On data lost and found, new-old knowledge, and how to sleep
Dear Eva,
I am thinking tonight about how we learn new things and how being taught something directly by someone is just one of a multitude of ways of learning. Today I fell upon new knowledge after collecting nibbles from a variety of sources — a bit of a podcast here, a small political debate with Bill there, a conversation with you and others at work today — and eventually stitching them all together into a new insight while sitting next to my kids while they watched a stirring episode of Paw Patrol on Nickelodeon.
Now, a few hours later, I am sitting here wondering whether the insight is really new at all, even to me. Is it just a new way of thinking about the same things I so often think and write about? Would it make it any less of an insight if that was all it was? Doesn’t any new bit of knowledge get tucked into a larger theory or way of understanding something?
Recently, I had the experience of telling Bill about some interesting little bit of historical evidence for something that I read that I had never heard before. His response, “We have talked about this before.” Hmm. Well, it sure felt new to me! What happened to that bit of data in my brain? There is plenty of information that glides in my ears and then right back out like wind through a tree, but usually something that interests me like this sticks. Why didn’t it go into permanent storage, I wonder?
It is interesting to ponder how much of our selves — our brains, our identities — are actually long-term vessels of memories, knowledge, thoughts. I think we tend to assume we are containers for a continually growing stack of data about things we learn and experience, but I don’t know about you, but my own past often feels just as vague in my memory as the plot of a novel I once read. Sometimes, I read things I wrote awhile ago, and the words sound familiar only in the way an argument you support feels familiar when you hear it.
This is not to say we are all starting from a new blank slate every day. Our histories shape us, no doubt. But the older I get, the less I think our histories define us.
All of this musing about memory and identity leaves no room to write about the dots I felt like I connected tonight. That is probably for the best. It needs to steep in the old noggin for a bit before I attempt to articulate it anywhere other than my crumpled spiral notebook.
As I close this letter, I am enjoying the thought of you sitting at your computer a few hundred miles north of here right now writing your letter to me. Synchronous, yet independent, communication. Letter writing is such an old mode of sustaining a connection with someone, but it somehow feels so revolutionary in this time and place. Have we stumbled upon an old/new method for sustaining a long distance creative partnership? Here’s hoping!
Yours,
Sarah
December 6, 2018
Dear Sarah,
There was so much in your letter last week that I’ve been stewing over in these days since. I’ve been thinking a lot about what the brain knows and learns, and what the body knows and learns. (Disclaimer: I’m not a neuroscientist, but why would I let that stop me?) There are infinite things the body knows that the brain is working on learning and knowing on a conscious, intentional, informed level. Your brain is leading the show all the time but it’s not consciously passing every instruction where it needs to go in some perceptible, “visible” way.
I’m thinking about Jonah practicing the piano and the many ways we learn and practice to form muscle memories, so our bodies know what to do on some level that we don’t fully have to think about anymore. When I was more regularly a part of orchestras, I’d practice the music so much that my body did know it — your hands are moving and your eyes see the music and also see through it in some sense. And then occasionally if you were paying too much attention you would sort of look back at yourself and your hands flying and you would have a moment of recognition — Wow, can you believe my hands know what they are doing right now? And then things would get a little clunkier, what was fluid would become again an assembly of individual notes, coming apart a bit at the seams — with the eyes looking right at things they break apart into all the little shards and fragments.
There can be similar moments when you’re writing — the way that something takes over and helps put the words side by side in some new way and it gets a bit exciting, and then when you see it happening it’s like the spotlight is too bright, too direct, and the rhythm sneaks off into the peripheral vision again. I suppose I’m talking about what people would call “flow” though the label is less interesting than thinking about how it works and feels. How to let the body and the muscles do what they know how to do without getting the brain overly involved? Or, how to let the brain in at the right moments to practice, to discover, to reveal, to talk about those learned-known-reflexive moments? Last week you were writing about learning how to live with the clarity of someone at the end of life, the sense that things become clearer as we understand finally that our time is limited. But I wonder if we know it all along, our bodies know it, and that’s partly how we all seem to know some ways to get to that clarity when the time comes — the body knows what to do.
I was reading this week about a sleep-tracking ring, a ring you wear on your finger, some new relationship with data, a measurement marriage, or data decor, and this ring has earned more than $20 million in a recent funding round. The ring “tracks your sleep habits to help you achieve better sleep,” measuring your body movements, temperature, and so on. The people providing the $20 million say the ring will help address a “challenge that faces us all — getting enough high-quality sleep.” The ring retails for $299 to $999 depending on your choice of materials. The data gathering and mining feels like this look back at ourselves, trying to understand this thing the body knows how to do, how to sleep, breaking it apart into lots of little shards to try to help reassemble the thing that was whole, and at a hefty price. I was also listening to Alie Ward’s podcast Ologies and the episode about Somnology, the study of sleep, and there is this sense that people think they should be getting eight straight hours of sleep, and that they’re not sleeping — maybe they’re fretting and looking back at themselves not sleeping and then they’re caught in a strange anxiety loop that I’m not sure the $299+ sleep ring is going to be able to rescue them from. We’re working long hours and not taking our vacations and staring at our screens until late at night and we feel like we aren’t sleeping, and maybe there is some measurement we can take that will tell us why, if we can spend $300 to learn about our bodies. They know how to sleep, we’ve come this far.
I’m coming back around a bit to the idea of sticking with something, learning new things by building them in every day until they are there in the rhythms of the muscles, but how do we know when to stop or move on? When is the body doing the right things that it knows how to do, and when have the signals calcified, when would it be better to unlearn some of those memories and habits we carry around with us? We have to learn many things new as kids, and then as adults we have to both trust our bodies on what they know, and we have to help them unlearn certain things. We try to see and measure all the individual pieces, every contributing factor — our heart rhythms and pulses and movements and temperatures while we sleep — and we buy the ring hoping it will help us see ourselves, and now we’ll pore over the data we’re gathering on ourselves and try to point at the tiny dial we can turn ever so slightly to make things different. If we can measure the mess maybe we can put it in some kind of order. We’re looking forward to ever more futuristic ways of knowing ourselves and we’re doing detective work, revealing the interlocking systems that are flowing along freely along the way. When we know more about what our bodies do and do not know, what they get right and what they get wrong — what will we do differently? Do we really want to change the big things, instead of trying to turn all the tiny little dials separately?
I’m off to bed, friend! Going to sleep on it.
Eva