The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed April 2014 at TEDxBinghamtonUniversity
Hannah Fry: The mathematics of love
Finding the right mate is no cakewalk — but is it even mathematically likely? In a charming talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows patterns in how we look for love, and gives her top three tips (verified by math!) for finding that special someone.
Transcript:
Today I want to talk to you about the mathematics of love. Now, I think that we can all agree that mathematicians are famously excellent at finding love. But it's not just because of our dashing personalities, superior conversational skills and excellent pencil cases. It's also because we've actually done an awful lot of work into the maths of how to find the perfect partner.
Now, in my favorite paper on the subject, which is entitled, "Why I Don't Have a Girlfriend" -- (Laughter) -- Peter Backus tries to rate his chances of finding love. Now, Peter's not a very greedy man. Of all of the available women in the U.K., all Peter's looking for is somebody who lives near him, somebody in the right age range, somebody with a university degree, somebody he's likely to get on well with, somebody who's likely to be attractive, somebody who's likely to find him attractive. (Laughter) And comes up with an estimate of 26 women in the whole of the UK. It's not looking very good, is it Peter? Now, just to put that into perspective, that's about 400 times fewer than the best estimates of how many intelligent extraterrestrial life forms there are. And it also gives Peter a 1 in 285,000 chance of bumping into any one of these special ladies on a given night out. I'd like to think that's why mathematicians don't really bother going on nights out anymore.
The thing is that I personally don't subscribe to such a pessimistic view. Because I know, just as well as all of you do, that love doesn't really work like that. Human emotion isn't neatly ordered and rational and easily predictable. But I also know that that doesn't mean that mathematics hasn't got something that it can offer us because, love, as with most of life, is full of patterns and mathematics is, ultimately, all about the study of patterns. Patterns from predicting the weather to the fluctuations in the stock market, to the movement of the planets or the growth of cities. And if we're being honest, none of those things are exactly neatly ordered and easily predictable, either. Because I believe that mathematics is so powerful that it has the potential to offer us a new way of looking at almost anything. Even something as mysterious as love. And so, to try to persuade you of how totally amazing, excellent and relevant mathematics is, I want to give you my top three mathematically verifiable tips for love.
Okay, so Top Tip #1: How to win at online dating. So my favorite online dating website is OkCupid, not least because it was started by a group of mathematicians. Now, because they're mathematicians, they have been collecting data on everybody who uses their site for almost a decade. And they've been trying to search for patterns in the way that we talk about ourselves and the way that we interact with each other on an online dating website. And they've come up with some seriously interesting findings. But my particular favorite is that it turns out that on an online dating website, how attractive you are does not dictate how popular you are, and actually, having people think that you're ugly can work to your advantage. Let me show you how this works. In a thankfully voluntary section of OkCupid, you are allowed to rate how attractive you think people are on a scale between 1 and 5. Now, if we compare this score, the average score, to how many messages a selection of people receive, you can begin to get a sense of how attractiveness links to popularity on an online dating website.
This is the graph that the OkCupid guys have come up with. And the important thing to notice is that it's not totally true that the more attractive you are, the more messages you get. But the question arises then of what is it about people up here who are so much more popular than people down here, even though they have the same score of attractiveness? And the reason why is that it's not just straightforward looks that are important. So let me try to illustrate their findings with an example. So if you take someone like Portia de Rossi, for example, everybody agrees that Portia de Rossi is a very beautiful woman. Nobody thinks that she's ugly, but she's not a supermodel, either. If you compare Portia de Rossi to someone like Sarah Jessica Parker, now, a lot of people, myself included, I should say, think that Sarah Jessica Parker is seriously fabulous and possibly one of the most beautiful creatures to have ever have walked on the face of the Earth. But some other people, i.e., most of the Internet, seem to think that she looks a bit like a horse. (Laughter) Now, I think that if you ask people how attractive they thought Sarah Jessica Parker or Portia de Rossi were, and you ask them to give them a score between 1 and 5, I reckon that they'd average out to have roughly the same score. But the way that people would vote would be very different. So Portia's scores would all be clustered around the 4 because everybody agrees that she's very beautiful, whereas Sarah Jessica Parker completely divides opinion. There'd be a huge spread in her scores. And actually it's this spread that counts. It's this spread that makes you more popular on an online Internet dating website. So what that means then is that if some people think that you're attractive, you're actually better off having some other people think that you're a massive minger. That's much better than everybody just thinking that you're the cute girl next door.
Now, I think this begins makes a bit more sense when you think in terms of the people who are sending these messages. So let's say that you think somebody's attractive, but you suspect that other people won't necessarily be that interested. That means there's less competition for you and it's an extra incentive for you to get in touch. Whereas compare that to if you think somebody is attractive but you suspect that everybody is going to think they're attractive. Well, why would you bother humiliating yourself, let's be honest? Here's where the really interesting part comes. Because when people choose the pictures that they use on an online dating website, they often try to minimize the things that they think some people will find unattractive. The classic example is people who are, perhaps, a little bit overweight deliberately choosing a very cropped photo, or bald men, for example, deliberately choosing pictures where they're wearing hats. But actually this is the opposite of what you should do if you want to be successful. You should really, instead, play up to whatever it is that makes you different, even if you think that some people will find it unattractive. Because the people who fancy you are just going to fancy you anyway, and the unimportant losers who don't, well, they only play up to your advantage.
Okay, Top Tip #2: How to pick the perfect partner. So let's imagine then that you're a roaring success on the dating scene. But the question arises of how do you then convert that success into longer-term happiness and in particular, how do you decide when is the right time to settle down? Now generally, it's not advisable to just cash in and marry the first person who comes along and shows you any interest at all. But, equally, you don't really want to leave it too long if you want to maximize your chance of long-term happiness. As my favorite author, Jane Austen, puts it, "An unmarried woman of seven and twenty can never hope to feel or inspire affection again." (Laughter) Thanks a lot, Jane. What do you know about love?
So the question is then, how do you know when is the right time to settle down given all the people that you can date in your lifetime? Thankfully, there's a rather delicious bit of mathematics that we can use to help us out here, called optimal stopping theory. So let's imagine then, that you start dating when you're 15 and ideally, you'd like to be married by the time that you're 35. And there's a number of people that you could potentially date across your lifetime, and they'll be at varying levels of goodness. Now the rules are that once you cash in and get married, you can't look ahead to see what you could have had, and equally, you can't go back and change your mind. In my experience at least, I find that typically people don't much like being recalled years after being passed up for somebody else, or that's just me.
So the math says then that what you should do in the first 37 percent of your dating window, you should just reject everybody as serious marriage potential. (Laughter) And then, you should pick the next person that comes along that is better than everybody that you've seen before. So here's the example. Now if you do this, it can be mathematically proven, in fact, that this is the best possible way of maximizing your chances of finding the perfect partner. Now unfortunately, I have to tell you that this method does come with some risks. For instance, imagine if your perfect partner appeared during your first 37 percent. Now, unfortunately, you'd have to reject them. (Laughter) Now, if you're following the maths, I'm afraid no one else comes along that's better than anyone you've seen before, so you have to go on rejecting everyone and die alone. (Laughter) Probably surrounded by cats nibbling at your remains.
Okay, another risk is, let's imagine, instead, that the first people that you dated in your first 37 percent are just incredibly dull, boring, terrible people. Now, that's okay, because you're in your rejection phase, so thats fine, you can reject them. But then imagine, the next person to come along is just marginally less boring, dull and terrible than everybody that you've seen before. Now, if you are following the maths, I'm afraid you have to marry them and end up in a relationship which is, frankly, suboptimal. Sorry about that. But I do think that there's an opportunity here for Hallmark to cash in on and really cater for this market. A Valentine's Day card like this. (Laughter) "My darling husband, you are marginally less terrible than the first 37 percent of people I dated." It's actually more romantic than I normally manage.
Okay, so this method doesn't give you a 100 percent success rate, but there's no other possible strategy that can do any better. And actually, in the wild, there are certain types of fish which follow and employ this exact strategy. So they reject every possible suitor that turns up in the first 37 percent of the mating season, and then they pick the next fish that comes along after that window that's, I don't know, bigger and burlier than all of the fish that they've seen before. I also think that subconsciously, humans, we do sort of do this anyway. We give ourselves a little bit of time to play the field, get a feel for the marketplace or whatever when we're young. And then we only start looking seriously at potential marriage candidates once we hit our mid-to-late 20s. I think this is conclusive proof, if ever it were needed, that everybody's brains are prewired to be just a little bit mathematical.
Okay, so that was Top Tip #2. Now, Top Tip #3: How to avoid divorce. Okay, so let's imagine then that you picked your perfect partner and you're settling into a lifelong relationship with them. Now, I like to think that everybody would ideally like to avoid divorce, apart from, I don't know, Piers Morgan's wife, maybe? But it's a sad fact of modern life that 1 in 2 marriages in the States ends in divorce, with the rest of the world not being far behind. Now, you can be forgiven, perhaps for thinking that the arguments that precede a marital breakup are not an ideal candidate for mathematical investigation. For one thing, it's very hard to know what you should be measuring or what you should be quantifying. But this didn't stop a psychologist, John Gottman, who did exactly that. Gottman observed hundreds of couples having a conversation and recorded, well, everything you can think of. So he recorded what was said in the conversation, he recorded their skin conductivity, he recorded their facial expressions, their heart rates, their blood pressure, basically everything apart from whether or not the wife was actually always right, which incidentally she totally is. But what Gottman and his team found was that one of the most important predictors for whether or not a couple is going to get divorced was how positive or negative each partner was being in the conversation.
Now, couples that were very low-risk scored a lot more positive points on Gottman's scale than negative. Whereas bad relationships, by which I mean, probably going to get divorced, they found themselves getting into a spiral of negativity. Now just by using these very simple ideas, Gottman and his group were able to predict whether a given couple was going to get divorced with a 90 percent accuracy. But it wasn't until he teamed up with a mathematician, James Murray, that they really started to understand what causes these negativity spirals and how they occur. And the results that they found I think are just incredibly impressively simple and interesting. So these equations, they predict how the wife or husband is going to respond in their next turn of the conversation, how positive or negative they're going to be. And these equations, they depend on the mood of the person when they're on their own, the mood of the person when they're with their partner, but most importantly, they depend on how much the husband and wife influence one another.
Now, I think it's important to point out at this stage, that these exact equations have also been shown to be perfectly able at describing what happens between two countries in an arms race. (Laughter) So that -- an arguing couple spiraling into negativity and teetering on the brink of divorce -- is actually mathematically equivalent to the beginning of a nuclear war. (Laughter)
But the really important term in this equation is the influence that people have on one another, and in particular, something called the negativity threshold. Now, the negativity threshold, you can think of as how annoying the husband can be before the wife starts to get really pissed off, and vice versa. Now, I always thought that good marriages were about compromise and understanding and allowing the person to have the space to be themselves. So I would have thought that perhaps the most successful relationships were ones where there was a really high negativity threshold. Where couples let things go and only brought things up if they really were a big deal. But actually, the mathematics and subsequent findings by the team have shown the exact opposite is true. The best couples, or the most successful couples, are the ones with a really low negativity threshold. These are the couples that don't let anything go unnoticed and allow each other some room to complain. These are the couples that are continually trying to repair their own relationship, that have a much more positive outlook on their marriage. Couples that don't let things go and couples that don't let trivial things end up being a really big deal.
Now of course, it takes bit more than just a low negativity threshold and not compromising to have a successful relationship. But I think that it's quite interesting to know that there is really mathematical evidence to say that you should never let the sun go down on your anger.
So those are my top three tips of how maths can help you with love and relationships. But I hope that aside from their use as tips, they also give you a little bit of insight into the power of mathematics. Because for me, equations and symbols aren't just a thing. They're a voice that speaks out about the incredible richness of nature and the startling simplicity in the patterns that twist and turn and warp and evolve all around us, from how the world works to how we behave. So I hope that perhaps, for just a couple of you, a little bit of insight into the mathematics of love can persuade you to have a little bit more love for mathematics. Thank you. (Applause)
TEDxUCL
Is life really that complex?
Can an algorithm forecast the site of the next riot? In this accessible talk, mathematician Hannah Fry shows how complex social behavior can be analyzed and perhaps predicted through analogies to natural phenomena, like the patterns of a leopard's spots or the distribution of predators and prey in the wild.
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Saturday, September 19, 2015
GralInt-TED Talks-Mandy Len Catron: Falling in love is the easy part
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed August 2015 at TEDxChapmanU
Mandy Len Catron: Falling in love is the easy part
Did you know you can fall in love with anyone just by asking them 36 questions? Mandy Len Catron tried this experiment, it worked, and she wrote a viral article about it (that your mom probably sent you). But … is that real love? Did it last? And what’s the difference between falling in love and staying in love?
Transcript:
I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year. "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer.
So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes.
So here are a couple of sample questions.
Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
As you can see, they really do get more personal as they go along.
Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met.
So when I first came across this study a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they'd invited the entire lab to the ceremony. So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued. And when I got the chance to try this study myself, with someone I knew but not particularly well, I wasn't expecting to fall in love. But then we did, and --
(Laughter)
And I thought it made a good story, so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later.
Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I'm guessing that some of you are probably wondering, are we still together? And the reason I think you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again for the past seven months. And this question is really what I want to talk about today. But let's come back to it.
(Laughter)
So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous. I had been working on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog. But a blog post might get a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views. And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship. But as it turned out, I had no idea.
So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened to the traffic on my blog. And by Sunday, both the Today Show and Good Morning America had called. Within a month, the article would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention. It's one thing to work up the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life has made international news -
(Laughter)
and to realize that people across the world are genuinely invested in the status of your new relationship.
(Laughter)
And when people called or emailed, which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together? In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase "Are you still together?" and several messages popped up immediately. They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one. I did radio interviews and they asked. I even gave a talk, and one woman shouted up to the stage, "Hey Mandy, where's your boyfriend?" And I promptly turned bright red.
I understand that this is part of the deal. If you write about your relationship in an international newspaper, you should expect people to feel comfortable asking about it. But I just wasn't prepared for the scope of the response. The 36 questions seem to have taken on a life of their own. In fact, the New York Times published a follow-up article for Valentine's Day, which featured readers' experiences of trying the study themselves, with varying degrees of success.
So my first impulse in the face of all of this attention was to become very protective of my own relationship. I said no to every request for the two of us to do a media appearance together. I turned down TV interviews, and I said no to every request for photos of the two us. I think I was afraid that we would become inadvertent icons for the process of falling in love, a position I did not at all feel qualified for.
And I get it: people didn't just want to know if the study worked, they wanted to know if it really worked: that is, if it was capable of producing love that would last, not just a fling, but real love, sustainable love.
But this was a question I didn't feel capable of answering. My own relationship was only a few months old, and I felt like people were asking the wrong question in the first place. What would knowing whether or not we were still together really tell them? If the answer was no, would it make the experience of doing these 36 questions any less worthwhile? Dr. Arthur Aron first wrote about these questions in this study here in 1997, and here, the researcher's goal was not to produce romantic love. Instead, they wanted to foster interpersonal closeness among college students, by using what Aron called "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure." Sounds romantic, doesn't it? But the study did work. The participants did feel closer after doing it, and several subsequent studies have also used Aron's fast friends protocol as a way to quickly create trust and intimacy between strangers. They've used it between members of the police and members of community, and they've used it between people of opposing political ideologies. The original version of the story, the one that I tried last summer, that pairs the personal questions with four minutes of eye contact, was referenced in this article, but unfortunately it was never published.
So a few months ago, I was giving a talk at a small liberal arts college, and a student came up to me afterwards and he said, kind of shyly, "So, I tried your study, and it didn't work." He seemed a little mystified by this. "You mean, you didn't fall in love with the person you did it with?" I asked.
"Well..." He paused. "I think she just wants to be friends."
"But did you become better friends?" I asked. "Did you feel like you got to really know each other after doing the study?" He nodded.
"So, then it worked," I said.
I don't think this is the answer he was looking for. In fact, I don't think this is the answer that any of us are looking for when it comes to love.
I first came across this study when I was 29 and I was going through a really difficult breakup. I had been in the relationship since I was 20, which was basically my entire adult life, and he was my first real love, and I had no idea how or if I could make a life without him. So I turned to science. I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love, and I think I was hoping that it might somehow inoculate me from heartache. I don't know if I realized this at the time -- I thought I was just doing research for this book I was writing -- but it seems really obvious in retrospect. I hoped that if I armed myself with the knowledge of romantic love, I might never have to feel as terrible and lonely as I did then. And all this knowledge has been useful in some ways. I am more patient with love. I am more relaxed. I am more confident about asking for what I want. But I can also see myself more clearly, and I can see that what I want is sometimes more than can reasonably be asked for. What I want from love is a guarantee, not just that I am loved today and that I will be loved tomorrow, but that I will continue to be loved by the person I love indefinitely. Maybe it's this possibility of a guarantee that people were really asking about when they wanted to know if we were still together.
So the story that the media told about the 36 questions was that there might be a shortcut to falling in love. There might be a way to somehow mitigate some of the risk involved, and this is a very appealing story, because falling in love feels amazing, but it's also terrifying. The moment you admit to loving someone, you admit to having a lot to lose, and it's true that these questions do provide a mechanism for getting to know someone quickly, which is also a mechanism for being known, and I think this is the thing that most of us really want from love: to be known, to be seen, to be understood. But I think when it comes to love, we are too willing to accept the short version of the story. The version of the story that asks, "Are you still together?" and is content with a yes or no answer.
So rather than that question, I would propose we ask some more difficult questions, questions like: How do you decide who deserves your love and who does not? How do you stay in love when things get difficult, and how do you know when to just cut and run? How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps into every relationship, or even harder, how do you live with your partner's doubt? I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions, but I think they're an important start at having a more thoughtful conversation about what it means to love someone.
So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad.
But falling in love is not the same thing as staying in love. Falling in love is the easy part. So at the end of my article, I wrote, "Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be." And I cringe a little when I read that now, not because it isn't true, but because at the time, I really hadn't considered everything that was contained in that choice. I didn't consider how many times we would each have to make that choice, and how many times I will continue to have to make that choice without knowing whether or not he will always choose me. I want it to be enough to have asked and answered 36 questions, and to have chosen to love someone so generous and kind and fun and to have broadcast that choice in the biggest newspaper in America. But what I have done instead is turn my relationship into the kind of myth I don't quite believe in. And what I want, what perhaps I will spend my life wanting, is for that myth to be true.
I want the happy ending implied by the title to my article, which is, incidentally, the only part of the article that I didn't actually write.
(Laughter)
But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love.
Thank you.
To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
JAN. 9, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By MANDY LEN CATRON
Updated, Feb. 13, 2015 |
More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.
Let me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”
He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if?” I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.
“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”
I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.
I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening.
I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions; there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question.
They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”
But they quickly became probing.
In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”
I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with our mothers.
The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or months.
I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late.
We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances.
The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).
Much of Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other.
It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.
We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.”
He hesitated and asked. “Do you think we should do that, too?”
“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.
“We could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.
The night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer.
“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.
“O.K.,” he said, smiling.
I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.
I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but rather a clump of very useful cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.
When the timer buzzed, I was surprised — and a little relieved. But I also felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.
Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.
But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.
I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known.
It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.
But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.
You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it could become.
Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.
Mandy Len Catron teaches writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and is working on a book about the dangers of love stories.
Modern Love College Essay Contest
We invited college students nationwide to open their hearts and laptops and write an essay that tells the truth about what love is like for them today.
No. 37: Big Wedding or Small?
Quiz: The 36 Questions That Lead to Love
JAN. 9, 2015
Modern Love
By DANIEL JONES
Updated, Feb. 13, 2015 | To try the 36 questions described below, download our free app for your phone, tablet or other device.
In Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” she refers to a study by the psychologist Arthur Aron (and others) that explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions. The 36 questions in the study are broken up into three sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the previous one.
The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters closeness. To quote the study’s authors, “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” Allowing oneself to be vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this exercise forces the issue.
The final task Ms. Catron and her friend try — staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes — is less well documented, with the suggested duration ranging from two minutes to four. But Ms. Catron was unequivocal in her recommendation. “Two minutes is just enough to be terrified,” she told me. “Four really goes somewhere.”
Set I
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Set II
13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
Set III
25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling ... “
26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share ... “
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
Overcoming Love Addiction: One Apple Martini at a Time
AUG. 20, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By PETER DeMARCO
I appeared as a love addict on a live morning television talk show in Detroit in the late 1980s, when I was 28. The producer, whom I knew through my job as a New York City book publicist, arranged for me to fly out to be a guest, along with an author who had written a book on love addiction.
In front of a studio audience, I shared how I had lost my mother at 15 and my father at 20, and had remained with my younger brother and sister in my childhood home, where I was still living as an adult. My goal was to be loved, I told them, and my obsessive need to fill an emotional emptiness had left me powerless to move forward with my life.The author confirmed that love addiction was as serious as heroin or alcohol dependency.
Ostensibly, I had flown to Detroit with the hope that a public sharing and meeting with a specialist could help me overcome my addiction. But after leaving the studio I flew to Pittsburgh for a blind date with a producer I had been flirting with by phone for the previous six months. I saw the Detroit trip as an excuse to call and ask if she would be free that Friday night. I said I would be in the area, by plane.
She was shocked and said she would love to meet me, then booked me into a hotel for the weekend.
After a taxi dropped me off in front of the Pittsburgh television station, my adrenaline from appearing on live TV had worn off, and I stood frozen beneath the giant call letters on the building, suitcase in hand, feeling like the scared, sad creature I had been all of my life, someone whose self-worth was dependent on a woman’s acceptance, and in this case, someone I had never met.
My weekend in Pittsburgh turned out to be the worst thing for a love addict: a storybook romance of candlelit dinners and hand-holding in the Mount Washington neighborhood. Two weeks later she came to visit me, and as we walked along a Long Island beach, arm in arm, I felt a high that no drug could ever top.
Two months later she moved west for a bigger job in a bigger market, and her late night “I miss you” phone calls stopped. I never saw her again.
During this period, I couldn’t function at work, couldn’t pick up the phone to do my job, didn’t even want the job anymore. I sat there in disbelief, wondering how someone who couldn’t stop staring into my eyes when we were together could suddenly be gone.
One day my boss walked into my office and handed me a piece of paper with a phone number. “Call her,” she said. “She saved my life.”
The number belonged to a therapist who had studied with Anna Freud.
I sat in therapy once a week, offering up my life to her. She told me I was taking 15 years of emotional life with my mother and placing that baggage onto each woman. She called them little deaths: Each time a woman rejected me I experienced the loss of my mother all over again.
I was also starting to go bald, which only fed my insecurities. I explored self-help and empowerment seminars and began to find confidence within myself, but it was easy to do when I wasn’t romantically attached.
When I was fired from a different publishing company for not being committed, I took the time off to prepare the house for sale. It was a difficult decision. The house had become a character in my life, something I needed to care for, because, according to the therapist, I was waiting for my parents to come home. “The subconscious dies hard,” she said.
I moved to New York, where I began to pursue an acting career and work temporary office jobs to make money.
One Memorial Day weekend, when I was 38, I had one of those better-than-scripted encounters, similar to what happened in Pittsburgh. Out to dinner with a group of friends, I ended up sitting next to a friend’s wife’s cousin, visiting from Los Angeles. She lived in Venice Beach and sold jewelry on the boardwalk.
The next day we went to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone roller coaster, which had always been one of my fantasy dates and something my parents had done when they met. It was the kind of date I had never gone on as a teenager.
Later, on Columbus Avenue, we stopped in one of those new martini bars. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the bar was empty. She ordered apple martinis. I said I didn’t like martinis, but she said to trust her.
They went down like candy. We danced to the Bee Gees on the jukebox; I kissed her.
After walking and talking for hours, we said good-night in front of my friend’s apartment. Then she said something odd: “You’ll probably be married by the next time I see you.”
I called three days later when she was back in L.A. and said I was ready to get on a plane, but she sounded aloof. I could hardly believe this was the same person from a few days earlier. “Let’s just see how things go,” she said.
I hung up in shock, knowing it was over. I hated myself for sounding, once again, too desperate, yet I felt powerless to stop the pattern of placing all of my hope in someone I hardly knew.
In my studio apartment, which lacked a view of the sky or of any greenery, I felt sealed off from the world and was reminded of the short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which a man is entombed behind a newly constructed brick wall.
I bought apple martini ingredients and played the Bee Gees. I stared at the chilled green liquid in the delicate glass with desperation, as if I could telepathically communicate with her.
The receptionist at my latest assignment, a young married woman from the Midwest who was studying to be a therapist, noticed my depressed body language and asked what was wrong.
“An apple martini,” I said cryptically, and told her the story.
She said I was worrying about the wrong things and that my problem was not having career direction. “You should become a teacher,” she said. “New York City needs teachers.”
It was an unusual thing to hear, since that subject had never come up in our conversations. But I was truly desperate, ready to hear something different. I was a writer and loved reading. And the year before, I had been a Big Brother mentor to an 11-year-old boy.
Two days later I applied to a new teaching program that was looking for non-teachers to be trained and placed inside the city’s neediest schools. They would also pay for a master’s degree.
For my interview in front of a small group of candidates and interviewers, I created an English lesson in which I used my first baseball glove to symbolize childhood innocence and my love for my father, who had been dead for almost 20 years. Then I read a paragraph from “Catcher in the Rye” in which Holden talks about his dead brother’s baseball mitt.
Three months later, I stood in front of a classroom of ninth graders in a Washington Heights school. I finally had a career, one I could love.
After my first week, I took a walk down the Upper West Side to meet a friend for dinner. I passed by the martini bar where the L.A. woman and I drank apple martinis. I went in. In an indirect way, my life had changed because of that drink, and I wanted to make a symbolic toast to her. It was also an act of self-pity.
The bartender was the same guy from that weekend. I asked if he remembered me. He said he didn’t. I told him we were the only ones there and had danced to the Bee Gees. He said that people danced in there all the time, that they got engaged — he’d seen everything.
I ordered an apple martini and said I was celebrating becoming a teacher.
“What do you teach?” the woman next to me asked. And for the second time, an apple martini changed my life, because I’ve been married to her for 13 years.
Sometimes, when I sit on the stoop in front of my house in the suburbs and watch my two young boys play on the lawn, I think about the crazy series of events that occurred when I went back to that martini bar to lament a woman who had predicted that I would be married before we met again.
I never displayed the love-addict tendencies in the initial relationship with my future wife. Maybe it was because I had found a career I loved. One thing I do know: It helped that she liked bald guys.
Peter DeMarco, a writer in Ridgewood, N.J., teaches at a public high school in Washington Heights.
The Peril of Not Dying for Love
SEPT. 10, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By CLAIRE JIA
High school Friday nights for my sister and me meant romantic comedies, trading boy secrets in our basement and playing a game called, “What Would You Do for Love?”
Popular questions included: “Would you give up your career for love?” “Would you eat a scorpion for love?” “Cut off your thumb?” “Jump in front of a car?”
“But I would die,” I’d protest.
“So,” she would say, “would you die for love?”
In the movies, people always did dramatic things for love: ditching their careers, donating organs or giving up their lives.
We watched Jack sink to his death in the icy Atlantic so Rose could stay afloat on the raft, and we cried when Harry ran through New York City to declare his love for Sally. We binge-watched Asian serial dramas, where the girl either has leukemia or is poor, and some rich boy (against all odds) falls in love with her.
I learned everything about love from movies. Love had a sexy soundtrack. Love was forever. Love almost always involved rain, stubborn parents and irrevocable passionate sacrifice.
Growing up, I wanted that sort of big love. My favorite romantic formula was the best-friends-falling-in-love pattern, à la Chandler and Monica in “Friends” or Ron and Hermione in “Harry Potter.”
In my dream, we would know each other for about three years. I would confide in him about my crushes. We would drink craft beer on rooftops at 2 a.m., screaming crude things at passers-by. Then one day I’d start dating someone totally wrong for me.
He would try to act normal and shake it off, because he was happy for me. But he would become distant and I’d be too obsessed with my Hugh Jackman look-alike boyfriend to notice.
Suddenly, I would fall ill with a cancer of some sort, and my friend would anonymously donate his organ to me. I would wake up in the hospital with him by my side and realize it was him I loved all along. Then he would kiss me, we’d have a trendy outdoor wedding and raise our 2.1 children in a Brooklyn brownstone.
My ABC Family Fantasy would have been harmless if I had realized real life isn’t like that.
I met the guy who would become the subject of this fantasy in the fall of my freshman year of college. I was out at a party, my key-card lanyard roped around my neck like a purity ring, when I bumped into someone I recognized from my floor. He pointed at me and said, “You’re Claire, right?”
Wary, I asked how he knew my name.
“I saw your door sign,” he said, blushing. “I scoped everyone out on the floor. Was that creepy?”
“Very,” I said, smirking, though I had done the same thing.
He was funny, attractive (in an approachable way) and soon was one of my closest friends. I mocked his Radiohead obsession; he made fun of my affinity for Top 40 music.
One winter night we were sitting on his bed at 4 a.m. talking about childhood insecurities when I realized this was it: He was the best friend I had been waiting to fall in love with.
Soon I became the narrator of my own romantic comedy. We spent spring break together, and on the five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York he asked me, in a nostalgic throwback to high school, to go to Spring Formal with him. He described the art studio his mother had back home. As we walked through Chinatown, he held my hand — not in a cheesy way, but because he wanted to make sure I was safe.
In my mind, I checked off the boxes (Cute ask-out? Talking about his family? Protective body contact? Check, check, check). A month later, we had our first kiss.
These memories fit my falling-in-love-with-my-best-friend story so perfectly that I ignored many moments of discomfort: our clammy hands and his rambling texts about “exciting” finance internships. For the story, I pretended that I liked kissing him, though I later described our make-out sessions to friends as being “like two co-workers shaking hands, but less intense.”
One evening during finals, it rained. “I’ve always wanted to be kissed in the rain,” I thought and went to get him. When I grabbed his hand and told him what I wanted to do, he replied, abruptly, “I don’t think there’s a spark between us.”
I didn’t know how to respond. “Cool,” I finally said, shrugging. “We’re better as friends, anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. Then, putting on his headphones, he said he needed to study for his exam, so could I close the door behind me?
I stood in the hallway in my pajamas, unsure of how to feel. My friends were hanging out in the common room, unaware of the tragedy that had just occurred. Simply going back to my room to work on my Foucault essay didn’t seem the right response to this romantic Armageddon.
When Allie and Noah broke up in “The Notebook,” there was door slamming, hurled insults and crying. It seemed to me I needed to do something similar, so I ran out into the rain, shoeless, and screamed into the night. That’s what people do when they lose love, isn’t it? Scream? Or at least cry? But for me, the tears didn’t come. I just felt cold and wet and stupid. And I realized I had forgotten my keys.
Three months later, when we came back to school in the fall, I couldn’t put a finger on what it was that gnawed at me. He didn’t completely ignore me. He didn’t have sex with my roommate. He didn’t delete my number. We just didn’t see each other as much because we didn’t live in the same building anymore. I couldn’t even be mad at him. I felt empty, needy and, above all, bored.
If I couldn’t have my Chandler-Monica fantasy, I would take the Shakespearean tragedy instead. As the autumn months dragged on, I turned to downing wine and writing dark love poetry. Until I finally found myself lying face up in a pile of leaves on a biting October day, wearing the same shirt for the third day in a row, hoping someone would see me. As I lay there feeling dirty and invisible, I realized the saddest part: I never loved him in the first place.
I suppose I had known this all along, but for the story I had tried to love him. And after our breakup, I felt sad and lonely. But above all, I felt disappointment — a simple disappointment that I couldn’t have love. I chalked up all these emotions to heartbreak, because heartbreak is so much sexier than disappointment.
As I dated more, I learned that big love and big heartbreak come seldom. I resisted online dating because I didn’t think “I liked his profile picture” was a good story. Anonymously giving your kidney to your dying friend? That was a good story.
I thought the high-volume, quick-gratification nature of online dating cheapened the sanctity of romance. But having already failed in my quest for the perfect love story, I decided to give love a try in the least romantic way possible. As the Tinder app downloaded onto my phone, I silently mourned my coveted great love.
I met a guy for coffee, another for drinks. No one was perfect. No one was a total loser. I didn’t kiss any of them in the rain, but neither did I ever throw my drink in a date’s face. My life became a routine of swipe, swipe, message, date, awkward hookup, with a bottle of wine to finish the night.
It wasn’t heartbreak that became draining, but the lack of it.
I have been told so many times what love should look like that I am unsure what love even is anymore. If it doesn’t look like midnight kisses with my best friend, and it doesn’t look like a booty call from a Tinder match, what is it?
Dating more has certainly made my outlook on love a little less precious. I know that in real life, few people ever jump in front of a car, cut off their thumbs or eat scorpions for love, if they ever did. And rarely do people get a chance at big sacrificial displays in the form of a donated body organ.
We’re told love isn’t love until he’s begging on his knees, and that heartbreak isn’t heartbreak until you’ve lost your mind. We think we want love, but we’ve rarely seen it, because love is a boundless unknown that no romantic stereotype can capture.
Movies promise us blissful forevers or crushing sorrow, but most of the time, love is neither. Maybe it’s just two people who tolerate each other. Maybe it’s a mutual right swipe. What would I do for love? I’ll let you know when I actually find it.
Claire Jia is a recent graduate of Amherst College.
A Millennial’s Guide to Kissing
AUG. 6, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By EMMA COURT
When a total stranger kissed me under the artificial lights of an airplane cabin somewhere above international waters, my first thought was of the Orthodox woman sitting to my left.
I hoped she was asleep. It was a 12-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Newark, and I wanted to nap too, but how could I now?
The kiss, coming out of nowhere, had turned me into the heroine of a bad romance novel: heart fluttering, weak-kneed, every nerve electrified. Those blue fleece blankets had never been so sexy.
It was an overnight flight, and I had already crunched the simple calculus: If I slept, I’d be over the seven-hour time difference by the time we landed and ready to hop back into a new semester at college. My highest hope for the trip, besides hours of sleep, had been that they would serve hummus at the in-flight dinner.
My stranger and I were returning from Birthright Israel trips with groups from our respective universities. Birthright Israel is a free 10-day trip to Israel for young Jewish-Americans, and I had wanted to go before I graduated. Last winter, before my final semester of college, I finally had.
Because there are so many young people on Birthright Israel trips, they’re often mocked as an attempt to spark a connection to Israel through the bedroom — and plenty of that had happened on my trip. But it hadn’t happened to me until that moment.
Spoiling the perfect narrative of two strangers meeting on an airplane, I admit that we had met before, just once, briefly, when I bumped into a friend from high school during a stop in Jerusalem.
One of her friends had been cute, I had remembered. And now here he was behind me as we boarded the airplane, then bending his tall frame into the aisle seat next to me. As he lifted his backpack into the overhead compartment, I marveled at my luck.
Between us sprang the kind of instant intimacy fostered by open personalities in tight quarters. We spoke in spurts about the gossip on our trips and what we had done during the days spent in Israel. We flirted. We kissed that first time. Then we kissed again.
Splitting a pair of headphones, we listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Taylor Swift. We slept a little, poorly.
Born and raised in New York City, I found his life as a not-so-Jewish boy in North Carolina foreign and dazzling. He and his friends did things like take long hiking trips and, in preparation, dehydrate their food.
I liked how easy he was, how ready to talk. I liked his laugh and his dark eyes. He knew how to figure out where rainbows would appear in the sky and told me about the “Door to Hell” in Turkmenistan, a crater of natural gas that’s been on fire for more than 30 years.
It seemed torn from the back of a Nicholas Sparks paperback: A Southern science major from a small liberal arts school and a Northern humanities major from a huge pre-professional university meet in the skies over the Mediterranean. The heat between them is palpable.
But less romantic details persisted: I was a senior, about to start my second semester, with plans to head to Dallas after graduation. He was a sophomore, with the swaddling comfort of knowing where he’d be for the next few years.
But it didn’t matter anyway, did it? In 12 hours, we’d be back on paths that led us in opposite directions. This meeting was just a romantic interlude from our real lives. And if it did mean anything, we were college students; we knew how to pretend it didn’t.
On the plane, the lights came back on and the breakfast cart appeared. Reality set in as we sipped orange juice from tin-foil-covered cups and, for the first time, had little to say to each other. During the bumpy landing, he distracted me by talking about famous airplane crashes.
And then with a final, jarring thump, we were back on the ground. As we gathered our belongings from what had been our temporary home, I wondered what would happen next.
We bought tickets at the train terminal, lingering on the automated buttons. After, as we were about to board trains headed in different directions, we stared at each other. He rested one arm on his rolling suitcase, bewilderment in his dark eyes.
I hugged him a brisk no-nonsense goodbye. We didn’t exchange numbers.
“Bye,” he shouted down the stairs at my back. “See you never.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. Even embracing the more positive of the possibilities, it still stung.
And that should have been it: a story I told, giggling, to friends until the details faded, and he was just a boy whose name I didn’t remember. But I saw his name on my Facebook News Feed in a batch of photos our mutual friend had uploaded, and I couldn’t resist.
I clicked “Add Friend.” And one day, he messaged me.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I typed back. “How’s life?”
It went like this for days. But talking to him made me feel like a time traveler, spliced between the snowy paths of my campus and the darkened airplane we had shared. I was sitting in class or at meetings at the local campus cafe, doing my readings in the library, and then a message on my screen would tug me back. I didn’t like the way it upset my balance, how far away and powerless it made me feel.
There was also a girl at his school lurking in the background of his messages. Was he trying to make me jealous? Was he just not thinking clearly?
Mass media has a fascination with hookup culture among people around my age (21) meriting in-depth investigations and contentious opining about what it all means. But they often miss a simple fact: There’s nothing particularly new about trying to avoid getting hurt.
It’s just that my generation has turned this avoidance into a science, perfecting the separation of the physical from the emotional. We truncate whenever possible: texting over calling, meeting over apps rather than in person. We leave in the early morning without saying goodbye. Being casual is cooler than intimacy and vulnerability. Or so we think.
Having the last word was once a sign of one’s wit and smarts. It meant that your comment had gravitas and staying power. But today, having the last word is the ultimate in weakness: It means being the person who doesn’t merit an answer. Better to leave them hanging than risk the same happening to you. Keep it shallow so your heart isn’t on the line.
Being aware of all this does not grant immunity from its effects.
One night, my roommate’s hookup rolled over in the dark and asked her in a half-murmur, “Is this a special thing?”
Confused, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she asked him to repeat himself. She wasn’t certain she had heard him correctly.
“Never mind,” he said.
Later, she worried she had missed a crucial moment, one she would never get back. But if she had misunderstood, she risked showing her hand by revealing that she wanted him to stick around in the morning. It was too scary a prospect, so she never said anything.
Was my airplane interlude a special thing? Would things have been different if one of us had had the courage to say something other than goodbye before heading to our trains?
On the platform, walking away from him, I had decided that the whole affair was just one of many half-formed romantic liaisons that trail you in your youth. But maybe that attitude was also the problem.
He and I had met on an airplane, but we were headed to different destinations, so our encounter was charged with the impossibility of things going anywhere. At the time, I had had an inexplicable comfort level with it all. I only realized later why it had been such an oddly familiar feeling: My generation treats every liaison as if it is happening on an airplane, as if we have only that one night and there is no tomorrow.
Our story wasn’t so different, after all.
I don’t know what else could have happened. But I wonder what we collectively lose as we try so hard not to care. We pretend that it doesn’t matter, that we have time, that because we are young we are invulnerable.
He and I don’t communicate anymore; he moved on, and so did I. But in my head, I go back to that train platform. I turn to him, say goodbye. And then, recalling his parting words, I say them right back: “See you never.”
Emma Court recently graduated from Cornell.
The 36 Questions: An Answer to Their Prayers?
FEB. 13, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By DANIEL JONES
Last month, a few days before Mandy Len Catron’s essay “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This” appeared in Modern Love, she aired some concerns about the coming exposure on her blog, writing that while a few hundred people may see one of her blog posts, thousands would see this column.
She underestimated by about 8 million.
In the essay, Ms. Catron told of how she found love by replicating a 20-year-old experiment by the psychologist Arthur Aron that involved two strangers asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions followed by a four-minute staring session to see if doing so would lead to intimacy and love. For Ms. Catron and the man she barely knew, the experiment worked.
Readers found this combination of romance and science (with a happy ending) irresistible. Ms. Catron’s story went viral, with couples across the country and around the globe trying the questions themselves.
The New Yorker and Dame magazine spoofed the experiment with 36 questions about how to fall out of love.
One man even posed the questions to his disengaged cat in a YouTube video, which amassed nearly 40,000 views.
A ticketed singles event in Manhattan drew 70 hopefuls who paid $40 each to be paired up and guided through the experiment.
The notion of falling in love from a quiz may sound like a gimmick, but the broad resonance of Dr. Aron’s 36 questions may be partly explained by the fact that there is nothing gimmicky about them. In this age of Tinder and self-curated dating profiles, where image and first impressions hold sway, these questions go deep.
But as Dr. Aron cautions, this isn’t an experiment that can be easily repeated with a series of romantic prospects, because you risk having canned answers if you keep using the same questions.
Since the essay appeared, we have been receiving reports from strangers and longtime couples who have tried the quiz, often armed with one of several quickly created apps featuring the quiz (The New York Times, in consultation with Dr. Aron, has created one as well, available atnytimes.com/36questions).
Two weeks after her essay appeared, Ms. Catron was still trying to adjust to what it had wrought. She and her boyfriend were out at a pizza parlor when he took out his phone and started typing. She assumed he was texting someone, but he slid the phone across to her. It read: “the couple next to us is doing the 36 questions.”
Sure enough, they were. In that moment, the full impact of her article finally hit home.
With Valentine’s Day upon us, we’d like to share a sampling of the stories we heard.
Daniel Jones is the editor of Modern Love and author of “Love Illuminated: Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject (With the Help of 50,000 Strangers).”
Source: www.nytimes.com
Filmed August 2015 at TEDxChapmanU
Mandy Len Catron: Falling in love is the easy part
Did you know you can fall in love with anyone just by asking them 36 questions? Mandy Len Catron tried this experiment, it worked, and she wrote a viral article about it (that your mom probably sent you). But … is that real love? Did it last? And what’s the difference between falling in love and staying in love?
Transcript:
I published this article in the New York Times Modern Love column in January of this year. "To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This." And the article is about a psychological study designed to create romantic love in the laboratory, and my own experience trying the study myself one night last summer.
So the procedure is fairly simple: two strangers take turns asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions and then they stare into each other's eyes without speaking for four minutes.
So here are a couple of sample questions.
Number 12: If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Number 28: When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
As you can see, they really do get more personal as they go along.
Number 30, I really like this one: Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things you might not say to someone you just met.
So when I first came across this study a few years earlier, one detail really stuck out to me, and that was the rumor that two of the participants had gotten married six months later, and they'd invited the entire lab to the ceremony. So I was of course very skeptical about this process of just manufacturing romantic love, but of course I was intrigued. And when I got the chance to try this study myself, with someone I knew but not particularly well, I wasn't expecting to fall in love. But then we did, and --
(Laughter)
And I thought it made a good story, so I sent it to the Modern Love column a few months later.
Now, this was published in January, and now it is August, so I'm guessing that some of you are probably wondering, are we still together? And the reason I think you might be wondering this is because I have been asked this question again and again and again for the past seven months. And this question is really what I want to talk about today. But let's come back to it.
(Laughter)
So the week before the article came out, I was very nervous. I had been working on a book about love stories for the past few years, so I had gotten used to writing about my own experiences with romantic love on my blog. But a blog post might get a couple hundred views at the most, and those were usually just my Facebook friends, and I figured my article in the New York Times would probably get a few thousand views. And that felt like a lot of attention on a relatively new relationship. But as it turned out, I had no idea.
So the article was published online on a Friday evening, and by Saturday, this had happened to the traffic on my blog. And by Sunday, both the Today Show and Good Morning America had called. Within a month, the article would receive over 8 million views, and I was, to say the least, underprepared for this sort of attention. It's one thing to work up the confidence to write honestly about your experiences with love, but it is another thing to discover that your love life has made international news -
(Laughter)
and to realize that people across the world are genuinely invested in the status of your new relationship.
(Laughter)
And when people called or emailed, which they did every day for weeks, they always asked the same question first: are you guys still together? In fact, as I was preparing this talk, I did a quick search of my email inbox for the phrase "Are you still together?" and several messages popped up immediately. They were from students and journalists and friendly strangers like this one. I did radio interviews and they asked. I even gave a talk, and one woman shouted up to the stage, "Hey Mandy, where's your boyfriend?" And I promptly turned bright red.
I understand that this is part of the deal. If you write about your relationship in an international newspaper, you should expect people to feel comfortable asking about it. But I just wasn't prepared for the scope of the response. The 36 questions seem to have taken on a life of their own. In fact, the New York Times published a follow-up article for Valentine's Day, which featured readers' experiences of trying the study themselves, with varying degrees of success.
So my first impulse in the face of all of this attention was to become very protective of my own relationship. I said no to every request for the two of us to do a media appearance together. I turned down TV interviews, and I said no to every request for photos of the two us. I think I was afraid that we would become inadvertent icons for the process of falling in love, a position I did not at all feel qualified for.
And I get it: people didn't just want to know if the study worked, they wanted to know if it really worked: that is, if it was capable of producing love that would last, not just a fling, but real love, sustainable love.
But this was a question I didn't feel capable of answering. My own relationship was only a few months old, and I felt like people were asking the wrong question in the first place. What would knowing whether or not we were still together really tell them? If the answer was no, would it make the experience of doing these 36 questions any less worthwhile? Dr. Arthur Aron first wrote about these questions in this study here in 1997, and here, the researcher's goal was not to produce romantic love. Instead, they wanted to foster interpersonal closeness among college students, by using what Aron called "sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personalistic self-disclosure." Sounds romantic, doesn't it? But the study did work. The participants did feel closer after doing it, and several subsequent studies have also used Aron's fast friends protocol as a way to quickly create trust and intimacy between strangers. They've used it between members of the police and members of community, and they've used it between people of opposing political ideologies. The original version of the story, the one that I tried last summer, that pairs the personal questions with four minutes of eye contact, was referenced in this article, but unfortunately it was never published.
So a few months ago, I was giving a talk at a small liberal arts college, and a student came up to me afterwards and he said, kind of shyly, "So, I tried your study, and it didn't work." He seemed a little mystified by this. "You mean, you didn't fall in love with the person you did it with?" I asked.
"Well..." He paused. "I think she just wants to be friends."
"But did you become better friends?" I asked. "Did you feel like you got to really know each other after doing the study?" He nodded.
"So, then it worked," I said.
I don't think this is the answer he was looking for. In fact, I don't think this is the answer that any of us are looking for when it comes to love.
I first came across this study when I was 29 and I was going through a really difficult breakup. I had been in the relationship since I was 20, which was basically my entire adult life, and he was my first real love, and I had no idea how or if I could make a life without him. So I turned to science. I researched everything I could find about the science of romantic love, and I think I was hoping that it might somehow inoculate me from heartache. I don't know if I realized this at the time -- I thought I was just doing research for this book I was writing -- but it seems really obvious in retrospect. I hoped that if I armed myself with the knowledge of romantic love, I might never have to feel as terrible and lonely as I did then. And all this knowledge has been useful in some ways. I am more patient with love. I am more relaxed. I am more confident about asking for what I want. But I can also see myself more clearly, and I can see that what I want is sometimes more than can reasonably be asked for. What I want from love is a guarantee, not just that I am loved today and that I will be loved tomorrow, but that I will continue to be loved by the person I love indefinitely. Maybe it's this possibility of a guarantee that people were really asking about when they wanted to know if we were still together.
So the story that the media told about the 36 questions was that there might be a shortcut to falling in love. There might be a way to somehow mitigate some of the risk involved, and this is a very appealing story, because falling in love feels amazing, but it's also terrifying. The moment you admit to loving someone, you admit to having a lot to lose, and it's true that these questions do provide a mechanism for getting to know someone quickly, which is also a mechanism for being known, and I think this is the thing that most of us really want from love: to be known, to be seen, to be understood. But I think when it comes to love, we are too willing to accept the short version of the story. The version of the story that asks, "Are you still together?" and is content with a yes or no answer.
So rather than that question, I would propose we ask some more difficult questions, questions like: How do you decide who deserves your love and who does not? How do you stay in love when things get difficult, and how do you know when to just cut and run? How do you live with the doubt that inevitably creeps into every relationship, or even harder, how do you live with your partner's doubt? I don't necessarily know the answers to these questions, but I think they're an important start at having a more thoughtful conversation about what it means to love someone.
So, if you want it, the short version of the story of my relationship is this: a year ago, an acquaintance and I did a study designed to create romantic love, and we fell in love, and we are still together, and I am so glad.
But falling in love is not the same thing as staying in love. Falling in love is the easy part. So at the end of my article, I wrote, "Love didn't happen to us. We're in love because we each made the choice to be." And I cringe a little when I read that now, not because it isn't true, but because at the time, I really hadn't considered everything that was contained in that choice. I didn't consider how many times we would each have to make that choice, and how many times I will continue to have to make that choice without knowing whether or not he will always choose me. I want it to be enough to have asked and answered 36 questions, and to have chosen to love someone so generous and kind and fun and to have broadcast that choice in the biggest newspaper in America. But what I have done instead is turn my relationship into the kind of myth I don't quite believe in. And what I want, what perhaps I will spend my life wanting, is for that myth to be true.
I want the happy ending implied by the title to my article, which is, incidentally, the only part of the article that I didn't actually write.
(Laughter)
But what I have instead is the chance to make the choice to love someone, and the hope that he will choose to love me back, and it is terrifying, but that's the deal with love.
Thank you.
To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This
JAN. 9, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By MANDY LEN CATRON
Updated, Feb. 13, 2015 |
More than 20 years ago, the psychologist Arthur Aron succeeded in making two strangers fall in love in his laboratory. Last summer, I applied his technique in my own life, which is how I found myself standing on a bridge at midnight, staring into a man’s eyes for exactly four minutes.
Let me explain. Earlier in the evening, that man had said: “I suspect, given a few commonalities, you could fall in love with anyone. If so, how do you choose someone?”
He was a university acquaintance I occasionally ran into at the climbing gym and had thought, “What if?” I had gotten a glimpse into his days on Instagram. But this was the first time we had hung out one-on-one.
“Actually, psychologists have tried making people fall in love,” I said, remembering Dr. Aron’s study. “It’s fascinating. I’ve always wanted to try it.”
I first read about the study when I was in the midst of a breakup. Each time I thought of leaving, my heart overruled my brain. I felt stuck. So, like a good academic, I turned to science, hoping there was a way to love smarter.
I explained the study to my university acquaintance. A heterosexual man and woman enter the lab through separate doors. They sit face to face and answer a series of increasingly personal questions. Then they stare silently into each other’s eyes for four minutes. The most tantalizing detail: Six months later, two participants were married. They invited the entire lab to the ceremony.
“Let’s try it,” he said.
Let me acknowledge the ways our experiment already fails to line up with the study. First, we were in a bar, not a lab. Second, we weren’t strangers. Not only that, but I see now that one neither suggests nor agrees to try an experiment designed to create romantic love if one isn’t open to this happening.
I Googled Dr. Aron’s questions; there are 36. We spent the next two hours passing my iPhone across the table, alternately posing each question.
They began innocuously: “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” And “When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?”
But they quickly became probing.
In response to the prompt, “Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common,” he looked at me and said, “I think we’re both interested in each other.”
I grinned and gulped my beer as he listed two more commonalities I then promptly forgot. We exchanged stories about the last time we each cried, and confessed the one thing we’d like to ask a fortuneteller. We explained our relationships with our mothers.
The questions reminded me of the infamous boiling frog experiment in which the frog doesn’t feel the water getting hotter until it’s too late. With us, because the level of vulnerability increased gradually, I didn’t notice we had entered intimate territory until we were already there, a process that can typically take weeks or months.
I liked learning about myself through my answers, but I liked learning things about him even more. The bar, which was empty when we arrived, had filled up by the time we paused for a bathroom break.
I sat alone at our table, aware of my surroundings for the first time in an hour, and wondered if anyone had been listening to our conversation. If they had, I hadn’t noticed. And I didn’t notice as the crowd thinned and the night got late.
We all have a narrative of ourselves that we offer up to strangers and acquaintances, but Dr. Aron’s questions make it impossible to rely on that narrative. Ours was the kind of accelerated intimacy I remembered from summer camp, staying up all night with a new friend, exchanging the details of our short lives. At 13, away from home for the first time, it felt natural to get to know someone quickly. But rarely does adult life present us with such circumstances.
The moments I found most uncomfortable were not when I had to make confessions about myself, but had to venture opinions about my partner. For example: “Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner, a total of five items” (Question 22), and “Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time saying things you might not say to someone you’ve just met” (Question 28).
Much of Dr. Aron’s research focuses on creating interpersonal closeness. In particular, several studies investigate the ways we incorporate others into our sense of self. It’s easy to see how the questions encourage what they call “self-expansion.” Saying things like, “I like your voice, your taste in beer, the way all your friends seem to admire you,” makes certain positive qualities belonging to one person explicitly valuable to the other.
It’s astounding, really, to hear what someone admires in you. I don’t know why we don’t go around thoughtfully complimenting one another all the time.
We finished at midnight, taking far longer than the 90 minutes for the original study. Looking around the bar, I felt as if I had just woken up. “That wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Definitely less uncomfortable than the staring into each other’s eyes part would be.”
He hesitated and asked. “Do you think we should do that, too?”
“Here?” I looked around the bar. It seemed too weird, too public.
“We could stand on the bridge,” he said, turning toward the window.
The night was warm and I was wide-awake. We walked to the highest point, then turned to face each other. I fumbled with my phone as I set the timer.
“O.K.,” I said, inhaling sharply.
“O.K.,” he said, smiling.
I’ve skied steep slopes and hung from a rock face by a short length of rope, but staring into someone’s eyes for four silent minutes was one of the more thrilling and terrifying experiences of my life. I spent the first couple of minutes just trying to breathe properly. There was a lot of nervous smiling until, eventually, we settled in.
I know the eyes are the windows to the soul or whatever, but the real crux of the moment was not just that I was really seeing someone, but that I was seeing someone really seeing me. Once I embraced the terror of this realization and gave it time to subside, I arrived somewhere unexpected.
I felt brave, and in a state of wonder. Part of that wonder was at my own vulnerability and part was the weird kind of wonder you get from saying a word over and over until it loses its meaning and becomes what it actually is: an assemblage of sounds.
So it was with the eye, which is not a window to anything but rather a clump of very useful cells. The sentiment associated with the eye fell away and I was struck by its astounding biological reality: the spherical nature of the eyeball, the visible musculature of the iris and the smooth wet glass of the cornea. It was strange and exquisite.
When the timer buzzed, I was surprised — and a little relieved. But I also felt a sense of loss. Already I was beginning to see our evening through the surreal and unreliable lens of retrospect.
Most of us think about love as something that happens to us. We fall. We get crushed.
But what I like about this study is how it assumes that love is an action. It assumes that what matters to my partner matters to me because we have at least three things in common, because we have close relationships with our mothers, and because he let me look at him.
I wondered what would come of our interaction. If nothing else, I thought it would make a good story. But I see now that the story isn’t about us; it’s about what it means to bother to know someone, which is really a story about what it means to be known.
It’s true you can’t choose who loves you, although I’ve spent years hoping otherwise, and you can’t create romantic feelings based on convenience alone. Science tells us biology matters; our pheromones and hormones do a lot of work behind the scenes.
But despite all this, I’ve begun to think love is a more pliable thing than we make it out to be. Arthur Aron’s study taught me that it’s possible — simple, even — to generate trust and intimacy, the feelings love needs to thrive.
You’re probably wondering if he and I fell in love. Well, we did. Although it’s hard to credit the study entirely (it may have happened anyway), the study did give us a way into a relationship that feels deliberate. We spent weeks in the intimate space we created that night, waiting to see what it could become.
Love didn’t happen to us. We’re in love because we each made the choice to be.
Mandy Len Catron teaches writing at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and is working on a book about the dangers of love stories.
Modern Love College Essay Contest
We invited college students nationwide to open their hearts and laptops and write an essay that tells the truth about what love is like for them today.
No. 37: Big Wedding or Small?
Quiz: The 36 Questions That Lead to Love
JAN. 9, 2015
Modern Love
By DANIEL JONES
Updated, Feb. 13, 2015 | To try the 36 questions described below, download our free app for your phone, tablet or other device.
In Mandy Len Catron’s Modern Love essay, “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This,” she refers to a study by the psychologist Arthur Aron (and others) that explores whether intimacy between two strangers can be accelerated by having them ask each other a specific series of personal questions. The 36 questions in the study are broken up into three sets, with each set intended to be more probing than the previous one.
The idea is that mutual vulnerability fosters closeness. To quote the study’s authors, “One key pattern associated with the development of a close relationship among peers is sustained, escalating, reciprocal, personal self-disclosure.” Allowing oneself to be vulnerable with another person can be exceedingly difficult, so this exercise forces the issue.
The final task Ms. Catron and her friend try — staring into each other’s eyes for four minutes — is less well documented, with the suggested duration ranging from two minutes to four. But Ms. Catron was unequivocal in her recommendation. “Two minutes is just enough to be terrified,” she told me. “Four really goes somewhere.”
Set I
1. Given the choice of anyone in the world, whom would you want as a dinner guest?
2. Would you like to be famous? In what way?
3. Before making a telephone call, do you ever rehearse what you are going to say? Why?
4. What would constitute a “perfect” day for you?
5. When did you last sing to yourself? To someone else?
6. If you were able to live to the age of 90 and retain either the mind or body of a 30-year-old for the last 60 years of your life, which would you want?
7. Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?
8. Name three things you and your partner appear to have in common.
9. For what in your life do you feel most grateful?
10. If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?
11. Take four minutes and tell your partner your life story in as much detail as possible.
12. If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Set II
13. If a crystal ball could tell you the truth about yourself, your life, the future or anything else, what would you want to know?
14. Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
15. What is the greatest accomplishment of your life?
16. What do you value most in a friendship?
17. What is your most treasured memory?
18. What is your most terrible memory?
19. If you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? Why?
20. What does friendship mean to you?
21. What roles do love and affection play in your life?
22. Alternate sharing something you consider a positive characteristic of your partner. Share a total of five items.
23. How close and warm is your family? Do you feel your childhood was happier than most other people’s?
24. How do you feel about your relationship with your mother?
Set III
25. Make three true “we” statements each. For instance, “We are both in this room feeling ... “
26. Complete this sentence: “I wish I had someone with whom I could share ... “
27. If you were going to become a close friend with your partner, please share what would be important for him or her to know.
28. Tell your partner what you like about them; be very honest this time, saying things that you might not say to someone you’ve just met.
29. Share with your partner an embarrassing moment in your life.
30. When did you last cry in front of another person? By yourself?
31. Tell your partner something that you like about them already.
32. What, if anything, is too serious to be joked about?
33. If you were to die this evening with no opportunity to communicate with anyone, what would you most regret not having told someone? Why haven’t you told them yet?
34. Your house, containing everything you own, catches fire. After saving your loved ones and pets, you have time to safely make a final dash to save any one item. What would it be? Why?
35. Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Why?
36. Share a personal problem and ask your partner’s advice on how he or she might handle it. Also, ask your partner to reflect back to you how you seem to be feeling about the problem you have chosen.
Overcoming Love Addiction: One Apple Martini at a Time
AUG. 20, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By PETER DeMARCO
I appeared as a love addict on a live morning television talk show in Detroit in the late 1980s, when I was 28. The producer, whom I knew through my job as a New York City book publicist, arranged for me to fly out to be a guest, along with an author who had written a book on love addiction.
In front of a studio audience, I shared how I had lost my mother at 15 and my father at 20, and had remained with my younger brother and sister in my childhood home, where I was still living as an adult. My goal was to be loved, I told them, and my obsessive need to fill an emotional emptiness had left me powerless to move forward with my life.The author confirmed that love addiction was as serious as heroin or alcohol dependency.
Ostensibly, I had flown to Detroit with the hope that a public sharing and meeting with a specialist could help me overcome my addiction. But after leaving the studio I flew to Pittsburgh for a blind date with a producer I had been flirting with by phone for the previous six months. I saw the Detroit trip as an excuse to call and ask if she would be free that Friday night. I said I would be in the area, by plane.
She was shocked and said she would love to meet me, then booked me into a hotel for the weekend.
After a taxi dropped me off in front of the Pittsburgh television station, my adrenaline from appearing on live TV had worn off, and I stood frozen beneath the giant call letters on the building, suitcase in hand, feeling like the scared, sad creature I had been all of my life, someone whose self-worth was dependent on a woman’s acceptance, and in this case, someone I had never met.
My weekend in Pittsburgh turned out to be the worst thing for a love addict: a storybook romance of candlelit dinners and hand-holding in the Mount Washington neighborhood. Two weeks later she came to visit me, and as we walked along a Long Island beach, arm in arm, I felt a high that no drug could ever top.
Two months later she moved west for a bigger job in a bigger market, and her late night “I miss you” phone calls stopped. I never saw her again.
During this period, I couldn’t function at work, couldn’t pick up the phone to do my job, didn’t even want the job anymore. I sat there in disbelief, wondering how someone who couldn’t stop staring into my eyes when we were together could suddenly be gone.
One day my boss walked into my office and handed me a piece of paper with a phone number. “Call her,” she said. “She saved my life.”
The number belonged to a therapist who had studied with Anna Freud.
I sat in therapy once a week, offering up my life to her. She told me I was taking 15 years of emotional life with my mother and placing that baggage onto each woman. She called them little deaths: Each time a woman rejected me I experienced the loss of my mother all over again.
I was also starting to go bald, which only fed my insecurities. I explored self-help and empowerment seminars and began to find confidence within myself, but it was easy to do when I wasn’t romantically attached.
When I was fired from a different publishing company for not being committed, I took the time off to prepare the house for sale. It was a difficult decision. The house had become a character in my life, something I needed to care for, because, according to the therapist, I was waiting for my parents to come home. “The subconscious dies hard,” she said.
I moved to New York, where I began to pursue an acting career and work temporary office jobs to make money.
One Memorial Day weekend, when I was 38, I had one of those better-than-scripted encounters, similar to what happened in Pittsburgh. Out to dinner with a group of friends, I ended up sitting next to a friend’s wife’s cousin, visiting from Los Angeles. She lived in Venice Beach and sold jewelry on the boardwalk.
The next day we went to Coney Island and rode the Cyclone roller coaster, which had always been one of my fantasy dates and something my parents had done when they met. It was the kind of date I had never gone on as a teenager.
Later, on Columbus Avenue, we stopped in one of those new martini bars. It was a Saturday afternoon, and the bar was empty. She ordered apple martinis. I said I didn’t like martinis, but she said to trust her.
They went down like candy. We danced to the Bee Gees on the jukebox; I kissed her.
After walking and talking for hours, we said good-night in front of my friend’s apartment. Then she said something odd: “You’ll probably be married by the next time I see you.”
I called three days later when she was back in L.A. and said I was ready to get on a plane, but she sounded aloof. I could hardly believe this was the same person from a few days earlier. “Let’s just see how things go,” she said.
I hung up in shock, knowing it was over. I hated myself for sounding, once again, too desperate, yet I felt powerless to stop the pattern of placing all of my hope in someone I hardly knew.
In my studio apartment, which lacked a view of the sky or of any greenery, I felt sealed off from the world and was reminded of the short story “The Cask of Amontillado,” in which a man is entombed behind a newly constructed brick wall.
I bought apple martini ingredients and played the Bee Gees. I stared at the chilled green liquid in the delicate glass with desperation, as if I could telepathically communicate with her.
The receptionist at my latest assignment, a young married woman from the Midwest who was studying to be a therapist, noticed my depressed body language and asked what was wrong.
“An apple martini,” I said cryptically, and told her the story.
She said I was worrying about the wrong things and that my problem was not having career direction. “You should become a teacher,” she said. “New York City needs teachers.”
It was an unusual thing to hear, since that subject had never come up in our conversations. But I was truly desperate, ready to hear something different. I was a writer and loved reading. And the year before, I had been a Big Brother mentor to an 11-year-old boy.
Two days later I applied to a new teaching program that was looking for non-teachers to be trained and placed inside the city’s neediest schools. They would also pay for a master’s degree.
For my interview in front of a small group of candidates and interviewers, I created an English lesson in which I used my first baseball glove to symbolize childhood innocence and my love for my father, who had been dead for almost 20 years. Then I read a paragraph from “Catcher in the Rye” in which Holden talks about his dead brother’s baseball mitt.
Three months later, I stood in front of a classroom of ninth graders in a Washington Heights school. I finally had a career, one I could love.
After my first week, I took a walk down the Upper West Side to meet a friend for dinner. I passed by the martini bar where the L.A. woman and I drank apple martinis. I went in. In an indirect way, my life had changed because of that drink, and I wanted to make a symbolic toast to her. It was also an act of self-pity.
The bartender was the same guy from that weekend. I asked if he remembered me. He said he didn’t. I told him we were the only ones there and had danced to the Bee Gees. He said that people danced in there all the time, that they got engaged — he’d seen everything.
I ordered an apple martini and said I was celebrating becoming a teacher.
“What do you teach?” the woman next to me asked. And for the second time, an apple martini changed my life, because I’ve been married to her for 13 years.
Sometimes, when I sit on the stoop in front of my house in the suburbs and watch my two young boys play on the lawn, I think about the crazy series of events that occurred when I went back to that martini bar to lament a woman who had predicted that I would be married before we met again.
I never displayed the love-addict tendencies in the initial relationship with my future wife. Maybe it was because I had found a career I loved. One thing I do know: It helped that she liked bald guys.
Peter DeMarco, a writer in Ridgewood, N.J., teaches at a public high school in Washington Heights.
The Peril of Not Dying for Love
SEPT. 10, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By CLAIRE JIA
High school Friday nights for my sister and me meant romantic comedies, trading boy secrets in our basement and playing a game called, “What Would You Do for Love?”
Popular questions included: “Would you give up your career for love?” “Would you eat a scorpion for love?” “Cut off your thumb?” “Jump in front of a car?”
“But I would die,” I’d protest.
“So,” she would say, “would you die for love?”
In the movies, people always did dramatic things for love: ditching their careers, donating organs or giving up their lives.
We watched Jack sink to his death in the icy Atlantic so Rose could stay afloat on the raft, and we cried when Harry ran through New York City to declare his love for Sally. We binge-watched Asian serial dramas, where the girl either has leukemia or is poor, and some rich boy (against all odds) falls in love with her.
I learned everything about love from movies. Love had a sexy soundtrack. Love was forever. Love almost always involved rain, stubborn parents and irrevocable passionate sacrifice.
Growing up, I wanted that sort of big love. My favorite romantic formula was the best-friends-falling-in-love pattern, à la Chandler and Monica in “Friends” or Ron and Hermione in “Harry Potter.”
In my dream, we would know each other for about three years. I would confide in him about my crushes. We would drink craft beer on rooftops at 2 a.m., screaming crude things at passers-by. Then one day I’d start dating someone totally wrong for me.
He would try to act normal and shake it off, because he was happy for me. But he would become distant and I’d be too obsessed with my Hugh Jackman look-alike boyfriend to notice.
Suddenly, I would fall ill with a cancer of some sort, and my friend would anonymously donate his organ to me. I would wake up in the hospital with him by my side and realize it was him I loved all along. Then he would kiss me, we’d have a trendy outdoor wedding and raise our 2.1 children in a Brooklyn brownstone.
My ABC Family Fantasy would have been harmless if I had realized real life isn’t like that.
I met the guy who would become the subject of this fantasy in the fall of my freshman year of college. I was out at a party, my key-card lanyard roped around my neck like a purity ring, when I bumped into someone I recognized from my floor. He pointed at me and said, “You’re Claire, right?”
Wary, I asked how he knew my name.
“I saw your door sign,” he said, blushing. “I scoped everyone out on the floor. Was that creepy?”
“Very,” I said, smirking, though I had done the same thing.
He was funny, attractive (in an approachable way) and soon was one of my closest friends. I mocked his Radiohead obsession; he made fun of my affinity for Top 40 music.
One winter night we were sitting on his bed at 4 a.m. talking about childhood insecurities when I realized this was it: He was the best friend I had been waiting to fall in love with.
Soon I became the narrator of my own romantic comedy. We spent spring break together, and on the five-hour bus ride from Boston to New York he asked me, in a nostalgic throwback to high school, to go to Spring Formal with him. He described the art studio his mother had back home. As we walked through Chinatown, he held my hand — not in a cheesy way, but because he wanted to make sure I was safe.
In my mind, I checked off the boxes (Cute ask-out? Talking about his family? Protective body contact? Check, check, check). A month later, we had our first kiss.
These memories fit my falling-in-love-with-my-best-friend story so perfectly that I ignored many moments of discomfort: our clammy hands and his rambling texts about “exciting” finance internships. For the story, I pretended that I liked kissing him, though I later described our make-out sessions to friends as being “like two co-workers shaking hands, but less intense.”
One evening during finals, it rained. “I’ve always wanted to be kissed in the rain,” I thought and went to get him. When I grabbed his hand and told him what I wanted to do, he replied, abruptly, “I don’t think there’s a spark between us.”
I didn’t know how to respond. “Cool,” I finally said, shrugging. “We’re better as friends, anyway.”
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. Then, putting on his headphones, he said he needed to study for his exam, so could I close the door behind me?
I stood in the hallway in my pajamas, unsure of how to feel. My friends were hanging out in the common room, unaware of the tragedy that had just occurred. Simply going back to my room to work on my Foucault essay didn’t seem the right response to this romantic Armageddon.
When Allie and Noah broke up in “The Notebook,” there was door slamming, hurled insults and crying. It seemed to me I needed to do something similar, so I ran out into the rain, shoeless, and screamed into the night. That’s what people do when they lose love, isn’t it? Scream? Or at least cry? But for me, the tears didn’t come. I just felt cold and wet and stupid. And I realized I had forgotten my keys.
Three months later, when we came back to school in the fall, I couldn’t put a finger on what it was that gnawed at me. He didn’t completely ignore me. He didn’t have sex with my roommate. He didn’t delete my number. We just didn’t see each other as much because we didn’t live in the same building anymore. I couldn’t even be mad at him. I felt empty, needy and, above all, bored.
If I couldn’t have my Chandler-Monica fantasy, I would take the Shakespearean tragedy instead. As the autumn months dragged on, I turned to downing wine and writing dark love poetry. Until I finally found myself lying face up in a pile of leaves on a biting October day, wearing the same shirt for the third day in a row, hoping someone would see me. As I lay there feeling dirty and invisible, I realized the saddest part: I never loved him in the first place.
I suppose I had known this all along, but for the story I had tried to love him. And after our breakup, I felt sad and lonely. But above all, I felt disappointment — a simple disappointment that I couldn’t have love. I chalked up all these emotions to heartbreak, because heartbreak is so much sexier than disappointment.
As I dated more, I learned that big love and big heartbreak come seldom. I resisted online dating because I didn’t think “I liked his profile picture” was a good story. Anonymously giving your kidney to your dying friend? That was a good story.
I thought the high-volume, quick-gratification nature of online dating cheapened the sanctity of romance. But having already failed in my quest for the perfect love story, I decided to give love a try in the least romantic way possible. As the Tinder app downloaded onto my phone, I silently mourned my coveted great love.
I met a guy for coffee, another for drinks. No one was perfect. No one was a total loser. I didn’t kiss any of them in the rain, but neither did I ever throw my drink in a date’s face. My life became a routine of swipe, swipe, message, date, awkward hookup, with a bottle of wine to finish the night.
It wasn’t heartbreak that became draining, but the lack of it.
I have been told so many times what love should look like that I am unsure what love even is anymore. If it doesn’t look like midnight kisses with my best friend, and it doesn’t look like a booty call from a Tinder match, what is it?
Dating more has certainly made my outlook on love a little less precious. I know that in real life, few people ever jump in front of a car, cut off their thumbs or eat scorpions for love, if they ever did. And rarely do people get a chance at big sacrificial displays in the form of a donated body organ.
We’re told love isn’t love until he’s begging on his knees, and that heartbreak isn’t heartbreak until you’ve lost your mind. We think we want love, but we’ve rarely seen it, because love is a boundless unknown that no romantic stereotype can capture.
Movies promise us blissful forevers or crushing sorrow, but most of the time, love is neither. Maybe it’s just two people who tolerate each other. Maybe it’s a mutual right swipe. What would I do for love? I’ll let you know when I actually find it.
Claire Jia is a recent graduate of Amherst College.
A Millennial’s Guide to Kissing
AUG. 6, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By EMMA COURT
When a total stranger kissed me under the artificial lights of an airplane cabin somewhere above international waters, my first thought was of the Orthodox woman sitting to my left.
I hoped she was asleep. It was a 12-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Newark, and I wanted to nap too, but how could I now?
The kiss, coming out of nowhere, had turned me into the heroine of a bad romance novel: heart fluttering, weak-kneed, every nerve electrified. Those blue fleece blankets had never been so sexy.
It was an overnight flight, and I had already crunched the simple calculus: If I slept, I’d be over the seven-hour time difference by the time we landed and ready to hop back into a new semester at college. My highest hope for the trip, besides hours of sleep, had been that they would serve hummus at the in-flight dinner.
My stranger and I were returning from Birthright Israel trips with groups from our respective universities. Birthright Israel is a free 10-day trip to Israel for young Jewish-Americans, and I had wanted to go before I graduated. Last winter, before my final semester of college, I finally had.
Because there are so many young people on Birthright Israel trips, they’re often mocked as an attempt to spark a connection to Israel through the bedroom — and plenty of that had happened on my trip. But it hadn’t happened to me until that moment.
Spoiling the perfect narrative of two strangers meeting on an airplane, I admit that we had met before, just once, briefly, when I bumped into a friend from high school during a stop in Jerusalem.
One of her friends had been cute, I had remembered. And now here he was behind me as we boarded the airplane, then bending his tall frame into the aisle seat next to me. As he lifted his backpack into the overhead compartment, I marveled at my luck.
Between us sprang the kind of instant intimacy fostered by open personalities in tight quarters. We spoke in spurts about the gossip on our trips and what we had done during the days spent in Israel. We flirted. We kissed that first time. Then we kissed again.
Splitting a pair of headphones, we listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Taylor Swift. We slept a little, poorly.
Born and raised in New York City, I found his life as a not-so-Jewish boy in North Carolina foreign and dazzling. He and his friends did things like take long hiking trips and, in preparation, dehydrate their food.
I liked how easy he was, how ready to talk. I liked his laugh and his dark eyes. He knew how to figure out where rainbows would appear in the sky and told me about the “Door to Hell” in Turkmenistan, a crater of natural gas that’s been on fire for more than 30 years.
It seemed torn from the back of a Nicholas Sparks paperback: A Southern science major from a small liberal arts school and a Northern humanities major from a huge pre-professional university meet in the skies over the Mediterranean. The heat between them is palpable.
But less romantic details persisted: I was a senior, about to start my second semester, with plans to head to Dallas after graduation. He was a sophomore, with the swaddling comfort of knowing where he’d be for the next few years.
But it didn’t matter anyway, did it? In 12 hours, we’d be back on paths that led us in opposite directions. This meeting was just a romantic interlude from our real lives. And if it did mean anything, we were college students; we knew how to pretend it didn’t.
On the plane, the lights came back on and the breakfast cart appeared. Reality set in as we sipped orange juice from tin-foil-covered cups and, for the first time, had little to say to each other. During the bumpy landing, he distracted me by talking about famous airplane crashes.
And then with a final, jarring thump, we were back on the ground. As we gathered our belongings from what had been our temporary home, I wondered what would happen next.
We bought tickets at the train terminal, lingering on the automated buttons. After, as we were about to board trains headed in different directions, we stared at each other. He rested one arm on his rolling suitcase, bewilderment in his dark eyes.
I hugged him a brisk no-nonsense goodbye. We didn’t exchange numbers.
“Bye,” he shouted down the stairs at my back. “See you never.”
I couldn’t tell if he was serious or joking. Even embracing the more positive of the possibilities, it still stung.
And that should have been it: a story I told, giggling, to friends until the details faded, and he was just a boy whose name I didn’t remember. But I saw his name on my Facebook News Feed in a batch of photos our mutual friend had uploaded, and I couldn’t resist.
I clicked “Add Friend.” And one day, he messaged me.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I typed back. “How’s life?”
It went like this for days. But talking to him made me feel like a time traveler, spliced between the snowy paths of my campus and the darkened airplane we had shared. I was sitting in class or at meetings at the local campus cafe, doing my readings in the library, and then a message on my screen would tug me back. I didn’t like the way it upset my balance, how far away and powerless it made me feel.
There was also a girl at his school lurking in the background of his messages. Was he trying to make me jealous? Was he just not thinking clearly?
Mass media has a fascination with hookup culture among people around my age (21) meriting in-depth investigations and contentious opining about what it all means. But they often miss a simple fact: There’s nothing particularly new about trying to avoid getting hurt.
It’s just that my generation has turned this avoidance into a science, perfecting the separation of the physical from the emotional. We truncate whenever possible: texting over calling, meeting over apps rather than in person. We leave in the early morning without saying goodbye. Being casual is cooler than intimacy and vulnerability. Or so we think.
Having the last word was once a sign of one’s wit and smarts. It meant that your comment had gravitas and staying power. But today, having the last word is the ultimate in weakness: It means being the person who doesn’t merit an answer. Better to leave them hanging than risk the same happening to you. Keep it shallow so your heart isn’t on the line.
Being aware of all this does not grant immunity from its effects.
One night, my roommate’s hookup rolled over in the dark and asked her in a half-murmur, “Is this a special thing?”
Confused, rubbing the sleep from her eyes, she asked him to repeat himself. She wasn’t certain she had heard him correctly.
“Never mind,” he said.
Later, she worried she had missed a crucial moment, one she would never get back. But if she had misunderstood, she risked showing her hand by revealing that she wanted him to stick around in the morning. It was too scary a prospect, so she never said anything.
Was my airplane interlude a special thing? Would things have been different if one of us had had the courage to say something other than goodbye before heading to our trains?
On the platform, walking away from him, I had decided that the whole affair was just one of many half-formed romantic liaisons that trail you in your youth. But maybe that attitude was also the problem.
He and I had met on an airplane, but we were headed to different destinations, so our encounter was charged with the impossibility of things going anywhere. At the time, I had had an inexplicable comfort level with it all. I only realized later why it had been such an oddly familiar feeling: My generation treats every liaison as if it is happening on an airplane, as if we have only that one night and there is no tomorrow.
Our story wasn’t so different, after all.
I don’t know what else could have happened. But I wonder what we collectively lose as we try so hard not to care. We pretend that it doesn’t matter, that we have time, that because we are young we are invulnerable.
He and I don’t communicate anymore; he moved on, and so did I. But in my head, I go back to that train platform. I turn to him, say goodbye. And then, recalling his parting words, I say them right back: “See you never.”
Emma Court recently graduated from Cornell.
The 36 Questions: An Answer to Their Prayers?
FEB. 13, 2015
Credit Brian Rea
Modern Love
By DANIEL JONES
Last month, a few days before Mandy Len Catron’s essay “To Fall in Love With Anyone, Do This” appeared in Modern Love, she aired some concerns about the coming exposure on her blog, writing that while a few hundred people may see one of her blog posts, thousands would see this column.
She underestimated by about 8 million.
In the essay, Ms. Catron told of how she found love by replicating a 20-year-old experiment by the psychologist Arthur Aron that involved two strangers asking each other 36 increasingly personal questions followed by a four-minute staring session to see if doing so would lead to intimacy and love. For Ms. Catron and the man she barely knew, the experiment worked.
Readers found this combination of romance and science (with a happy ending) irresistible. Ms. Catron’s story went viral, with couples across the country and around the globe trying the questions themselves.
The New Yorker and Dame magazine spoofed the experiment with 36 questions about how to fall out of love.
One man even posed the questions to his disengaged cat in a YouTube video, which amassed nearly 40,000 views.
A ticketed singles event in Manhattan drew 70 hopefuls who paid $40 each to be paired up and guided through the experiment.
The notion of falling in love from a quiz may sound like a gimmick, but the broad resonance of Dr. Aron’s 36 questions may be partly explained by the fact that there is nothing gimmicky about them. In this age of Tinder and self-curated dating profiles, where image and first impressions hold sway, these questions go deep.
But as Dr. Aron cautions, this isn’t an experiment that can be easily repeated with a series of romantic prospects, because you risk having canned answers if you keep using the same questions.
Since the essay appeared, we have been receiving reports from strangers and longtime couples who have tried the quiz, often armed with one of several quickly created apps featuring the quiz (The New York Times, in consultation with Dr. Aron, has created one as well, available atnytimes.com/36questions).
Two weeks after her essay appeared, Ms. Catron was still trying to adjust to what it had wrought. She and her boyfriend were out at a pizza parlor when he took out his phone and started typing. She assumed he was texting someone, but he slid the phone across to her. It read: “the couple next to us is doing the 36 questions.”
Sure enough, they were. In that moment, the full impact of her article finally hit home.
With Valentine’s Day upon us, we’d like to share a sampling of the stories we heard.
Daniel Jones is the editor of Modern Love and author of “Love Illuminated: Exploring Life’s Most Mystifying Subject (With the Help of 50,000 Strangers).”
Source: www.nytimes.com
ECO/GralInt-LLAVES- RECICLADO FUNDACIÓN GARRAHAN
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
LLAVES- RECICLADO FUNDACIÓN GARRAHAN
Fuente/Source: ecoviva@clarin.com
LLAVES- RECICLADO FUNDACIÓN GARRAHAN
Fuente/Source: ecoviva@clarin.com
Sunday, September 13, 2015
MED/SC/GralInt-Importante avance argentino contra la esclerosis múltiple
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Importante avance argentino contra la esclerosis múltiple
Investigadores de la Fundación Fleni, asociados con la universidad de Harvard y el centro Ibyme estudiaron la relación de la oscuridad con esta enfermedad autoinmune y degenerativa; descubrieron el rol que ejerce la melatonina como factor ambiental y promesa terapéutica
Por Víctor Ingrassia | LA NACION
Los investigadores Francisco Quintana, Mauricio Farez y el líder de la investigación, el doctor Jorge Correale en la Fundación Fleni. Foto: Archivo / Fleni
¿Por qué estadísticamente hay menos brotes o recaídas de esclerosis múltiple (EM) en el otoño o el invierno y lo contrario en primavera y verano?
A partir de esta observación de larga data, científicos argentinos del flamante Centro para la Investigación de Enfermedades Neurológicas (CIEN) de la Fundación Fleni comenzaron a investigar ese factor ambiental en la incidencia de esta enfermedad autoinmune y neurodegenerativa que afecta a 3 millones de adultos jóvenes (de 15 a 40 años) en todo el mundo y más de 12.000 en la Argentina.
Siendo que esta enfermedad no es hereditaria y su aparición se debe a una interrelación compleja entre algunos factores propios de los individuos (genéticos) y externos, como por ejemplo determinadas infecciones, ingesta de sodio, tabaquismo, niveles de vitamina D y la exposición solar -mucho más notoria en los meses con más luz-, los científicos liderados por el doctor Jorge Correale, jefe del Servicio de Neuroinmunología de Fleni, investigaron la incidencia que cumplían para el desarrollo de la EM.
La esclerosis múltiple afecta la mielina en el cuerpo humano, una sustancia que recubre los nervios que conducen los impulsos eléctricos desde el cerebro hacia la periferia del organismo y viceversa. Foto: Archivo
"Existía el interés en determinar y establecer el rol que juegan los factores medioambientales en la EM, con el fin de modificarlos y de esta manera impactar en el curso de la enfermedad y el riesgo de desarrollarla. La respuesta a esta pregunta llevó casi 5 años de trabajo con investigadores de la Universidad de Harvard, en EE.UU. y del Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental (Ibyme) de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires que dirige el doctor Gabriel Rabinovich", explicó Correale a LA NACION durante la presentación de la investigación recientemente publicada en la prestigiosa revista CELL llamada: "La melatonina en la estacionalidad de los brotes de esclerosis múltiple".
EL FACTOR DE LA LUZ
Abocados a esta "lógica estacional", los expertos se enfocaron primero en la vitamina D. "Sabemos que se secreta por la exposición al sol, con más posibilidad en primavera y verano, y que es buena para la esclerosis múltiple. Pero este factor de cuanto más sol, más vitamina D y mejoras para la enfermedad, no tenía correlación debido al incremento de brotes o recaídas en primavera y verano, por lo que lo llamamos 'la paradoja estacional'", explicó a este medio Mauricio Farez, investigador del servicio de Neuroinmunología de Fleni.
Foto: Archivo
Motivados por esa contradicción, los investigadores se abocaron a estudiar otros factores que guardaran una mejor correlación entre la luz solar y la frecuencia de exacerbaciones de la enfermedad y detectaron que el factor responsable de la disminución de los brotes de la enfermedad en el otoño e invierno era la oscuridad: "Durante esos los días son más cortos, con menos horas de luz solar y mayor oscuridad, lo que a su vez estimula la secreción de melatonina, una hormona secretada por la glándula pineal durante la noche y en mayor medida durante los meses con menor luz solar, como es el otoño e invierno", sostuvo Correale.
Si bien posee múltiples funciones como la adaptación del cuerpo al cambio de estaciones, esta hormona con variacion circadiana y estacional, es más conocida es su actuación sobre el sueño, como sustancia natural que determina el ciclo sueño-vigilia. "Experimentando con ratones, notamos que existe una relación inversa: a mayores niveles de melatonina, menor cantidad de brotes", aseguró Correale.
Los brotes son exacerbaciones de un síntoma previo o la aparición de uno nuevo que dure más de 48 horas y esté separado al menos 30 días de un episodio previo. Los síntomas más frecuentes son: pérdida visual, trastorno de la coordinación y el equilibrio, y trastornos de la ductilidad de piernas y brazos. Se trata así de la segunda causa de discapacidad en los adultos jóvenes argentinos, después de los accidentes de tránsito.
La melatonina puede bloquear el desarrollo de células Th17, que son responsables del daño cerebral que se produce en esta enfermedad
Farez explicó que en el caso de la EM, se encontró que la melatonina puede bloquear el desarrollo de unas células conocidas como Th17, que son en gran parte responsables del daño cerebral que se produce en esta enfermedad. "Además, la melatonina promueve la generación de células reguladoras o Tr1, que apaciguan la respuesta inmune y bloquean de esta manera el daño al cerebro", añadió el experto.
PROMESAS TERAPÉUTICAS
La investigación publicada en Cell, incluye en su primera parte 139 pacientes con esclerosis múltiple estudiados en su totalidad, en la Argentina. El estudio de los investigadores locales permite entonces ubicar a la melatonina como un nuevo factor ambiental con impacto en el curso de la EM, al tiempo que coloca a esta hormona y sus análogos como promesas terapéuticas a ser estudiadas en estudios clínicos a futuro. Así, los resultados del estudio también podrían tener impacto en el tratamiento de otras enfermedades autoinmunes con un comportamiento estacional similar, tales como la artrosis reumatoidea o el lupus.
Foto: Télam
Pero los expertos remarcaron algo clave y fundamental a esta altura de los estudios llevados: "Los pacientes con esclerosis múltiple no deben tomar melatonina, de hecho está contraindicado ya que aún no se han hecho los ensayos clínicos correspondientes en humanos para determinar las dosis correctas de ingesta", aclaró Correale.
Nuestro descubrimiento forma parte de la Medicina Traslacional, es decir, ir desde la investigación básica a la aplicada
Y agregó: "Nuestro descubrimiento forma parte de la Medicina Traslacional, es decir, ir desde la investigación básica a la aplicada. Pero para que este abordaje pueda ser aplicable en humanos debemos descubrir primero cuál es la dosis óptima de melatonina u otro compuesto para impactar en los brotes y ayudar a regular el sistema inmune, pero sin efectos colaterales. Antes de su uso el estudio debe pasar por todas las fases clínicas, para lo que se requiere más investigaciones que dependen en parte del financiamiento".
La buena noticia sobre la publicación argentina fue acompañada por otra del mismo tinte: la inauguración del CIEN, el Centro para la Investigación de Enfermedades Neuroinmunológicas de Fleni, el cual se abocará, por una parte, a la asistencia para el diagnóstico de diversas enfermedades neuroinmunológicas, como esclerosis múltiple, neuromielitis óptica, encefalopatías autoinmunes, neuropatías autoinmunes, miastenia gravis, entre otras. Además, se enfocará a la investigación básica en patologías neuroinmunológicas con el objetivo de entender los mecanismos que las originan y posibilitar el desarrollo de nuevos elementos de diagnóstico, pronóstico y tratamiento que en el corto o mediano plazo puedan ser trasladados a la asistencia de los pacientes.
UNA ENFERMEDAD QUE PREOCUPA
La esclerosis múltiple afecta la mielina en el cuerpo humano, una sustancia que recubre los nervios que conducen los impulsos eléctricos desde el cerebro hacia la periferia del organismo y viceversa.
Cuando se ve afectada la mielina, aparecen los síntomas de esta patología autoinmune y neurodegenerativa. Cada paciente presenta síntomas distintos que pueden variar de acuerdo a la evolución de la enfermedad, la gravedad del cuadro y su extensión en el tiempo, y tiene un grupo de síntomas propios, que dependen del lugar del sistema nervioso donde se manifiesta la desmielinización.
Los síntomas más comunes son debilidad, sensación de hormigueo, escasa coordinación, fatiga, problemas de equilibrio y mareos, además de alteraciones visuales, visión doble, temblores, espasticidad y trastornos en el habla. Otros síntomas habituales pasan por la aparición de problemas intestinales o urinarios y en la función sexual, sensibilidad incrementada al calor, problemas con la memoria a corto plazo y, ocasionalmente, problemas de juicio o de razonamiento (cognitivos).
La investigación y los recursos humanos fueron financiados por la Fundación Allende y la Academia Nacional de Medicina, la Federación Internacional de Esclerosis Múltiple (MSIF), la Universidad de Harvard, el Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Conicet); y por subsidios privados.
La nómina completa de los investigadores incluye a Mauricio Farez y Jorge Correale del CIEN y el Servicio de Neuroinmunología de FLENI, Eugenia Balbuena-Aguirre1 y Célica Ysrraelit; Ivan Mascanfroni, Ada Yeste, Gopal Murugaiyan, Lucien Garro, Bonny Patel, Chen Zhu2, Vijay Kuchroo3 y Francisco Quintana todos pertenecientes Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts, USA); Santiago Méndez-Huergo y Gabriel Rabinovich, ambos del Laboratorio de Inmunopatología, Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (IBYME-CONICET).
Fuente/Source: www.lanacion.com.ar
Importante avance argentino contra la esclerosis múltiple
Investigadores de la Fundación Fleni, asociados con la universidad de Harvard y el centro Ibyme estudiaron la relación de la oscuridad con esta enfermedad autoinmune y degenerativa; descubrieron el rol que ejerce la melatonina como factor ambiental y promesa terapéutica
Por Víctor Ingrassia | LA NACION
Los investigadores Francisco Quintana, Mauricio Farez y el líder de la investigación, el doctor Jorge Correale en la Fundación Fleni. Foto: Archivo / Fleni
¿Por qué estadísticamente hay menos brotes o recaídas de esclerosis múltiple (EM) en el otoño o el invierno y lo contrario en primavera y verano?
A partir de esta observación de larga data, científicos argentinos del flamante Centro para la Investigación de Enfermedades Neurológicas (CIEN) de la Fundación Fleni comenzaron a investigar ese factor ambiental en la incidencia de esta enfermedad autoinmune y neurodegenerativa que afecta a 3 millones de adultos jóvenes (de 15 a 40 años) en todo el mundo y más de 12.000 en la Argentina.
Siendo que esta enfermedad no es hereditaria y su aparición se debe a una interrelación compleja entre algunos factores propios de los individuos (genéticos) y externos, como por ejemplo determinadas infecciones, ingesta de sodio, tabaquismo, niveles de vitamina D y la exposición solar -mucho más notoria en los meses con más luz-, los científicos liderados por el doctor Jorge Correale, jefe del Servicio de Neuroinmunología de Fleni, investigaron la incidencia que cumplían para el desarrollo de la EM.
La esclerosis múltiple afecta la mielina en el cuerpo humano, una sustancia que recubre los nervios que conducen los impulsos eléctricos desde el cerebro hacia la periferia del organismo y viceversa. Foto: Archivo
"Existía el interés en determinar y establecer el rol que juegan los factores medioambientales en la EM, con el fin de modificarlos y de esta manera impactar en el curso de la enfermedad y el riesgo de desarrollarla. La respuesta a esta pregunta llevó casi 5 años de trabajo con investigadores de la Universidad de Harvard, en EE.UU. y del Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental (Ibyme) de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires que dirige el doctor Gabriel Rabinovich", explicó Correale a LA NACION durante la presentación de la investigación recientemente publicada en la prestigiosa revista CELL llamada: "La melatonina en la estacionalidad de los brotes de esclerosis múltiple".
EL FACTOR DE LA LUZ
Abocados a esta "lógica estacional", los expertos se enfocaron primero en la vitamina D. "Sabemos que se secreta por la exposición al sol, con más posibilidad en primavera y verano, y que es buena para la esclerosis múltiple. Pero este factor de cuanto más sol, más vitamina D y mejoras para la enfermedad, no tenía correlación debido al incremento de brotes o recaídas en primavera y verano, por lo que lo llamamos 'la paradoja estacional'", explicó a este medio Mauricio Farez, investigador del servicio de Neuroinmunología de Fleni.
Foto: Archivo
Motivados por esa contradicción, los investigadores se abocaron a estudiar otros factores que guardaran una mejor correlación entre la luz solar y la frecuencia de exacerbaciones de la enfermedad y detectaron que el factor responsable de la disminución de los brotes de la enfermedad en el otoño e invierno era la oscuridad: "Durante esos los días son más cortos, con menos horas de luz solar y mayor oscuridad, lo que a su vez estimula la secreción de melatonina, una hormona secretada por la glándula pineal durante la noche y en mayor medida durante los meses con menor luz solar, como es el otoño e invierno", sostuvo Correale.
Si bien posee múltiples funciones como la adaptación del cuerpo al cambio de estaciones, esta hormona con variacion circadiana y estacional, es más conocida es su actuación sobre el sueño, como sustancia natural que determina el ciclo sueño-vigilia. "Experimentando con ratones, notamos que existe una relación inversa: a mayores niveles de melatonina, menor cantidad de brotes", aseguró Correale.
Los brotes son exacerbaciones de un síntoma previo o la aparición de uno nuevo que dure más de 48 horas y esté separado al menos 30 días de un episodio previo. Los síntomas más frecuentes son: pérdida visual, trastorno de la coordinación y el equilibrio, y trastornos de la ductilidad de piernas y brazos. Se trata así de la segunda causa de discapacidad en los adultos jóvenes argentinos, después de los accidentes de tránsito.
La melatonina puede bloquear el desarrollo de células Th17, que son responsables del daño cerebral que se produce en esta enfermedad
Farez explicó que en el caso de la EM, se encontró que la melatonina puede bloquear el desarrollo de unas células conocidas como Th17, que son en gran parte responsables del daño cerebral que se produce en esta enfermedad. "Además, la melatonina promueve la generación de células reguladoras o Tr1, que apaciguan la respuesta inmune y bloquean de esta manera el daño al cerebro", añadió el experto.
PROMESAS TERAPÉUTICAS
La investigación publicada en Cell, incluye en su primera parte 139 pacientes con esclerosis múltiple estudiados en su totalidad, en la Argentina. El estudio de los investigadores locales permite entonces ubicar a la melatonina como un nuevo factor ambiental con impacto en el curso de la EM, al tiempo que coloca a esta hormona y sus análogos como promesas terapéuticas a ser estudiadas en estudios clínicos a futuro. Así, los resultados del estudio también podrían tener impacto en el tratamiento de otras enfermedades autoinmunes con un comportamiento estacional similar, tales como la artrosis reumatoidea o el lupus.
Foto: Télam
Pero los expertos remarcaron algo clave y fundamental a esta altura de los estudios llevados: "Los pacientes con esclerosis múltiple no deben tomar melatonina, de hecho está contraindicado ya que aún no se han hecho los ensayos clínicos correspondientes en humanos para determinar las dosis correctas de ingesta", aclaró Correale.
Nuestro descubrimiento forma parte de la Medicina Traslacional, es decir, ir desde la investigación básica a la aplicada
Y agregó: "Nuestro descubrimiento forma parte de la Medicina Traslacional, es decir, ir desde la investigación básica a la aplicada. Pero para que este abordaje pueda ser aplicable en humanos debemos descubrir primero cuál es la dosis óptima de melatonina u otro compuesto para impactar en los brotes y ayudar a regular el sistema inmune, pero sin efectos colaterales. Antes de su uso el estudio debe pasar por todas las fases clínicas, para lo que se requiere más investigaciones que dependen en parte del financiamiento".
La buena noticia sobre la publicación argentina fue acompañada por otra del mismo tinte: la inauguración del CIEN, el Centro para la Investigación de Enfermedades Neuroinmunológicas de Fleni, el cual se abocará, por una parte, a la asistencia para el diagnóstico de diversas enfermedades neuroinmunológicas, como esclerosis múltiple, neuromielitis óptica, encefalopatías autoinmunes, neuropatías autoinmunes, miastenia gravis, entre otras. Además, se enfocará a la investigación básica en patologías neuroinmunológicas con el objetivo de entender los mecanismos que las originan y posibilitar el desarrollo de nuevos elementos de diagnóstico, pronóstico y tratamiento que en el corto o mediano plazo puedan ser trasladados a la asistencia de los pacientes.
UNA ENFERMEDAD QUE PREOCUPA
La esclerosis múltiple afecta la mielina en el cuerpo humano, una sustancia que recubre los nervios que conducen los impulsos eléctricos desde el cerebro hacia la periferia del organismo y viceversa.
Cuando se ve afectada la mielina, aparecen los síntomas de esta patología autoinmune y neurodegenerativa. Cada paciente presenta síntomas distintos que pueden variar de acuerdo a la evolución de la enfermedad, la gravedad del cuadro y su extensión en el tiempo, y tiene un grupo de síntomas propios, que dependen del lugar del sistema nervioso donde se manifiesta la desmielinización.
Los síntomas más comunes son debilidad, sensación de hormigueo, escasa coordinación, fatiga, problemas de equilibrio y mareos, además de alteraciones visuales, visión doble, temblores, espasticidad y trastornos en el habla. Otros síntomas habituales pasan por la aparición de problemas intestinales o urinarios y en la función sexual, sensibilidad incrementada al calor, problemas con la memoria a corto plazo y, ocasionalmente, problemas de juicio o de razonamiento (cognitivos).
La investigación y los recursos humanos fueron financiados por la Fundación Allende y la Academia Nacional de Medicina, la Federación Internacional de Esclerosis Múltiple (MSIF), la Universidad de Harvard, el Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (Conicet); y por subsidios privados.
La nómina completa de los investigadores incluye a Mauricio Farez y Jorge Correale del CIEN y el Servicio de Neuroinmunología de FLENI, Eugenia Balbuena-Aguirre1 y Célica Ysrraelit; Ivan Mascanfroni, Ada Yeste, Gopal Murugaiyan, Lucien Garro, Bonny Patel, Chen Zhu2, Vijay Kuchroo3 y Francisco Quintana todos pertenecientes Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School (Boston, Massachusetts, USA); Santiago Méndez-Huergo y Gabriel Rabinovich, ambos del Laboratorio de Inmunopatología, Instituto de Biología y Medicina Experimental, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (IBYME-CONICET).
Fuente/Source: www.lanacion.com.ar
GralInt-ROSH HASHANAH/HAPPY NEW YEAR! (5776) Shanah Tova!
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
ROSH HASHANAH
SHANAH TOVA!
Fuente/Source: Google Images
ROSH HASHANAH
SHANAH TOVA!
Fuente/Source: Google Images
Saturday, September 12, 2015
GralInt-La mejor (y la peor) manera de identificar a un mentiroso
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
La mejor (y la peor) manera de identificar a un mentiroso
Hay que olvidarse del lenguaje corporal o los movimientos de los ojos; hay maneras mucho mejores de identificar a quien quiere engañarnos
Para desenmascarar a un mentiroso podría ser suficiente usar un poco de tacto y sentido común.
El equipo de oficiales de seguridad de Thomas Ormerod enfrentaba una tarea aparentemente imposible. Se les pidió entrevistar a pasajeros en los aeropuertos de Europa, con el
objeto de descubrir a un puñado de falsos viajeros "plantados" entre la multitud.
De hecho, sólo una de 1.000 personas que tenían que entrevistar intentaría engañarlos. Era como encontrar una aguja en un pajar.
¿Qué hicieron? Una buena opción era concentrarse en el lenguaje corporal o los movimientos de los ojos, ¿correcto? ¡Incorrecto! Eso hubiera sido, de hecho, una mala idea.
Estudio tras estudio han encontrado que los esfuerzos -incluso por parte de policías profesionales- de leer las mentiras en el lenguaje corporal y las expresiones faciales rinden
frutos similares a dejarle la cuestión a la suerte.
En una de las investigaciones, sólo 50 de 20.000 personas lograron hacer un juicio correcto con más de 80% de precisión.
El equipo de Ormerod trató una estrategia diferente y logró identificar a los pasajeros falsos en la vasta mayoría de los casos. Para ello tuvo que botar a la basura las claves
generalmente aceptadas del engaño y comenzar de cero.
CLINTON Y LA NARIZ
Durante los últimos años, la investigación sobre el engaño ha estado plagada por resultados decepcionantes.
La mayoría del trabajo previo se ha concentrado en leer las intenciones del mentiroso en su lenguaje corporal o su rostro, a partir de pistas como el sonrojo, la sonrisa nerviosa
o los ojos distraídos.
El ejemplo más famoso es el de Bill Clinton, que se tocó la nariz cuando negó su affair con Monica Lewinsky, lo que entonces se tomó como un signo seguro de que estaba mintiendo.
La idea detrás de esto, dice Timothy Levine de la Universidad de Alabama, en Birmingham, es que el acto de mentir provoca algunas emociones fuertes -nervios, culpa, quizás la
excitación del desafío- que son difíciles de contener.
En los ojos no está la clave para definir quién miente y quién dice la verdad.
De acuerdo con la teoría, incluso si creemos que tenemos cara de póker, es posible que nos descubramos con movimientos muy sutiles, conocidos como "micro expresiones", que pueden
entregarnos.
Pero mientras más investigaban los psicólogos, más poco confiables y elusivas parecían estas pistas.
El problema es la enorme variedad del comportamiento humano. Con la familiaridad, es posible que identifiques los tics de alguien cuando dice la verdad, pero otras personas
actuarán de manera muy diferente: no hay un diccionario universal del lenguaje corporal
"No hay signos consistentes que se presenten siempre con el engaño", dice Ormerod, quien tiene su base en la Universidad de Sussex (sur de Inglaterra).
"Yo me río en forma nerviosa, otros se ponen más serios, algunos hacen contacto visual, otros lo evitan", explica.
Y DEPENDEMOS DE ELLOS
A pesar de estos resultados, nuestra integridad con frecuencia depende de la existencia de estos signos míticos.
Toma por caso los chequeos a que algunos pasajeros pueden enfrentarse antes de un viaje de larga duración (un proceso que Ormerod investigó para los Juegos Olímpicos de 2012).
Típicamente los funcionarios utilizan un cuestionario de respuesta cerrada ("sí" o "no") sobre las intenciones del viajero y son preparados para observar "señales sospechosas"
(como un cierto nerviosismo en el lenguaje corporal).
"Esto no da la oportunidad de escuchar lo que están diciendo y pensar en su credibilidad, ni de observar cambios en el comportamiento, que son aspectos críticos del engaño",
dice.
Los protocolos existentes también tienden a la subjetividad, dice el especialista. Por ejemplo, los funcionarios con frecuencia encuentran a más sospechosos entre ciertos grupos
étnicos. "El método actual de hecho evita que se identifique el engaño", asegura.
Claramente, se necesita un nuevo método. Pero dados los resultados pobrísimos en el laboratorio, ¿cuál puede ser la respuesta?
Según Ormerod, es increíblemente simple: deja de concentrarte en detalles sutiles y enfócate en lo que la gente está diciendo, sondeando con gentileza los puntos de presión
correctos para lograr que la fachada del mentiroso se desmorone.
UN CUESTIONARIO PARA DESTAPAR EL ENGAÑO
Ormerod y su colega Coral Dando de la Universidad de Wolverhampton identificaron una serie de principios conversacionales que deberían incrementar tus posibilidades de descubrir
la mentira:
Usa preguntas abiertas. Esto obliga al mentiroso a ampliar su historia hasta que se ve atrapado en su propia red de engaños.
Utiliza el factor sorpresa. Los investigadores deben tratar de incrementar la "carga cognitiva" del mentiroso, por ejemplo, haciéndole preguntas que no anticipaba y que pueden
resultar confusas, o pidiéndole que cuente un evento de atrás para adelante. Estas técnicas le hacen más difícil mantener su fachada.
Fíjate en los detalles pequeños y verificables. Si un pasajero dice que está en la Universidad de Oxford, pídele que te cuente cómo va de la casa al trabajo. Sin embargo, si
encuentras una contradicción no entregues tu juego: en vez de corregirlo, es mejor permitirle al mentiroso que gane confianza mientras suelta más mentiras.
Observa los cambios en la confianza. Fíjate con cuidado en si el estilo del mentiroso potencial cambia cuando se lo desafía: un mentiroso puede mostrarse muy elocuente cuando se
siente en control de la conversación, pero si su zona de confort se ve limitada, puede que se cierre.
El objetivo es lograr una conversación casual más que un interrogatorio intenso. Bajo esta presión suave, el mentiroso se descubrirá contradiciendo su propia historia o
volviéndose obviamente evasivo o errático.
"Lo importante es que no hay una bala de plata, una respuesta definitiva. Estamos tomando lo mejor y juntándolo para lograr una aproximación cognitiva", dice Ormerod.
EL SIMPLE ARTE DE CONVERSAR
El especialista admite abiertamente que su estrategia puede sonar como simple sentido común.
"Un amigo me dijo que estaba tratando de patentar el arte de conversar", relata.
Pero los resultados hablan por sí mismos.
En el experimento que reseñamos al principio, el equipo preparó a un puñado de pasajeros falsos con tickets realistas y documentos de identidad.
Les dieron una semana para crear su historia y se les pidió alinearse con pasajeros genuinos en aeropuertos europeos. Los funcionarios entrenados en la técnica de entrevista de
Ormerod y Dando tuvieron 20 veces más posibilidades de detectar a los pasajeros falsos -que identificaron en el 70% de los casos- que las personas que usaron las señales
sospechosas.
"Es realmente impresionante", dice Levine, quien no participó en el estudio, y quien piensa que es particularmente importante que el experimento se efectuara en aeropuertos de
verdad.
EL ARTE DE LA PERSUASIÓN
El lenguaje corporal tampoco da pistas firmes.
Los experimentos de Levine, por su parte, han arrojado resultados igualmente poderosos.
Como Ormerod, Levine cree que entrevistas inteligentes diseñadas para exponer los agujeros en la historia del mentiroso son mejores que tratar de identificar signos en el
lenguaje corporal.
Por ejemplo, recientemente organizó un juego de trivialidades en el que un grupo de estudiantes competía en pareja por un premio en efectivo de US$5 por cada respuesta correcta.
Los estudiantes no lo sabían, pero sus compañeros eran actores. En un momento dado, el coordinador del juego abandonaba la habitación y la tarea del actor era sugerir al
estudiante que echara una miradita a la respuesta correcta.
Algunos estudiantes aceptaron la oferta. A continuación, agentes federales reales los interrogaron sobre si habían hecho trampa. Usando preguntas tácticas para sondear sus
historias, sin enfocarse en lenguaje corporal o pistas, lograron identificar a los tramposos con más de un 90% de precisión.
Un experimento psicológico en aeropuertos de Europa reveló que una entrevista bien conducida puede ser la respuesta al problema de cómo identificar a personas con falsas
intenciones.
Un experto logró un 100% de aciertos en 33 entrevistas. Un resultado sorprendente que hace una enorme sombra a la idea de la exactitud del análisis del lenguaje corporal.
Aún más importante, un estudio de seguimiento encontró que incluso entrevistadores novatos podían lograr hasta un 80% de precisión simplemente utilizando las preguntas abiertas
indicadas; por ejemplo, cómo contaría la historia la pareja de la persona interrogada.
De hecho, con frecuencia los investigadores persuadieron a los mentirosos a admitir abiertamente su engaño. "Los expertos fueron fabulosos en este respecto", dice Levine.
Su secreto era un simple truco conocido por los maestros en el arte de la persuasión: empezar la conversación preguntando cuán honesta es la persona.
Simplemente lograr que dijeran que decían la verdad los llevaba a ser más cándidos después. "A la gente le gusta creer que es honesta, y esto los compromete a cooperar", dice
Levine.
"Incluso quienes no eran honestos tuvieron dificultades para fingir que estaban cooperando, así que en la mayoría de los casos podías ver quién estaba fingiendo".
TAMBIÉN LO PUEDES USAR TÚ
Claramente es posible que estos trucos ya estén siendo utilizados por algunos detectives expertos, pero dado el folklore que rodea el tema del lenguaje corporal, vale la pena
enfatizar cuán poderosa puede ser la persuasión frente a la dudosa ciencia del lenguaje corporal.
A pesar de su éxito, Ormerod y Levine están muy interesados en que se intente replicar y expandir sus hallazgos, para comprobar que se mantienen en diferente situaciones.
"Siempre debemos estar atentos a las afirmaciones grandilocuentes que lo abarcan todo", dice Levine.
Aunque estas técnicas serán de ayuda para los cuerpos de seguridad, los mismos principios podrían ayudarte a ti a cazar a los mentirosos en tu vida.
"Lo hago con los niños todo el tiempo", dice Ormerod.
Lo importante es mantener una mente abierta y no sacar conclusiones apresuradas. Solo porque alguien parece estar nervioso o le cuesta recordar un detalle crucial, no significa
que es culpable. En cambio, hay que buscar las inconsistencias más generales.
No hay un método a prueba de todo para detectar la mentira, pero utilizando un poco de tacto, inteligencia y persuasión podrías tener esperanzas de que, eventualmente, la verdad
saldrá a la luz.
Fuente/Source: www.lanacion.com.ar
La mejor (y la peor) manera de identificar a un mentiroso
Hay que olvidarse del lenguaje corporal o los movimientos de los ojos; hay maneras mucho mejores de identificar a quien quiere engañarnos
Para desenmascarar a un mentiroso podría ser suficiente usar un poco de tacto y sentido común.
El equipo de oficiales de seguridad de Thomas Ormerod enfrentaba una tarea aparentemente imposible. Se les pidió entrevistar a pasajeros en los aeropuertos de Europa, con el
objeto de descubrir a un puñado de falsos viajeros "plantados" entre la multitud.
De hecho, sólo una de 1.000 personas que tenían que entrevistar intentaría engañarlos. Era como encontrar una aguja en un pajar.
¿Qué hicieron? Una buena opción era concentrarse en el lenguaje corporal o los movimientos de los ojos, ¿correcto? ¡Incorrecto! Eso hubiera sido, de hecho, una mala idea.
Estudio tras estudio han encontrado que los esfuerzos -incluso por parte de policías profesionales- de leer las mentiras en el lenguaje corporal y las expresiones faciales rinden
frutos similares a dejarle la cuestión a la suerte.
En una de las investigaciones, sólo 50 de 20.000 personas lograron hacer un juicio correcto con más de 80% de precisión.
El equipo de Ormerod trató una estrategia diferente y logró identificar a los pasajeros falsos en la vasta mayoría de los casos. Para ello tuvo que botar a la basura las claves
generalmente aceptadas del engaño y comenzar de cero.
CLINTON Y LA NARIZ
Durante los últimos años, la investigación sobre el engaño ha estado plagada por resultados decepcionantes.
La mayoría del trabajo previo se ha concentrado en leer las intenciones del mentiroso en su lenguaje corporal o su rostro, a partir de pistas como el sonrojo, la sonrisa nerviosa
o los ojos distraídos.
El ejemplo más famoso es el de Bill Clinton, que se tocó la nariz cuando negó su affair con Monica Lewinsky, lo que entonces se tomó como un signo seguro de que estaba mintiendo.
La idea detrás de esto, dice Timothy Levine de la Universidad de Alabama, en Birmingham, es que el acto de mentir provoca algunas emociones fuertes -nervios, culpa, quizás la
excitación del desafío- que son difíciles de contener.
En los ojos no está la clave para definir quién miente y quién dice la verdad.
De acuerdo con la teoría, incluso si creemos que tenemos cara de póker, es posible que nos descubramos con movimientos muy sutiles, conocidos como "micro expresiones", que pueden
entregarnos.
Pero mientras más investigaban los psicólogos, más poco confiables y elusivas parecían estas pistas.
El problema es la enorme variedad del comportamiento humano. Con la familiaridad, es posible que identifiques los tics de alguien cuando dice la verdad, pero otras personas
actuarán de manera muy diferente: no hay un diccionario universal del lenguaje corporal
"No hay signos consistentes que se presenten siempre con el engaño", dice Ormerod, quien tiene su base en la Universidad de Sussex (sur de Inglaterra).
"Yo me río en forma nerviosa, otros se ponen más serios, algunos hacen contacto visual, otros lo evitan", explica.
Y DEPENDEMOS DE ELLOS
A pesar de estos resultados, nuestra integridad con frecuencia depende de la existencia de estos signos míticos.
Toma por caso los chequeos a que algunos pasajeros pueden enfrentarse antes de un viaje de larga duración (un proceso que Ormerod investigó para los Juegos Olímpicos de 2012).
Típicamente los funcionarios utilizan un cuestionario de respuesta cerrada ("sí" o "no") sobre las intenciones del viajero y son preparados para observar "señales sospechosas"
(como un cierto nerviosismo en el lenguaje corporal).
"Esto no da la oportunidad de escuchar lo que están diciendo y pensar en su credibilidad, ni de observar cambios en el comportamiento, que son aspectos críticos del engaño",
dice.
Los protocolos existentes también tienden a la subjetividad, dice el especialista. Por ejemplo, los funcionarios con frecuencia encuentran a más sospechosos entre ciertos grupos
étnicos. "El método actual de hecho evita que se identifique el engaño", asegura.
Claramente, se necesita un nuevo método. Pero dados los resultados pobrísimos en el laboratorio, ¿cuál puede ser la respuesta?
Según Ormerod, es increíblemente simple: deja de concentrarte en detalles sutiles y enfócate en lo que la gente está diciendo, sondeando con gentileza los puntos de presión
correctos para lograr que la fachada del mentiroso se desmorone.
UN CUESTIONARIO PARA DESTAPAR EL ENGAÑO
Ormerod y su colega Coral Dando de la Universidad de Wolverhampton identificaron una serie de principios conversacionales que deberían incrementar tus posibilidades de descubrir
la mentira:
Usa preguntas abiertas. Esto obliga al mentiroso a ampliar su historia hasta que se ve atrapado en su propia red de engaños.
Utiliza el factor sorpresa. Los investigadores deben tratar de incrementar la "carga cognitiva" del mentiroso, por ejemplo, haciéndole preguntas que no anticipaba y que pueden
resultar confusas, o pidiéndole que cuente un evento de atrás para adelante. Estas técnicas le hacen más difícil mantener su fachada.
Fíjate en los detalles pequeños y verificables. Si un pasajero dice que está en la Universidad de Oxford, pídele que te cuente cómo va de la casa al trabajo. Sin embargo, si
encuentras una contradicción no entregues tu juego: en vez de corregirlo, es mejor permitirle al mentiroso que gane confianza mientras suelta más mentiras.
Observa los cambios en la confianza. Fíjate con cuidado en si el estilo del mentiroso potencial cambia cuando se lo desafía: un mentiroso puede mostrarse muy elocuente cuando se
siente en control de la conversación, pero si su zona de confort se ve limitada, puede que se cierre.
El objetivo es lograr una conversación casual más que un interrogatorio intenso. Bajo esta presión suave, el mentiroso se descubrirá contradiciendo su propia historia o
volviéndose obviamente evasivo o errático.
"Lo importante es que no hay una bala de plata, una respuesta definitiva. Estamos tomando lo mejor y juntándolo para lograr una aproximación cognitiva", dice Ormerod.
EL SIMPLE ARTE DE CONVERSAR
El especialista admite abiertamente que su estrategia puede sonar como simple sentido común.
"Un amigo me dijo que estaba tratando de patentar el arte de conversar", relata.
Pero los resultados hablan por sí mismos.
En el experimento que reseñamos al principio, el equipo preparó a un puñado de pasajeros falsos con tickets realistas y documentos de identidad.
Les dieron una semana para crear su historia y se les pidió alinearse con pasajeros genuinos en aeropuertos europeos. Los funcionarios entrenados en la técnica de entrevista de
Ormerod y Dando tuvieron 20 veces más posibilidades de detectar a los pasajeros falsos -que identificaron en el 70% de los casos- que las personas que usaron las señales
sospechosas.
"Es realmente impresionante", dice Levine, quien no participó en el estudio, y quien piensa que es particularmente importante que el experimento se efectuara en aeropuertos de
verdad.
EL ARTE DE LA PERSUASIÓN
El lenguaje corporal tampoco da pistas firmes.
Los experimentos de Levine, por su parte, han arrojado resultados igualmente poderosos.
Como Ormerod, Levine cree que entrevistas inteligentes diseñadas para exponer los agujeros en la historia del mentiroso son mejores que tratar de identificar signos en el
lenguaje corporal.
Por ejemplo, recientemente organizó un juego de trivialidades en el que un grupo de estudiantes competía en pareja por un premio en efectivo de US$5 por cada respuesta correcta.
Los estudiantes no lo sabían, pero sus compañeros eran actores. En un momento dado, el coordinador del juego abandonaba la habitación y la tarea del actor era sugerir al
estudiante que echara una miradita a la respuesta correcta.
Algunos estudiantes aceptaron la oferta. A continuación, agentes federales reales los interrogaron sobre si habían hecho trampa. Usando preguntas tácticas para sondear sus
historias, sin enfocarse en lenguaje corporal o pistas, lograron identificar a los tramposos con más de un 90% de precisión.
Un experimento psicológico en aeropuertos de Europa reveló que una entrevista bien conducida puede ser la respuesta al problema de cómo identificar a personas con falsas
intenciones.
Un experto logró un 100% de aciertos en 33 entrevistas. Un resultado sorprendente que hace una enorme sombra a la idea de la exactitud del análisis del lenguaje corporal.
Aún más importante, un estudio de seguimiento encontró que incluso entrevistadores novatos podían lograr hasta un 80% de precisión simplemente utilizando las preguntas abiertas
indicadas; por ejemplo, cómo contaría la historia la pareja de la persona interrogada.
De hecho, con frecuencia los investigadores persuadieron a los mentirosos a admitir abiertamente su engaño. "Los expertos fueron fabulosos en este respecto", dice Levine.
Su secreto era un simple truco conocido por los maestros en el arte de la persuasión: empezar la conversación preguntando cuán honesta es la persona.
Simplemente lograr que dijeran que decían la verdad los llevaba a ser más cándidos después. "A la gente le gusta creer que es honesta, y esto los compromete a cooperar", dice
Levine.
"Incluso quienes no eran honestos tuvieron dificultades para fingir que estaban cooperando, así que en la mayoría de los casos podías ver quién estaba fingiendo".
TAMBIÉN LO PUEDES USAR TÚ
Claramente es posible que estos trucos ya estén siendo utilizados por algunos detectives expertos, pero dado el folklore que rodea el tema del lenguaje corporal, vale la pena
enfatizar cuán poderosa puede ser la persuasión frente a la dudosa ciencia del lenguaje corporal.
A pesar de su éxito, Ormerod y Levine están muy interesados en que se intente replicar y expandir sus hallazgos, para comprobar que se mantienen en diferente situaciones.
"Siempre debemos estar atentos a las afirmaciones grandilocuentes que lo abarcan todo", dice Levine.
Aunque estas técnicas serán de ayuda para los cuerpos de seguridad, los mismos principios podrían ayudarte a ti a cazar a los mentirosos en tu vida.
"Lo hago con los niños todo el tiempo", dice Ormerod.
Lo importante es mantener una mente abierta y no sacar conclusiones apresuradas. Solo porque alguien parece estar nervioso o le cuesta recordar un detalle crucial, no significa
que es culpable. En cambio, hay que buscar las inconsistencias más generales.
No hay un método a prueba de todo para detectar la mentira, pero utilizando un poco de tacto, inteligencia y persuasión podrías tener esperanzas de que, eventualmente, la verdad
saldrá a la luz.
Fuente/Source: www.lanacion.com.ar
POL/GralInt-La emotiva carta de Leopoldo López tras ser condenado a 14 años de prisión
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
La emotiva carta de Leopoldo López tras ser condenado a 14 años de prisión
El dirigente opositor venezolano escribió una carta que fue leída públicamente por su mujer; aseguró que seguirá en la lucha contra el gobierno de Nicolás Maduro
El dirigente opositor venezolano Leopoldo López escribió una carta en la cárcel luego de ser condenado a casi 14 años de prisión y pidió a la gente de su país que continúe la lucha contra el gobierno de Nicolás Maduro. "El próximo 6 de diciembre salgamos con toda nuestra fuerza a votar y a defender a todos y cada uno de los centros electorales", sostuvo en referencia a las próximas elecciones legislativas de Venezuela.
La carta fue leída por su mujer, Lilian Tintori, que explicó que se sintió encerrada también en la cárcel de Ramo Verde. Aseguró que no la querían dejar salir para acudir al acto donde leería la carta de su marido.
"Durante dos horas y media me cerraron la reja y no me dejaban salir, pero logré sacar un mensaje de Leopoldo para ustedes hoy, después de una larga noche y después de asumir una condena injusta", dijo.
Tintori explicó que conversó con su esposo y que luego de leer la carta, López fue derivado a un sector especial de la cárcel y quedó aislado del resto de los prisioneros. "Lo metieron en un calabozo de dos por dos, sin luz y con todas sus pertenencias por el piso", agregó.
LA CARTA
Fuente/Source: www.lanacion.com.ar
La emotiva carta de Leopoldo López tras ser condenado a 14 años de prisión
El dirigente opositor venezolano escribió una carta que fue leída públicamente por su mujer; aseguró que seguirá en la lucha contra el gobierno de Nicolás Maduro
El dirigente opositor venezolano Leopoldo López escribió una carta en la cárcel luego de ser condenado a casi 14 años de prisión y pidió a la gente de su país que continúe la lucha contra el gobierno de Nicolás Maduro. "El próximo 6 de diciembre salgamos con toda nuestra fuerza a votar y a defender a todos y cada uno de los centros electorales", sostuvo en referencia a las próximas elecciones legislativas de Venezuela.
La carta fue leída por su mujer, Lilian Tintori, que explicó que se sintió encerrada también en la cárcel de Ramo Verde. Aseguró que no la querían dejar salir para acudir al acto donde leería la carta de su marido.
"Durante dos horas y media me cerraron la reja y no me dejaban salir, pero logré sacar un mensaje de Leopoldo para ustedes hoy, después de una larga noche y después de asumir una condena injusta", dijo.
Tintori explicó que conversó con su esposo y que luego de leer la carta, López fue derivado a un sector especial de la cárcel y quedó aislado del resto de los prisioneros. "Lo metieron en un calabozo de dos por dos, sin luz y con todas sus pertenencias por el piso", agregó.
LA CARTA
Fuente/Source: www.lanacion.com.ar
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