Obscure Lessons from Math & Science

Maybe these lessons are not so obscure, but as I’ve been taking prerequisites for a nursing program, they represent another dimension of what I’ve been learning/relearning. (I apologize ahead of time for the uneven tone of what follows: some of these “lessons” engender my humorous side, while other inspire my inner philosopher or social psychologist.)

What’s the status on your permeable membrane?  Not a typical question, I know, and I’m not talking about your skin or the envelope around your cells, from which I drew the example. Most people, I assume, fall into the psychological category of semi-permeable. (If you’re in that category, bully for you. Go on to the next lesson.) The rest of us possess the unfortunate quality of taking in too much or too little.

I’m afraid that since I fall into the first category, I won’t be much help on the second. If you don’t take enough in, all I can really say is this: Be assured that you are this kind of person if you find yourself on an episode of “I Married a Mobster.” (I mean, come on. There were signs.) One should also be alarmed if 1) a significant other carries on a year-plus affair, 2) an accountant or investor steals all of one’s life savings (though those folks can be tricky, it’s true), 3) everyone at the conference table is howling with laughter, but you “just don’t get it.”

Unfortunately, as I intimated, I don’t know how to help. Ask more questions? Develop some healthy paranoia? Ask the heavens to unstick the cobwebby goo from around your senses? (I’m at a loss, so please forgive me. Because I’m at the other end of the spectrum, trying to come up with solutions is like an uber-wealthy politician trying to relate to your joblessness or end-of-the-month inability to pay bills).

For those of us in the overly permeable category, there’s a panoply of options. A very incomplete list would include 1) unremediated schizophrenia or other mental illness, 2) pharmaceuticals!, 3) heavy use of alcohol and/or street drugs!, 4) permanent hermit status, 5) endless years of therapy, 6) endless journaling, or my personal favorites, 7) yoga and meditation, 8) relentless internal “housekeeping,” whereby you toss on the ash heap various useless assumptions, obsessions, feelings, beliefs, and relationships, or  9) some combination of the above. Believe me, I do not place judgment on anyone’s use of any of the above strategies, although homelessness, jail time, and psychosis present obvious drawbacks.

Oversensitivity sucks. However, seeing the underside of nearly everything has its upside. (Did I just say that?) Maybe it’s even a gift—at least, if one manages not to drink oneself into oblivion, adopt an unwavering victim status, or redirect one’s hurt or sickness in an outward direction (in other words, please avoid becoming the next Unibomber or Timothy McVeigh).

There is usually more than one way to solve a problem. This is true even in addition; it’s called the commutative property (2 +1 can also be written 1+2).

The online algebra classes I’ve taken the last two semesters have solidified this point for me. Pearson Learning Solutions produces these fabulous textbooks with an online interface that I cannot stop raving about. After reading a section of text, I then go into something online called My Math Lab to do the homework. Each question may be answered three times incorrectly before I get dinged. But even so, I always have the option to click a button that pulls up a similar problem so I can try again. Another great feature allows me to pull up an application that will walk me through the steps to the solution. The end result: no math anxiety. I can try a problem, then try it again and again. I can go step by step with the online tutorial—multiple times, if need be.

The second advantageous aspect of this system concerns experimentation. The problem appears on the screen, and say I don’t know quite how to approach it. No problem! Sometimes I’ll just give it a go and see what happens. And sometimes I’ll end up solving the problem in a less than typical fashion. Woo-hoo, I’m a genius, I’ll think. I’m not really, but the mind has amazing ways of working toward solutions.

I’ve found this idea of “more than one way to solve a problem” a useful tenet, and it’s essential to call to mind when someone tells you that you simply must do things a certain way. While it may be true that theirs is more expedient, sane, healthier, safer, or more long-lasting, believe me—it doesn’t represent the only way. And if you follow your own path, you might discover a startlingly wonderful new method of arriving at an answer.

We are all one. Yeah, yeah, I know—this is a spiritual truth and not something one is supposed to derive from math and science. Poppycock. In biology, one thing I’ve been learning about involves systems and their interrelationships. An individual organism is part of a larger population of similar organisms, which then participate in a community, which takes part in an ecosystem, which takes its place in the overall biosphere. This trend moves the other direction as well: from individual to organ systems and organs to tissues to cells to organelles and then molecules and atoms. If someone ingests food with an awful microbe (God help you), that person is likely to feel systemic effects. In the same way, if you toss chemicals into a water body, there will be ever-enlarging effects in the greater world. We understand this in a fundamental way, even if we don’t always acknowledge it (it’s certainly not politically expedient to acknowledge it, that’s for sure).

Here’s another example that should make us pause and look at one another. Human beings—according to what has been learned through the Human Genome Project—are 99.99%  genetically similar. What we might observe about our differences can seem extraordinary, and we put a premium on their value, but statistically speaking, those differences are small.

An experience I’ve had since I stopped working for a local hospice speaks to this point as well. Sometimes I’ll be driving around, and I’ll pass the home of someone I took care of during their final days or months, and then I’ll pass by another and one more. I’ll suddenly be struck by the web of death across Boulder County, by how we’re all connected through that experience—not one of us gets out of it. And I’ll think, Well, if we’re all connected by death, why not by life? Why are we not more aware of our interconnectedness? I don’t have an answer for that one, but I figure there’s some kind of payoff in not acknowledging it. After all, if I’m not connected to you, what do I care if you lost your job, or if the nearby plant or pipeline poisoned your water, if my kid called your kid “retarded,” if the state’s roads look like hell and the neighborhood school stinks and you suffer from some disease that requires my tax dollars but I believe the government shouldn’t take any of my money because I need it for a vacation to the Bahamas?    

Just because you’re solving for X and Y, don’t assume you understand the whole alphabet. By this, I’m referring to what I’m learning regarding graphs (and of course, extrapolating from that). I’ll sometimes graph an equation in algebra, and the line represented by it will shoot up indefinitely—or down, depending. But I’m usually solving for one or two variables, not an infinite number of them. Who knows what that would look like—I’m certainly not there mathematically speaking.

I’ve just started working with a graphing calculator, which is kind of fun. Basically, you have to input the minimum and maximum values for X along the horizontal axis; then you input the minimum and maximum values for Y along the vertical axis. If you don’t set up the window correctly, it may appear as if the graph of the line is shooting up or down at an uninterrupted angle; but widen the window, and whoa! Sometimes the line actually hits its full height a little higher up and then changes direction.

And here, because I’m odd, I think of Whitney Houston (may she rest in peace). What a meteoric rise, right? What a fabulous talent. But it’s hard to know what else was going on—why the sharp downfall, the recovery, her eventual death? None of us can account for all the variables that had an impact on her life. None of us could have predicted the dips and recoveries. Sometimes our “window” isn’t wide enough. And people are full of mystery; you can’t put them on a graph because sometimes their influences are unknown to us (possibly even to them), and influences don’t all possess equal pull. The lesson to me: show some humility, girlfriend.

The body possesses an amazing capacity to heal. You cut yourself with a serrated knife, and five days later, the injury appears to be much better. Experiments with stem cells return function to the malfunctioning body part of a lab rat. Former Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords is shot, and months later, though still struggling with her recovery, she is able to speak and understand, to carry out many tasks of her pre-injured life.

This last example highlights a difficult aspect of this truth: unfortunately, we often learn more about the body’s healing capacity from those events where it fails to do so, or fails in part. I think, too, of my twin sons (who, for those of you who don’t know, share about six medical diagnoses between them). I think of that scar down one son’s chest from heart surgeries, which reminds me that eventually he’ll require another operation; of that inch-long scar on the side of his neck, where the heart-lung machine's tubing entered his body the second time he was hooked up, which reminds me of the brain hemorrhage that occurred during that period because of the blood-thinners he had to be on; of those times my other son finds a phrase and then cannot stop repeating it, the synapses of his brain firing in some fashion I cannot fathom; of the wide-eyed, anxious look that sometimes appears on his face because stimuli from the world is impinging upon his nervous system.

But even in offering these personal examples, I still look at my boys and realize that in so many ways, their little bodies developed according to the usual plan. Muscles attached to bones, their hearts beat, their eyes track an object, they try with amazing courage to communicate, they run and jump and laugh. And from the time of their various diagnoses, they have traveled a long, long way toward recovery.

Also, after reading about meiosis—that very intricate process whereby our parents’ DNA is copied, crosses over, divides, and then divides again, with individual gametes later joining to become each of us—I cannot help being awestruck by my children’s individuality and perfection. Mutations, my textbook assures me, happen with great rarity. But people don’t often find a chunk of meteor either, so if my sons’ genes mutated in some way, I can’t help thinking that it’s as if I had not one but two chunks of star-stuff fall into my backyard. The very fact of their being seems so specific to me, so personal, that I simply assume we are bound up in a grand universal plan of some sort. Hokey-sounding? Maybe, but not from my vantage point.