What Foster Is Actually Thinking All Day
Has this ever happened to you? You're sitting in class, or in a meeting for your business, and suddenly a new thought occurs to you. You scan the faces in the room, looking at each one in turn as a quiet panic starts to rise. My God, you realize, I'm trapped in a room with a bunch of hairless, talking apes.
Perhaps you've experienced this state of mind. Considering some perfectly mundane aspect of your life, it suddenly occurs to you how utterly bizarre it really is. It's something that we all take for granted, but - looking at it in this frame of mind - you see it as completely alien, as absurd. For crying out loud, how bizarre is it that right now, in my very own house, there are two individuals of the genus Felis, carnivorous mammals nor more than a foot or so in length, hiding somewhere, possibly asleep on my own bed or that of my parents. These animals and their precursors have lived with us in this house for approximately one full decade, during which time we have fed them regularly, released them from our house during the day, and watched them return, night after night, to our doorstep once darkness fell. Several of these carnivores have disappeared; in these cases, we have felt intense emotional pain, and then eventually sought out and acquired replacement animals. How bizarre is it that we stimulate the animals' natural hunting tendencies with string and with small cloth items fabricated to resemble their original prey species? How utterly disquieting is it that these predators cohabit with us, rely on us for their food and water sources, yet - unlike even many other animals - they exhibit a fierce resistance to any sort of training, from useful tasks to amusement. They simply live in our home, eat our food, and come back here every night to sleep. Unlike the many other animals of which this is true - mice, flying squirrels, carpenter ants - we embrace these little beasts, invest great time and money in their health, and take time out of our days to interact with them.
If that doesn't strike you as profoundly bizarre, stretch your head a little. Life is more interesting when it's strange.
Questioning premises isn't just amusing, though. It's also useful. In a lab, it's essential to be able to spot how the ways in which you've framed your questions will shape your answers. Likewise, a writer in the humanities will be well-served by pointing out unquestioned assumptions. I see it as especially useful for someone in evolutionary psychology: the things that we all take for granted, the "of course, everybody does that"s of the world, are exactly the clear starting point for analysis informed by evolutionary theory. It might be advantageous in everyday life to accept the default program, but for anyone picking at its roots, I recommend a little self-alienation. I mean, how weird is it that we just pick up cultural expectations from the people around us ....
Perhaps you've experienced this state of mind. Considering some perfectly mundane aspect of your life, it suddenly occurs to you how utterly bizarre it really is. It's something that we all take for granted, but - looking at it in this frame of mind - you see it as completely alien, as absurd. For crying out loud, how bizarre is it that right now, in my very own house, there are two individuals of the genus Felis, carnivorous mammals nor more than a foot or so in length, hiding somewhere, possibly asleep on my own bed or that of my parents. These animals and their precursors have lived with us in this house for approximately one full decade, during which time we have fed them regularly, released them from our house during the day, and watched them return, night after night, to our doorstep once darkness fell. Several of these carnivores have disappeared; in these cases, we have felt intense emotional pain, and then eventually sought out and acquired replacement animals. How bizarre is it that we stimulate the animals' natural hunting tendencies with string and with small cloth items fabricated to resemble their original prey species? How utterly disquieting is it that these predators cohabit with us, rely on us for their food and water sources, yet - unlike even many other animals - they exhibit a fierce resistance to any sort of training, from useful tasks to amusement. They simply live in our home, eat our food, and come back here every night to sleep. Unlike the many other animals of which this is true - mice, flying squirrels, carpenter ants - we embrace these little beasts, invest great time and money in their health, and take time out of our days to interact with them.
If that doesn't strike you as profoundly bizarre, stretch your head a little. Life is more interesting when it's strange.
Questioning premises isn't just amusing, though. It's also useful. In a lab, it's essential to be able to spot how the ways in which you've framed your questions will shape your answers. Likewise, a writer in the humanities will be well-served by pointing out unquestioned assumptions. I see it as especially useful for someone in evolutionary psychology: the things that we all take for granted, the "of course, everybody does that"s of the world, are exactly the clear starting point for analysis informed by evolutionary theory. It might be advantageous in everyday life to accept the default program, but for anyone picking at its roots, I recommend a little self-alienation. I mean, how weird is it that we just pick up cultural expectations from the people around us ....