Brains, War, Aliens, Spiders & Other Quirky Reading Thoughts

Modern masculinity, unsettling questions about our brains and the future of homo sapiens, plus irreverent children’s lit

What I’m reading now is a strange brew of magical realism, current events, deep thoughts about our brains, and cheeky kids’ books. Connections abound, and the full array of emotions parade like peacock tails. Here’s what’s been on my list lately:

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

“The Warrior Myth” by Mike Nelson, published in August issue of The Atlantic

Home Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari

The Life Impossible by Matt Haig

“The Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity” by R. Keith Sawyer, published in Creative Research Journal

“Nuclear Roulette” by Jeffrey Goldberg, published in August issue of The Atlantic

Good Little Wolf by Nadia Shireen

The Spider in the Well by Jess Hannigan

Thoughts on Modern Masculinity: The Mighty Red + The Warrior Myth

The first reading match-up is between a novel by one of my favorite authors, Louise Erdrich, about teenagers and their families in the aftermath of tragedy, and an article in The Atlantic about the deep-down meaning of the warrior ethos. Common threads intertwine in both narratives, offering echoes I didn’t expect.

The Man Who Nurtures

In her novel The Mighty Red, Erdrich paints all her characters with exquisite tenderness. I fell in love with all of them, especially this one minor male character, Ichor Dumach, who’s the father of one of the main protagonists, Hugo. At one point, he says the cringiest thing to his freshly in love teenage son over a family dinner.

“ ‘As I say, the important thing isn’t money,’ said his father. ‘It is when a man cooks for a woman and later makes heated and trustworthy love to her.’ Ichor leaned toward his son. ‘These are the things that bind a woman to a man. Not money.’ ” Absolutely any teenager receiving this knowledge bomb instantly thinks, “Ewwwww gross.” Because now you’re thinking about your parents having sex, right? Ick. But from where I sit somewhere on the other side of 40, this perspective is utterly charming and deeply significant. Also worth noting? The dinner they’re eating was indeed prepared by Ichor. In fact, he foraged for the mushrooms in the dish. He’s the one the moms call for recipes.

Cooking aside, Ichor’s is an alternative narrative for what it means to be a man today. He’s unabashedly devoted to nourishing his spouse and his family, to being equal parts emotionally and physically strong. Later on in the story, Ichor is the one who saves a young man’s life (Gary) in the wake of a suicide attempt. The rescue is not executed via physical heroics, but rather through stoic and unflinching psychological and emotional support and truth-telling.

The exchange between the two men following the rescue is raw and honest — sustaining and life-giving. A type of nourishment passed from one man to the other.

“ ‘I wish I could go back in time, Mr. Dumach. Every single day I wish I could go back in time.’

‘I know,’ said Ichor.

‘Suicide always leaves someone else holding your pain,’ said Ichor. ‘There’s no reasoning out what happened, Gary, why the ice was rotten right there. You’ll never get an answer.’

‘I’m gonna sound like a kindergarten teacher, but you could start by saying you’re sorry. Say it to everybody who was with you, and to their families, and to their friends. And say it to Jordan. Trust me, it will help. And it’s what a man would do.’

‘Okay,’ said Gary, slowly, for now his terror was different and he didn’t know if he could accomplish what his savior had asked.

‘And then after that, there’s the next step, and the next after that. The way back up that hill—’ Ichor tipped his head up the slope.

The Yin and the Yang of Modern Masculinity

In contrast to the lopsided rhetoric in the manosphere, where for the man to be strong the woman must be subservient, Ichor flexes his muscles through active care. It is a melding of strength and understanding – the yin and the yang of hard and soft. It isn’t one or the other. His wife doesn’t dominate him in the absence of his being the “head of the household.” Ichor’s version of manliness is nuanced and multi-dimensional. It isn’t one thing or another, and it cannot be categorized in a cliché.

The Problem with “Pure” Warrior Ethos

I heard echoes of this dichotomy in an article in the August issue of The Atlantic, “The Warrior Myth: What Pete Hegseth doesn’t understand about soldiers” by Mike Nelson. Today, there is a craving and a call for a so-called pure “warrior ethos,” without the weakening weights of “wokeness” to slow it down, or somehow make it less effective. It’s a desire to let men be men, to take care of business as they see fit. Nelson spent 23 years as a paratrooper and Green Beret, during which time he led a company of Green Berets in Afghanistan in 2014. He understands better than most the balance required in combat, the constant effort of holding dualities in tension.

Of a surprise mission he led, he writes this: “That night’s events tell two stories. The first is that my team needed to destroy the enemy, using quick and lethal violence. This imperative is the core rationale for any army’s existence. But my team members also needed to act as professional soldiers: to set aside their emotional impulses, even in moments of fear, and uphold the law and the moral standards of the United States Army. Anger, resentment, and the desire for retribution can never be fully suppressed. Just as saints feel tempted to sin, even the most moral people can find themselves pushed to the limits by the compounding stresses of combat.”

The new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, sees war painted in shades of stark black and white.

According to Nelson, he “has declared that his priorities for the Pentagon will be lethality and returning the military ‘to the war fighters.’ As he said at the Army War College in April, ‘Everything starts and ends with warriors in training and on the battlefield. We are leaving wokeness and weakness behind.’” It’s a zero-sum game, essentially. “Anything that falls outside Hegseth’s vision of lethality is painted as a woke distraction, and anyone suggesting restraint is a hindrance or a remnant of the previous regime,” as Nelson puts it.

A False Dichotomy

There is no nuance in Hegseth’s perspective, only cold clarity—as one-sided as any definition of masculinity prevailing in the manosphere. What, exactly, is at stake with this focus on lethality, at the expense of professionalism and moral codes of conduct? “… Hegseth risks creating a false dichotomy – that one must choose between lethality and professionalism,” writes Nelson. “… America’s military remains at its most effective when inspired to maintain both its professionalism and its warrior culture.”

It is not one or the other – holding both simultaneously is the true source of power. And what’s at stake is even larger than losing battles and wars. As Nelson concludes in his piece: “Leadership at the Defense Department should not overcorrect for past mistakes. Failure to recognize the brutal truths of combat and to embrace a warrior ethos risks losing future wars. But a cult-like devotion to achieving that ethos without connection to larger values risks losing our way.”

Complex Duality Is the Only Way Forward

Each of us literally holds multitudes, and there is no black and white in this world, only countless shades of gray. Nuance and context aren’t inconveniences to be pushed aside and discounted, they are exactly the spaces where battles are won or lost, where hearts and minds find belonging or disconnection. As humans, we crave certainty and stability, a sense of rightness easily explained. For men, warriors or not, this seems especially true at this pivotal moment. Right now, there’s a blank space for writing a new definition of masculinity. The loudest among us are shouting to fill it with lopsided distillations. But the right answer isn’t a slogan, it’s a complex duality flexible enough to hold competing realities as part of a single circle.

I’ve been drawing brains lately…

Brains Are on My Mind: Homo Deus + The Life Impossible + The Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity

At first glance, a magical realism novel, a non-fiction work by a historian-futurist-philosopher and a scientific review of neuroscience research about creativity have little in common. And yet. The Life Impossible by Matt Haig, Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari and the “Neuroscience of Creativity” study by R. Keith Sawyer all deal in large part with the domain of the brain. All ask fascinating what-if questions. If you think about it, we humans have been on a mission to supercharge the computing power of our brains for the last 5,000 years. That’s when we invented writing and money (and numbers), pretty much simultaneously. This was a huge unlock because it extended our thinking power beyond the constraints of memory. When you can write things down, you don’t have to hold them in your brain.

Today’s AI computing power offers a further exponential extension of our brain power. It prompts Harari to ask: What if our brains can merge with tech? What happens then? Haig asks a different, complementary question: What if we could unlock the full potential of our brains through a deeper understanding of ourselves? What if we could abandon the harmful stories we tell about ourselves? What if we could erase the separating lines we draw, that exist only in our minds? And the Neuroscience of Creativity asks a third question: What happens when we see our brains as innately creative organs? What changes when ALL humans realize they ARE creative, that it is not some special talent only possessed by an exclusive few?

90 Days with Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow is the third book I’ve read by Yuval Noah Harari this year. I also digested Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century. Adding it up now, that means I’ve spent about 3 months out of 7 in close company with this gentleman – and his voice is definitely beginning to take up permanent residence in my brain. His writing is clear, well-reasoned and presented in a dispassionate tone at times even drily funny. In case you’re wondering, there’s nothing “brief” about either Sapiens or Homo Deus, unless you consider that the 70,000 or so years he focuses on are but a brief blip in the fullness of time.

In Home Deus, some of his ideas about what our future might hold are wholly disturbing. Will we merge with machines? Will Homo Sapiens go the way of the Neanderthal – i.e. obsolete and thus extinct? Will there be a new privileged class of superhumans? Are we naught but a collection of algorithms such that AI and social media will know us better than we know ourselves given enough data? Do we matter as individuals at all? Or are we just bits of data that count only inasmuch as they can improve the system in which we all live (or are trapped)?

If anything at all is comforting, it’s the continuous lesson in the vast sweep and scope of history. We have green lawns because people have always had green lawns. That’s what we think. But lawns are actually relatively new in the context of the tens of thousands of years of our existence. Knowing that what we experience now is absolutely NOT how it’s always been is incredibly helpful. If you understand that nothing is inevitable and everything is subject to change, then you can be free to live differently, both as individuals and collectively.

Although Harari’s books offer copious context to help you understand humans in general and your self specifically more deeply, I always walk away with far more questions than answers. Here are a few (more) I’m now pondering:

Are all human lives equally valuable?

Do we have souls? If so, where are they? If not, what does that mean?

Where is my authentic self? Do I even have one?

What does it mean if I literally contain multitudes?

What happens when you cut the corpus callosum?

Why the heck do we have emotions?

Is my brain an unreliable narrator?

Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?

What’s more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?

What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?

Read more of my ruminations on Homo Deus here. Mind you, I’m not saying you’ll find any answers, but you might uncover a few new understandings.

Longing for Ibiza

Reading Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible sparked a big-time craving deep in my heart to spend time on the sun-soaked Spanish island of Ibiza. Through the eyes of his narrator, 72-year-old retired maths teacher and widow Grace Winters, I experienced what it might be like to make a home in the quirky Ibiza community.

Soon enough after arriving on the island, Grace is pulled into a mysterious undercurrent (literally and metaphysically), a sort of alien presence under the ocean called La Presencia that opens up new dimensions within and without. Experiencing her inner unfolding felt closer to real life than to magical realism to me, like decoding the secrets of our own brains, tapping into the latent power already there, versus being bestowed talents by an otherworldly life form. Granted, some of the abilities gifted to Grace by La Presencia are squarely in the realm of fantasy (for now). She is able to read others’ thoughts, for example. And can instantly understand and speak any new language. Additionally, she can signal to animals, who can understand and heed her call.

Her biggest breakthrough, however, is a deep, empathetic and loving understanding of herself that allows her to let go of the harmful thinking patterns and self-beliefs she’s harbored and nurtured over decades. In short, by changing her mind she is able to unlock and unleash the full powers of the gifts she’s been given by La Presencia. She’s able to let go of the binary thinking that blocks us from understanding our fundamental interconnectedness, and hold conflicting dualities in a single sphere.

“We have the unbreakable and the eternal inside us. We have the universe in our blood and bones. You see, if you want to visit a new world, you don’t need a spacecraft. All you need to do is change your mind,” Grace observes.

It’s this last line that most attracts me: we have the power to literally change our minds. But effecting that brain-altering change requires a deep understanding of the structure and function of your brain.

Read more of my thoughts about The Life Impossible here, along with a collection of my favorite quotes from the novel.

This image comes from the AI image generation platform Ideogram, contributed by a fellow user.

Welcome to Your Complicated, Creative Brain: “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity” + “Nuclear Roulette”

Here’s a fact for you: “…the heightened activation [in any given area of the brain during a creative task] is never more than 3 percent above the activation level of that region during the comparison task or the baseline state.” This is one of the most impactful excerpts I read from the scholarly research review “The Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity.”

That’s right. No matter who the person or what they’re doing (say, Picasso drawing a masterpiece), the brain is never any more than 3 percent more active than at ANY OTHER TIME. Like, just staring out the window, for instance. There have been a myriad of studies attempting to parse out exactly what is going on in the brain during the creative process, and it turns out not much more than usual.

A little weird, right? But a lot freeing. To me, that means we’re all within grasp of huge creativity pretty much all the time. I’m not more creative than you are. Maybe I practice creativity more or express it with greater frequency, but all of our brains possess equal creative power.

“When people are engaged in creative tasks, the same brain areas are active that are active in many everyday tasks—even in ordinary tasks that we do not associate with creativity. Every normal, healthy human being engages in these brain processes; they are required for everyday functioning.”

Two things that do seem essential to activating creativity: daydreaming and mastery of a specific skill.

The research seems to show that “Mind wandering is likely to be the brain state that corresponds to incubation,” which many times precedes a creative insight. Apparently, we drift in and out of very short bursts of this state so many times we’re not even aware of. Finally, as shouldn’t be surprising, those who have acquired expertise in a given area — writing, dance, music, painting — their brains are optimized for creativity in those areas.

In Conclusion

All this to say… the brain is mysterious and powerful, but not unknowable or inaccessible. We’re discovering more and more every day, and we all have the responsibility to understand that 3-pound mass floating in our skulls to the best of our abilities. We owe it to ourselves, present and maybe more importantly, future.

It may also help to understand that we really don’t have one single holistic brain, we have a series of stacked, connected brains, layered from most ancient to newest development. Our oldest brains control our most essential processes, like breathing and heartbeats, and they’re also the seat of our emotional responses.

In the article “Nuclear Roulette” by Jeffrey Goldberg, published in August issue of The Atlantic, I came across this quote from sociobiologist E.O. Wilson: “We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology.” One can instantly understand how such odd bedfellows could be problematic when it comes to nuclear armament. And similarly, a bit knotty for all of modern life.

Spiders + Wolves

In the spirit of John Klassen (I Want My Hat Back), there’s this new category of irreverent children’s literature that totally hits the spot for me. There’s no neat and tidy moral message. No sweet happy ending. They’re a quirky reflection of the messy nature of actual life, nothing more and nothing less.

After the third or fourth reading of one such book, Good Little Wolf by Nadia Shireen, in which a kind and gentle wolf gets eaten up along with his little old lady friend Mrs. Boggins (When asked to stop eating people up, the Big Bad Wolf replies: “OK. I’ll start tomorrow.”), I thought to myself, there may be a lesson here after all. Then I proceeded to ruminate to my 9-year-old son that some people tell you who they are, right out loud, and we should believe what they say. They aren’t trying to be good or do better, we’re the ones hoping they can be, bestowing the benefit of the doubt, doling out chance after chance. When we’d be better off just taking them at their word. He looked at me and said, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, Mom.” But maybe you do?

Similarly, The Spider in the Well by Jess Hannigan seems to be a story about the advantages of extortion done right, wherein a kind boy who does more than his fair share for his town realizes he’s been taken advantage of and beats his neighbors at their own game. As I say, there’s no neat and tidy life lessons here, just helpful observations about human nature. It’s a problematic story about problematic people in a problematic town, which feels awfully close to actual problematic life. In a genre that often tilts toward saccharine sweetness, I always appreciate these bracing gems with their refreshingly enigmatic endings. And in this case, my kids love that the author’s name is Jess… (“Did you write this, Mom?”) Nope. But if I ever wrote children’s lit, that would totally be my style.