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Conversation Lesson

Dan: Hello, hello, Aaron Campbell! How are you today?

Aaron: How’s it going Danny D.?

Dan: Very good, very good.

Aaron: Yeah. What’s new?

Dan: What’s new in my life? I’m feeling as relaxed and at peace with the world as I always am.

Aaron: Oh, wow! That’s nice. I feel the opposite. I feel a little stressed out, a little bit busy, just too many things on my mind. Gosh, I wish I could be like you. It would be nice.

Dan: Well, I’m going to take you under my wing and I’m going to teach you everything I know. First, I want you to wash my feet.

Aaron: Are you crazy? No, thanks. What do you need your feet washed for? Can’t you wash your own feet?

Dan: No, it’s for you. It’s not for me. I know it looks that way.

Aaron: Oh it’s for me. I see. So if I wash your feet, it will benefit me, it will make me peaceful.

Dan: It will teach you some humility.

Aaron: Some humility. I guess that’s what I need.

Dan: And then you’ll find peace just like me. Okay, this is nonsense. Let’s get to the topic.

Aaron: All right. Let’s get to it.

Dan: We’re talking about expectations. I was pretty blown away when I first heard about this character, Daniel Kish.

Aaron: Oh, the blind… He’s a boy or a young man?

Dan: No, he’s a middle-aged guy. He learned how to use sound to sense the world around him.

Aaron: Ah! Echolocation.

Dan: Echolocation, right. Which is what bats do.

Aaron: That’s what we normally associate it with is bats and cave sparrows and whales and things like that.

Dan: Right. He believes that that’s an ability that we all can develop, but I think he was in a particularly unique situation, and the environment that he grew up in that allowed him to do that.

One, he was blind so he was without help. And he wasn’t babied by the people around him.

Aaron: That’s right. His mother actually allowed him to fail and allowed him to put himself in situations that were “dangerous,” that kind of thing.

Dan: Even though society is telling her, her family, the police, the teachers at school were telling her, “This is dangerous. You can’t let a blind kid go off alone or ride a bicycle.” He’s going to hurt himself and he did.

Aaron: Yet by virtue of what she did and the way she raised him, he developed the sensibilities that would allow him to do things like climb a wall or navigate a street with lots of busy cars.

Dan: Rock climb, ride a bicycle when in traffic. Pretty amazing guy. His back stories, it’s really unique. I think his father was, I think I read his father was abusive.

Aaron: Oh really?

Dan: So there was kind of a culture of fear and maybe that had something to do with his mother wanting him to be strong and not to… Maybe she had some fear in her life from her husband and she didn’t want her son to grow up that way. It’s really hard to imagine. Can you imagine if your child broke her teeth because she was riding a bicycle and she couldn’t see? I can’t imagine. I would be like, “Okay, that’s enough of that.”

Aaron: Yeah, no more of that.

Dan: But his mother had some real courage. I guess that’s what all parents in some sense have to do. They have to let their children be free to become independent. That’s what Daniel Kish is the hardest part, is making the people around the family members of the blind people understand that their love, their desire to protect their child or their mother or their father, that’s what really stands in the way of them becoming independent beings that can see. That’s what he says. He says, what he’s doing, that’s seeing.

So that’s another really interesting point that we think about seeing as being something out there, eyeballs or connecting with things out there. But in reality, our eyeballs are sensing the light and creating these images in our mind.

Aaron: And that could be one definition of seeing. Maybe, for each person that’s different. And since most of us can see with our eyes, that’s what seeing is. But when you’re blind, seeing has a totally different experiential meaning.

Dan: Right. On a brain scan level, what they found is, what’s happening in his brain when he’s seeing images with sound is very similar to what’s happening in a normal, a sighted person’s brain when they are seeing images.

Aaron: But what I find most interesting… I mean, of course, that is amazing in a biological sense that a human being could practice echolocation and get around and “see” quite well to navigate the world around them. But for me the most interesting part of this is the fact that it’s his mother’s expectations and his mother’s love. We might say ‘true love’ because you know that saying, “If you love someone, set them free.” And I think sometimes we conflate ideas of love, like love meaning, “I’m attached to you and I want to protect you and I want to prevent you from being harmed.” And in that process, I actually prevent you from growing and developing. There’s that tension there as a parent or as someone, you’re taking care of someone. Where do you draw the line? How much freedom do you give someone to fail or to be injured, to get hurt, and when do you step in and protect? I think it’s a really interesting dynamic.

Dan: Yeah. Back to this whole idea of echolocation. Somebody was just recently, just yesterday, I was at a party and somebody… I wasn’t even talking about Daniel Kish and my friend just started talking about Jacques Lusseyran who was a French Resistance fighter against the Nazis in World War II. He was an underground Resistance fighter. He was captured by the Nazis and he was put in a concentration camp. And apparently he’s written some amazing book. I think it’s called “And There Was Light” and it’s about his story. I haven’t read it yet but I want to. Apparently, it talks about how he had this amazing ability to sense. I don’t know if he was using sound, but he had developed this ability to, not just sense where objects are in space, but this real empathy with people, he could really feel what was happening with people. And it actually came to the point where he was feeling sorry for the people that had eyes because they weren’t able to sense…

Aaron: Hang on a second, hang on a second. I’m confused. Did you say that he was blind?

Dan: Yes.

Aaron: Okay, from the very beginning, he was blind? Or he was blinded later in life through an accident or?

Dan: I think he became blind as a child, like 7 or 8, he had some sort of accident.

Aaron: Okay. Sorry to interrupt you.

Dan: I’m not really sure to what degree he was underground, but he was with some underground Resistance movement and he was somehow a leader.

Aaron: As a blind man?

Dan: Yes, as a blind man.

Aaron: Interesting.

Dan: I think it was because he was blind when he was thrown in the concentration camp, he wasn’t forced into labor, but of course it was still horrible. He just sounded like this amazing guy who was able to sense and able to have empathy with people at a greater degree than people that were relying on their sight to sense their environment. Anyhow, that’s “And There Was Light.” Sounds like a really interesting book.

Aaron: Yeah, interesting. This whole idea of expectations and how that can actually affect reality has been kind of going through my mind recently after reading the story and hearing about it because, especially that study that was done about the teachers that were given these fake I.Q.

test results about students and they were told these students were special, they’re going to be special people. And what’s interesting about it is that because they formed these expectations that these students would be great people or special people, that they started treating them differently and maybe in a subconscious way, in the sense that they gave them more eye contact. They were nicer to them. They helped them more. They focused on them more. They gave them more attention. And it got me thinking that, I wonder if it’s really the expectation that’s doing this or it’s those things the teachers are actually on an unconscious or subconscious level.

Dan: Well, that’s what this guy Rosenthal, who’s famous for this experiment. That’s what he says.

He says it’s not some magical power. It’s that their beliefs affect the way they act on a subconscious level.

Aaron: So that makes me wonder that maybe I don’t need to expect. I just need to mimic those actions that are leading to those people’s success in the sense that even if I don’t truly believe that my daughter is going to become a great musician or a great writer or something like that, I can still give her all that attention and all that care and love and eye contact, and maybe that is what helps.

Dan: I don’t think you can do those things. I think it’s like such a complicated mash of ways that we communicate that are below the surface and I don’t think it’s possible. Probably not possible to do that if you don’t believe.

Aaron: Right. It goes hand in hand with believing.

Dan: I mean if you think somebody is–

Aaron: Extraordinary.

Dan: Or like a loser.

Aaron: Oh I see. The opposite.

Dan: And you just like, give them a lot of eye contact and say, “You can do it, buddy!” I mean, they’re probably going to feel that if that’s what you really believe if you feel that they’re hopeless. So it really makes you think about what… Of course we got responsibility as parents to support our children.

Aaron: Sure. Or as teachers to help our students out.

Dan: Or as teachers. But even just as regular people, as the way we interact with our friends and the way we accept their dreams and their ambitions and try to support them in whatever direction helps them grow. I’m sure you’ve had friends in your life that were really cynical and very negative, and it just makes you think how it’s possible to really influence them, especially if you spend a lot of time around people. When I was younger, I got some really, really friends, that friends that will always be close in my heart. But I get around them and they can be really negative.

Aaron: Yeah, you don’t want to be around negative energy, do you?

Dan: Yeah. I mean I still care about them but I can see it if I was around them to the extent that I was as a teenager, it would really limit my ability to grow and do new things.

Aaron: I also wonder, too, about this whole idea of expectancy and the power of it. In that experiment, the teachers expected these students to be extraordinary individuals when in fact they were just the same as the other students, in the sense that they were not particularly special.

However, in my own experience of expectations, sometimes I feel that a person of authority like a parent or a teacher expect something of you can add a lot of stress to your life. And it can almost backfire in some ways. I had a lot of self-expectations when I was younger as a tennis player. I was a competitive tennis player in high school. Before then, even in junior high, and I put a lot of pressure on myself that was unnecessary because I expected to win. I expected to win the tournament and it just led to a poor performance because I set my expectations too high. So I wonder what role that plays in it, as well.

Dan: That’s what we really think about. You always hear people talking about you got to believe in yourself, and you got to expect good things, and good things will happen to you. But just like you’re saying, when you put too much pressure on yourself in anything, when you overthink things

Aaron: Your performance suffers.

Dan: You step out of any hope to get in a state of flow which is what you really want to be in if you want to be successful in any kind of sphere of life.

It wasn’t just the case of these elementary kids, though. I was listening to this other interview about this experiment that they did with rats, one of these running rats through a maze. And they called in outside scientists. These are scientists. And the person conducting the study said, “Okay, we’re just going to be testing how long it takes these rats to run through a maze. And I’m going to give you,” and this outside scientist, you’re going to get this mouse, and this outside scientist, you’re going to get this mouse. These were all men and women of science and they just happened to say, “Oh by the way, this rat that I’m giving you, he’s a real dummy. And these rats, this rat is really special. You’re lucky. Watch this one.” And he was randomly giving names, giving evaluations on the intelligence of these rats. And all the rats were the same. The ones that he just randomly chose as being really smart rats, they performed way better on the race. And what they were saying is that unconsciously these… They even were interviewing, they were recording these scientists. And it was really funny to hear a scientist say, “Yeah he does look a little dim, this little guy.” Or he says, “Yeah this guy, he looks, I can see. You see the eye contact?”

Aaron: He looks like a dummy, this one’s really smart.

Dan: So what they guessed was at work there is that those scientists were treating those mice nicer. They were being less rough with them and they were maybe stroking them a little bit and giving them this feeling of affection, which maybe made the mice more relaxed and made them do better.

Aaron: That’s interesting. It’s very similar to placebo effect, in a way. Of course, the placebo effect being when doctors give patients what they say is medicine but in fact it’s just nothing but like sugar or powder or whatever. But the patients believe that it’s a special medicine, it’s going to cure them. And indeed they actually had better results in terms of healing the illness or sickness. Same thing, they’ve done research on wine tasting. And if you tell someone that this famous wine critic has given this a score of 95 out of 100, indeed people tend to report greater feelings of satisfaction. They report a much better taste when they taste that wine that just like a normal average wine, when in fact it’s the same quality level. There’s no difference.

Dan: I think those cases are really interesting, but those are both cases, placebos and people tricked into thinking that one wine is better than the other. Those are people that have been fooled into thinking one thing, which affects their experience in the world.

Aaron: And their perception.

Dan: But this is a case which seems much more extraordinary to me, that the effects of what other people believe could affect our performance.

Aaron: And the fact that it’s a rat. I mean, this is not even something you can verbally communicate with and in an intelligible way.

Dan: But who knows? Maybe one of those rats was a genius.

Aaron: Who knows, man? It’s possible.

Dan: But we once did, and it’s kind of similar, that placebo effect, we once did an old lesson about

Aaron: That’s right we did, didn’t we?

Dan: I think about superstitions. And it was something about some research they did with telling people that we’re going to practice, we’re going to see your ability to do a golf putting. And randomly, I’m going to give you the lucky ball and you get the normal ball. And the people who were told they had the lucky ball, they did better because they somehow believe that something superstitious that this had some power. But that idea that it can come from the outside, these beliefs can come from the outside and affect things, it’s extraordinary.

Aaron: Well, Dan, I just want to let you know that I really, really believe in you. I really do.

Dan: Of course you do. I’m your mentor.

Aaron: I believe in you.

Dan: Of course you believe in me.

Aaron: I know that you’re going to be a successful and happy person.

Dan: Of course you believe in me. If you didn’t, I’d fire you. I wouldn’t let you carry my bags. I wouldn’t let you wash my feet.

Aaron: Wash your feet. Yeah, you’re right.

Dan: Well, I believe in you, too.

Aaron: Well, thank you. I appreciate that. It’s because of your belief. That’s what keeps me going.

Dan: Okay. I think that we should just call it right there.

Aaron: Yeah, it’s done.

Dan: Okay, see you everybody.

Aaron: All right. Adios.