Saturday, 13 August, 2022 – E posted one picture today. It is a picture of a pile of produce, with a piece of paper sitting on top of it that says his name. I am guessing it is pile of vegetables he picked. And as pictures of veggies go, it is nice. There must be some satisfaction in seeing such a big pile of beautiful, ripe, yummy stuff which you know is going become part of a delicious meal.
I mentioned yesterday that I was thinking about how travel is changing E. There are probably several different ways this trip is influencing E but the one I had in mind, in particular, is how it is rewiring his brain. As I was walking in the sweltering August-in-Kansas heat, I listened to an episode on the podcast Freakonomics called “The U.S. Is Just Different — So Let’s Stop Pretending We’re Not.” I won’t summarize the whole episode because it is long and complicated, and for the purposes of writing about E, what struck me was something fairly minor, in the course of the entire episode. I started thinking about what he is doing now – interacting with people from very different cultures – and wondering what impact the trip might have on his life in 10, or 20, or 30 years. He’ll have memories, of course, but are there decisions, or choices, he’ll make as an adult with his own family, his own children, which this trip will influence?
In the episode, a professor of evolutionary biology, Joe Henrich, was talking about trying to measure culture, “[H]ow it is that we acquire ideas, beliefs, and values from other people and how this has shaped human genetic evolution?” In other words, how does going somewhere and learning something from someone else actually change our brain, our biological makeup? Our brains actually create new pathways when we “acquire ideas from other people”! Holy crap! Isn’t that kind of amazing?
Henrich says, “You can’t separate ‘culture’ from ‘psychology’ or ‘psychology’ from ‘biology,’ because culture physically rewires our brains and thereby shapes how we think.” One example he gives is literacy. In “a society in which 95 percent of adults are highly literate,” he writes, people have a thicker corpus callosum than a society in which only 5 percent of people are highly literate.” I do not know the significance of having a thicker corpus callosum. Do I want it to be thicker or not? I don’t know.
In any case, the point was, to me, that this trip could be altering E’s life in ways we don’t even see or understand now, and maybe never will, but it will still happen. Maybe a neural pathway is being created that will lead him where he would not go otherwise, to be happier, or choose a loving spouse, or see a career opportunity, or simply embrace some change in his life that doesn’t feel impossible to deal with.
Obviously, I don’t know if any of that is true.
But it feels true.