Proteins are not actually made of coils, arrows, or sheets, but Orme’s drawings of protein structures incorporate green coils (representing alpha-helices, which show how protein subunits connect in spiral formations), red arrows (representing beta-sheets, which are subunits connected in flat formations), and yellow cord (representing links between sheets and coils). Scientific illustrators employ these standard visual motifs to show the general protein structure. Reproduced from Essential Cell Biology (Fifth Edition) by Bruce Alberts, Karen Hopkin, Alexander Johnson, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and Peter Walter. Copyright © 2019 by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Karen Hopkin, Alexander Johnson, the Estate of Julian Lewis, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Nicole Marie Odie Roberts, and Peter Walter. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Sometimes, the best point of reference is (at) your fingertip. To help biology students comprehend microscope magnification strengths, Orme’s illustration focuses on an easily-understood object: a thumb. Reproduced from Essential Cell Biology (Fifth Edition) by Bruce Alberts, Karen Hopkin, Alexander Johnson, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Keith Roberts, and Peter Walter. Copyright © 2019 by Bruce Alberts, Dennis Bray, Karen Hopkin, Alexander Johnson, the Estate of Julian Lewis, David Morgan, Martin Raff, Nicole Marie Odie Roberts, and Peter Walter. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

It’s easier to understand a figure when an illustrator relates it to something else. Here, seeing planes drawn through a mouse’s body helps students understand the anatomy of the human brain, above. Courtesy of Nigel Orme, from Principles of Neurobiology, Luo et. al, published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

How does an artist illustrate the changes that occur as molecules pass in and out of a cell, through the cell membrane? Here, Orme represents cell membranes as “boxes” stacked into shelves, and molecules moving in and out of the shelves as “balls.” Mathematical notations describe the “boxes” at various states, over time. Courtesy of Nigel Orme, from Physical Biology of the Cell, Philips et. al, published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Illustrators work closely with scientists to puzzle out the best presentation for difficult concepts. Here, Orme’s sketches appear alongside an author’s attempt to explain pores in a cell membrane. The diagram that resulted from their work shows a section of a cell membrane, with open and closed pores and surrounding proteins. Courtesy of Nigel Orme, from Physical Biology of the Cell, Philips et. al, published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Some scientific figures are intuitive, such as this one illustrating Pavlovian conditioning in a dog. Courtesy of Nigel Orme, from Principles of Neurobiology, Luo et. al, published by Garland Science, Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

I graduated from art school in a muddle. All I’d ever really wanted to do was draw, and I had done so on every sheet of paper that came within range of my pencil. But suddenly, it all felt very self-indulgent. I felt I should do something meaningful with my art and somehow give something back. I sincerely believe in the intellectual value of art in our culture, but I was looking for something more concrete. What could I do with my art to really make the world a better place?

Fresh out of my program, I found a job working in a government design office. One day, the manager came over to my desk with a task he thought I’d enjoy: creating an instruction leaflet for the Overseas Development Department explaining how to build a brick kiln. The leaflet was to be distributed to remote villages in West Africa to people who didn’t share a common written language, so I would have to convey information entirely through illustration and without any words. I had to include two figures, a man and a boy, who were to act as the “measuring sticks,” offering an idea of the scale of the structure. I also couldn’t employ perspective in my drawings; I was told African art mostly doesn’t use perspective, the drawing technique through which an artist makes one end of an object smaller to indicate that it is further away from the viewer. Africans looking at a drawing of a kiln that used perspective might think that one end of the kiln should be built smaller than the other.

This was an epiphany moment for me. I realized the real power of art. Here was a message that only illustration could deliver. This was my purpose!

It was just a few months later that I met Keith Roberts, a plant biologist, renowned science writer, and talented artist, who was helping a publisher create meaningful figures for several scientific book projects and was looking for an artist to ease the workload. We’ve worked together now for over 30 years. I’ve built a career as a science illustrator, helping to educate the next generation of biologists, doctors, physicists, surgeons, and more.

I should say at this point that I have no science training whatsoever. People often say to me, “Well, you must have learned so much science over that time.” The fact is that what I’ve really learned is how to ask questions of scientists. I need to understand the logic of scientific concepts so that I can visualize them and come up with narratives and figures to explain them to others. It can be a complicated process, but in the end, my scientist collaborators and I always find a common language. I’ll sit with them at the beginning of their project, or at least at the beginning of the art process, and sketch away as they talk. Generally, they are extremely patient with me, explaining over and over what it is they want me to draw until I understand the concept.

I’ve found the process to be particularly challenging when I work with physicists, whose idea of an illustration is often an equation rather than an image—but this makes physics figures some of the most rewarding projects to work on. When I worked on Physical Biology of the Cell, the physicists writing the book wanted to convey to biologists, “Look, everything you understand about biology is underpinned by physics and math. And a grasp of those subjects will enable you to maybe see your biology in a different way.” So, to make the concepts real for biologists, we had to come up with graphics that had the simplicity and clarity of typical biological illustrations, which are usually either a picture of something or a schematic diagram of an action, and then superimpose the physics and math. The process can be a revelation for the author as well as their intended audience. One of my physics friends told me that making a figure together and visualizing the math led him to understand a familiar concept from physics in a completely different way. In his mind, the visual description linked ideas that he had previously only considered separately. Neither of us could have anticipated that.

It’s remarkable to me that scientists receive absolutely no training in visual communication. Their professional reputations rest on the papers they publish and the lectures they give, and they must illustrate both with coherent figures. Yet, they are expected to somehow learn the tricks of the art trade by magic, picking up complex skills by osmosis, or by watching their perplexed peers stumbling along, trying to do the same.

When I worked with professors over the years, I often thought that I should write a course to teach science students the basics of visual communication; in 2014, with Jané Kondev, a friend and physics professor at Brandeis University and artist/educator Maddy Pikarsky, I finally did. Our week-long course includes lectures on the history of art, graphics, communication, and perception, together with practical drawing exercises, that help budding scientists look at, think about, and design clear, informative visuals. Helping students express their science more clearly and concisely, and have fun with drawing at the same time, has been incredibly rewarding.

At the start, I suffered from imposter syndrome. Sitting at a desk with some of the biggest names in science can be very daunting. But I’ve found that specialists at the top of their own professions often embrace art and become very engaged in the process of making figures. Perhaps it’s because they respect and understand the teaching power of a good illustration. Perhaps it’s because they can tell that the process of building thoughtful figures is a genuine and substantial investment in their book—not just some robotic step on a production line.

People often claim they cannot draw. The first question to ask is, “When did you last try?” (The answer is usually “in high school,” when they were obliged to.) Most people would surprise themselves if they saw how well they could draw once they practiced. If you want to be good at anything, you have to do it, do it again, and then do it some more.

Take a pocket sketchbook and a pencil and draw for five to 10 minutes every day. By the end of a month you’ll be amazed at what you are capable of. And you may just start to realize the real power of art.

The post I Turn Science Into Art appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The one thing that Americans do agree on is that it’s getting worse: nearly 8 in 10 Americans polled in a 2018 election day survey said that, “Americans are becoming more politically divided.”

We’ve heard a lot lately about issues of civility and free speech. These issues are headline grabbing, but they aren’t central to what is broken in our public sphere. Rather, issues of civility and free speech are symptoms of larger, systemic problems.

America’s public sphere is broken because we communicate as propagandists and we don’t know the rules of productive discussion and debate. Focusing on free speech or civility to solve these problems is, in fact, a red herring, a distraction from the real issues that need to be addressed.

It’s plain that our current way of speaking to each other doesn’t work. A recent Pew survey found that 53 percent of Americans thought that talking about politics with people on the other side of the political divide is “stressful and frustrating.” And, it seems, having those stressful and frustrating conversations makes things worse, not better. Sixty-three percent in the Pew poll said that talking to those across the political divide left them feeling like they have even less in common than they had previously believed. That could be because only 4 percent of Americans describe their political opposition as “fair.”

Partisanship and distrust have infected all aspects of our civic life. We only have confidence and trust in the government when our side controls it and we fear the worst when our side does not. There is currently no credible, neutral “umpire” of American politics—there is no media organization that we all trust to tell us what we need to know to make good decisions, and there is no government institution that we all trust to uphold the rule of law.

We treat one another as partisans first and as citizens second. And, what’s worse, our media, government institutions, and elected officials seem to prefer us to be partisans.

Without hyperbole, we might describe our moment as another “age of catastrophe,” similar to the one that saw the collapse of many economies and democracies between the two world wars.

Our current age of catastrophe is characterized by a fundamental breakdown of the nation’s public sphere—as evidenced by widespread distrust, political polarization, and frustration.

On October 25, 1931—during the previous age of catastrophe—philosopher John Dewey gave a radio lecture on the relationship between education and democracy. “Democracy will be a farce,” explained Dewey, “unless individuals are trained to think for themselves, to judge independently, to be critical, to be able to detect subtle propaganda and the motives which inspire it.”

Does Dewey’s edict still apply? Can we educate ourselves out of this disaster? Maybe. There are two important differences between then and now. First, in the 1930s, government propaganda contributed to the age of catastrophe. Today, we citizens are the propagandists behind the catastrophe.

Everything about our current media ecosystem is designed for us to communicate as propagandists. Ubiquitous notifications are designed to addict us so we continually engage with messages. Likes, favorites, and retweets reward us by pinging the dopamine receptors in our brains. Apps withhold notifications to keep us cycling back for positive feedback, and algorithms reward and amplify only the most polarizing messages—so that we are constantly urged to voice our most outrageous takes on political events.

Every single one of us has more propaganda power in our pockets than any government had at its disposal between the world wars. Instead of being independent thinkers who are overwhelmed by and succumb to government “newspeak,” we willingly create, consume, and spread propaganda ourselves. We create memes to attack our political opponents. We watch and share conspiracy theories and other “news” riddled with half-truths. We communicate cynically and gullibly—we believe nothing the other side says and everything our side says.

Communicating cynically and gullibly has broken our public sphere. Our addiction to propaganda has left us vulnerable. Look again at the 2016 Russian propaganda efforts and you’ll see that their strategy was to take advantage of our already hyper-polarized public sphere to get us all to spread their messages of distrust and resentment. And we did.

Like Dewey said in 1931, we need to be educated to think, judge, and be critical about the news that we post and consume. Unfortunately, most of us don’t know how to do this. We might consider encouraging social media users to take a training course in journalism skills so that when they produce media content they know how to do so responsibly.

Another difference between Dewey’s era and our own is that in 1931 we had more trust in government, media, and institutions than we do now, in large part because we participated in collective decision-making more back then than we do now. Robert Putnam explained in Bowling Alone that generations of Americans have stopped joining clubs, PTAs, and other civic organizations that once served as laboratories for democracy. Our failure to participate in these organizations meant that we failed to learn democratic practices. Our failure to participate also made us less trusting of the decisions that are being made on our behalf. Eventually, we began to distrust the democratic process itself.

Researchers know that there’s a reciprocal relationship between participating in public deliberation and trusting the outcomes of the decisions made. This means that we need to learn skills in public deliberation. But public deliberation requires neutral arbiters—referees—to regulate our public discourse. We could be our own umpires, but we don’t know the rules. Without rules, our conversations are unproductive, and those who speak the loudest, with the most anger, control our public discourse.

We can still join civic organizations and learn the rules of productive conversations. We can also participate in structured conversations in our local communities. We have institutions that know how to teach such skills. Organizations like the Kettering Foundation conduct training in how to facilitate difficult conversations and create issue guides for communities to use for problem solving. Communication centers like the Center for Public Deliberation at Colorado State University are labs for teaching these democratic skills. Students there learn how to design fair deliberative processes, facilitate conversations with Colorado communities, and act as neutral guides for real-world community problem solving.

And it works. According to Martín Carcasson, director of the Colorado State center, “with a good process, we can significantly lower the bar on the difficulty of the conversation, and often get much better results.” He said that, in his 12 years of facilitating those conversations he has found that the situation ended up worse than it started in only a handful of cases. “I truly believe,” said Carcasson, that “we aren’t nearly as divided as we think we are, and a quality conversation can reveal that.”

A recent report from More in Common backs up such optimism: “77% of Americans believe our differences are not so great that we cannot come together.” In other words, those 63 percent of Americans who reported having even less in common after talking about politics with someone from the other side of the political divide probably weren’t doing it right.

Perhaps Dewey was overly optimistic, and democracy has always been something of a farce. Even so, learning to communicate as citizens rather than as propagandists and learning how to have productive conversations about difficult topics could prevent our democratic farce from turning into tragedy. We must avert the catastrophe of our broken public sphere.

The post Preaching Civility Won’t Save American Democracy appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

A mythology grew up around the importance of inserting graphic elements at the ends of written online text: Because we aren’t face-to-face with our interlocutor, we need to provide additional information to convey what our demeanor, body stance, or vocal intonation might have offered. During the early popularization of email and IM, newbies were warned that online messages could be easily misunderstood. As a safeguard, emoticons could help.

Over time, online graphic markers have evolved in type, number, and function. The Japanese invented kaomoji, a version of emoticons but written horizontally, in 1986, and the style spread in Asia. GIFs—essentially small pictures, these days often animated—first appeared in 1987. And then there are emojis, initially introduced on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s. (The word “emoji” sounds as if it’s related to “emoticon,” but it’s a combination of two Japanese words meaning “picture” and “character”.) Though it feels as if there are now zillions of emojis, the official total in the Unicode Standard was just over 2600 as of July 2017. Users of mobile devices can pluck off what they like to incorporate into messages.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, we might think that emojis, like their emoticon and kaomoji ancestors, could be relied upon to clarify our online written messages. It turns out, though, that emojis are subject to the same potential pitfalls as traditional speech and writing.

Emoji cookies. Photo courtesy of Clare Griffiths/Flickr.

At its core, human language enables people to convey meaning to one another. When language or other symbolic systems don’t seem adequate to express what’s on our minds, we get creative. We repurpose existing words to have new meanings, as when in the 1950s, Americans began to use the word “moonlighting” to mean working a second job (as it were, by the light of the moon). We borrow from elsewhere, as with the wonderfully onomatopoetic “schlep,” taken from Yiddish, which had earlier schlepped over from Middle High German.

We also borrow (or make up) words or symbols that concisely express what otherwise would require a whole phrase. Think of German “Schadenfreude,” which is definitely shorter than “pleasure derived from the misfortune of others.” Or take the “thinking face” emoji——or the “person getting a massage” emoji—. The expressive power of today’s emojis make the original smiley and frowny seem primitive.

Even with plenty of words, though—or plenty of emojis—communication can be misleading or ambiguous. For communication to be successful, both sender and recipient need to assign the same meaning to symbols. But there may be no guarantee of a match. If I’m your supervisor, and I say, “Just take an hour” for lunch, you might bristle because you interpret me to be a stickler for time on the job, when I mean to encourage you to get out of the office and relax. (This is an actual example. It took two years before my administrative assistant revealed she’d felt insulted.) When The New York Times tweeted on June 4, 2017 that “The London attacks [on London Bridge] hit a nation still reeling from the shock of the bombing in Manchester almost 2 weeks ago,” resilient Brits reminded the world that in the U.K., “reeling” denotes a Scottish form of dancing. With emojis, if I send you a message that just shows a person in a bed——am I saying that I’m going to bed? That you should? That I’m about to buy a bed? That I’m in the hospital? It turns out that pictures rely on context for correct interpretation, just as words do.

But there’s another requirement for communication (offline and online) to be successful, and that is knowing how to express what we want to say. Writers have long looked to others for help. Take the old-fashioned genre of “complete letter writers”—books which provided sample missives for all occasions, from writing home to your family to asking a business associate for money. By the early 20th century, when use of the telegraph became more familiar and affordable, Western Union started offering pre-set messages for those who (in the words of Annteresa Lubrano, author of The Telegraph) “needed help in finding the right words for the right occasion.”

Emojis on Halloween, 2014. Photo courtesy of Chris Blakely/Flickr.

Then there’s the printed greeting card, which first appeared in the mid-19th century. Those purchasing such cards don’t need to figure out what to say or how to say it. Be it a wedding or birthday, retirement or death, just sign the card, address the envelope, affix a stamp, and find a mailbox.

Sometimes greeting card messages accurately convey what is in our hearts. But not always. Valentine’s Day cards are the perfect example. Stand at the greeting cards section of a store in the run-up to February 14, and you find men and women purchasing mushy sentiments that hardly represent what they feel about their significant other. The same duplicity occurs in spoken language: Think of passing an acquaintance on the street, asking “How are you doing?” and hastening on before waiting for an answer, or of telling a person you instantly dislike, “It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

What about using pre-fabricated emoticons or emojis in online communication? Do we always mean what they say? Sometimes we insert graphic markers because we feel we are supposed to. Teenage girls, studies have found, judge male age-mates to be unfeeling if they don’t liberally pepper their text messages with graphic add-ons. At the other end of the user spectrum, my professional colleagues of a certain age are now inserting icons from their mobile phone menus, though they would never wink or stick out their tongue that way IRL, even with their closest friends. When I ask why, the answers are “It’s fun,” “It makes me feel young,” or “Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

As teenage girls, mature academics, and millions of others can attest, using graphic markers can add enjoyment, along with creativity, and often clarity, to online communication. Such benefits are important because they encourage us to think about what meanings and emotions we wish to convey to others.

However, as with spoken and written language, is there any guarantee that our symbols will consistently convey to our interlocutor what is in our minds or hearts? As any linguist—or psychiatrist—will tell you: Don’t count on it.

The post Emojis Don’t Give Meaning to Our Deepest Feelings appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Taylor’s particular and pervasive influence in Canada is partly the result of his long interest in politics—he ran for parliament several times in the 1960s—but more importantly his academic study of dialogue in all of its permutations. I know this firsthand. For 19 years my office was next to Taylor’s at McGill University, where we both taught, and he was a good friend and a profound influence on me. I have spent many years in dialogues with Canada’s Indigenous people and I have learned an enormous amount about dialogue from them, but I have also learned from Taylor, in both his writings and his practice.

“Dialogue” means “through” (dia) participation in and of “logos” (speech). One of the central themes in Charles Taylor’s philosophical writing and teaching is his view that humans are basically dialogical animals. In essence, what makes us human beings is that we are always talking with each other, always caught in complex webs of interlocution, and at our best we experience a kind of “together-joy,” when we are communicating with each other—Nietzsche called it Mitfreude. It is the theme that has been most important to me. If you have seen Taylor teach or speak publicly you can understand why dialogue is so central to his view of the human condition: He manifestly comes alive in dialogues, enjoys them, and is “at his best” in them. But it runs deeper than this, because Taylor has taken an expansive view of dialogue, explaining four kinds of dialogical relationships that humans have with themselves, each other, and the world around us.

The first is his study of the dialogical relationship one has with oneself. The history of how we talk to and make sense of ourselves as individuals is the topic of his book Sources of the Self, written in 1992. Taylor traces the ideas of the self through history: From Greek ethics based in virtue and character to the Christian turn inward beginning with Augustine, and then the tremendous deepening of self-dialogue through the Romantics, and finally to the explosion of meditation, prayer, yoga, contemplation, and so on in spiritual and secular traditions today.

Secondly, he’s studied and clarified the many kinds of dialogue we have with one another: Discussion, negotiation, bargaining, deliberation, communion, teacher-student, and so on. His philosophical and political writings have been concerned with clarifying the conditions of mutual recognition, deep diversity, fusion of horizons, mutual learning, and coming to agree and act together. And these writings have been developed in the course of his long engagement in bilingual and multilingual political activities in Quebec and Canada.

Some of Taylor’s work takes dialogue out of the realm of merely talking to another level. As Taylor has shown in his expressive philosophy of language, although dialogue is manifest in speech, it is grounded in practices, in the living world, and, in many cases, in the living spirit; and it does not always require speech, as, for example, in dance. “Communion” with all living beings is the most basic form of dialogue. And so his third area of interest is the relationship that humans are capable of having with the living earth (anima mundi). Here dialogue involves all the senses (synaesthesia) as we try to understand how the earth sustains life and how we can interact with it in reciprocally sustaining ways. He traces this dialogue from Goethe and Humboldt to deep ecology, the Gaia hypothesis today and Indigenous peoples’ relation to Mother Earth.

Finally, there is the dialogical relationship with the spiritual realm, whether this is the human spirit of humanist traditions or the spiritual sources of religious traditions. In A Secular Age (2007) and more recent work he explores how different types of secular societies block or diminish the use of religious language in the public sphere or discredit the possibility of the transcendent dimension of spiritual dialogue.

I think there is one particular kind of speech dialogue that has a certain importance for Taylor. This is when people come together not to argue, discuss, deliberate, or negotiate, but to try to suspend their emotional attachment to the deep-seated assumptions or prejudgments that pit them against one another; to put their conflicting assumptions into the intersubjective space of dialogue; and to just share and discuss these prejudgments until they begin to understand and trust one another.

This non-attachment is exceptionally difficult in modern societies, and Taylor has seen many failures. But the idea, and it is a very old one, is that creative, shared meanings might just become the ongoing basis of cooperation, of living together nonviolently. This is the kind of practice of dialogical “transvaluation” (Umwertung) that he said “we can and should struggle for.” This is the great gift he continues to offer us through his remarkable speaking and writing.

Where this has been particularly important for Canadians is that Taylor has modeled for us how to conduct ongoing dialogues that allow both parties to change, and change their sense of self, sometimes over generations as we join in looking at a future together. This perspective has given Canadians a whole new way of thinking about our own association as itself a complex federation that we co-articulate ourselves through dialogues, disputes, negotiations, resolutions, and new negotiations over time. Thus, being Canadian became an awareness of interdependence, or being-with others.

Taylor emphasizes that this sense of the interdependence of humanity is not ethically or morally neutral. It’s actually the same mutual care that all the great spiritual traditions teach. If one wishes to bring about mutual recognition and respect in deeply diverse societies, Taylor shows, then one has to embody mutual recognition and respect in one’s own everyday interactions, in one’s relationships with others, no matter how they initially respond. The change in the larger society one is arguing for has to be the means here and now: One must be the exemplary change if one wishes to move others.

For several generations of scholars, Taylor’s description of dialogic relationships and his manner of engagement have been deeply influential. These scholars have built from his ideas and taken them in new directions out of the elite political sphere to the grassroots, where they are conducting ongoing dialogues with communities to create a more participatory democracy.

The post The Philosopher Who Showed Canadians How to Talk to One Another appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

 
These days, we want to be with each other but also elsewhere, connected to wherever else we want to be, because what we value most is control over where we put our attention. Our manners have evolved to accommodate our new priorities. When you’re out to dinner with friends, you can’t assume that you have their undivided attention. Cameron, a college junior in New Hampshire, says that when his friends have dinner, “and I hate this, everyone puts their phones next to them when they eat. And then, they’re always checking them.”

The night before at dinner he had texted a friend sitting next to him (“ ’S’up, dude?”) just to get his attention. Cameron’s objection is common, for this is the reality: When college students go to dinner, they want the company of their friends in the dining hall and they also want the freedom to go to their phones. To have both at the same time, they observe what some call the “rule of three”: When you are with a group at dinner you have to check that at least three people have their heads up from their phones before you give yourself permission to look down at your phone. So conversation proceeds—but with different people having their “heads up” at different times.

I meet with Cameron and seven of his friends. One of them, Eleanor, describes the rule of three as a strategy of continual scanning:

Let’s say we are seven at dinner. We all have our phones. You have to make sure that at least two people are not on their phones or looking down to check something—like a movie time on Google or going on Facebook. So you need sort of a rule of two or three. So I know to keep, like, two or three in the mix so that other people can text or whatever.

It’s my way of being polite. I would say that conversations, well, they’re pretty, well, fragmented. Everybody is kind of in and out. Yeah, you have to say, “Wait, what . . .” and sort of have people fill you in a bit when you drop out.

The effect of the rule of three is what you might expect. As Eleanor says, conversation is fragmented. And everyone tries to keep it light.

 
Even a Silent Phone Disconnects Us

Keeping talk light when phones are on the landscape becomes a new social grace. One of Eleanor’s friends explains that if a conversation at dinner turns serious and someone looks at a phone, that is her signal to “lighten things up.” And she points out that the rule of three is a way of being polite even when you’re not at the dinner table. When “eyes are down” at phones, she says, “conversation stays light well beyond dinner.”

When I first planned the research that would lead to this book, my idea was to focus on our new patterns of texting and messaging. What made them compelling? Unique? But early in my study, when I met with these New Hampshire students, their response to my original question was to point me to another question that they thought was more important. “I would put it this way,” says Cameron. “There are fewer conversations—not with the people you’re texting, but with the people around you!” As he says this, we are in a circle of eight, talking together, and heads are going down to check phones. A few try not to, but it is a struggle.

Cameron sums up what he sees around him. “Our texts are fine. It’s what texting does to our conversations when we are together, that’s the problem.”

It was a powerful intuition. What phones do to in-person conversation is a problem. Studies show that the mere presence of a phone on the table (even a phone turned off) changes what people talk about. If we think we might be interrupted, we keep conversations light, on topics of little controversy or consequence. And conversations with phones on the landscape block empathic connection. If two people are speaking and there is a phone on a nearby desk, each feels less connected to the other than when there is no phone present. Even a silent phone disconnects us.

So it is not surprising that in the past 20 years we’ve seen a 40 percent decline in the markers for empathy among college students, most of it within the past 10 years. It is a trend that researchers link to the new presence of digital communications.

Why do we spend so much time messaging each other if we end up feeling less connected to each other? In the short term, online communication makes us feel more in charge of our time and self-presentation.

If we text rather than talk, we can have each other in amounts we can control. And texting and email and posting let us present the self we want to be. We can edit and retouch.

I call it the Goldilocks effect: We can’t get enough of each other if we can have each other at a digital distance—not too close, not too far, just right.

But human relationships are rich, messy, and demanding. When we clean them up with technology, we move from conversation to the efficiencies of mere connection. I fear we forget the difference. And we forget that is a difference or that things were ever different. Studies show that when children hear less adult talk, they talk less. If we turn toward our phones and away from our children, we will start them off with a deficit of which they will be unaware. It won’t be only about how much they talk. It will be about how much they understand the people they’re talking with.

Indeed, when young people say, “Our texts are fine,” they miss something important. What feels fine is that in the moment, so many of their moments are enhanced by digital reminders that they are wanted, a part of things. A day online has many of these “moments of more.” But as digital connection becomes an ever larger part of their day, they risk ending up with lives of less.

The post To Start Talking, Stop Texting appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Last month, when renowned astrophysicist Stephen Hawking joined Sina Weibo, China’s version of Twitter, he racked up more than 2 million followers in two days. His first post, which appeared in both English and Chinese, read: “In my physical travels, I have only been able to touch the surface of your fascinating history and culture. But now I can communicate with you through social media.”

Yet, as the platforms for communication have multiplied, and with the means to connect now constantly available on our ubiquitous mobile devices, these “connections” can come with a cost: the loss of real-life human interaction. Why meet in person when you can converse on Facebook? Why answer a call when you can send a text? For every Hawking, there are countless hawkers. On social media, marketers of everything from corn chips to cruises invite us to “join the conversation.” But how much actual conversation is taking place?

As a preview for Zocalo’s sixth annual book prize event, “Why We Must Relearn the Art of Conversation,” we asked communications scholars and linguists: How has the emergence of digital technology changed the way we communicate with one another? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

The post Have Emojis Replaced Emotions? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Scientists are learning about not only the ways in which people hear and categorize laughs, but also how human laughter relates to similar vocal behaviors across the animal kingdom. We have now uncovered many clues about the origins of this fascinating and ubiquitous behavior: While laughter might seem on the surface to be about jokes and humor, it turns out that it’s really about communicating affiliation and trust.

And then it gets tricky.

In one line of research in my vocal communication lab at UCLA, we have been playing recorded laughs to listeners and simply asking them, is this laugh “real” or “fake”? The question is intuitive and easy for everybody to understand, including people from all over the world. Our recorded laughs were taken either from real conversations between friends in a laboratory setting, or they were produced on command, also in the lab. As we expected, listeners were able to tell the “real” laughs (which we call spontaneous) from the “fake” laughs (which we call volitional) about 70 percent of the time. But people definitely made mistakes, and at a rate that was a little surprising. In our initial experiment, people thought fake laughs were real about a third of the time. So why are people falling for the fake laughs? Before we can answer that, we need to address where laughter came from in the first place.

Laughter in humans likely evolved from play vocalizations in our primate ancestors. We can be reasonably sure of this because we can see related vocal behaviors in many primate species today, as well as in other kinds of animals like rats and dogs. Scientists have described these play vocalizations as evolved from labored breathing during play. When animals engage in rough and tumble play fighting, for example, they get tired, and they also signal to one another they are playing. For instance, if during the play one animal bites another, it could be taken as an attack—but if they signal while panting that they are just playing, the play can continue without being interrupted by an unnecessary real fight.

So how does this relate to human laughter? By looking at the similarities and dissimilarities between various traits in different species, and then incorporating what is known about the evolutionary connection between those species, we can make fairly certain estimates about how old a trait is, and how it has changed over evolutionary time. The main thing that has changed with human laughter is that our laughs have become longer, and relatively more voiced. This basically means that the sound has more of a tone, including the stereotyped vowel sounds we all know: The human “hahaha” was born. Of course, human laughter can be composed of many sounds, including snorts, grunts, and hisses. But when we produce the classic “hahaha,” complete with vowels and a lot of energy, it sounds happiest, and people think it is most friendly. When we make this sound, we are essentially revealing the action of an ancient emotional vocal system shared with many species, and that has important consequences in how people appraise a laugh, and the laugher, at that moment.

When we laugh with our friends, we are usually having fun. Laughter triggers the release of brain endorphins that make us feel good, and it reduces stress. There is even evidence that we experience a temporary slight muscle weakness called cataplexy when we laugh, so we could be communicating honestly that we are unlikely (or relatively unable) to attack. But laughter is not always made in fun, and can actually be quite hurtful in some circumstances, such as contexts that involve ostracism and social alienation. Genuine laughs between friends directed at an outsider can be threatening, and even done in jest toward a specific in-group target can be hurtful (e.g., teasing). This shows that laughter is a powerful signal with huge communicative flexibility.

We were laughing before we were talking, and along with crying, screaming, gesturing, and other nonverbal signals, our hominin ancestors probably put on quite a vocal show before language evolved. But we did eventually learn to talk, and in doing so we developed fine control over our breathing to regulate it for speech, and better motor control over our larynx (also known as the voice box), lips, and tongue. These innovations afford us the ability to be vocal mimics. As this skill developed for speech production, the ability to imitate other non-speech sounds came rather quickly. Suddenly, the fake laugh was born, as was the fake cry, scream, and orgasm, among other sounds. There are many contexts in which laughter might be appropriate, and even advantageous to produce, but the emotional trigger simply isn’t there—so what do we do? We often try and make the sound anyway, and apparently with some success.

So a fake laugh is basically an imitation of a real laugh, but produced with a slightly different set of vocal muscles controlled by a different part of our brain. The result is that there are subtle features of the laughs that sound like speech, and recent evidence suggests people are unconsciously quite sensitive to them. For example, if you slow down a “real” laugh about two and half times, the result is strangely animal-like. It sounds like an ape of some kind, and while it’s hard to identify, it definitely sounds like an animal. But when you slow down human speech, or a “fake” laugh, it doesn’t sound like a nonhuman animal at all—it sounds like human speech slowed down. We put this observation to the test with slowed down versions of the laughs we used for our first experiment, and found out that when we asked people whether a slowed laugh recording was a human or nonhuman animal, they couldn’t tell with the real/spontaneous laughs, but they could tell that the recordings of fake/volitional laughs were of people.

We can detect parts of a laugh that are hard to fake—and that part has to do with the control of our breath. The ability to be a good faker has its advantages, so there has likely been evolutionary pressure to fake it well, with subsequent pressure on listeners to be good “faker detectors.” Imagine your attempt to pretend you get a joke, or your forced chuckle during a job interview. This “arms race” dynamic, as it’s called in evolutionary biology, results in good fakers, and good fake detectors, which seems to describe the current situation as evidenced by many recent studies, including my own.

We’ve learned that the reasons we laugh are as complicated as our social lives, and relate closely to our personal relationships and communicative strategies. One focus of researchers now is trying to decipher the relationship between specific sound features of our laughs—from loud belly laughs to quiet snickering—and what listeners perceive those features to mean. For someone studying the evolution of human communication, there are few things better to study. And it’s no joke.

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I like it because it is both a timeless exhortation—to expand one’s horizons—and a particularly timely one. The year 2015—the far-away year Marty McFly travels to in the 1980s classic Back to the Future—is shaping up, ironically, to be a year when the reassuringly familiar reasserts itself. Such mainstays as the Bush-versus-Clinton dynastic feud, the Star Wars saga, interest rates, U.S. power around the world, the Dallas Cowboys and Pittsburgh Steelers, and the telephone all are poised to make a comeback this year. But don’t trust me: Grab a half-dozen Post-it notes and make a few forecasts of your own on the defining questions of 2015.

Before going any further, however, I realize my last comeback suggestion might seem absurd: that the phone, used as such, as in the lost art of dialing and talking, is back. But the hacking of Sony in late 2014 may prove a tipping point, forcing people in many different workplaces to avoid putting certain things in writing. “Call me” may turn out to be among the most emailed words in 2015, shedding their once ominous overtones to become shorthand for, “I have something juicy to say about this, but I would be crazy to write it.” Here’s an interesting forecast close to home: Write on your first Post-it whether you think you will spend more or less time talking on your phone in 2015 than in 2014 (and figure it out at year’s end).

In politics, 2015 is shaping up to be a throwback year as Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton explore, and likely announce, their 2016 presidential bids. Will Bush or Mitt Romney or someone less aligned with the party’s business wing (Rand Paul, Ted Cruz?) be ahead in the GOP’s polls as 2015 comes to a close, on the eve of primary season? Write down your prediction on a Post-it (eschewing email for obvious reasons). And, if it is Bush riding high, will the dynastic hue of the contest affect how voters view Clinton?

The appeal of the familiar is understandable: The country has had a hard time settling into a semblance of normalcy pretty much since the start of this millennium, buffeted by a series of booms and busts, not to mention wars. Now the Federal Reserve, the institution wielding the greatest (if underappreciated) power over our financial affairs, is coaxing us to be OK with going back to normal. 2015 is when the Fed plans to put an end to its emergency measure of keeping the important benchmark interest rate it charges financial institutions at essentially zero. One defining story line for the year is whether this is seen as a vote of confidence in the economy, or whether it spooks markets addicted to artificial stimulation. Use a third Post-it note to guess whether the Dow Industrials Average will crack 20,000 and end 2015 above that level, which is slightly more than 10 percent higher than it is today.

In either case, the United States will look like a safe haven compared to much of the world. Our lead in all aspects of information technology keeps growing. We’re experiencing a manufacturing renaissance. We are well on our way to becoming one of the world’s lowest-cost (and self-sufficient) energy producers. 2014 started with a barrel of oil costing some $20 more than a share of Apple. The year closed with a surging share of Apple costing almost twice as much as a plummeting barrel of oil ($114 to $60). Go ahead and forecast on your fourth Post-it which of these two (Apple share or barrel of oil) will cost more at the end of 2015, and what the spread will be.

It should become clearer in the coming year that America has gotten its mojo back. It isn’t only our economic prowess. There’s also a renewed acceptance of American power and influence in much of the world, courtesy of Vladimir Putin’s antics, China’s extraterritorial assertiveness, the implosion of the anti-American left in Latin America, and all the global challenges—climate change, pandemics like Ebola, the persistence of radical Islamist terrorism—that still require U.S leadership.

This desire on the part of many countries for closer ties, coupled with America’s renewed economic confidence and domestic political trends, might make possible an ambitious trans-Pacific trade deal. And that would signal to the world that America is no longer stuck in the Middle East. On your fifth Post-it forecast a ranking of Iraq, Ukraine, Mexico, and China, according to the number of times each is mentioned in 2015 in The New York Times.

Meanwhile, information technologies continue to empower us. But now the revolution turns inward, as the next frontier of the Information Age that brought the outside world to our fingertips—the next great unseen that we will see—will be within ourselves. 2015 will be the year of the iWatch and other tracking and diagnostic technologies—some wearable, some in your medicine cabinet, others like cheaper, faster, and less intrusive blood tests at the nearby drugstore—that will allow us to acquire unprecedented self-knowledge.

This will keep the topic of inequality alive, as we talk about how such technologies create a new “digital divide.” I don’t have a clever forecasting prompt here for your last Post-it, but rather a question worth jotting down and contemplating: What does it mean for a society to have some people walking around with sophisticated dashboards measuring their well-being, while many others don’t, and remain in the dark? That seems qualitatively different than having the divide be defined around one’s access to knowledge of China or finances.

As bullish as I am on 2015, I should caution readers that I am usually optimistic at the start of every new year. It must be a personal flaw. And that’s why “See the unseen in 2015” is a perfect personal slogan, and not just as an exhortation to climb a mountain or go on safari or avail myself of these self-tracking technologies. The slogan is an antidote to my own complacency, a cautionary admonition to be on the lookout for the unexpected shocks that can upset my rosy scenarios.

After all, no one has ever said that, when it looked like nothing could go wrong, nothing went wrong. Happy new year.

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I didn’t realize it at the time, but my great-grandmother’s collection would give me a window into the desires—and anxieties—of a world I would only later come to understand and appreciate as I pursued my doctorate in American history. Until I embarked on that journey, the cards often sat in the back of closets or under piles of other accumulated stuff. Still, every so often, I’d take them out, dust them off, and wonder at them anew. Once my long nights of historical study began, I returned to them more and more often, until they finally set me on a path of becoming a scholar of American holidays and culture, including the phenomenon of holiday postcards.

It turns out there was a good reason my ancestor had piles and piles of these rectangular cardboard artifacts. For a few years in the early 20th century, postcards were a massive phenomenon. Billions of postcards flowed through the mail, and billions more were bought and put into albums and boxes. And amid that prodigious output, holiday postcards were one of the most popular types, with Christmas reigning supreme, just as it had in my inherited collection.

The practice of sending Christmas cards pre-dated the broader postcard craze by several decades, largely thanks to the efforts of Louis Prang. Prang was a savvy printing entrepreneur who kept adding products and lithographic techniques to his ever-expanding business, including the introduction of Christmas greeting cards (perhaps at his wife’s suggestion) in 1875. By the 1880s he was publishing more than 5 million holiday cards each year. And once postcards fell out of favor, greeting card companies like American Greetings and Hallmark rushed in to fill the void. But for a few short years between 1907 and 1910, Christmas postcards created a visual conversation between Americans that was unique because it was also very public. They were in many ways a forerunner of today’s impulse to post selfies and holiday pictures on social media. Unlike a greeting card or letter that hides its contents within an envelope, a postcard was always on display—from the rack in the drugstore where it might be purchased to its final destination. And those billions of snowy landscapes and bag-toting Santas churning through the mail system—the Rural Free Delivery system in particular—revealed much of what was on people’s minds at the height of the Progressive Era.

Take mistletoe, for example. Mistletoe had long been part of the Christmas tradition, with young men using sprigs of the plant to claim the right to demand or steal a kiss. Yet this was an era when women were asking serious questions about their rights and questioning the assumed passivity of their lives in everything from courtship and marriage to education and work. This is why so many postcards feature a woman who has taken control of mistletoe, deciding when and where it will be hung, and when she will choose to be under it and for whom. Sure, the rowdy, sprig-wielding young man still shows up in Christmas postcards, but now he must contend with the “New Woman” who uses mistletoe as part of her new right to take the initiative.

Rural landscapes are another good example. On the surface, nothing seems particularly unusual about a Christmas greeting that features a little snow-covered house in the countryside. That sort of mythologized ideal has been around since before the Civil War, when Currier and Ives capitalized on rural nostalgia with their inexpensive prints. Still, rural and small-town America was far from a contented place in the first decade of the 20th century. Farm children seemed to be fleeing to cities in droves, with 1910 marking the last census of a majority-rural American population.

One reason billions of Christmas postcards circulated with nary a cityscape to be seen is that rural Americans were circulating an idealized vision of themselves. When times seemed tough, all those picture-perfect fields, barns, fences, and country homes became a way to create an alternative narrative—one that was beautiful, healthy, and prosperous. One could argue this instinct shares significant DNA with the practice of staging family photographs for Christmas cards, or for today’s Facebook postings. There is something comforting and empowering about controlling the visual elements of a holiday greeting to your friends and family. Those visuals are not just representing you but a perfected version of you, and your world.

These were also the years when the United States saw the peak of European immigration, particularly immigrants from Southern and Eastern European nations like Russia, Lithuania, Italy, and Greece. Partly as a reaction to this inflow, and its surrounding anxieties, people were eager to emphasize their longstanding roots in the country, as if to say “we came here generations ago, not yesterday.” Manifestations of this urge to claim native roots pop up in the period’s genealogical societies, colonial revival movements, and yes, holidays. An “Old Fashioned Christmas” is a phrase that appears with increasing regularity through the first two decades of the 20th century. It is also a repeated theme in Christmas postcards with plenty of “ye olden time” imagery of colonial homesteads, spinning wheels, lanterns, rocking chairs, muskets, and horse-drawn coaches.

The postcard fad ended when the best postcards—which were printed in Germany using superior lithographic techniques—were priced out of the market by a newly passed tariff in 1909. By 1910, interest was waning as American firms failed to produce postcards of equal quality. World War I put the final nail in the coffin. Yet whereas Halloween or Thanksgiving greeting cards never took off the way their postcard predecessors had, Christmas cards have remained an American tradition, if now dressed up in an envelope. Always a mirror of the times, popular Christmas card styles included Art Deco in the 1920s and patriotic cards during World War II.

Looking back, however, there was something distinctive about the old postcards. They put it all out there—hopes, dreams, worries, excitement, wonder, fear, pride, and more—for store clerks and mailmen, nosy neighbors and family members to see and read.

Certainly I wonder how my great-grandmother’s network of cousins, friends, and her future husband (who sent her plenty of courting postcards, including a few mistletoes of his own) picked the cards they sent. What appealed to them and why? As a kid my answer would have been “because they look cool,” but as a cultural historian I now look deeper for what might like beneath the surface. Like so many others who gravitated to postcards with an almost forceful passion, she was a young rural girl from a long line of rural Americans who saw the world changing quickly. Postcards were a way of dealing with those changes, some welcome I’m sure, and many not. Still, I do agree with my younger self … they were and remain pretty darn cool.

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Some say it’s not how you start but how you finish. As someone who has built a career helping leaders run meetings that are enjoyable and a valuable use of time (sounds improbable, doesn’t it!), I believe how you start a meeting is critical—whether with colleagues, clients, volunteers, your local government, or even your family.

And I always start meetings the same way. With “check-ins.”

At the beginning of every meeting, I invite each person to briefly answer the same question or set of questions.

My check-in question can be as simple as: How are you feeling? Or: What is going on for you that people in the room might need to know?

Sometimes, depending on my sense of the room, I’ll get more specific, asking: What question do you think is most critical that we discuss in today’s meeting? Or: What are you excited about and what are you worried about? One of my favorite questions for leadership teams that meet on a weekly basis is: “What is a high, and a low, from your week? Where do you need help?”

Check-ins encourage everyone in the room to focus on the meeting and one another. This may seem like a given, but unfortunately, in our distraction-filled world, it is not. During check-ins, you’re not looking at your e-mail or phone. You’re not interrupting the person who’s trying to speak.

The check-ins pull people in. Every single person speaks and everyone listens to every person speaking. (In other words, you don’t comment on other people’s check-ins.) And if you want input from introverts during meetings, check-ins help them get over the hump of speaking up. And because everyone talks at the beginning, check-ins make it clear that this meeting is for everyone, and not just the boss.

In check-ins, we all quickly learn where the other people in the room are coming from and what is going on with them on that particular day. Research shows that when you understand where people are coming from, you start to build relationships and trust. So when the inevitable bumps and miscommunications arise in our work environments, we are less likely to jump to negative conclusions about our colleagues, fight (or flee), or complain about a seemingly errant colleague.

Instead, we are more likely to walk down the hall or pick up the phone to talk with that colleague directly. When we develop relationships, we act from an assumption that our colleagues are trustworthy and we can work things out. So problems get resolved more rapidly, and organizations are able to adapt more quickly.

Some people think that check-ins slow you down. They don’t. Check-ins allow everyone to get a sense of the whole room much more quickly than is possible with one-on-one conversation. And they can draw out information that is essential to conducting a good meeting. I encourage people to mention if they are feeling tired, sick, or overwhelmed during check-ins.

Of course, there is sometimes resistance to doing check-ins: They can seem too structured or touchy-feely for some cultures. While check-ins may feel awkward at first, the benefits of them make it worth your while to push through the resistance.

Sometimes people learn the hard way the need to be open in check-ins. On the second day of a recent two-day-long leadership team meeting I facilitated, an executive—a private person who doesn’t like being vulnerable—chose not to say in the check-in that he had been up since 3 a.m. with a toothache. So his clenched jaw, contorted facial muscles, and sharp speech were interpreted by many of his peers as, “He’s not happy with where this conversation is going. He’s angry.” Had he mentioned in the check-in that he was exhausted and in pain, his peers and boss would have understood the cause of his behavior.

I’m unsure of where the check-in originated, but I know it is a longstanding technique in focus groups. I first learned about check-ins at my first organizational development job at a Massachusetts consulting firm. The company had a meditation room, and we opened our weekly business development meeting with a minute of silence followed by a check-in. I’ve been using check-ins as a tool to run productive meetings ever since. From small NGOs and start-ups to Fortune 100 leadership teams and the United Nations, I start every meeting the same way: with a question. I even use them at home in an effort to get my pre-teen son to open up at the dinner table about his day at school. (This may be the most valuable place to use them!)

Today, inside my own consultancy Groupaya, we do check-ins all the time—when we meet in my kitchen in San Francisco, and online every Monday. We also do them in our weekly conference calls with clients—even with eight people on the phone and just an hour for the meeting.

I don’t limit myself to check-ins. With all my clients, I also do check-outs—a question or questions posed to everyone at the end of meetings. The technique works for all the reasons check-ins do—and a few others. People often bring up a point or question that’s been missed in the discussion. People naturally end up talking about next steps, about what’s unanswered by the discussion, and about the meeting’s most important moments.

Most of my former clients continue to do check-ins and check-outs. Even those who were initially skeptical end up seeing them as a tool for discovering what is really going on in their company or organization.

I do acknowledge some limits on where check-outs are useful: I don’t do them at the dinner table. That would be a little much. I can just see my pre-teen son’s eyes rolling at the thought.

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