HW: Levine, Robert and Wolff, Ellen. Social Time: The Heartbeat of Culture. Psychology Today. 1985.
1. What are some of the unseen ways that the tree below has been shaped?
There are two general categories of influences on the tree: Nature and Nurture.
The Nature and Nurture Dynamic
The tree begins with a seed that houses the tree's genetic material, an algorithm for how the tree should grow. But the rules of the algorithm interact with the environment that the seed lands in. For example, the tree's genes are programmed to grow towards the sunlight, but that depends upon what is around the tree and what happens to the tree.
- the light it receives
- its surroundings like buildings and other trees
- the soil composition
- pollution
- animals and insects nesting/affecting in the tree
- And the tree is also affected by human activity:
- pruning
- fertilizing
- people driving by the tree with trucks hitting the branches
The poem below was written by Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman who was a sociology major from Harvard. (She also wrote and read The Hill We Climb, the poem at the 2021 Presidential Inauguration). You can read more about her and hear her recite her poetry on this 2021 post from the NY Magazine.
Arborescent I
by
Amanda Gorman
We are
Arborescent-
What goes
Unseen
Is at the very
Root of ourselves.
Distance can
Distort our deepest
Sense
Of who
We are,
Leave Us
Warped
& wasted
As winter's
Wind. We will
Not Walk
From what
We've borne
We would
Keep it
For a while
Sit silent &
Swinging on its branches
Like a child
Refusing to come
Home. We would
Keep.
Knowing how
We would
Again
Give up
Our World
For this one.
2b. What are some things that "go unseen" that are "at the very root of ourselves"?
Like Gorman explains in her poem, people are like trees as well. Humans are born with biological nature - genes that provide an aptitude and a road map for growth. In other words, all living creatures from trees to humans are dependent on both nature and nurture. But humans are affected by their surroundings - their environment including both the physical environment and the social environment. Similar to trees, many animals are born with instincts and abilities to survive on their own.
Human Nature is to be Nurtured
But people are different than trees and animals in profound ways. If a tree's seed falls to the ground and takes root, left to itself, it grows. But if a human baby is born, left to itself, it is unlikely to survive. In other words, humans are deeply interdependent on other humans to survive. In other words, it is human nature to be nurtured. Humans need to be cared for, and that is why we are born with a biology and a psychology designed for social interaction.
Blueprint by Nicholas ChristakisNicholas Christakis is a sociologist and medical doctor. In his 2019 book, Blueprint, he explains that humans are born with a nature that makes us be nurtured. This is what Christakis calls the "social suite:"“At the core of all societies, I will show, is the social suite:
(1) The capacity to have and recognize individual identity
(2) Love for partners and offspring
(3) Friendship
(4) Social networks
(5) Cooperation
(6) Preference for one’s own group (that is, “in-group bias”)
(7) Mild hierarchy (that is, relative egalitarianism
(8) Social learning and teaching”
Watch Christakis briefly summarize his book on youtube here or on the embedded video below:
For more info., Christakis has a 30 min interview with the RSA here that explains how his work can inform us during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Evidence for the connection between nature and nurture and the human social connection:
Born Helpless
From Scientific American,
Human babies enter the world utterly dependent on caregivers to tend to their every need. Although newborns of other primate species rely on caregivers, too, human infants are especially helpless because their brains are comparatively underdeveloped. Indeed, by one estimation a human fetus would have to undergo a gestation period of 18 to 21 months instead of the usual nine to be born at a neurological and cognitive development stage comparable to that of a chimpanzee newborn.
From Cornell,
Newborn horses can stand within an hour of birth. Baby wood ducks leap from a nest to splash down in a pond a day after hatching. Yet human babies, as well as the young of many other species of mammals and birds, require months or years of care before they reach full mobility and sensory function, let alone maturity.
Alpaca babies usually walk and nurse within 30 minutes of being born.
Neurobiology and psychology
- mirror neurons
- vagus nerve
- facial recognition
- language
- oxytocin
- left-cradling bias
- “A left-cradling bias arises from the right hemisphere advantage for social processing, for example, visual recognition of infant facial expressions,” the authors of the first study write. “The position of an infant on the mother’s left side may optimize maternal monitoring, by directing sensory information predominantly to the mother’s right hemisphere.”
Allow us to translate. You probably learned in biology class that the right side of the brain controls the left side of the body and that the opposite holds true too. So if you’re holding baby on the left, your right hemisphere—the one responsible for processing emotion, making sense of what you see and facial recognition—is fully engaged. Your parenting muscles, in a sense, are fully flexed.
From Our World in Data,
Dr. Vivek Murthy, Surgeon General of the United States, recently wrote: “Loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day”.
From the National Institutes of Health,
Social relationships—both quantity and quality—affect mental health, health behavior, physical health, and mortality risk. Sociologists have played a central role in establishing the link between social relationships and health outcomes, identifying explanations for this link, and discovering social variation (e.g., by gender and race) at the population level. Studies show that social relationships have short- and long-term effects on health, for better and for worse, and that these effects emerge in childhood and cascade throughout life to foster cumulative advantage or disadvantage in health. This article describes key research themes in the study of social relationships and health, and it highlights policy implications suggested by this research.
From Harvard Medical School,
Social connections like these not only give us pleasure, they also influence our long-term health in ways every bit as powerful as adequate sleep, a good diet, and not smoking. Dozens of studies have shown that people who have social support from family, friends, and their community are happier, have fewer health problems, and live longer.
Dean Ornish's Reaserch
Dr. Dean Ornish, a cardiologist who found through research that patients with medical issues, including surgeries like bypass surgery or mastectomies, healed quicker and more thoroughly if they had meaningful relationships in their lives.
From Dr. Ornish's website:
At the Heart of Healing: Connection
Loneliness and Isolation
Medicine today tends to focus primarily on the physical and mechanistic: drugs and surgery, genes and germs, microbes and molecules. However, there isn’t any other factor in medicine – not diet, not smoking, not exercise, not stress, not genetics, not drugs, not surgery – that has a greater impact on our quality of life, incidence of illness and premature death from all causes than loneliness and isolation.
Love and intimacy — our ability to connect with ourselves and others, is at the root of what makes us sick and what makes us well, what causes sadness and what brings happiness, what makes us suffer and what leads to healing. If a new drug had the same impact, virtually every doctor in the country would be recommending it for his or her patients. It would be malpractice not to prescribe it — yet, with few exceptions, we doctors do not learn much about the healing power of love, intimacy, and transformation in our medical training.
There is a deep spiritual hunger in this country. The real epidemic in our culture is not only physical heart disease, but also what I call emotional and spiritual heart disease. The profound sense of loneliness, isolation, alienation, and depression that are so prevalent in our culture with the breakdown of the social structures that used to provide us with a sense of connection and community. It is, to me, a root of the illness, cynicism, and violence in our society.
We are creatures of community. Those individuals, societies, and cultures who learned to take care of each other, to love each other, and to nurture relationships with each other during the past several hundred thousand years were more likely to survive than those who did not. Those people who did not learn to take care of each other often did not make it. In our culture, the idea of spending time taking care of each other and creating communities has become increasingly rare. Ignoring these ideas imperils our survival.
Awareness is the first step in healing, both individually and socially. Part of the value of science is to increase the level of awareness of how much these choices matter that we make each day. Not just a little, but a lot, and not just to the quality of life but also the quantity of life – to our survival. When we understand how important these issues are, then we can do something about it. These include:
• spending more time with our friends and family• communication skills• group support• confession, forgiveness, and redemption• compassion, altruism, and service• psychotherapy• touching• commitment• meditationWhen we increase the love and intimacy in our lives, we also increase the health, joy, and meaning in our lives.
- Danielle, found in 2004.
Watch this video from the Oprah show which summarizes her initial finding and then updates how she is ten years later. Ten years after she was found, the Tampa Bay Time did an update on her here.
Watch this video from the Oprah show which summarizes her initial finding and then updates how she is ten years later. Ten years after she was found, the Tampa Bay Time did an update on her here.
- Genie, found in 1970.
The video below is about a girl named Genie that was locked in a bedroom alone for 12 years of her life. Here is what Susan Curtiss wrote about her in her book, Genie; A Psycholinguistic Study of a Modern-Day Wild Child.
Here is a brief clip from a documentary about Genie's story. And below are notes from one of the researchers studying Genie:
Genie was pitiful. Hardly ever having worn clothing, she did not react to temperature, either heat or cold. Never having eaten solid food, Genie did not know how to chew and had great difficulty in swallowing. Having been strapped down and left sitting on a potty chair she could not stand erect, could not straighten her arms or legs, could not run hop, jump or climb. In fact she could only walk with difficulty shuffling her feet and swaying from side to side. Hardly ever having seen more than a space of ten feet in front of her she had become nearsighted to exactly that distance....Surprisingly, however, Genie was alert and curious. She maintained good eye contact and...She was intensely eager for human contact.
Some people have been found to be living with wild (feral) animals. These feral people provide more evidence that humans are influenced by their surroundings. Check out this website for examples of feral children.
Socialization before birth!
- This Ted Talk by Annie Murphy Paul explains some of the ways that humans begin learning before birth!
- Another example of prenatal socialization is in identical twins who have the same exact DNA and biology. Because they are exactly the same, nurses will often paint the nails of twins differently so that they can quickly tell them apart. But, often the parents of these twins can tell them apart from their earliest days because they have already started developing different personalities even before being born.
- The effects of alcohol and drugs on unborn babies are one example of prenatal effects on unborn babies that are well documented. Additionally, other examples are the effects of prenatal vitamins and stress on the mother.
- Yet another example of socialization happening in utero is that babies are influenced by what mothers eat during their pregnancy. One study shows that the amniotic fluid around the baby can take on the flavor and smell of certain foods or spices. Babies show a correlation to those foods after being born. See more about this study here.
- There is even more recent research that has found that the experiences a grandmother has can affect the genes that she passes down to her grandchild! In other words, the nurturing or socialization process that affects you, might start decades before you are even born! This multigenerational effect on genes is known as epigenetics. Here is a link to a PBS program called The Ghost in your Genes about epigenetics. The researchers theorize that social experiences can affect the genes of a person and, more amazingly, these genes can be passed down to a generation or two. So the grandchildren may experience the effects of their grandparents' lives on their genes. How amazing is that? They call it the "ghost in your genes," explained on the BBC here.
