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Young in mind: Saying no to caricatures of aging
I recently became a grandfather. This was a joyous event in our family, and my first emotion was indeed joy -- for the new parents, for the healthy baby boy. But I confess that my second reaction -- and not far behind -- was much more conflicted: I'm too young to be a grandfather, I found myself thinking. Don't grandparents sit on park benches and drive slowly? Within weeks I found myself upping my cardio routine and modifying my diet a bit, with the idea of shedding a couple of pounds. I should do more sit-ups, too. Who knows, maybe I'll even train for a triathlon. There are two schools of thought regarding aging.
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You’ve changed somehow. Is that a new turnip?
I spent about an hour yesterday at the National Gallery of Art, mesmerized by the Italian artist Giuseppe Arcimboldo’s paintings of human faces. They are not realistic depictions of faces, though some were meant as portraits of public figures. They are instead composites of familiar objects like flowers, fruit or fish and crustaceans—each rendered with scientific accuracy. Close examination reveals the intricate interplay of these objects, but at first glance they are unmistakably faces, with noses and ears and hair and chins. They are quite surreal, which is remarkable given that Arcimboldo created them in the 16th century. Arcimboldo clearly knew something about how we perceive faces.
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The logic of a psychopath
Before his execution in the Florida electric chair in 1989, Ted Bundy confessed to murdering 30 young women, typically by bludgeoning them to death and often raping them as well. He almost certainly had many more victims than that, perhaps more than 100. But he avoided suspicion for much of his five-year killing spree, in part because he was good-looking and clean-cut, a college grad and a law student. Despite this outward appearance, Bundy was socially clueless. He was introverted and by his own description had no sense of how to get along with people. Near the end of his life he described himself this way: "I didn't know what made things tick.
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Border Bias: Mapping Risk and Safety
I once lived within a short walking distance of a state line, and I had a friend who lived right on the avenue that was the dividing line. That meant she could be cutting her lawn while watching her neighbor cut his lawn in a different state. Living on a border loses its novelty after a while, but visitors always find it intriguing. They seem to expect the Berlin Wall or some other concrete demarcation of an abstract political division. This curiosity arises because of cognitive mapmaking, which is different from regular mapmaking. Cartographers measure and plot distances over land and water, but when we make a mental map, we rely on categories to help us keep things straight.
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Brandishing our inner talisman
Mexicans call it mal de ojo, and in Brazil it's olho gordo. Turks call it the Eye of Medusa and ward it off with the ubiquitous talisman called nazar. American Jews use the Yiddish phrase Keyn aynhoreh to counter the jinx. Cultures all over the world, dating back to antiquity, have some version of the "evil eye" -- the poisonous stare of those who envy others' good fortune. We recognize these beliefs as magical thinking, of course, but as with any superstition that is so widespread, belief in the evil eye raises some intriguing questions: What psychological purpose do these beliefs serve, and what are their roots in human nature?
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Colorblind? Or blind to injustice?
In 1896, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a devastating blow to the cause of racial equality, ruling 7-1 in Plessy v. Ferguson that "separate but equal" was the law of the land. The lone dissenter in that landmark case was Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave owner, who bitterly predicted an era of inequality and racial intolerance in America. History proved Harlan right, and we now know what followed as the Jim Crow era. Indeed it took almost 60 more years for the court to begin setting things right by discarding the "separate but equal" doctrine.
