrassed by doing his business in front of her. Valid points made by both. So, is Chris the open-minded man capable of seeing across vast socioeconomic differences? Or is he like most of us – seeing others more easily, clearly, and safely when they enter our emotional comfort zone?
Improving Your Ability to See Requires Intention, Motivation and Immersion
By the time you are an adult, your brain has been trained for decades to see the world through a particular cultural lens. Improving your ability to see difference requires intention, motivation, and immersion even when there is little threat involved. Two of my daughter’s closest friends are identical twins - when I first met them it was impossible for me to see their differences. They are both on the short side, with angular, athletic bodies and shoulder length, blonde hair (occasionally, one wears pony-tails, the other pig tails, to help differentiate them – not a big help). They are both polite, silly, and care deeply about animals. In the beginning, being unable to differentiate them deeply disturbed me.
On a weekend trip to Maine, I saw each of them clearly for the first time. It was like looking into a Magic Eye book the moment your eyes focus at just the right distance and a three-dimensional image pops out of the page. The Memorial Day trip provided the immersion and perspective I needed to see past their superficial similarities. On a hike up Mount Battie, I noticed that Shelby liked to walk ahead of the pack and that Melissa preferred to walk beside my daughter, chatting constantly. Melissa and my daughter were attached at the hip, laughing and giggling, even as they scrambled up a steep rock face. When they reached the top of one challenging pile of boulders, they found Shelby already sitting on a huge rock, arms wrapped around her knees, appreciating the breathtaking view of the harbor - comfortable and confident in her own personal space. By the end of the weekend, I knew these two girls in a deeper and clearer way. I knew Shelby loved chocolate and Melissa hated it. I knew that Shelby was just a little taller than Melissa and that Melissa had a small scar over her eye from a fall she had taken as a toddler. I have never confused the two again. So even two identical twins, who began life from one egg and one sperm – the exact same genetic code, are wonderfully different people because of the experiences they each have had. And with motivation and experience my nervous system was able to see and appreciate the differences between the two.
