Illustration by Grace J. Kim
Over the holidays, I spent a few days around my father-in-law’s dog, Stella. She would greet me by licking my hands, leaning heavily against my leg, and jumping up to put her paws on my shoulders, like she wanted to waltz. Despite these warm hellos, she would unceremoniously walk away when she’d had enough of me.
I’d recently found out that, according to most scientists, animals don’t say goodbye. It wasn’t only dogs but also nonhuman primates, our closest animal relatives, who skip these farewell rituals. Learning about this mysterious fact made me pay closer attention to any pets I interacted with. I also started to become more aware of my goodbyes to fellow-humans, noticing how varied and, at times, odd they often are.
Any field of science is about paying attention, whether you’re putting something under a microscope, cataloguing animal behavior, or figuring out what genes or cells do. When you pay more attention, you get to be surprised by things that you had become numb to, like saying goodbye, listening to music, sleeping in, or feeling like an adult. During the past month, I’ve been writing a pop-up science column on these seemingly idiosyncratic topics. Thinking about these subjects has helped the routine seem novel again. And by delving into research that pays attention to familiar experiences, I’ve realized that much of the world around me is not as fixed as I might have thought.
For example, when I learned that genetic variations led some people to thrive on four hours of sleep per night, I realized there were people out there with more time each day—time that I wished I had to do things like finish Thomas Mann’s “The Magic Mountain” for my book club. What do they do with all that extra wakeful consciousness? Were they ever jealous of my ability to sleep in? That night, when I went to bed, I saw my need for eight hours of rest in a new way.
Or, at the end of last year, when my Instagram stories were full with my friends’ Spotify Wrapped posts, I didn’t question why they wanted to share the music they loved the most, or why anyone listened to the same artist over and over. (I’m a serial song repeater, too.) That is, until I heard about musical anhedonia, a condition that leads some people to have no emotional response to music at all. There’s nothing like talking to someone with no feeling for music to reveal how emotion-soaked it is for the rest of us; after that, even listening to songs while doing the dishes sometimes becomes a marvel. At the same time, talking to one musical anhedonic about the emotional pleasure he feels while looking at art moved me just as much as any symphony could.
This week, I wrote about turning a fresh eye to the story of your own life. Perhaps your age makes you feel solidly like an adult, or else like someone stuck in their youth, or maybe lost in between. People like to divide time into stages, and though this desire is close to universal where they draw those lines is not. I researched bygone ideas about life stages (to one ancient Greek thinker, adulthood didn’t start until forty-two), and learned about a new one introduced in the last six years. I came away with an appreciation for the chapters in my own life that I hadn’t even known existed.
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Margot Robbie as Catherine Earnshaw in “Wuthering Heights.”Photograph courtesy Warner Bros. Pictures
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