A Few More Points

Sigh, I couldn't resist posting a few more points on the book.  I'll try to write this post in less than five minutes.

One interesting thing I've learned in future chapters is that it's very, very hard for women to have a baby and work full time.  She gives really interesting biological evidence that there are strong natural drives for mothers to want to be with their baby when the baby is newly born.  (I suppose that for some, this is one of the most obvious things in the world.)  Mothers who didn't care about babies before they had their own will very likely change the moment they hold theirs.  Mothers who have a baby and go back to full time working in a relatively short time should have intense struggles since all these hormones are kicking in.  (The author adds her own experience to the others.)  Mothers mothering their baby releases all sorts of pleasureful hormones and desires in the women.  (Eh, the chapter got a little weird; she talked about how breastfeeding releases hormones which cause deep pleasure in the mother.  No way I can ever relate to that.)  In fact, a lot of the brain parts activated during mothering (cuddling, nurturing, breastfeeding, etc.), they've found, are similar to some of the brain parts activated during sex, and there are supposed to be high degrees of pleasure in both.  The big recommendation she had for women (it seemed) was to spend a lot of time part time when the baby is born.

Next, she devotes a whole chapter on women in high places of success who struggle with the feeling of being an imposter.  Even though they win awards and degrees, they are more likely to fear being "found out" and that they really don't deserve their position.  Men tend to not struggle with this as much.  It was interesting.  It seemed that when women found out about these studies, their reaction was: "Oh, OTHER people are afraid of being found out, but seriously, I really am a fake.  I just got lucky to get to my current position.  I don't know what I'm doing in this position."  They will believe this even if their accomplishments are just as high as men's.  And this is so even if they have only received accolades and encouragement. The belief just won't go away.

Pinker observes that this psychological thing has two opposing effects.  For some women, it drives them to work harder so that they end up attaining more accomplishments and degrees and stuff.  (There are studies that show that women scientists are a lot more meticulous and careful than men scientists.)  For other women, it drives them to quit.  She shares her own struggle with this towards the end of the chapter.

Well, I guess I couldn't relate to this one either.  I've never felt like an imposter in gaining my philosophy degrees and such (though I do think I know of some guys who have struggled with this).  I just loved studying philosophy and working hard at it!

I think I have felt this ("imposter") feeling in certain times of ministry, where I wasn't sure how to lead someone in conversation and prayer.  But I think that in that case, maybe I WAS an imposter!  ("Imposter feeling" as in, "I'm not REALLY a spiritual leader who knows exactly what to pray for and what to say and how to give the right sort of encouragement/rebuke/advice.  I guess, though, I didn't really feel like an imposter in those situations because I was quite willing to tell the other person that I wasn't sure what I was doing.  hahahaha.  Pinker says that feeling inadequate is different from feeling like an imposter.)

Ackh!  I've gone over five minutes!  Gotta go back to working on my philosophy paper!

No More Book Reports and the New Atheists

Okay, in terms of time priority (teaching this summer, dissertation proposal, and general research), posting on Susan Pinker's excellent book The Sexual Paradox: Men, Women, and the Real Gender Gap will have to be dropped.  I hope you all (umm... all two or three of you) enjoyed the summaries while they lasted!

In the meantime, American Christians should know about the "new atheists", who have sometimes been referred to as the four horsemen: Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris.

As a quiz, does anybody know what books these atheists have written? =)

Something under the doghouse!!!

So I was outside with my Dad yesterday, and we were moving my dog's doghouse to another place in the yard.  And we lifted it and put it somewhere else.  And in the area underneath the doghouse, there were a lot of bugs that had made their home...

and guess what else i saw?!?!?

A SNAKE!!!  Yep, it was black with a yellow stripe, and probably about 3 to 4 feet long.  And I went, "Abba!!!  Abba!!!  A snake!  Snake!  Snake!  Snake!"  ('Abba' means dad in Korean.)  My dad picked up a big stick to kill it, and I went "nooo!!!!!  Don't kill it!!!!" I had compassion on the snake.  I didn't want it to die; I wanted it to just move to another place in the yard and live happily there.

Well, my Dad's strikes missed anyway, and the snake slithered along into an area underneath a lot of brush.  We never found it.  Wow, I wonder if my dog knew that a snake was living under her house all along?!  Phew.

I told my Mom, "Hey Mom!  Isn't it cool that we saw a snake?!?"  My mom, who had seen it too, had a different opinion.  She said that the snake was "jingoohruwhuh"; which means nasty and gross.

Welp, that was my experience yesterday.

Prodigy Men with Aspergers

Chapter 5 is on genius men with Aspergers, a syndrome which disables normal socializing and is found mostly in males.  But many with Aspergers are extremely gifted in certain areas.  She basically goes through a bunch of cases of such men, and they are all really interesting.  Such men hate randomness and will prefer a regular schedule and a computer program over people.  Though they enjoy company and social interaction, it is difficult because they have a difficult time understanding what they're supposed to do (socially).  Pinker talks of her interview with a man named Georges:

"While I was focused on capturing the human experience of Asperger syndrome, its impact on Georges' relationships, his family, and his work, he was hell-bent on showing me all his portable electronic devices and how they were programmed--one to count down the minutes and seconds until the weekend, another to count the minutes and seconds that had passed since the moment of his birth, a third to record the milliseconds until his lease was up... His determination to deconstruct his thought processes for me was not just instructive but endearing.  Like Bob and Daniel [two other men who are interviews earlier in the chapter], Georges was trying to forge a connection and enjoyed human contact.  That it didn't come naturally didn't mean they didn't want it.  Explaining how their brains worked to others was their way to connect.

Still Georges lives alone by choice.  "It takes a lot of effort to deal with people on a day-to-day basis.  I need a few pauses between social interactions so I can face people at work," he said.  But it would be a mistake to think of him or the other men profiled here as not interested in socializing or in making friends.  Georges told me he enjoys people "as long as they're not cranky."  But a job requiring him to read other people's emotional states and intentions would be impossible.  "If I was at a job where I had to watch my social interactions and people's impressions of me..." Here there was a pause as he struggled to find the words to express just how bad this would be.  "That would be like being a rocket scientist for you. You work with people on a day-to-day basis--connecting.  I call it people processing.  I need a lot of time off to do just a little bit of that." "(154-155)

Pinker then explores some evidence that men with Asperger syndrome are the extreme of certain male tendencies, and how this provides some explanation for why such men would do well in physics/engineering/computerscience/etc.  That's enough for today.

Girls' Empathy

Little time, but in chapter 4, Pinker basically cites a bunch of studies showing how women tend to have more empathy than men.  They can understand other's emotions more quickly and be moved by them more than men, which would explain the data in the previous posts (and she talks about a lot of studies that show this, but I'm too lazy to write them).  They are better at putting themselves in other people's shoes and feeling their pain.

"Girls and women, on average, make more eye contact than men when communicating; show more empathy toward friends and family; and, remarkably, demonstrate signs of these skills from early infancy, well before any cultural expectations about women as nurturers can be absorbed.  Studies of twins show that the ability to understand social situations-which requires empathy-is largely inherited, and that there are large differences between boys and girls that are most noticeable when children are young.  An interest in looking at someone's face is a good clue to how empathy begins, as the cues to another person's emotions are written right there.  And just a few days after birth, the majority of newborn girls show more interest in looking at a human face than at a mechanical mobile, whereas for boys it's the reverse: 43 percent of 102 male babies gazed longer at the mobile, compared to 17 percent of the girls.  Baby girls respond to others' distress more quickly, crying longer when another baby cries and looking sad when others are sad.  As toddlers, girls are more likely to show overt signs of sympathy, such as asking "What's wrong?," attempting to comfort someone, and expressing concern with appropriate facial expressions.  A small girl offering comfort to someone in distress might seem saccharine had the phenomenon not been documented repeatedly over the last thirty years.  Selfless acts prick our own feelings of empathy, even if we've learned to distrust such gestures as contrived, especially when they're attributed to women.  But what if women's heightened sense of empathy were not viewed through an ideological lens?  What if it is a naturally varying but necessary appetite, like the need for food, sleep, sex, or human contact?" (104-105)

The above quotation is heavily footnoted, but people can get the book if they want the support.  She also documents how they have done studies where men and women both look at a picture of a woman with a facial expression.  While men and women are roughly equal at noting if the woman is happy, the women were a lot better at noticing if the women was stressed, bothered, or sad.