Post 500

This is officially the Five Hundredth Post I have published on here since I began less than a year ago. As such, I felt there should be some mild significance to it.

So bear with me, but I want to tell a story. Actually two stories. The point of these stories is that humans are social animals, and alone in my cube, day after day, this blog, and the blogs I read off the right-hand column, have been my social connection to the world of like-minded individuals.

Story one: About two weeks ago I was in the bathroom here at work, sitting on the toilet. The bathroom is arranged such that there are two stalls and two urinals. I was in the handicapped stall, unable to see anyone else who was entering and leaving. Someone entered, and I heard them walk up to one of the urinals. When, a few seconds later, they cleared their throat, I knew without a shadow of a doubt that it was Mike, who, I thought to myself, must have come down from the fourth floor to use the restroom down here on the third floor. Moments later, I exited the stall and washed my hands, while Mike washed his.

Story two: Last night when I was driving my wife and me home from a meeting, we passed a man jogging. He was jogging away from us, and I could not see his face. However, something about the way he ran tripped something in my brain, and I thought to myself "I went to junior high with a kid two years older than me who ran just like that. We went to different high schools, however. I saw him once when I was a sophomore in high school, walking then." As Mrs. TAE and I passed the runner, I turned back to see his face. It was, in fact, my peer from junior high.

What is remarkable about these two events is not that I have an amazing memory. I am not known for memorizing textbooks, or faces, or names. I am an intelligent person, and fared well on standardized tests, but as far as memory goes, I'd put myself no higher than the 80th percentile.
And yet I was able to recognize Mike's throat clearing (having probably never heard it) because I know his voice amongst the ~30,000 different people I have met or heard the voice of in my lifetime. I was able to recognize the gait pattern of a man I had not seen in 12 years, and had not seen run in 15.

This leads me all to the conclusion that the human brain is a remarkable, bizarre social memory device unlike any seen elsewhere in the universe. The old saying "how can the zebras tell each other apart?" may have credence here, because its just as likely they can't. They only need to recognize one zebra a year, their progeny, and once it is fully grown they can easily forget it along with the others. Zebra can live in a world where there is only "me," "not me," "food," "not food," and "predator." Social animals, however, tend to have stronger memories for identifying one another, like male lions being able to tell, by smell alone, his cubs from his rivals, even though he has spent little or no time with the cubs.
But humans have taken this to a whole new level: language. We've evolved a tongue and mouth capable of orating an infinite number of different sounds, many of which we have deliberately organized into several thousand current and past languages. Amongst those languages, there are countless dialects, and accents. We have developed a method to leave marks (words) on objects to transmit communication to others. We have even learned how to communicate with each other using electricity. We have evolved a brain capable of discerning not only thousands of different voices, but being able to detect emotions within the verbalization of those voices.

And not just verbal and written communication, but physical traits of humans have become communication tools, and we've evolved to recognize them, even over time, as in the case of my junior high peer whose running gait I still recognize. We've evolved the mental capacity to detect one human's shape and facial structure from another, and from that, though risque to mention, we evolved the ability to better detect differences amongst our own race much better than amongst other races, which leads inescapably to the conclusion that human social interaction evolved our incredible skills to discern individuals in a small population of humans, but it would seem that proto-humans required little need to detect the differences between two individuals from outside that small population. The human mind, it appears, is much better at recognizing "us" than "them".
However, this is something easily overcome, yet adding further evidence to the pile of examples of ways the plasticity of the brain's social center is remarkable. Spend a lot of time with people from another race, and suddenly you learn to recognize them as easily as you formerly recognized your own. Your brain, it would seem, has adopted a new tribe.

And is it any surprise that the methods that most effectively teach preschool kids to think critically are similar to the methods the elderly use to keep their failing minds sharp? Are these likely derivatives of the organizational methods proto-humans used to successfully develop their communication skills?
Let me put it this way: if a group of proto-humans wanted to go hunting, how to plan where each hunter would be positioned, what each hunter's job was, and what to do in case of changed plans? Then when changes of the plan occurred during the hunt, how could the hunters quickly broadcast the plan changes to one another? And after the hunt, how best to review the ups and downs of the hunt, and exchange ideas about why the hunt succeeded or failed?
The answer to all these is communication. Through communication, the human animal claimed its spot atop the food chain. Through communication, humans stopped being animals and became...well...human.


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