This is one of the first pieces I wrote in grad school, and remains one of the most personal. I wrote this for Contemporary Nonfiction, still one of my favorite classes.
As we emerged from the dimly-lit and mysteriously-puddled T station, I smelled an instantly familiar mixture of Dunkin Donuts coffee, sea-salt air, and historical significance. After traversing the dozens of stairs in the sprawling square of Government Center, Alex grabbed my hand.
“Feel good to be back?” he asked, squinting genially in the midday sun. I inhaled deeply through my nose, and forcefully exhaled, just as I had learned in yoga class.
I had started off college in Boston like so many other 18-year-olds: wide-eyed, enthusiastic, and privately terrified. I didn’t know a soul and was somehow left out of the immediate clique-forming ritual that seems to happen every year at Boston University within the first two weeks of matriculation. This was partially due to the fact that I had somehow been assigned to a single room that I am still convinced was actually a closet (I had to walk through my sophomore suitemates’ spacious double room to get to our shared bathroom) on an otherwise freshmen-less floor at the east end of campus, far removed from the bonding occurring at the “woo hoo no parents!” keggers of the frosh-heavy dorms half a mile west of me.
I also managed to debunk the Disney-flavored myth that you can achieve anything through hard work and perseverance. After doing well in math and science in high school and given my interest in medicine (and efficiency!), I had come to Boston to pursue what I believed to be the perfect major – biomedical engineering. The magnitude of this miscalculation was so large as to be almost comical; I tried harder and studied more than in my previous thirteen years of formal education combined, and even that was not enough to help me pass Electromagnetic Physics for Engineers or Linear Algebra. I lost my half-tuition scholarship, a large chunk of my dignity, and all passion for the mechanical aspects of things. After three semesters of trying to convince myself that it would get easier, that it was worth it, that I would not quit, my sanity finally triumphed over my stubbornness, and I decided to give up on engineering and on Boston University. This decision was made easier by the fact that the Office of Financial Assistance had even less faith in my academic abilities than I did, and finally yanked my scholarship after two semesters of sending vaguely threatening letters. Without it I couldn’t afford to stay at BU, even in another major, so I transferred back to my state school, the University of Maryland. I switched my focus of study to something science-related that involved absolutely no physics: neurophysiology. Now, for the first time in four years, I was back in Boston thanks to a Christmas gift from my well-meaning boyfriend.
Showing off the downtown area to Alex was a cinch. I had always loved the city, the seemingly haphazard but ultimately beautiful architectural juxtaposition of old and new, the ornate brownstones, the caliginous concrete subway stations (“it feels like the Bat Cave in here,” Alex had marveled). He repeatedly had to drag me back in step with him as I kept bounding ahead with excitement, proudly exhibiting the city that was the first home I had ever chosen.
But as we walked west along the quiet brick sidewalks of Beacon Street towards my alma nada, I felt my steps get heavier. The border between my affection for Boston and my disdain for it was drawn through Kenmore Square, the eastern boundary of the Boston University campus. I stared up at the famous neon Citgo sign, mere feet from my freshman dormitory, and felt a nostalgia-tinged mixture of sadness and regret. As we passed by various school buildings on my tour of disappointment, I identified them by the torturous classes they housed: the cold stone building on Cummington Street where I used to study in vain for Differential Equations; the windowless basement that served as my Systems and Circuits classroom and smelled of mold and mental anguish; the cavernous Metcalf Center where bendy straws and paper clips lost all their whimsy when I was assigned to build a load-bearing bridge out of them in Mechanics 210 (mine collapsed under the pressure of the air escaping my professor’s lips as he laughed at my, uh, inventive design).
I provided the commentary for our tour with just a hint of strain in my laughter, unconsciously stealing glances at Alex as I talked, looking for something. After two years together and one sharing an apartment, I wasn’t too worried that this trip would reveal a side of me he didn’t like – I had already shown him plenty of those. Then what was I looking for? Sympathy? Comfort? An eye to catch and have an I know, right. Me! Total catastrophe! ha-ha moment that would somehow transform it all from pathetic into hilarious? I wasn’t sure.
I had met Alex during my last semester of college, when I was at the polar opposite of my forlorn days in Boston. At Maryland, I had found the academic and social success that had so painfully eluded me at BU. I had established a good group of friends, and with my hard work finally being channeled into classes that were actually comprehensible to me, both my grades and self-confidence had gotten a considerable boost. I had disclosed to him some anecdotes about my time in Boston, but mostly in reference to my appreciation for the city itself; a self-preservation instinct compelled me to keep the details of my previous loserdom under wraps. As close as our relationship had brought us, I wasn’t sure that I was prepared to let him to see me in all my sad-sack, piteous splendor. It had been almost unbearable to see myself that way.
I had grown up like many children of my generation whose parents were hyper-focused on self-esteem; for fear of any of us developing a complex, we were praised and rewarded for even the most underwhelming achievements. Instead of just the champions, every player in my soccer league received a trophy, ostensibly an award for donning the uniform correctly. I had never truly failed at anything (or at least never felt like I had), so my complete academic and social failure at BU not only hurt, but caught me off-guard. It was like getting hit by an unexpected wave at the beach, feeling the physical pain of its thumping force but also detecting something intentional in it, something personal that compounded the pain with an inexplicable sense of betrayal. I had taken a leap in leaving behind my whole life in Maryland to go to BU, and all I got in return for my bravery was the occasional “+” after a “D” and a stress-eating habit.
We passed by the Photonics Center and I told Alex about the time I had spent there, where I often spaced out of my 8 AM Fluid Dynamics class into a daydream in which I was thrown down the steep stairs of the lecture auditorium, landing in a defeated pile at the feet of the professor, who would immediately realize the agony his class was causing me and declare me exempt from further exams. I excused myself to run to the restroom while Alex smoked a cigarette outside.
As I walked into the silent chrome room, a wave crested over me. I had neglected to tell Alex that this bathroom was the place where I came to cry if I couldn’t make it back to my dorm room in time to lament a particularly soul-crushing class. It had almost always been empty (spotting a girl in the Photonics Center was rare), so I was able to bawl in peace. I heard the shhk of the automatic air freshener spritzing the room with its lavender scent and recalled the day I got a C- on an essay in Modern American Literature (which at the time was the only class I wasn’t bombing) and had been able to determine that the timed sprays were separated by exactly eighteen minutes.
I don’t know what I had expected to feel when I got in there; probably the same feeling I had been preparing to return to the entire trip, what I felt the countless hours that I spent huddled in one of these stalls, stifling my whimpers with a snotty sleeve: the dull, gnawing pain of monotonous failure. Bracing myself, I waited for it, almost visibly flinching in anticipation of its venomous strike.
But it never came. I didn’t feel it in the bathroom, just as I hadn’t felt it walking down Commonwealth Avenue through the ghosts of academic probation past. I hadn’t even felt it peeking in on my sophomore dorm, where I spent most of my last semester in Boston trying to sleep away my misery while the whiteboard hanging on the other side of the door wallowed in friendless neglect and my textbooks scowled at me in exasperation from their scattered positions all over the floor. Actually, the most salient emotion I detected was relief. It was surprisingly cathartic to stand here and narrate (with visual aids!) to Alex my various failings and shameful shortcomings. Rather than acting disappointed or turned off, he merely nodded, laughed, or commented on the architecture of the buildings. In a way, Alex’s blasé attitude towards my disastrous past made it much more bearable to me, who back at twenty years old had been convinced that not hacking it at BU was the end of the world. My failure was like a spider. “Oh my god!” I had screamed at it. “It’s so huge and awful and scary!” Alex had come along, given an unimpressed shrug and a little chuckle at my hysteria, and squashed it dead, leaving me to blush about how silly my disproportionate terror had been.
As I exited my sarcophagus of self-pity, I realized that for the first time ever, I was leaving this building with a smile on my face. Alex was waiting for me when I got outside, genteelly offering up his bent arm, his smiling gaze as steady as ever.
Thursday, September 16, 2010
Decisions, Decisions
This is actually one of the pieces (the others are too long and boring to be included here) I used in my application to the Writing Program at Hopkins. It's about the best doctor in the world, my mom.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve always been vaguely suspicious of all those who claim that their primary reason for entering medical school or the medical field in general is “to help people,” in the same way that I’m leery of people who describe themselves as “generous” or “humble.” What are my reasons, then, for considering healthcare as a potential profession? Well, it’s complicated.
Medical school has been on my college map since my freshman year, but I’ve very purposely kept it off the must-see list. It’s more like one of those “we’ll stop there if we have time on our way back” kind of landmarks that reek of good intentions and rare follow through. I’m not ready to completely rule it out yet because it might turn out that I really want to be a doctor. At the same time, I can’t set my future in stone like so many of my declared pre-med classmates, because I have seen and can instinctively feel that the med school train is not an easy one to disembark, and inertia alone should not be what is responsible for bringing me to my ultimate occupation. Further complicating this already difficult decision is the fact that my ambassador to Medicalschoolville is my mother, a successful neonatologist who has been saving newborn baby lives for over 30 years.
Growing up with Dr. Mom had its share of disadvantages. I had several school friends who were granted permission to stay home from school to tend to a medical crisis as underwhelming as a stubbed toe, but my mother wouldn’t think twice about sending me off to school with a fever of 99.8 (“It’s low-grade; just make sure you drink a lot of water,” was her usual dismissal). Even working part-time, moonlighting and taking day shifts as she did for most of my childhood, she spent a lot of time away. My most anguished moments of those years occurred when I would occasionally slip and refer to our longtime babysitter as “Mom.” She always assured my red, round face that it was ok, it didn’t mean I didn’t love my mommy, but I never actually felt the satisfaction with this explanation that I conveyed.
Of course, having a doctor in the house did come with benefits, many of which are evident to me only in retrospect. Trips to the pediatrician outside our yearly checkups were few and far between for my sisters and I, a blessing which I can only now, after seeing those stewing germ traps (“sick” waiting rooms) and amateur screaming contests (“well” waiting rooms), truly appreciate. Chest colds, bloody noses, and weird skin rashes never rattled my mother, and her lack of anxiety or fear was usually enough to quell my own worries about such ailments.
Another thing I couldn’t appreciate until I was in my teens, and even more so when I had had some medical training (I became certified as an EMT a year ago, in an attempt to test out the patient-care waters), was just how good a doctor my mother is. She is precise, thorough, extremely knowledgeable, and though she may curse like a sailor, she stays calm during a crisis. And if there is one thing the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit sees, it’s crises. Now when she comes home after a long 24 hour—yes, 24 hour—shift and tells me what a dumbass the obstetrician was being, I know that he probably was. I know that not all doctors can catch an obscure (and usually highly improbable) condition portrayed on ER like my mother can, and that many pediatricians can’t answer a surgical or cardiac question as well as she.
These recent realizations that give me so much pride as a daughter also give me much doubt as a potential medical student and doctor. When I look over the facts, I appear to possess exactly none of the qualities that make my mother such a good doctor: she is meticulous and methodical, while in school I muddled sloppily through much of my schoolwork; she works incredibly hard and goes on little sleep, while I have been known to break down into tears if woken before I’ve gotten my necessary eight hours; she has every planner, organizer, and calendar that Day-Timer makes, while every planner I’ve ever owned goes ignored after about two weeks of inconsistent use. Knowing that I have the intellectual abilities but none of the work ethic, I doubt very seriously that I could ever live up to this legacy, could ever be as good a doctor as my mother. I have the natural aptitude and lack of motivation that echo “wasted talent” and “so much potential.”
If my mom knew she was raising a potential future doctor, she probably would have kept most of her stories of medical school and residency to herself. Tales that would fit in nicely around a campfire on a dark summer night, they told of soul-crushing 36 hour shifts, fatal misdiagnoses and days without time to shower or eat a hot meal. I can recall one particularly shocking tale that still freaks me out a little. My mother, a resident at the time, had just gotten off another zillion-hour shift at the university hospital in Baltimore and was pulling out of the parking lot, headed home to Ellicott City when she realized that her brakes were not working. Not knowing what was wrong and desperate for sleep, my mother, the same woman who arrives at the airport two and half hours before the flight is scheduled to leave and still gets nervous when any of her three grown daughters stands “too close” (read: four feet) to the unenclosed edge of our back deck, drove home the nine miles to her apartment using the hand brake as the only means of stopping her car.
This story is all the proof I need that medical training can drive a person crazy. If medical school can transform the most cautious-to-the-point-of-neurosis person I know into a reckless sleep fiend, what insanities await me if I choose the same career path?
Besides fearing for my mental health, much of the agony I have suffered in considering this major life decision revolves around what my mother will think about my decision. I know that she would be very happy to have another doctor in the family, but this wish has never been verbalized. Both my parents have been very careful to make it clear to all three of their children that they do not want us to worry about what they think about our decisions, that these are our own and only our own. Whenever I think about the (granted, mostly unspoken and very light) pressure from my mother to go into medicine, I can hear every after school special/grrrl power magazine/episode of “Full House” in my ear, telling me that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about what I do, that I should follow my heart no matter what. But those things never taught me who to listen to when my own heart is mute, indifferent, shrugging. This is my true and somewhat shameful reason for considering a career in medicine: I don’t know what else to do. I hear no calling of my own, so saddle up to the next best thing, my mother’s calling. I inherited her face and her stubbornness, so why not her vocation?
When the pre-med pressure gets to be too much and I begin to feel suffocated under all the MCAT preparation bibles, imagining living my life without ever making my mother proud, I remind myself of an incident from my high school days. At our high school, parking lot space was limited so parking without a permit carried a hefty fine. I, being a senior and an athlete, was fortunate enough to have the coveted piece of plastic dangling from my rearview mirror, except for the day it fell down onto the passenger seat floor without my realizing it. When I got to my car after school and saw the large orange “VIOLATION” sticker unceremoniously adhered to my window, I stared, confused and pissed, until I saw the missing permit. I went to the finance office to clear up the misunderstanding, and was stymied when the head of security refused to waive the fine despite my rational explanation. I was livid at the injustice for days until my mother approached me about the incident. She had just been at school and had gotten talking to another member of the school security team, a woman who had been in the room when I had made my protests about the permit violation. My mother said that the woman had remarked how impressed she had been with my handling of the situation.
“She said you were calm, but firm,” my mother recounted, beaming. Out of all the highlights that I thought had been my most shining moments—a 1550 on the SATs, the winning goal in overtime of my senior playoff lacrosse game—I felt more pride emanating from my mother over this small and unglamorous encounter than for any of my academic or athletic accomplishments.
Though I still cling to many of my dreams about impressing people at the neighborhood Christmas party with my illustrious job title and making my mother proud through my career, I am beginning not just to understand, but to believe that I can only truly live up to my mother’s legacy by becoming the person she is, not doing the work she does. More so than her medical aptitude, I hope that I have inherited her tenacious attitude, her ability to cut through endless amounts of bullshit to get to the heart of a matter, her constant striving for growth. No matter where my career and my life lead me, I know now to look at her less as a reputation I have to live up to, and more as a commiserator, a knowledgeable guide, a companion in the foxhole. She has taken the path that looms before me now, so veiled and ominous, and has triumphed.
Until I hear my own calling, I wait, patiently and without (too much) anxiety. And hey, I might turn out to be a really good neurologist. After all, I do like to help people.
To be perfectly honest, I’ve always been vaguely suspicious of all those who claim that their primary reason for entering medical school or the medical field in general is “to help people,” in the same way that I’m leery of people who describe themselves as “generous” or “humble.” What are my reasons, then, for considering healthcare as a potential profession? Well, it’s complicated.
Medical school has been on my college map since my freshman year, but I’ve very purposely kept it off the must-see list. It’s more like one of those “we’ll stop there if we have time on our way back” kind of landmarks that reek of good intentions and rare follow through. I’m not ready to completely rule it out yet because it might turn out that I really want to be a doctor. At the same time, I can’t set my future in stone like so many of my declared pre-med classmates, because I have seen and can instinctively feel that the med school train is not an easy one to disembark, and inertia alone should not be what is responsible for bringing me to my ultimate occupation. Further complicating this already difficult decision is the fact that my ambassador to Medicalschoolville is my mother, a successful neonatologist who has been saving newborn baby lives for over 30 years.
Growing up with Dr. Mom had its share of disadvantages. I had several school friends who were granted permission to stay home from school to tend to a medical crisis as underwhelming as a stubbed toe, but my mother wouldn’t think twice about sending me off to school with a fever of 99.8 (“It’s low-grade; just make sure you drink a lot of water,” was her usual dismissal). Even working part-time, moonlighting and taking day shifts as she did for most of my childhood, she spent a lot of time away. My most anguished moments of those years occurred when I would occasionally slip and refer to our longtime babysitter as “Mom.” She always assured my red, round face that it was ok, it didn’t mean I didn’t love my mommy, but I never actually felt the satisfaction with this explanation that I conveyed.
Of course, having a doctor in the house did come with benefits, many of which are evident to me only in retrospect. Trips to the pediatrician outside our yearly checkups were few and far between for my sisters and I, a blessing which I can only now, after seeing those stewing germ traps (“sick” waiting rooms) and amateur screaming contests (“well” waiting rooms), truly appreciate. Chest colds, bloody noses, and weird skin rashes never rattled my mother, and her lack of anxiety or fear was usually enough to quell my own worries about such ailments.
Another thing I couldn’t appreciate until I was in my teens, and even more so when I had had some medical training (I became certified as an EMT a year ago, in an attempt to test out the patient-care waters), was just how good a doctor my mother is. She is precise, thorough, extremely knowledgeable, and though she may curse like a sailor, she stays calm during a crisis. And if there is one thing the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit sees, it’s crises. Now when she comes home after a long 24 hour—yes, 24 hour—shift and tells me what a dumbass the obstetrician was being, I know that he probably was. I know that not all doctors can catch an obscure (and usually highly improbable) condition portrayed on ER like my mother can, and that many pediatricians can’t answer a surgical or cardiac question as well as she.
These recent realizations that give me so much pride as a daughter also give me much doubt as a potential medical student and doctor. When I look over the facts, I appear to possess exactly none of the qualities that make my mother such a good doctor: she is meticulous and methodical, while in school I muddled sloppily through much of my schoolwork; she works incredibly hard and goes on little sleep, while I have been known to break down into tears if woken before I’ve gotten my necessary eight hours; she has every planner, organizer, and calendar that Day-Timer makes, while every planner I’ve ever owned goes ignored after about two weeks of inconsistent use. Knowing that I have the intellectual abilities but none of the work ethic, I doubt very seriously that I could ever live up to this legacy, could ever be as good a doctor as my mother. I have the natural aptitude and lack of motivation that echo “wasted talent” and “so much potential.”
If my mom knew she was raising a potential future doctor, she probably would have kept most of her stories of medical school and residency to herself. Tales that would fit in nicely around a campfire on a dark summer night, they told of soul-crushing 36 hour shifts, fatal misdiagnoses and days without time to shower or eat a hot meal. I can recall one particularly shocking tale that still freaks me out a little. My mother, a resident at the time, had just gotten off another zillion-hour shift at the university hospital in Baltimore and was pulling out of the parking lot, headed home to Ellicott City when she realized that her brakes were not working. Not knowing what was wrong and desperate for sleep, my mother, the same woman who arrives at the airport two and half hours before the flight is scheduled to leave and still gets nervous when any of her three grown daughters stands “too close” (read: four feet) to the unenclosed edge of our back deck, drove home the nine miles to her apartment using the hand brake as the only means of stopping her car.
This story is all the proof I need that medical training can drive a person crazy. If medical school can transform the most cautious-to-the-point-of-neurosis person I know into a reckless sleep fiend, what insanities await me if I choose the same career path?
Besides fearing for my mental health, much of the agony I have suffered in considering this major life decision revolves around what my mother will think about my decision. I know that she would be very happy to have another doctor in the family, but this wish has never been verbalized. Both my parents have been very careful to make it clear to all three of their children that they do not want us to worry about what they think about our decisions, that these are our own and only our own. Whenever I think about the (granted, mostly unspoken and very light) pressure from my mother to go into medicine, I can hear every after school special/grrrl power magazine/episode of “Full House” in my ear, telling me that it doesn’t matter what anyone else thinks about what I do, that I should follow my heart no matter what. But those things never taught me who to listen to when my own heart is mute, indifferent, shrugging. This is my true and somewhat shameful reason for considering a career in medicine: I don’t know what else to do. I hear no calling of my own, so saddle up to the next best thing, my mother’s calling. I inherited her face and her stubbornness, so why not her vocation?
When the pre-med pressure gets to be too much and I begin to feel suffocated under all the MCAT preparation bibles, imagining living my life without ever making my mother proud, I remind myself of an incident from my high school days. At our high school, parking lot space was limited so parking without a permit carried a hefty fine. I, being a senior and an athlete, was fortunate enough to have the coveted piece of plastic dangling from my rearview mirror, except for the day it fell down onto the passenger seat floor without my realizing it. When I got to my car after school and saw the large orange “VIOLATION” sticker unceremoniously adhered to my window, I stared, confused and pissed, until I saw the missing permit. I went to the finance office to clear up the misunderstanding, and was stymied when the head of security refused to waive the fine despite my rational explanation. I was livid at the injustice for days until my mother approached me about the incident. She had just been at school and had gotten talking to another member of the school security team, a woman who had been in the room when I had made my protests about the permit violation. My mother said that the woman had remarked how impressed she had been with my handling of the situation.
“She said you were calm, but firm,” my mother recounted, beaming. Out of all the highlights that I thought had been my most shining moments—a 1550 on the SATs, the winning goal in overtime of my senior playoff lacrosse game—I felt more pride emanating from my mother over this small and unglamorous encounter than for any of my academic or athletic accomplishments.
Though I still cling to many of my dreams about impressing people at the neighborhood Christmas party with my illustrious job title and making my mother proud through my career, I am beginning not just to understand, but to believe that I can only truly live up to my mother’s legacy by becoming the person she is, not doing the work she does. More so than her medical aptitude, I hope that I have inherited her tenacious attitude, her ability to cut through endless amounts of bullshit to get to the heart of a matter, her constant striving for growth. No matter where my career and my life lead me, I know now to look at her less as a reputation I have to live up to, and more as a commiserator, a knowledgeable guide, a companion in the foxhole. She has taken the path that looms before me now, so veiled and ominous, and has triumphed.
Until I hear my own calling, I wait, patiently and without (too much) anxiety. And hey, I might turn out to be a really good neurologist. After all, I do like to help people.
A Tree Grows in Derwood
And no, that wasn't the original title. It actually didn't have a title and that's all I could come up with in five seconds. This is an essay I wrote after taking a beautiful Saturday trip out to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center with my Science in Action class.
I have been here before. Technically, this is my first visit to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, but I have been here before. Born and raised in Derwood, about 30 miles northwest of the Laurel, Maryland, refuge, I spent many an early spring day trekking through woods identical to these, as our house backed up to one of the slithering tentacles of Rock Creek Regional Park that unfurls from the main tract of park land in Washington, DC. The sights are familiar: a green twig, so delicate in its infancy, growing skyward out of a graveyard of dead leaves, emerging triumphantly from the decaying bodies of its deceased cousins; the forest floor, patterned by the playful geometrical dance of branches and mid-morning light; the large oak trees that I can barely wrap my arms halfway around, hovering silently but fondly with an affected aloofness, like a parental chaperone trying to stealthily eavesdrop at a school dance.
As a child, the woods were a fun place to romp around with my sisters, a place where we would bounce on the suspended bridge a neighbor had constructed out of an old radio tower to span the ten-foot creek and compete to see who could sway the bridge the most, shrieking gleefully as our toes dipped closer to the shallow, russet water with each bounce. But as time has rolled on and the bridge’s glistening steel has faded to a muted rust, that forest has come to mean much more to me. It is where I discovered that stillness can be tranquil and not terrifying; that it implies not death, but a beautiful harmony of life. It is where as a teenager I would take solitary walks in order to feel less alone. It is where I came on September 12, 2001 to weep, to feel safe, to find something familiar and permanent in a world I no longer recognized.
Though my mother reassured me that the woods behind our house were park land and could never be razed to make room for the type of McMansion-ish housing developments that were beginning to crop up all over town, I worried. I worried most for the forest’s myriad furry and flowered inhabitants, but I also worried for myself. I didn’t want to look out from our back deck onto anything but the chorus of trees that had been rooted there all my life, singing their leafy hymns to the stars. As long as they don’t cut them down, it will be okay, I thought. I hadn’t even considered that the biggest threat to my beloved woods might actually lie within them, lurking among the perch and the poplar trees with a menacing silence.
Back at the Patuxent Center, I watch intently as Dr. Karen Lips and three of her graduate students demonstrate how to catch a salamander. As a highly regarded herpetologist and ecologist, Lips has traveled up and down Latin America studying amphibian species in some of the most biologically diverse regions of the world. In the case of the salamander, though, the most diverse and populous area is literally right in our own backyards: the Appalachian Mountain region is home to more salamanders than any other area on earth. But the salamander population, like that of many amphibian species, is declining drastically: approximately 47% of all salamander species are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as threatened or endangered, and many more may have already gone extinct.
Though Lips believes there are several man-made culprits responsible for these declines, the most immediate villain may actually be all-natural. Chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease, has been linked to deaths in many amphibian species all over the world, including salamanders. A zoosporic fungus that surreptitiously seeps into the skin of amphibians, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or “chytrid fungus,” as it is more commonly called, grows particularly well in cool, damp climates, giving it ample opportunity to encounter amphibian species that prefer the same. It has affected various species of salamanders differently, as some populations have experienced massive die-offs within months of the first infection – and sometimes even complete eradication – while in others only a small portion of the population has succumbed to the fungal disease. The cause of this differential vulnerability is just one of the mysteries of the chytrid fungus that Lips and her team are trying to solve, in addition to how environmental changes affect the spread of the fungus and what can be done to slow this spread. They hope that answering these questions about the fungus will help guide effective salamander conservation efforts.
Her students show me how to slowly turn over a rock in the middle of the shallow creek bed, as salamanders prefer cool, damp environments, and how to delicately scoop up the inches-long amphibian and place it into a plastic bag where it can be more easily examined. They point out the color and design on its back, one way of identifying the species, and how they can easily distinguish an adult from a larva that has yet to metamorphose by the gills that have shrunken in and the meatier body. I peer closely at the little guy, with his four tiny legs and the knowing black beads of his eyes, and immediately feel compelled to pet him. This is quite unlike me, as I have never been much of a mud-digger type; when my worm-loving sister would approach me to proudly show off her latest slimy capture, my typical reaction was to scream and run away. But the salamander is just so cute, and I get attached quickly. Within a matter of minutes I have a name for him (Chester) picked out in my head.
Lips and her team do a run-through of their data collection, where they record the location where the salamander was found, his length and weight, and check for the small fluorescent marker with which they had previously tagged many of the creatures. The markers serve as an aide for studying species’ survival and movement, but this particular one turns out to be unmarked. They then gently place the salamander back in the water where they found him, open the bag, and in an instant he is gone, likely back to the dank cool of another rock’s underside. We move out of the creek and into the surrounding forest, where we repeat the process but turn over large logs rather than river rocks, searching for another local species that is fully terrestrial and so would never be caught in the creek.
This work is not particularly cutting-edge or glamorous, but it is important. Though the decline of a relatively unseen class of animals may not strike fear into many hearts, Lips says the implications of dying salamanders are potentially catastrophic. They may be small, but salamanders are huge in number, and especially in this region make up a large portion of the biomass, or the sum of all the biological matter in the forest. They form an important link in the food chain between organisms too small for other animals to go after and larger animals who need to feed on meatier prey like salamanders to survive. Salamanders are also one of the most energetically efficient animals; unlike us warm-blooded humans, they do not waste much energy through heat loss, and a high percentage of the nutrients they take in are used to build up their body mass, which gives their predators more protein, and these benefits continue all the way up the food chain to us. They also act as important regulators of the insect population. Like a good nightclub bouncer, salamanders ensure the environment is not overpopulated with pests, and their absence could result in overcrowding that has consequences much more dire than a long line for the bathroom: it could mean an increased spread of insect-carried diseases like dengue fever and Chagas disease. We may not think about or notice these things, but we will almost certainly notice the huge ecological disruption that could result from massive salamander die-offs. As Lips wrote in an editorial for the Baltimore Sun, “Their fate is inexorably linked to our own.”
Just as all our futures may depend on the survival of one of the forest’s smallest and most inconspicuous inhabitants, so too does a part of my past. My relationship to nature as I experienced it growing up is a part of my identity; I try to imagine what it would feel like to visit my childhood home after the woods have gone, replaced by a hauntingly empty field or a gaggle of unwelcome new neighbors, but I can’t. Instead I imagine how I felt after returning home one spring from college in Boston to find that one of the half-dozen tulip poplar trees scattered around the interior of our backyard had been felled by a bad storm. This was a tree whose thick, low-slung limbs made it ideal for climbing, and as a child I had spent countless afternoons winding my way through its timber maze, reveling in the adventure and the danger as I ascended. For the first several days at home I did double-takes with every glance out the kitchen window, my mind startled by the new landscape that looked like a familiar smile rendered suddenly gap-toothed. Where anyone else might see a simple stump, I saw a hole, a disconcerting void in the skyline of my childhood, and I could feel an emptiness seeping down into the storage spaces of my heart. I strained to make sense of this feeling of loss, simultaneously obvious and obscure. It was just a tree, I told myself. But it had long ago insinuated itself into my memories, sprouting sinewy roots as strong as those that remained in the ground next to its fallen trunk. I try to do the math, to multiply this vague sadness times the number of trees in the whole park, but the total is too staggering for me to comprehend.
I know that I cannot stop the natural decay and wear of living. Trees will fall, and fungi will spread. Salamanders will die, but with the help of scientists like Lips, hopefully they will not die out. With proper management – guided by the kind of research Lips and her team are conducting – and a little luck, these forests will be around for generations of children to explore and find themselves in. Someday they too will be able to walk into a foreign patch of woods on a crisp spring morning and instantly feel at home. They too will be able to enjoy all the bountiful gifts that an intimacy with nature can bring, and whether they know it or not, they will have conservation scientists like Karen Lips to thank, at least in part, for the privilege.
I have been here before. Technically, this is my first visit to the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, but I have been here before. Born and raised in Derwood, about 30 miles northwest of the Laurel, Maryland, refuge, I spent many an early spring day trekking through woods identical to these, as our house backed up to one of the slithering tentacles of Rock Creek Regional Park that unfurls from the main tract of park land in Washington, DC. The sights are familiar: a green twig, so delicate in its infancy, growing skyward out of a graveyard of dead leaves, emerging triumphantly from the decaying bodies of its deceased cousins; the forest floor, patterned by the playful geometrical dance of branches and mid-morning light; the large oak trees that I can barely wrap my arms halfway around, hovering silently but fondly with an affected aloofness, like a parental chaperone trying to stealthily eavesdrop at a school dance.
As a child, the woods were a fun place to romp around with my sisters, a place where we would bounce on the suspended bridge a neighbor had constructed out of an old radio tower to span the ten-foot creek and compete to see who could sway the bridge the most, shrieking gleefully as our toes dipped closer to the shallow, russet water with each bounce. But as time has rolled on and the bridge’s glistening steel has faded to a muted rust, that forest has come to mean much more to me. It is where I discovered that stillness can be tranquil and not terrifying; that it implies not death, but a beautiful harmony of life. It is where as a teenager I would take solitary walks in order to feel less alone. It is where I came on September 12, 2001 to weep, to feel safe, to find something familiar and permanent in a world I no longer recognized.
Though my mother reassured me that the woods behind our house were park land and could never be razed to make room for the type of McMansion-ish housing developments that were beginning to crop up all over town, I worried. I worried most for the forest’s myriad furry and flowered inhabitants, but I also worried for myself. I didn’t want to look out from our back deck onto anything but the chorus of trees that had been rooted there all my life, singing their leafy hymns to the stars. As long as they don’t cut them down, it will be okay, I thought. I hadn’t even considered that the biggest threat to my beloved woods might actually lie within them, lurking among the perch and the poplar trees with a menacing silence.
Back at the Patuxent Center, I watch intently as Dr. Karen Lips and three of her graduate students demonstrate how to catch a salamander. As a highly regarded herpetologist and ecologist, Lips has traveled up and down Latin America studying amphibian species in some of the most biologically diverse regions of the world. In the case of the salamander, though, the most diverse and populous area is literally right in our own backyards: the Appalachian Mountain region is home to more salamanders than any other area on earth. But the salamander population, like that of many amphibian species, is declining drastically: approximately 47% of all salamander species are classified by the International Union for Conservation of Nature as threatened or endangered, and many more may have already gone extinct.
Though Lips believes there are several man-made culprits responsible for these declines, the most immediate villain may actually be all-natural. Chytridiomycosis, a fungal disease, has been linked to deaths in many amphibian species all over the world, including salamanders. A zoosporic fungus that surreptitiously seeps into the skin of amphibians, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or “chytrid fungus,” as it is more commonly called, grows particularly well in cool, damp climates, giving it ample opportunity to encounter amphibian species that prefer the same. It has affected various species of salamanders differently, as some populations have experienced massive die-offs within months of the first infection – and sometimes even complete eradication – while in others only a small portion of the population has succumbed to the fungal disease. The cause of this differential vulnerability is just one of the mysteries of the chytrid fungus that Lips and her team are trying to solve, in addition to how environmental changes affect the spread of the fungus and what can be done to slow this spread. They hope that answering these questions about the fungus will help guide effective salamander conservation efforts.
Her students show me how to slowly turn over a rock in the middle of the shallow creek bed, as salamanders prefer cool, damp environments, and how to delicately scoop up the inches-long amphibian and place it into a plastic bag where it can be more easily examined. They point out the color and design on its back, one way of identifying the species, and how they can easily distinguish an adult from a larva that has yet to metamorphose by the gills that have shrunken in and the meatier body. I peer closely at the little guy, with his four tiny legs and the knowing black beads of his eyes, and immediately feel compelled to pet him. This is quite unlike me, as I have never been much of a mud-digger type; when my worm-loving sister would approach me to proudly show off her latest slimy capture, my typical reaction was to scream and run away. But the salamander is just so cute, and I get attached quickly. Within a matter of minutes I have a name for him (Chester) picked out in my head.
Lips and her team do a run-through of their data collection, where they record the location where the salamander was found, his length and weight, and check for the small fluorescent marker with which they had previously tagged many of the creatures. The markers serve as an aide for studying species’ survival and movement, but this particular one turns out to be unmarked. They then gently place the salamander back in the water where they found him, open the bag, and in an instant he is gone, likely back to the dank cool of another rock’s underside. We move out of the creek and into the surrounding forest, where we repeat the process but turn over large logs rather than river rocks, searching for another local species that is fully terrestrial and so would never be caught in the creek.
This work is not particularly cutting-edge or glamorous, but it is important. Though the decline of a relatively unseen class of animals may not strike fear into many hearts, Lips says the implications of dying salamanders are potentially catastrophic. They may be small, but salamanders are huge in number, and especially in this region make up a large portion of the biomass, or the sum of all the biological matter in the forest. They form an important link in the food chain between organisms too small for other animals to go after and larger animals who need to feed on meatier prey like salamanders to survive. Salamanders are also one of the most energetically efficient animals; unlike us warm-blooded humans, they do not waste much energy through heat loss, and a high percentage of the nutrients they take in are used to build up their body mass, which gives their predators more protein, and these benefits continue all the way up the food chain to us. They also act as important regulators of the insect population. Like a good nightclub bouncer, salamanders ensure the environment is not overpopulated with pests, and their absence could result in overcrowding that has consequences much more dire than a long line for the bathroom: it could mean an increased spread of insect-carried diseases like dengue fever and Chagas disease. We may not think about or notice these things, but we will almost certainly notice the huge ecological disruption that could result from massive salamander die-offs. As Lips wrote in an editorial for the Baltimore Sun, “Their fate is inexorably linked to our own.”
Just as all our futures may depend on the survival of one of the forest’s smallest and most inconspicuous inhabitants, so too does a part of my past. My relationship to nature as I experienced it growing up is a part of my identity; I try to imagine what it would feel like to visit my childhood home after the woods have gone, replaced by a hauntingly empty field or a gaggle of unwelcome new neighbors, but I can’t. Instead I imagine how I felt after returning home one spring from college in Boston to find that one of the half-dozen tulip poplar trees scattered around the interior of our backyard had been felled by a bad storm. This was a tree whose thick, low-slung limbs made it ideal for climbing, and as a child I had spent countless afternoons winding my way through its timber maze, reveling in the adventure and the danger as I ascended. For the first several days at home I did double-takes with every glance out the kitchen window, my mind startled by the new landscape that looked like a familiar smile rendered suddenly gap-toothed. Where anyone else might see a simple stump, I saw a hole, a disconcerting void in the skyline of my childhood, and I could feel an emptiness seeping down into the storage spaces of my heart. I strained to make sense of this feeling of loss, simultaneously obvious and obscure. It was just a tree, I told myself. But it had long ago insinuated itself into my memories, sprouting sinewy roots as strong as those that remained in the ground next to its fallen trunk. I try to do the math, to multiply this vague sadness times the number of trees in the whole park, but the total is too staggering for me to comprehend.
I know that I cannot stop the natural decay and wear of living. Trees will fall, and fungi will spread. Salamanders will die, but with the help of scientists like Lips, hopefully they will not die out. With proper management – guided by the kind of research Lips and her team are conducting – and a little luck, these forests will be around for generations of children to explore and find themselves in. Someday they too will be able to walk into a foreign patch of woods on a crisp spring morning and instantly feel at home. They too will be able to enjoy all the bountiful gifts that an intimacy with nature can bring, and whether they know it or not, they will have conservation scientists like Karen Lips to thank, at least in part, for the privilege.
Reiki and Reason Vie for a Scientist’s Allegiance
This is a piece I wrote about reiki for my workshop this past summer.
“Meow. Meeeeeowwwwwww.”
The cat’s cry gets louder and more plaintive as I approach his cage, and I can’t say I blame him. I am, after all, a grim reaper cleverly disguised in a white lab coat. As a surgical assistant to a neuropharmacologist, I am responsible for recording the vital signs of the cat and helping to administer the anesthesia that will keep the animal unconscious and pain-free throughout the experimental procedure until, in accordance with that great euphemism of science, he is “sacrificed.” This fatal surgery will give scientists a better understanding of the inner workings of nerve networks in the cardiac system that could eventually mean healthier hearts for human patients, but that is little consolation to either the cat or me right now. Once we get to the prep room, I take a few deep breaths. I place my cupped hands side by side over the cat, making light but firm contact on his back. Making sure to not leave any space between my fingers, I hold my hands in place for several minutes, touching but not pressing on his soft tawny fur. I then shift them up a few inches on his back, again pausing for three or four minutes.
As I repeat this process in a few other spots on the cat’s body, I can feel both our heartbeats begin to cautiously decelerate. His breaths slow and deepen, and soon the other surgical assistant, who has been physically restraining the cat, is able to loosen her grip a little and free up one hand to insert an IV. I finally respond to her overt quizzical glances by explaining that I am performing reiki healing, a systematic healing practice developed as a means of restoring energy and promoting healing within the mind, body, and spirit. I don’t bother to explain to her the rest of the story, which is that reiki healing was developed in Japan by a man named Mikao Usui in the early twentieth century following a vision he had at a sacred site that inspired him to develop a system of holistic healing. The practice is based on the concept of "ki," a life force energy that flows through and around us all and imbues us with life. It is believed that the depletion of this energy results in stress, anxiety, and pain. Usui created the system of reiki healing to attempt to restore this life force energy through healing touch. The idea is that the practitioner acts as a channel for this ki, extracting it from the surrounding universal space and transferring it to the client through his or her palms. The practitioner places her hands on very specific areas of the body, covering 12-20 spots in a session, which can last anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes – in a human at least. These improvised sessions on the cats usually last about 15 minutes, which is enough to cover most of the body.
My experience with reiki healing dates back quite far, all the way to before I was born. Linda Keiser Mardis, my mother’s reiki healing teacher and close friend, performed treatments on my mother while she was pregnant with my twin sister and me. Throughout my childhood, my mother would sporadically perform reiki healing on me to relieve the pain of injuries sustained on the soccer field and the congenital anxiety with which she had so generously endowed me.
Though I often was unable to remember how I felt during the session (it is extremely common for the client to fall asleep), I can attest to the almost tangible sense of calm that I felt upon awakening. Whether I had sought the comfort of my mother’s reassuring hands to relieve the physical pain of a torn knee ligament or the emotional pain inflicted by a particularly vicious classmate, the relaxation I experienced as a result of my reiki healing sessions covered me like a silky suit of armor, gentle but solid. When I took up an interest in yoga in my late teens, I mentioned to my mother that I was having a hard time understanding what people meant when they talked about feeling “centered.” She thought for a moment and replied, “Try to imagine how you feel after a reiki session.” I immediately understood.
My interest in becoming a reiki practitioner did not arise until a few years later. The high of having landed a job mere weeks after receiving my bachelor’s degree in neurophysiology quickly faded when I learned that my duties included assisting in the neuropharmacological cat surgeries. Being pretty cat-ambivalent and knowing that the cats were fully anesthetized for the entire surgery did not absolve me of the guilt and heartache I felt at having to sacrifice the creatures, and I spent many a night sleeping fitfully or not at all. I couldn’t just quit or asked to be removed from the surgeries, knowing full well that they would occur with or without me, so I decided that the best thing I could do was to treat the cats with the compassion and care they deserved, and to make the entire experience as painless as possible for them. I contacted Mardis about reiki healing training, and soon was laying my hands on cats in the prep room and sleeping through the night.
The response from my fellow surgical assistant is typical of scientists and the scientific-minded.
“That sounds like a bunch of hooey to me,” she says half-jokingly. It’s hard to argue with her. Reiki healing lacks the scientific evidence base that is required for a treatment to be viewed as “legitimate” in the eyes of modern western medicine. Some of the most salient attractions of the practice, like its lack of invasiveness and sheer simplicity, also make it difficult to test with the “gold standard” of westernized medical effectiveness assessment, the randomized controlled trial.
As a child, I never questioned the effectiveness of reiki healing; my own positive experiences as a client combined with my belief in the absolute wisdom of my mother removed the question of validity completely. But as I find myself on the other side of the table, a grown reiki practitioner as well as a scientist both by training and by disposition, I have struggled to reconcile my scientific sensibilities with my firsthand knowledge of the efficacy of reiki healing. My heart begs my brain to just believe, to let my experience guide me, an especially tall order for an organ so well-versed in skepticism. Meanwhile, my brain wants my heart to be rational – a laughable request. And so I am stymied.
In an attempt to satisfy my cerebral demand for data, I dig around for scraps of evidence, some proof that reiki healing is not the new age, woo-woo practice that my brain snarkily believes it to be. I still have to actively resist the urge to roll my eyes at concepts like “life force energy” and “attunement” (a step of the training to become a reiki practitioner, attunements are adjustments made by the Reiki Master to a student which allows Reiki energy to flow through them), and begin to fear that this cognitive dissonance is hopelessly permanent. But as I wade into the scientific literature, I uncover several studies on the beneficial effects of reiki that show positive changes in measures ranging from heart rate and blood pressure to more psychological metrics like the Beck Depression Inventory and Perceived Stress Scale. So there is hope!
Alas, most of these studies come with massive asterisks attached: some have sample sizes that are too low. Some are not adequately blinded, meaning that researcher bias (conscious or unconscious) could have tainted the results. Some do not account for variables like experience of the reiki healing practitioner or frequency of the treatment.
Whether these issues come down to sloppy science or an inherent inability of reiki healing to be tested by our canonical scientific method is debatable; however, there is no arguing that these results cannot be accepted as reliable evidence of reiki healing’s benefits. Drat. So close.
As this civil war wages on and both sides grow weary, compromise seems increasingly appealing. In this instance, compromise would mean acknowledging that I am dealing with apples and oranges, two separate and ultimately incomparable entities. Similarly to how I can hold in my heart equal affection for two friends who do not get along with each other, so too can I accept two different therapeutic modalities that may not be compatible or comparable, but that are both equally valid and deserving of respect.
Perhaps most challenging for a scientist to accept is that reiki healing may never be explainable by scientific conventions, that some things are inherently unknowable – or at least unprovable. But neuroscience, like many branches of biology, is rife with concepts and phenomena that leave even the brightest minds in the field shaking their heads with bewilderment. It is a science that embodies the expression, “the more we learn, the less we know.” Like an episode of “Lost,” every answer inevitably leads to fifty new questions, so I am pretty accustomed to not having explanations for why things work the way they do. Still, it’s important to remind myself that sometimes just asking the questions can be as much fun as finding the answers, and sometimes even more.
“Meow. Meeeeeowwwwwww.”
The cat’s cry gets louder and more plaintive as I approach his cage, and I can’t say I blame him. I am, after all, a grim reaper cleverly disguised in a white lab coat. As a surgical assistant to a neuropharmacologist, I am responsible for recording the vital signs of the cat and helping to administer the anesthesia that will keep the animal unconscious and pain-free throughout the experimental procedure until, in accordance with that great euphemism of science, he is “sacrificed.” This fatal surgery will give scientists a better understanding of the inner workings of nerve networks in the cardiac system that could eventually mean healthier hearts for human patients, but that is little consolation to either the cat or me right now. Once we get to the prep room, I take a few deep breaths. I place my cupped hands side by side over the cat, making light but firm contact on his back. Making sure to not leave any space between my fingers, I hold my hands in place for several minutes, touching but not pressing on his soft tawny fur. I then shift them up a few inches on his back, again pausing for three or four minutes.
As I repeat this process in a few other spots on the cat’s body, I can feel both our heartbeats begin to cautiously decelerate. His breaths slow and deepen, and soon the other surgical assistant, who has been physically restraining the cat, is able to loosen her grip a little and free up one hand to insert an IV. I finally respond to her overt quizzical glances by explaining that I am performing reiki healing, a systematic healing practice developed as a means of restoring energy and promoting healing within the mind, body, and spirit. I don’t bother to explain to her the rest of the story, which is that reiki healing was developed in Japan by a man named Mikao Usui in the early twentieth century following a vision he had at a sacred site that inspired him to develop a system of holistic healing. The practice is based on the concept of "ki," a life force energy that flows through and around us all and imbues us with life. It is believed that the depletion of this energy results in stress, anxiety, and pain. Usui created the system of reiki healing to attempt to restore this life force energy through healing touch. The idea is that the practitioner acts as a channel for this ki, extracting it from the surrounding universal space and transferring it to the client through his or her palms. The practitioner places her hands on very specific areas of the body, covering 12-20 spots in a session, which can last anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes – in a human at least. These improvised sessions on the cats usually last about 15 minutes, which is enough to cover most of the body.
My experience with reiki healing dates back quite far, all the way to before I was born. Linda Keiser Mardis, my mother’s reiki healing teacher and close friend, performed treatments on my mother while she was pregnant with my twin sister and me. Throughout my childhood, my mother would sporadically perform reiki healing on me to relieve the pain of injuries sustained on the soccer field and the congenital anxiety with which she had so generously endowed me.
Though I often was unable to remember how I felt during the session (it is extremely common for the client to fall asleep), I can attest to the almost tangible sense of calm that I felt upon awakening. Whether I had sought the comfort of my mother’s reassuring hands to relieve the physical pain of a torn knee ligament or the emotional pain inflicted by a particularly vicious classmate, the relaxation I experienced as a result of my reiki healing sessions covered me like a silky suit of armor, gentle but solid. When I took up an interest in yoga in my late teens, I mentioned to my mother that I was having a hard time understanding what people meant when they talked about feeling “centered.” She thought for a moment and replied, “Try to imagine how you feel after a reiki session.” I immediately understood.
My interest in becoming a reiki practitioner did not arise until a few years later. The high of having landed a job mere weeks after receiving my bachelor’s degree in neurophysiology quickly faded when I learned that my duties included assisting in the neuropharmacological cat surgeries. Being pretty cat-ambivalent and knowing that the cats were fully anesthetized for the entire surgery did not absolve me of the guilt and heartache I felt at having to sacrifice the creatures, and I spent many a night sleeping fitfully or not at all. I couldn’t just quit or asked to be removed from the surgeries, knowing full well that they would occur with or without me, so I decided that the best thing I could do was to treat the cats with the compassion and care they deserved, and to make the entire experience as painless as possible for them. I contacted Mardis about reiki healing training, and soon was laying my hands on cats in the prep room and sleeping through the night.
The response from my fellow surgical assistant is typical of scientists and the scientific-minded.
“That sounds like a bunch of hooey to me,” she says half-jokingly. It’s hard to argue with her. Reiki healing lacks the scientific evidence base that is required for a treatment to be viewed as “legitimate” in the eyes of modern western medicine. Some of the most salient attractions of the practice, like its lack of invasiveness and sheer simplicity, also make it difficult to test with the “gold standard” of westernized medical effectiveness assessment, the randomized controlled trial.
As a child, I never questioned the effectiveness of reiki healing; my own positive experiences as a client combined with my belief in the absolute wisdom of my mother removed the question of validity completely. But as I find myself on the other side of the table, a grown reiki practitioner as well as a scientist both by training and by disposition, I have struggled to reconcile my scientific sensibilities with my firsthand knowledge of the efficacy of reiki healing. My heart begs my brain to just believe, to let my experience guide me, an especially tall order for an organ so well-versed in skepticism. Meanwhile, my brain wants my heart to be rational – a laughable request. And so I am stymied.
In an attempt to satisfy my cerebral demand for data, I dig around for scraps of evidence, some proof that reiki healing is not the new age, woo-woo practice that my brain snarkily believes it to be. I still have to actively resist the urge to roll my eyes at concepts like “life force energy” and “attunement” (a step of the training to become a reiki practitioner, attunements are adjustments made by the Reiki Master to a student which allows Reiki energy to flow through them), and begin to fear that this cognitive dissonance is hopelessly permanent. But as I wade into the scientific literature, I uncover several studies on the beneficial effects of reiki that show positive changes in measures ranging from heart rate and blood pressure to more psychological metrics like the Beck Depression Inventory and Perceived Stress Scale. So there is hope!
Alas, most of these studies come with massive asterisks attached: some have sample sizes that are too low. Some are not adequately blinded, meaning that researcher bias (conscious or unconscious) could have tainted the results. Some do not account for variables like experience of the reiki healing practitioner or frequency of the treatment.
Whether these issues come down to sloppy science or an inherent inability of reiki healing to be tested by our canonical scientific method is debatable; however, there is no arguing that these results cannot be accepted as reliable evidence of reiki healing’s benefits. Drat. So close.
As this civil war wages on and both sides grow weary, compromise seems increasingly appealing. In this instance, compromise would mean acknowledging that I am dealing with apples and oranges, two separate and ultimately incomparable entities. Similarly to how I can hold in my heart equal affection for two friends who do not get along with each other, so too can I accept two different therapeutic modalities that may not be compatible or comparable, but that are both equally valid and deserving of respect.
Perhaps most challenging for a scientist to accept is that reiki healing may never be explainable by scientific conventions, that some things are inherently unknowable – or at least unprovable. But neuroscience, like many branches of biology, is rife with concepts and phenomena that leave even the brightest minds in the field shaking their heads with bewilderment. It is a science that embodies the expression, “the more we learn, the less we know.” Like an episode of “Lost,” every answer inevitably leads to fifty new questions, so I am pretty accustomed to not having explanations for why things work the way they do. Still, it’s important to remind myself that sometimes just asking the questions can be as much fun as finding the answers, and sometimes even more.
From Russia, With Apprehension
Here's a narrative piece I wrote about a crazy cab ride in Russia for my Techniques class last summer.
Though I hadn’t ever really given it much thought, I assumed that the only sound that a human would generate from the locked trunk of a car would be one of frenzied, desperate panic. Pounding, cries for help, screaming. I found out on a cab ride in the depths of an April night in St. Petersburg that this is not the case.
It was the “travel break” portion of my semester abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, during which my Russian Literature class had planned a literary tour of places we had read about in class, including several sites in St. Petersburg. Our instructor Jon and the class TA Anna were the only members of our group that were fluent in Russian, and as the likelihood of finding an English speaker in Russia was on par with the chance of running into a Russian teetotaler, we relied on them heavily, following on their heels like young chicks scurrying after their mother hen.
One night after an exhaustive tour of the city’s literary landmarks, including following Raskolnikov’s murderous 730-step journey from Crime and Punishment, Anna decided that she wanted to take some of us out for a real Russian bar experience. She was an expert guide; though an Icelandic native, Anna had lived in St. Petersburg for several years and knew the city well.
As we were a small group and the subway had already proven to be a claustrophobic, purse-clutching ordeal, we decided to cab to the bar. Russian taxis, we learned, are often are not marked (though inexplicably still easily identifiable to locals) and instead of meters, fares are agreed upon ahead of time. After haggling with a driver for several minutes, Anna turned back to us and shouted, “Okay, he’s going to take us for free!”
Wait, what? We Westerners exchanged puzzled glances that eventually gave way to shrugs. Maybe he was just being nice. Maybe he wanted to show us Americans that Russians weren’t all vodka-swilling misanthropes or other cinematic stereotypes. Maybe this was just how cabs worked in Russia, giving out free rides for no apparent reason. Besides, Anna wouldn’t put us in danger. She’d be fired (and likely sued) so fast if anything happened to us. So we hopped in, four Yankees crammed in the back, and Anna up front with the boisterous driver in the Members Only jacket.
Though I usually find myself on guard around people like Anna, prickly and impatient with the bored self-righteousness of an adolescent, I put my complete trust in her in Petersburg. Her fluent Russian and vested interest in not letting harm befall me were very large comforts in a country that had turned out to be much more foreign than I had imagined. I had felt off-balance and vaguely unsafe since arriving in this familiar-but-not-really land, where the buildings looked like buildings and the roads looked like roads, but there was still an alien feeling to the whole place, as if I was in a dream or on a movie set. Beneath Petersburg’s warm, pale skin, I felt a monster’s heart beating. Sitting in the deep leather warmth of the crowded backseat, my muscles relaxed for the first time in days.
Just then, as our driver lurched into the dim evening chill, I heard a curious noise behind me, coming from the trunk. Two noises actually. A low one, which wasn’t quite thumping, and another, which wasn’t quite a yell. Definitely something alive, though. Almost definitely a person.
As I glanced nervously around me, I realized I wasn’t the only one who had heard it. Tyler, sitting half on top of my right leg, furrowed his brow deeply, then after a few moments of what I assume was spent gathering up a courage that I myself didn’t possess, inquired uncertainly,
“Um, is there someone in the trunk?”
Anna and the driver broke from what seemed by its intonation to be a jovial conversation to peer back at us. It must have been hard not to laugh right then at the tableau of our stricken faces, so politely silent in their worried confusion.
Anna listened for a second, then without any change in countenance or inflection, fired off some Russian at the driver. He fired back. All I understood was Nyet. Nyet, nyet. They both laughed.
“Oh, no, he says that is just his friend,” Anna responded.
At this, a peculiar feeling came over me. I knew that if I had heard an ambiguous non-answer like this in a “free” taxi ride at home, I would be outside on the street by now, reciting the license plate number to the 911 operator. But the instinct to panic never came. To this day, I am not sure why; perhaps it was because the driver was one of the first people in Russia that I had seen smile with his eyes as well as his mouth; maybe my survival instincts had been nabbed in the subway while I was too busy watching my wallet; perhaps I was just sticking to my policy of taking cues from Anna, who remained as cool as chilled bottle of Russian Standard. Instead of freaking out, I leaned back against the cracked leather and laughed – a mixture of disbelief, resignation, and an appreciation for the absurdity of the whole thing.
My comrades reacted similarly, and the rest of the ride was cloaked in tentative laughs – we couldn’t be sure, but we thought we heard a chuckle coming from the trunk, too – and incredulity. The driver laughed hardest of all, his raspy chortle barreling out from behind a succession of unfiltered Marlboro Lights.
As we reached our destination – safely, and without paying a cent – I immediately recognized the strains of music leaking out of the smoky glow of the bar. It was a classic 80s hit, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” the same song that would be playing in countless American bars in a few hours. Walking inside, I thought, Maybe St. Petersburg isn’t so foreign after all.
Though I hadn’t ever really given it much thought, I assumed that the only sound that a human would generate from the locked trunk of a car would be one of frenzied, desperate panic. Pounding, cries for help, screaming. I found out on a cab ride in the depths of an April night in St. Petersburg that this is not the case.
It was the “travel break” portion of my semester abroad in Copenhagen, Denmark, during which my Russian Literature class had planned a literary tour of places we had read about in class, including several sites in St. Petersburg. Our instructor Jon and the class TA Anna were the only members of our group that were fluent in Russian, and as the likelihood of finding an English speaker in Russia was on par with the chance of running into a Russian teetotaler, we relied on them heavily, following on their heels like young chicks scurrying after their mother hen.
One night after an exhaustive tour of the city’s literary landmarks, including following Raskolnikov’s murderous 730-step journey from Crime and Punishment, Anna decided that she wanted to take some of us out for a real Russian bar experience. She was an expert guide; though an Icelandic native, Anna had lived in St. Petersburg for several years and knew the city well.
As we were a small group and the subway had already proven to be a claustrophobic, purse-clutching ordeal, we decided to cab to the bar. Russian taxis, we learned, are often are not marked (though inexplicably still easily identifiable to locals) and instead of meters, fares are agreed upon ahead of time. After haggling with a driver for several minutes, Anna turned back to us and shouted, “Okay, he’s going to take us for free!”
Wait, what? We Westerners exchanged puzzled glances that eventually gave way to shrugs. Maybe he was just being nice. Maybe he wanted to show us Americans that Russians weren’t all vodka-swilling misanthropes or other cinematic stereotypes. Maybe this was just how cabs worked in Russia, giving out free rides for no apparent reason. Besides, Anna wouldn’t put us in danger. She’d be fired (and likely sued) so fast if anything happened to us. So we hopped in, four Yankees crammed in the back, and Anna up front with the boisterous driver in the Members Only jacket.
Though I usually find myself on guard around people like Anna, prickly and impatient with the bored self-righteousness of an adolescent, I put my complete trust in her in Petersburg. Her fluent Russian and vested interest in not letting harm befall me were very large comforts in a country that had turned out to be much more foreign than I had imagined. I had felt off-balance and vaguely unsafe since arriving in this familiar-but-not-really land, where the buildings looked like buildings and the roads looked like roads, but there was still an alien feeling to the whole place, as if I was in a dream or on a movie set. Beneath Petersburg’s warm, pale skin, I felt a monster’s heart beating. Sitting in the deep leather warmth of the crowded backseat, my muscles relaxed for the first time in days.
Just then, as our driver lurched into the dim evening chill, I heard a curious noise behind me, coming from the trunk. Two noises actually. A low one, which wasn’t quite thumping, and another, which wasn’t quite a yell. Definitely something alive, though. Almost definitely a person.
As I glanced nervously around me, I realized I wasn’t the only one who had heard it. Tyler, sitting half on top of my right leg, furrowed his brow deeply, then after a few moments of what I assume was spent gathering up a courage that I myself didn’t possess, inquired uncertainly,
“Um, is there someone in the trunk?”
Anna and the driver broke from what seemed by its intonation to be a jovial conversation to peer back at us. It must have been hard not to laugh right then at the tableau of our stricken faces, so politely silent in their worried confusion.
Anna listened for a second, then without any change in countenance or inflection, fired off some Russian at the driver. He fired back. All I understood was Nyet. Nyet, nyet. They both laughed.
“Oh, no, he says that is just his friend,” Anna responded.
At this, a peculiar feeling came over me. I knew that if I had heard an ambiguous non-answer like this in a “free” taxi ride at home, I would be outside on the street by now, reciting the license plate number to the 911 operator. But the instinct to panic never came. To this day, I am not sure why; perhaps it was because the driver was one of the first people in Russia that I had seen smile with his eyes as well as his mouth; maybe my survival instincts had been nabbed in the subway while I was too busy watching my wallet; perhaps I was just sticking to my policy of taking cues from Anna, who remained as cool as chilled bottle of Russian Standard. Instead of freaking out, I leaned back against the cracked leather and laughed – a mixture of disbelief, resignation, and an appreciation for the absurdity of the whole thing.
My comrades reacted similarly, and the rest of the ride was cloaked in tentative laughs – we couldn’t be sure, but we thought we heard a chuckle coming from the trunk, too – and incredulity. The driver laughed hardest of all, his raspy chortle barreling out from behind a succession of unfiltered Marlboro Lights.
As we reached our destination – safely, and without paying a cent – I immediately recognized the strains of music leaking out of the smoky glow of the bar. It was a classic 80s hit, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” the same song that would be playing in countless American bars in a few hours. Walking inside, I thought, Maybe St. Petersburg isn’t so foreign after all.
Scientists Engineer Bacteria to Make Gasoline Alternative
This is a pretty standard news story I did on a new scientific finding for my Principles of Journalism class in Spring '10.
In a finding that could have a dramatic impact on the global climate and energy debates, scientists at UCLA have found a way to turn carbon dioxide into fuel through the use of genetically modified bacteria, researchers announced Thursday.
The process produces the chemical isobutanol, which has been proposed as an alternative to gasoline, and in fact is already being used as a gasoline additive. The researchers say the bacterial reaction that produces the fuel is energy-efficient because it is powered by photosynthesis, so sunlight is the only external energy needed to drive the reaction.
“This is potentially much more efficient and less expensive than the current approach,” said James C. Liao, associate director of the UCLA–Department of Energy Institute for Genomics and Proteomics and leader of the research team. “This new approach avoids the need for biomass deconstruction…which is a major economic barrier for biofuel production.”
In an article published in the latest edition of Nature Biotechnology, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science describe how they modified the cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus to ingest carbon dioxide and, with the help of sunlight, produce isobutyraldehyde gas, which can then be converted into liquid isobutanol.
Biofuels have been identified as one potential alternative to harmful carbon emission-producing fossil fuels, which have been blamed for the steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide thought to contribute greatly to global warming. Since many algae use light to digest carbon dioxide, scientists have studied the use of these organisms to convert CO2 into valuable products such as fuel. However, the conversion of algae into biodiesels requires many intermediate steps, adding to production costs.
Cyanobacteria also can be used to make hydrogen, another potential energy source, but this is still a rather inefficient method, according to scientists. Yet another approach is using genetically modified bacteria to convert CO2 and water into ethanol, but ethanol has significant drawbacks as a potential alternative fuel. It must be mixed with gasoline because it cannot power a vehicle on its own, and can be corrosive unless it undergoes costly modifications.
These attempts have highlighted the two main criteria necessary for a commercially viable biofuel: the conversion of CO2 and extraction of the fuel must both be cost- and energy-efficient. The UCLA research team say that the cyanobacteria they engineered readily converts carbon dioxide into isobutyraldehyde, which is advantageous because it is easy to extract, purify, and convert into several petroleum-based chemicals, including the viable gasoline alternative isobutanol.
Isobutanol is among a group of so-called higher-chain alcohols, which make fuels that are more efficient than ethanol while also being less corrosive and volatile. Though they have not fully refined their process yet, the researchers write that “the productivities of the engineered cyanobacteria for isobutyraldehyde and isobutanol …are already higher than the productivities of cyanobacteria demonstrated for hydrogen or ethanol.”
The discovery of an efficient, environmentally-friendly gasoline alternative is particularly relevant as leaders from 193 countries converge on Copenhangen this month for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in an attempt to establish a global climate agreement. Delegates hope to establish global guidelines and regulations to continue and extend the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Biofuels are playing a prominent role in the conference; organizers have chartered limousines that run on biofuels made from plant waste to carry delegates to events, and emphasis on the transportation industry and its need to reduce emissions is expected to be greater than in previous climate summits.
However, biofuels have seen a backlash in the face of reports that their production from crops such as corn cuts into farmland and, subsequently, the food supply. In 2007, the European Environmental Agency Scientific Committee called for further study of the environmental risks of biofuel production, citing accelerated deforestation and concerns about sustainability. This led the EU to backtrack on its goal for biofuels to make up 10% of all transportation fuels in Europe by the year 2020.
Recently, second-generation biofuels that use biomass such as plant waste and bacteria have come back in favor. Less than a week before Liao and his team released their findings, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $564 million investment in advanced biorefinery projects.
“Advanced biofuels are critical to building a cleaner, more sustainable transportation system in the U.S.” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “These projects will help establish a domestic industry that will create jobs here at home and open new markets across rural America.”
Though the production of isobutanol with cyanobacteria is still in the early stage, the UCLA team is optimistic. “This result demonstrates the technical feasibility for direct conversion of CO2 to fuels or chemicals, which could become an economically feasible option after further improvement,” they write. “The strategy…may provide an alternative path for addressing two of humanity's most pressing problems: energy and climate change.”
In a finding that could have a dramatic impact on the global climate and energy debates, scientists at UCLA have found a way to turn carbon dioxide into fuel through the use of genetically modified bacteria, researchers announced Thursday.
The process produces the chemical isobutanol, which has been proposed as an alternative to gasoline, and in fact is already being used as a gasoline additive. The researchers say the bacterial reaction that produces the fuel is energy-efficient because it is powered by photosynthesis, so sunlight is the only external energy needed to drive the reaction.
“This is potentially much more efficient and less expensive than the current approach,” said James C. Liao, associate director of the UCLA–Department of Energy Institute for Genomics and Proteomics and leader of the research team. “This new approach avoids the need for biomass deconstruction…which is a major economic barrier for biofuel production.”
In an article published in the latest edition of Nature Biotechnology, researchers from the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science describe how they modified the cyanobacterium Synechoccus elongatus to ingest carbon dioxide and, with the help of sunlight, produce isobutyraldehyde gas, which can then be converted into liquid isobutanol.
Biofuels have been identified as one potential alternative to harmful carbon emission-producing fossil fuels, which have been blamed for the steady rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide thought to contribute greatly to global warming. Since many algae use light to digest carbon dioxide, scientists have studied the use of these organisms to convert CO2 into valuable products such as fuel. However, the conversion of algae into biodiesels requires many intermediate steps, adding to production costs.
Cyanobacteria also can be used to make hydrogen, another potential energy source, but this is still a rather inefficient method, according to scientists. Yet another approach is using genetically modified bacteria to convert CO2 and water into ethanol, but ethanol has significant drawbacks as a potential alternative fuel. It must be mixed with gasoline because it cannot power a vehicle on its own, and can be corrosive unless it undergoes costly modifications.
These attempts have highlighted the two main criteria necessary for a commercially viable biofuel: the conversion of CO2 and extraction of the fuel must both be cost- and energy-efficient. The UCLA research team say that the cyanobacteria they engineered readily converts carbon dioxide into isobutyraldehyde, which is advantageous because it is easy to extract, purify, and convert into several petroleum-based chemicals, including the viable gasoline alternative isobutanol.
Isobutanol is among a group of so-called higher-chain alcohols, which make fuels that are more efficient than ethanol while also being less corrosive and volatile. Though they have not fully refined their process yet, the researchers write that “the productivities of the engineered cyanobacteria for isobutyraldehyde and isobutanol …are already higher than the productivities of cyanobacteria demonstrated for hydrogen or ethanol.”
The discovery of an efficient, environmentally-friendly gasoline alternative is particularly relevant as leaders from 193 countries converge on Copenhangen this month for the United Nations Climate Change Conference in an attempt to establish a global climate agreement. Delegates hope to establish global guidelines and regulations to continue and extend the provisions of the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Biofuels are playing a prominent role in the conference; organizers have chartered limousines that run on biofuels made from plant waste to carry delegates to events, and emphasis on the transportation industry and its need to reduce emissions is expected to be greater than in previous climate summits.
However, biofuels have seen a backlash in the face of reports that their production from crops such as corn cuts into farmland and, subsequently, the food supply. In 2007, the European Environmental Agency Scientific Committee called for further study of the environmental risks of biofuel production, citing accelerated deforestation and concerns about sustainability. This led the EU to backtrack on its goal for biofuels to make up 10% of all transportation fuels in Europe by the year 2020.
Recently, second-generation biofuels that use biomass such as plant waste and bacteria have come back in favor. Less than a week before Liao and his team released their findings, the U.S. Department of Energy announced a $564 million investment in advanced biorefinery projects.
“Advanced biofuels are critical to building a cleaner, more sustainable transportation system in the U.S.” said Energy Secretary Steven Chu. “These projects will help establish a domestic industry that will create jobs here at home and open new markets across rural America.”
Though the production of isobutanol with cyanobacteria is still in the early stage, the UCLA team is optimistic. “This result demonstrates the technical feasibility for direct conversion of CO2 to fuels or chemicals, which could become an economically feasible option after further improvement,” they write. “The strategy…may provide an alternative path for addressing two of humanity's most pressing problems: energy and climate change.”
Two of a Kind
This piece about my twin sister Sarah and I was written for my Viewpoint Journalism class last fall. It's really long and not my favorite, which is why I am posting it first, in hopes that no one will ever get this far back in the archives...
“Can you read each other’s minds?”
“When she gets hurt, do you feel pain?”
“Do you guys have special powers?”
As a twin, I’ve gotten used to these inane questions (the answers are no, no, and what the hell are you talking about?). From as early as I can remember, my fraternal twin sister Sarah and I were inundated with queries and expressions of awe at our twinship. I didn’t question it then, and was happy to revel in the attention. It is only recently that I have thought to more closely examine this phenomenon, to wonder why people seem to view the twin relationship as inherently special, and whether they are right.
In studying how twins are raised, researchers have found that parents tend to fall into one of two categories: “twin-oriented,” those that focus on the similarities of their children, playing up their twin-ness, and “differentiation-oriented,” those that accentuate differences among twins, trying to give each a sense of individuality. My parents definitely fell into the latter category: though baby pictures confirm that it was easy to tell us apart based solely on the size difference of our heads – Sarah’s wispy blond dome could easily be mistaken for a moon of my hulking planet of a noggin – we were always dressed in different colors. Instead of sharing a single cake for our birthday, each year my mother would decorate a layer for each of us, our own unique, if slightly downsized, sugary circle of celebration. Pictures from our first birthday confirm this practice was in place from the beginning, our tiny smiles each lit up by our own set of candles.
Interestingly, studies have shown that the differing parenting approaches are dictated by the twins’ behavior, rather than vice versa. Twins who act alike are more apt to receive twin-oriented parenting, while dissimilar twins will likely be raised in a differentiation-oriented manner. From a young age, Sarah and I were diametric opposites in terms of disposition. A notoriously fastidious baby, I would make a fuss over even a drop of spilled apple juice while next to me Sarah would swim contentedly in her dinner, grinning a wide tomato sauce-stained smile and ignoring the strands of spaghetti that had somehow slithered their way into her hair. Home videos reveal me to be either camera-shy or a baby stoner, gazing silently or retreating from view while Sarah sought out the video camera, babbling incessantly into the lens.
I’m not sure whether my parents’ decision to dress me in blue and Sarah in pink was prescient or the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but our childhood interests were as distant as our hat sizes. The prototypical tomboy, I played every sport I came across, eschewed Barbie dolls in favor of Nerf weapons, and almost made my mother aspirate her iced tea one summer afternoon when I announced that I would be wearing a tuxedo in my wedding. Sarah, on the other hand, loved lace dresses and stuffed animals, knew the first and middle names of every one of her two dozen Cabbage Patch Kids (many generously donated by me, Hater of All Things Girly), and filled her days running a daycare for her little plastic charges. When asked to join in, I would agree only to be the daycare’s secretary, manning a phone that never rang. But our interests weren’t completely mutually exclusive; we both liked to gather Sarah’s plush menagerie and stuff them between the two foam pads that served as our shared mattress, forming a hill of softness on which we would perform various ill-advised acrobatic stunts.
As much as my parents did their best to individualize us, the outside world seemed intent on defining us by our twinship. Courteous enthusiasm upon our introduction as two sisters gave way to a bubbly excitement when it was revealed that we were, in fact, sisters born on the same day. “Ooh, you’re twins?” became such a familiar phrase that it took on the timbre and cadence of a lullaby. Once they discovered our genetic little non-secret, our classmates and their previously uninterested parents suddenly became fascinated by us. They squealed over newly perceived (and often exaggerated) similarities, and adults of perfectly good vision began mixing us up, suddenly unsure who was whom.
I remember even at that age thinking, what’s all the fuss about? Dr. Nancy Segal, a professor of development psychology and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton – and a fraternal twin herself – says that people are generally interested in twins because they are counterintuitive to our concept of individuality. “Identical twins fascinate people because they are contrary to expectations of individual uniqueness in appearance and behavior – they are separate individuals, but more alike then anyone else,” Segal says. The children who grew up in my generation, one that emphasized self-esteem and celebrated individuality, whose elementary school classrooms were plastered with posters proclaiming “I Am Me!” and whose students’ self-oriented projects were littered with gold stars, may be even more intrigued by the idea that there could be someone else in the world who looked, and even behaved, the same way as them.
As much as we were treated as individuals in our own home, outside of it we were always a set. Our parents strove to make us feel special and unique, so we played sports, joined clubs, or fostered a musical talent to express and define ourselves. Although I played a different sport every season and Sarah was a musical whiz, to others we were still twins first, and Amy and Sarah second. It was a strange and paradoxical thing, to feel defined not by any individual talent or distinction, but rather by my relation to someone else. I was unique because we were the same. I learned early on to accept that as a twin, you stand out from the crowd, but the spotlight never shines on you alone.
Of course, as a child I didn’t much resist the emphasis on our twinship. Being known as a twin meant attention and notoriety. As just myself, I probably would have made friends at school, but being a twin in elementary school was like being popular in high school – I may not have been liked by everyone, but they all knew who I was. It made me proud. Like a gambler who garners a sense of accomplishment from winning Keno, I found myself taking credit for the genetic randomness of life, and relished the gifts that it brought me as if I had actually earned them.
The enthusiasm of breathless new acquaintances isn’t the only reason that twins are made to feel special in our culture. The study of heritability – the extent to which traits, like intelligence or aggression, are influenced by our genes – is a major part of current genetic research, as scientists try to place everything from eye color to handwriting to alcoholism somewhere on the nature-nuture spectrum. And one of the favored ways to look at heritability is using the classical twin study paradigm. First introduced in 1911, it compares identical twins to fraternal twins. Since identical twins share one hundred percent of their DNA and fraternal twins about fifty percent, comparing the two can give a strong indication of whether a trait is genetically influenced.
For example, if identical twins almost always show the same degree of shyness (both are very shy or both are very outgoing) and fraternal twins vary more, then one can reasonably conclude that genes are a large factor in the trait of shyness. These studies have helped researchers determine that genes play a big role in a wide array of biological traits, from blood pressure to attention-deficit disorder, but have little influence on others, like Parkinson’s Disease. They have also been helpful in determining the heritability of psychological traits. Major personality traits (openness, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness, known collectively as the Big Five) have been found to have a modest genetic origin from twenty to forty-five percent. Attitudes such as happiness and shyness also have high degrees of heritability, while mate choice has been shown to depend very little on genes.
Intelligence, as measured by IQ, has been the subject of many twin studies. The average correlation of IQ scores (measuring how similar one subject’s IQ score is to another’s; a correlation of 1 indicates a perfect match, while 0 indicates no connection at all) is .86 for identical twins, .60 for fraternal twins, .46 for non-twin siblings, and .15 for cousins. This general pattern follows for most traits: identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, who are in turn closer than non-twin siblings and more distant relatives. This evidence presents a strong case for a high genetic influence on our individual traits.
One of the most interesting findings from this intelligence research concerns the change of genetic influence with time. Several studies that have found that genes actually play a bigger role over time, accounting for about 60% of similarity in adults, as opposed to approximately 50% in adolescence and 30% in early childhood. This is counterintuitive to our natural assumption that environment would play a greater role as people age and tend to branch off further into their own individual lives. Instead, Dr. Segal says “it appears that with age we acquire greater freedom to fashion our own environments in ways that are more compatible with who we are, and in doing so we become ‘more like ourselves’ every day.” In the case of identical twins, becoming more like one’s self also means becoming more like one’s twin.
This idea is mirrored by a 2006 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that examined the twin relationship in terms of attachment. The researchers compared feelings of attachment to different “targets” (mother, father, sibling, and romantic partner) over time. Twins and non-twins showed similar patterns of attachment to all the targets except siblings. While non-twins reported feeling less attachment to their siblings over time, twins said they actually felt a stronger attachment to each other as they aged.
Some have objected that such twin studies are flawed because twins are usually raised in the same environment, which makes it impossible to tell if a similarity is due to their similar genes or the household they also share. The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart was started by Dr. Thomas Bouchard in 1979 to look at the rare instances where twins are raised separately. Many of us have heard stories of twins reared apart that upon reuniting discovered eerie similarities. One of the best-known of these cases is that of Jim Springer and Jim Lewis, twins from the Minnesota Study who were separated at infancy, raised apart, and finally reunited after thirty-nine years. The pair, known as “the Jim twins,” revealed some astonishing similarities: both had been married twice to women of the same name (Linda and Betty), had a son with the same name, and had even driven the same model car to the same three-block Florida beach neighborhood for vacation – without ever meeting. These extraordinary similarities highlight the strength of the genetic tie between the two men. Their story also amplifies the mystique of twinship; the congruence between them feels almost supernatural.
Twin studies have also become extremely important to the new hot topic of epigenetics, which is about the way that chemical alterations of DNA affect how certain genes are expressed. Scientists are learning that in addition to having different genes, different people can have the same gene which manifests itself differently based on how it interacts with other chemicals in the body. Take hair color, for example. Two people may have the same exact gene coding for the same exact brown hair color, but because one person’s DNA is modified differently (a few methyl groups have been added to it, say), the two people can end up being different shades of brunette. Identical twins play a pivotal role in epigenetic research. Since they have the exact same set of DNA, any differences in physical traits that are highly or totally genetically-influenced (like hair color) can be attributed to epigenetic changes in the expression of these genes.
In the end, these studies leave us with a general sense of a strong genetic influence sprinkled with exceptions and qualifications, emphasis on the varying degrees to which environmental factors play a role, and the acknowledgment of natural variability between all individuals. More relevant than the actual results of these studies is the scientific community’s increasing recognition of the value of twins in helping sort out the whole mess. The idea that by studying twins scientists might finally solve some of biology’s most persistent and complex puzzles (for instance, are we genetically predetermined to be anxious/gay/math whizzes? Or is it because we grew up in overindulgent/violent/emotionally repressed households?) gives twinship an air of importance, of necessity. Science needs twins in order to unlock the mysteries of genes that extend deeper than the sequences of DNA which comprise them. This reinforces the notion that twins are special, but not because of any individual distinction or achievement. Only as a pair, as a full set, can they help illuminate any of the shrouded secrets that lurk within the twisting double helices of our genetic makeup.
Some people believe that we tend to view twins as special because they manifest an ideal human relationship: built-in partners who fully understand and empathize with each other. While most people struggle to establish compatible long-term friendships and romantic partnerships, there is a sense that twins are connected with their soulmate from birth. Scientific study of such an intangible concept is difficult, so there is not a lot of evidence to support or refute this idea. But there is some.
In her book, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior, Nancy Segal has a name for the relationship unique to twins: friendship extraordinaire. In her observational research, she has watched twins interact in different cooperative and competitive environments. On cooperative tasks, such as putting together a jigsaw puzzle, identical twins were more likely to complete the task than fraternal twins, who more often acted like other children – shoving each other and hoarding pieces for themselves.
In a study of competitive tasks, twin pairs were asked to complete mathematical and matching tasks both separately and in the same room. Identical twins performed more alike when working in the same room, and identical twins who had performed faster working alone slowed down when in the same room to allow their co-twin to catch up. This phenomenon was absent in fraternal twin pairs. Segal concluded that identical twins showed “a greater restraint of selfishness” than other children. Even at a young – often very self-involved – age, twins make space for their co-twin in their lives. Perhaps this marks a distinct aspect of twinship; while most children have to be explicitly taught social concepts such as sharing and considering others’ feelings, twins adopt these ideas more intuitively, maybe even unconsciously. The difference is like using a natural limb versus an artificial one. We learn to use our hands naturally, through intuition and experience, while learning to operate a prosthetic device is an intense, highly cerebral and deliberate process.
Though we may have an urge to idealize the identical twin relationship as perfectly harmonious, Segal points out that many identical twins view each other as rivals with whom they constantly battle. However, she notes that “even ‘warring’ twins may be inseparable due to mutual understandings.” Though they may be sparring partners, they are partners nonetheless. Segal suggests that “identical twins may, thus, come closer than anyone else to achieving the coordinated, harmonious relations for which we all strive.” Though some dysfunctional couples may disagree, the ability of two people to be at odds with each other without disrupting feelings of intimacy is rarely found outside the confines of identical twin relationships.
Sarah and I were close growing up, but we were also each other’s biggest bully. As possibly the most studious 5th grader ever, Sarah carried around twenty pounds of books in her backpack, and I took great delight in exploiting the weight imbalance the behemoth created. I would seize every opportunity I could to give her a gentle shove or pull, which inevitably would send her stick-thin figure stumbling to the floor. She got her shots in too; like a pro wrestler notorious for a devastating move, Sarah was known (at least by me) for her “clawings:” she would dig her nails into my leg and drag them until she drew blood. Though neither of us has forgotten these memories, they are brought up now with laughs rather than tears, both of us incredulous, and slightly ashamed, of the damage we used to gleefully inflict on one another. But these recollections of our mutual torture lack the sting of pain or guilt that accompanies so many of my other childhood memories. We never officially apologized to each other for anything. We didn’t have to.
Evolutionary psychology, with its basic tenet that animals behave in ways which will allow them the highest possibility of passing on their genes to future generations, can explain many of our collective behaviors. It can also provide insight into twin relationships. For a time, scientists weren’t sure how well this theory fit with the many acts of altruism – helping out someone else at a cost to one’s self – observed in nature. After all, if animals are just driven to reproduce and pass along their genes, why would they take risks for anyone else? In 1964, William Hamilton, a preeminent evolutionary biologist, addressed this problem when he published a range of studies in which he proposed the concept of inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness is the idea that an animal will help close family members, with whom it shares many genes, in order to ensure that those genes get passed on, even if not through it. It is essentially the “selfishness” of the gene (wanting to be passed on somehow) that manifests itself unconsciously in altruistic behavior. This has been supported by studies which show that animals act more altruistically toward close family, such as siblings or offspring, than toward kin with whom they share fewer genes, such as cousins.
Based on this idea, it would follow that identical twins, who share all of their genes, should be equally as concerned with their twin’s prosperity as with their own. Identical twins are completely unique in this equal degree of self-interest and interest in another. This is not to say that a twin necessarily sees his co-twin’s life as equally important to his own (we all have a self-preservation instinct), but the similarity is much closer than that of any other human relationship. As Segal writes, “I do not believe there is a special process for responding to one’s identical twin. Instead, increased closeness between twins may be an extension of the general principle of directing increased altruism toward close relatives.”
Twins are also sometimes seen as two sides of the same coin, yin and yang. While I certainly don’t think of myself as a bad person, if the good twin-evil twin dichotomy really holds true, Sarah would be the one dressed in gauzy white. She is too nice to take shopping (I blame her for a closet’s worth of bad ideas, including ill-fitting Bono-esque sunglasses and a pair of overalls that she said looked “um, really cute!” on me) and has trouble being hostile even when she tries. In college, she used to complain about one of her music theory professors, an unpleasant woman who arbitrarily failed half her students each semester. Once Sarah proudly told me how she had banged on her professor’s office door late one night to vent her frustration. “I just knocked on her door,” she said, “but I would have rather knocked on her face!” It was one of the meanest things I have ever heard her say.
In the seven-plus months that she was unemployed after college, she never missed a single one of her monthly donations to the ASPCA. In contrast to her roommates who hung pictures of drunk friends and racy images of a shirtless Justin Timberlake or Ralph Lauren model, her college dorm room was decorated with a shrine-like photo collection of our beloved black lab/daschund mix Pete and a single poster of a fully-clothed LL Cool J (“just look at those lips!” she’d say). It’s this special brand of pure-hearted, unintentional hilarity that earned her the nickname “Dory,” Ellen DeGeneres’s character in Finding Nemo.
If she were just my sister rather than my twin, I’d probably find Sarah’s angelic persona annoying. I imagine I’d be faced with the “why can’t you be more like her?” question, to which I have no good answer. But it turns out that there are upsides to sharing the spotlight. As her twin, I can claim partial ownership instead of obligation. Rather than a pair of contrasting images, our portrait is shared, so I get to bask in the diffused light of her halo.
The finding discussed earlier that twins become more attached to their co-twin as they age is of particular interest to me now as I move into adulthood. Sarah and I have both changed a great deal since getting our first tastes of twin celebrity. She teaches music in a New Jersey elementary school, while I stare into a microscope for a living in D.C. My Ninja Turtle action figures are long gone, and she uses pasta for sustenance rather than accessorizing.
We talk and see each other regularly, but our contact is much less frequent than it used to be. Though she may take up a smaller part in my life, her role has become more important. As I experience the natural paring down of significant relationships that often occurs in young adulthood, I rely on her more for the emotional support that used to come from my parents, mentors, and the comfort of a stable childhood. She is the only person in my life who remembers all the funny stories from my childhood, and a glimpse at of our Facebook walls reveals a back-and-forth of inside jokes years – and in some cases decades – old. She is the only keeper of my deepest secrets, and the care package she sent me in the wake of my first big breakup did as much for my spirits as a dozen cathartic boy-bashing sessions with my friends. Reading the endearing loops of her child-like handwriting, I could hear her voice assuring me that “breakups are the fucking worst, but I swear it gets better.” It was the first time I actually believed I would be okay.
If the research on twin relationships has come to any kind of coherent conclusion about the special-ness of twins, the verdict is limited to identical twins. Fraternal twins like me are often viewed as the control group, having as much DNA in common as non-twin siblings. But studies have also shown a consistently higher degree of similarity in fraternal twins than other siblings.
So, since science gives me only vague and inconclusive evidence about the distinctiveness of my twin relationship, I look to my heart for a more fulfilling answer. Even as I encounter fewer people who are aware that I’m a twin, and so feel less externally defined by my twinship, my perception of our connection as special persists. Observing and experiencing other relationships has reinforced my thought that ours is unique, though I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly sets it apart. I have been guided by great parents, reveled in the intimacy of close friends, and been warmed by the fire of romantic relationships. But Sarah is different. We are different. I can’t explain why, and I don’t fully understand it myself, but it is true. And it is special.
“Can you read each other’s minds?”
“When she gets hurt, do you feel pain?”
“Do you guys have special powers?”
As a twin, I’ve gotten used to these inane questions (the answers are no, no, and what the hell are you talking about?). From as early as I can remember, my fraternal twin sister Sarah and I were inundated with queries and expressions of awe at our twinship. I didn’t question it then, and was happy to revel in the attention. It is only recently that I have thought to more closely examine this phenomenon, to wonder why people seem to view the twin relationship as inherently special, and whether they are right.
In studying how twins are raised, researchers have found that parents tend to fall into one of two categories: “twin-oriented,” those that focus on the similarities of their children, playing up their twin-ness, and “differentiation-oriented,” those that accentuate differences among twins, trying to give each a sense of individuality. My parents definitely fell into the latter category: though baby pictures confirm that it was easy to tell us apart based solely on the size difference of our heads – Sarah’s wispy blond dome could easily be mistaken for a moon of my hulking planet of a noggin – we were always dressed in different colors. Instead of sharing a single cake for our birthday, each year my mother would decorate a layer for each of us, our own unique, if slightly downsized, sugary circle of celebration. Pictures from our first birthday confirm this practice was in place from the beginning, our tiny smiles each lit up by our own set of candles.
Interestingly, studies have shown that the differing parenting approaches are dictated by the twins’ behavior, rather than vice versa. Twins who act alike are more apt to receive twin-oriented parenting, while dissimilar twins will likely be raised in a differentiation-oriented manner. From a young age, Sarah and I were diametric opposites in terms of disposition. A notoriously fastidious baby, I would make a fuss over even a drop of spilled apple juice while next to me Sarah would swim contentedly in her dinner, grinning a wide tomato sauce-stained smile and ignoring the strands of spaghetti that had somehow slithered their way into her hair. Home videos reveal me to be either camera-shy or a baby stoner, gazing silently or retreating from view while Sarah sought out the video camera, babbling incessantly into the lens.
I’m not sure whether my parents’ decision to dress me in blue and Sarah in pink was prescient or the creation of a self-fulfilling prophecy, but our childhood interests were as distant as our hat sizes. The prototypical tomboy, I played every sport I came across, eschewed Barbie dolls in favor of Nerf weapons, and almost made my mother aspirate her iced tea one summer afternoon when I announced that I would be wearing a tuxedo in my wedding. Sarah, on the other hand, loved lace dresses and stuffed animals, knew the first and middle names of every one of her two dozen Cabbage Patch Kids (many generously donated by me, Hater of All Things Girly), and filled her days running a daycare for her little plastic charges. When asked to join in, I would agree only to be the daycare’s secretary, manning a phone that never rang. But our interests weren’t completely mutually exclusive; we both liked to gather Sarah’s plush menagerie and stuff them between the two foam pads that served as our shared mattress, forming a hill of softness on which we would perform various ill-advised acrobatic stunts.
As much as my parents did their best to individualize us, the outside world seemed intent on defining us by our twinship. Courteous enthusiasm upon our introduction as two sisters gave way to a bubbly excitement when it was revealed that we were, in fact, sisters born on the same day. “Ooh, you’re twins?” became such a familiar phrase that it took on the timbre and cadence of a lullaby. Once they discovered our genetic little non-secret, our classmates and their previously uninterested parents suddenly became fascinated by us. They squealed over newly perceived (and often exaggerated) similarities, and adults of perfectly good vision began mixing us up, suddenly unsure who was whom.
I remember even at that age thinking, what’s all the fuss about? Dr. Nancy Segal, a professor of development psychology and director of the Twin Studies Center at California State University, Fullerton – and a fraternal twin herself – says that people are generally interested in twins because they are counterintuitive to our concept of individuality. “Identical twins fascinate people because they are contrary to expectations of individual uniqueness in appearance and behavior – they are separate individuals, but more alike then anyone else,” Segal says. The children who grew up in my generation, one that emphasized self-esteem and celebrated individuality, whose elementary school classrooms were plastered with posters proclaiming “I Am Me!” and whose students’ self-oriented projects were littered with gold stars, may be even more intrigued by the idea that there could be someone else in the world who looked, and even behaved, the same way as them.
As much as we were treated as individuals in our own home, outside of it we were always a set. Our parents strove to make us feel special and unique, so we played sports, joined clubs, or fostered a musical talent to express and define ourselves. Although I played a different sport every season and Sarah was a musical whiz, to others we were still twins first, and Amy and Sarah second. It was a strange and paradoxical thing, to feel defined not by any individual talent or distinction, but rather by my relation to someone else. I was unique because we were the same. I learned early on to accept that as a twin, you stand out from the crowd, but the spotlight never shines on you alone.
Of course, as a child I didn’t much resist the emphasis on our twinship. Being known as a twin meant attention and notoriety. As just myself, I probably would have made friends at school, but being a twin in elementary school was like being popular in high school – I may not have been liked by everyone, but they all knew who I was. It made me proud. Like a gambler who garners a sense of accomplishment from winning Keno, I found myself taking credit for the genetic randomness of life, and relished the gifts that it brought me as if I had actually earned them.
The enthusiasm of breathless new acquaintances isn’t the only reason that twins are made to feel special in our culture. The study of heritability – the extent to which traits, like intelligence or aggression, are influenced by our genes – is a major part of current genetic research, as scientists try to place everything from eye color to handwriting to alcoholism somewhere on the nature-nuture spectrum. And one of the favored ways to look at heritability is using the classical twin study paradigm. First introduced in 1911, it compares identical twins to fraternal twins. Since identical twins share one hundred percent of their DNA and fraternal twins about fifty percent, comparing the two can give a strong indication of whether a trait is genetically influenced.
For example, if identical twins almost always show the same degree of shyness (both are very shy or both are very outgoing) and fraternal twins vary more, then one can reasonably conclude that genes are a large factor in the trait of shyness. These studies have helped researchers determine that genes play a big role in a wide array of biological traits, from blood pressure to attention-deficit disorder, but have little influence on others, like Parkinson’s Disease. They have also been helpful in determining the heritability of psychological traits. Major personality traits (openness, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and conscientiousness, known collectively as the Big Five) have been found to have a modest genetic origin from twenty to forty-five percent. Attitudes such as happiness and shyness also have high degrees of heritability, while mate choice has been shown to depend very little on genes.
Intelligence, as measured by IQ, has been the subject of many twin studies. The average correlation of IQ scores (measuring how similar one subject’s IQ score is to another’s; a correlation of 1 indicates a perfect match, while 0 indicates no connection at all) is .86 for identical twins, .60 for fraternal twins, .46 for non-twin siblings, and .15 for cousins. This general pattern follows for most traits: identical twins are more similar than fraternal twins, who are in turn closer than non-twin siblings and more distant relatives. This evidence presents a strong case for a high genetic influence on our individual traits.
One of the most interesting findings from this intelligence research concerns the change of genetic influence with time. Several studies that have found that genes actually play a bigger role over time, accounting for about 60% of similarity in adults, as opposed to approximately 50% in adolescence and 30% in early childhood. This is counterintuitive to our natural assumption that environment would play a greater role as people age and tend to branch off further into their own individual lives. Instead, Dr. Segal says “it appears that with age we acquire greater freedom to fashion our own environments in ways that are more compatible with who we are, and in doing so we become ‘more like ourselves’ every day.” In the case of identical twins, becoming more like one’s self also means becoming more like one’s twin.
This idea is mirrored by a 2006 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that examined the twin relationship in terms of attachment. The researchers compared feelings of attachment to different “targets” (mother, father, sibling, and romantic partner) over time. Twins and non-twins showed similar patterns of attachment to all the targets except siblings. While non-twins reported feeling less attachment to their siblings over time, twins said they actually felt a stronger attachment to each other as they aged.
Some have objected that such twin studies are flawed because twins are usually raised in the same environment, which makes it impossible to tell if a similarity is due to their similar genes or the household they also share. The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart was started by Dr. Thomas Bouchard in 1979 to look at the rare instances where twins are raised separately. Many of us have heard stories of twins reared apart that upon reuniting discovered eerie similarities. One of the best-known of these cases is that of Jim Springer and Jim Lewis, twins from the Minnesota Study who were separated at infancy, raised apart, and finally reunited after thirty-nine years. The pair, known as “the Jim twins,” revealed some astonishing similarities: both had been married twice to women of the same name (Linda and Betty), had a son with the same name, and had even driven the same model car to the same three-block Florida beach neighborhood for vacation – without ever meeting. These extraordinary similarities highlight the strength of the genetic tie between the two men. Their story also amplifies the mystique of twinship; the congruence between them feels almost supernatural.
Twin studies have also become extremely important to the new hot topic of epigenetics, which is about the way that chemical alterations of DNA affect how certain genes are expressed. Scientists are learning that in addition to having different genes, different people can have the same gene which manifests itself differently based on how it interacts with other chemicals in the body. Take hair color, for example. Two people may have the same exact gene coding for the same exact brown hair color, but because one person’s DNA is modified differently (a few methyl groups have been added to it, say), the two people can end up being different shades of brunette. Identical twins play a pivotal role in epigenetic research. Since they have the exact same set of DNA, any differences in physical traits that are highly or totally genetically-influenced (like hair color) can be attributed to epigenetic changes in the expression of these genes.
In the end, these studies leave us with a general sense of a strong genetic influence sprinkled with exceptions and qualifications, emphasis on the varying degrees to which environmental factors play a role, and the acknowledgment of natural variability between all individuals. More relevant than the actual results of these studies is the scientific community’s increasing recognition of the value of twins in helping sort out the whole mess. The idea that by studying twins scientists might finally solve some of biology’s most persistent and complex puzzles (for instance, are we genetically predetermined to be anxious/gay/math whizzes? Or is it because we grew up in overindulgent/violent/emotionally repressed households?) gives twinship an air of importance, of necessity. Science needs twins in order to unlock the mysteries of genes that extend deeper than the sequences of DNA which comprise them. This reinforces the notion that twins are special, but not because of any individual distinction or achievement. Only as a pair, as a full set, can they help illuminate any of the shrouded secrets that lurk within the twisting double helices of our genetic makeup.
Some people believe that we tend to view twins as special because they manifest an ideal human relationship: built-in partners who fully understand and empathize with each other. While most people struggle to establish compatible long-term friendships and romantic partnerships, there is a sense that twins are connected with their soulmate from birth. Scientific study of such an intangible concept is difficult, so there is not a lot of evidence to support or refute this idea. But there is some.
In her book, Entwined Lives: Twins and What They Tell Us About Human Behavior, Nancy Segal has a name for the relationship unique to twins: friendship extraordinaire. In her observational research, she has watched twins interact in different cooperative and competitive environments. On cooperative tasks, such as putting together a jigsaw puzzle, identical twins were more likely to complete the task than fraternal twins, who more often acted like other children – shoving each other and hoarding pieces for themselves.
In a study of competitive tasks, twin pairs were asked to complete mathematical and matching tasks both separately and in the same room. Identical twins performed more alike when working in the same room, and identical twins who had performed faster working alone slowed down when in the same room to allow their co-twin to catch up. This phenomenon was absent in fraternal twin pairs. Segal concluded that identical twins showed “a greater restraint of selfishness” than other children. Even at a young – often very self-involved – age, twins make space for their co-twin in their lives. Perhaps this marks a distinct aspect of twinship; while most children have to be explicitly taught social concepts such as sharing and considering others’ feelings, twins adopt these ideas more intuitively, maybe even unconsciously. The difference is like using a natural limb versus an artificial one. We learn to use our hands naturally, through intuition and experience, while learning to operate a prosthetic device is an intense, highly cerebral and deliberate process.
Though we may have an urge to idealize the identical twin relationship as perfectly harmonious, Segal points out that many identical twins view each other as rivals with whom they constantly battle. However, she notes that “even ‘warring’ twins may be inseparable due to mutual understandings.” Though they may be sparring partners, they are partners nonetheless. Segal suggests that “identical twins may, thus, come closer than anyone else to achieving the coordinated, harmonious relations for which we all strive.” Though some dysfunctional couples may disagree, the ability of two people to be at odds with each other without disrupting feelings of intimacy is rarely found outside the confines of identical twin relationships.
Sarah and I were close growing up, but we were also each other’s biggest bully. As possibly the most studious 5th grader ever, Sarah carried around twenty pounds of books in her backpack, and I took great delight in exploiting the weight imbalance the behemoth created. I would seize every opportunity I could to give her a gentle shove or pull, which inevitably would send her stick-thin figure stumbling to the floor. She got her shots in too; like a pro wrestler notorious for a devastating move, Sarah was known (at least by me) for her “clawings:” she would dig her nails into my leg and drag them until she drew blood. Though neither of us has forgotten these memories, they are brought up now with laughs rather than tears, both of us incredulous, and slightly ashamed, of the damage we used to gleefully inflict on one another. But these recollections of our mutual torture lack the sting of pain or guilt that accompanies so many of my other childhood memories. We never officially apologized to each other for anything. We didn’t have to.
Evolutionary psychology, with its basic tenet that animals behave in ways which will allow them the highest possibility of passing on their genes to future generations, can explain many of our collective behaviors. It can also provide insight into twin relationships. For a time, scientists weren’t sure how well this theory fit with the many acts of altruism – helping out someone else at a cost to one’s self – observed in nature. After all, if animals are just driven to reproduce and pass along their genes, why would they take risks for anyone else? In 1964, William Hamilton, a preeminent evolutionary biologist, addressed this problem when he published a range of studies in which he proposed the concept of inclusive fitness. Inclusive fitness is the idea that an animal will help close family members, with whom it shares many genes, in order to ensure that those genes get passed on, even if not through it. It is essentially the “selfishness” of the gene (wanting to be passed on somehow) that manifests itself unconsciously in altruistic behavior. This has been supported by studies which show that animals act more altruistically toward close family, such as siblings or offspring, than toward kin with whom they share fewer genes, such as cousins.
Based on this idea, it would follow that identical twins, who share all of their genes, should be equally as concerned with their twin’s prosperity as with their own. Identical twins are completely unique in this equal degree of self-interest and interest in another. This is not to say that a twin necessarily sees his co-twin’s life as equally important to his own (we all have a self-preservation instinct), but the similarity is much closer than that of any other human relationship. As Segal writes, “I do not believe there is a special process for responding to one’s identical twin. Instead, increased closeness between twins may be an extension of the general principle of directing increased altruism toward close relatives.”
Twins are also sometimes seen as two sides of the same coin, yin and yang. While I certainly don’t think of myself as a bad person, if the good twin-evil twin dichotomy really holds true, Sarah would be the one dressed in gauzy white. She is too nice to take shopping (I blame her for a closet’s worth of bad ideas, including ill-fitting Bono-esque sunglasses and a pair of overalls that she said looked “um, really cute!” on me) and has trouble being hostile even when she tries. In college, she used to complain about one of her music theory professors, an unpleasant woman who arbitrarily failed half her students each semester. Once Sarah proudly told me how she had banged on her professor’s office door late one night to vent her frustration. “I just knocked on her door,” she said, “but I would have rather knocked on her face!” It was one of the meanest things I have ever heard her say.
In the seven-plus months that she was unemployed after college, she never missed a single one of her monthly donations to the ASPCA. In contrast to her roommates who hung pictures of drunk friends and racy images of a shirtless Justin Timberlake or Ralph Lauren model, her college dorm room was decorated with a shrine-like photo collection of our beloved black lab/daschund mix Pete and a single poster of a fully-clothed LL Cool J (“just look at those lips!” she’d say). It’s this special brand of pure-hearted, unintentional hilarity that earned her the nickname “Dory,” Ellen DeGeneres’s character in Finding Nemo.
If she were just my sister rather than my twin, I’d probably find Sarah’s angelic persona annoying. I imagine I’d be faced with the “why can’t you be more like her?” question, to which I have no good answer. But it turns out that there are upsides to sharing the spotlight. As her twin, I can claim partial ownership instead of obligation. Rather than a pair of contrasting images, our portrait is shared, so I get to bask in the diffused light of her halo.
The finding discussed earlier that twins become more attached to their co-twin as they age is of particular interest to me now as I move into adulthood. Sarah and I have both changed a great deal since getting our first tastes of twin celebrity. She teaches music in a New Jersey elementary school, while I stare into a microscope for a living in D.C. My Ninja Turtle action figures are long gone, and she uses pasta for sustenance rather than accessorizing.
We talk and see each other regularly, but our contact is much less frequent than it used to be. Though she may take up a smaller part in my life, her role has become more important. As I experience the natural paring down of significant relationships that often occurs in young adulthood, I rely on her more for the emotional support that used to come from my parents, mentors, and the comfort of a stable childhood. She is the only person in my life who remembers all the funny stories from my childhood, and a glimpse at of our Facebook walls reveals a back-and-forth of inside jokes years – and in some cases decades – old. She is the only keeper of my deepest secrets, and the care package she sent me in the wake of my first big breakup did as much for my spirits as a dozen cathartic boy-bashing sessions with my friends. Reading the endearing loops of her child-like handwriting, I could hear her voice assuring me that “breakups are the fucking worst, but I swear it gets better.” It was the first time I actually believed I would be okay.
If the research on twin relationships has come to any kind of coherent conclusion about the special-ness of twins, the verdict is limited to identical twins. Fraternal twins like me are often viewed as the control group, having as much DNA in common as non-twin siblings. But studies have also shown a consistently higher degree of similarity in fraternal twins than other siblings.
So, since science gives me only vague and inconclusive evidence about the distinctiveness of my twin relationship, I look to my heart for a more fulfilling answer. Even as I encounter fewer people who are aware that I’m a twin, and so feel less externally defined by my twinship, my perception of our connection as special persists. Observing and experiencing other relationships has reinforced my thought that ours is unique, though I can’t quite put my finger on what exactly sets it apart. I have been guided by great parents, reveled in the intimacy of close friends, and been warmed by the fire of romantic relationships. But Sarah is different. We are different. I can’t explain why, and I don’t fully understand it myself, but it is true. And it is special.
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