Mind over Matter

Dear Dr Ash,

I’ve recently delivered a book to my publishers and now find myself in a battle over the cover. The subject of the book is one I know well: I’ve been a leader in my field for decades, and I believe I have a good grasp of my audience, which has served me well in the past. But in conversations with the publishers, I feel like my ideas are not being taken seriously – and that I’m being treated more as a dilettante than a professional with experience. I know they’re experts in marketing books and I don’t want to discount good ideas, but I can’t help feeling that if I were a man my views would be given more weight. On the other hand, lots of authors probably battle over cover designs and fonts. How can I know if this is sexism, or just the business of publishing?

Perplexed in Plymouth

Dear Perplexed,

You may be familiar with the illusion of the old woman and young girl, first created by an anonymous German illustrator in the late nineteenth century and reproduced in its most famous form by William Ely Hall in 1915. Depending on how you look at it, the drawing appears to be either the side profile of an older woman with soulful eyes or as a young girl turning her head away from the viewer. Although both interpretations of the drawing are valid, it is only possible to perceive one of them at a time; the brain leaps from one version to the other without lingering in the ambiguous middle. The drawing is either the old woman or the young girl and never both at once.

Now, the reasonably scientific reader might think that whether you initially see the old woman or the young girl is a coincidence, perhaps based on where your eye first falls. But research suggests this isn’t true: younger viewers tend to see the young girl first, and older viewers tend to see the older woman first. This perceptual bias is, of course, unconscious and unintentional, and it’s an example of a basic brain mechanism. Neuroscientists like to say that vision is a mixture of “bottom-up” processes, detecting features like contrast, form and pattern, with “top-down” processes, detecting the social, emotional and logical context. As context is formed by our knowledge and assumptions about the world, so bias is an essential and inevitable part of perception.

I draw your attention to this drawing in order to illustrate a more general truth about “-isms” like sexism and racism: discriminatory behaviours are frequently ambiguous and often unintentional. Our brains rely on biases and heuristics, and it is impossible to perceive reality clearly without them. Your publishing team certainly responds to you in ways that are biased by their assumptions about your gender, race, age, class, and myriad other factors. Although that’s unfair, it’s also largely inevitable, a consequence of how our brains processes information. The question isn’t really whether this bias is sexist; it’s what to do about it.

Your ideas about your own book are not being taken seriously, and you have every right and reason to stand up for your views. Don’t waste your energy looking for a label to justify your irritation. Stand up for what you believe in, and try to listen to good arguments on their side too. Sometimes the best ideas can be found when two conflicting points of view rub up against each other. As in Hall’s illustration, when reasonable people disagree about complex perceptions, the right answer is often “both.”

Best wishes,
Dr. Ash

Dear Dr Ash,

When I was a young girl, children were told to be seen but not heard and the world revolved around older people. Now I’m a grandmother and I’m finding the tables have turned – it’s older people who should be seen but not heard and the world revolves around children. I love my own children and grandchildren dearly, but I wonder: when does it get to be my turn?

Overlooked in Oxfordshire

Dear Overlooked,

The evening sun is casting long sharp shadows across the grass, and I feel poignantly the passage of time reflected in your succinct letter. The late February sun in England always seems to make the colours of nature especially vivid. Greens almost shimmer in intensity, pierced occasionally by white snowdrops and pale yellow primroses. Spring seems to have come suddenly this year, and I feel caught on the back foot by that. Predictably, because February always seems to go by in a blur, and surprisingly, because I somehow never expect that. But what I can assure you is that the world doesn’t revolve around the young or the old, it revolves (with some astronomical allowances) around the sun.

I don’t write that in order to shrug off your important insight into the changes in intergenerational dynamics across time. The world does indeed feel like it has turned upside down and children rule the roost. I am just reaching that age when it’s a slight bore to squint at inscrutable virtual buttons on my telephone, which for no apparent reason appear and disappear on some sort of modified lunar cycle according to the whims of random twenty-year-olds smoking pot and cashing stock options in Silicon Valley. This is a world in which a ten-year-old boy who films himself “unboxing” toys makes more money in a year than a top consultant doctor will make in a lifetime. 

What you’re suffering from is in fact a need for agency – the feeling that your presence in the world matters and that the actions you take affect the environment around you. Agency is central to brain function; without it, we cannot interpret the sensory information we receive about the world. We touch things and move them around, we flip switches and pull on handles, not only to learn how things work but at a more basic level, to learn what things are. Without this testing – that is, without agency, our brains would be unable to construct the reality that we live in. And without that construct, humans and indeed most animals would suffer some form of psychosis. This is why you are reacting so strongly to a lack of agency in your own life; it really matters in a fundamental way.

The good news is that with age comes wisdom. What seemed to matter so much when we were young – who’s in, who’s out, what’s hot and what’s uncool (I am aware that even writing the word “uncool” is uncool) – these things were irrelevant all along. The world revolves around the sun, and therein lies your sense of agency. Our lives are connected to nature and to each other, and our presence in the world matters only so much as it matters to each of us ourselves. There is a bird singing now, in the birch tree outside my office window. I’m fairly certain he is unconcerned with when it will be his turn to have power. His power is, simply and fully, to enjoy the evening light and to sing.

Best wishes,
Dr. Ash.

Dr Ash Ranpura is a neuroscientist and clinical neurologist. He qualified in medicine and general neurology at Yale University and the Yale-New Haven Hospital, and trained in cognitive neuroscience at Queen Square, London