Paul Bisceglio | The Atlantic

The Greatest, Fakest World Record

2019-10-13T12:19:09-04:00

Updated at 2:15 p.m. ET on October 13, 2019.

Early yesterday morning, in a misty park in Vienna, Eliud Kipchoge ran a marathon in less than two hours. His time, 1:59:40, is the fastest any runner has ever covered 26.2 miles. Kipchoge carved two minutes off his own world record and became the first marathoner to break the two-hour barrier.

At the event, branded the INEOS 1:59 Challenge, the performance was heralded as a radical, historic leap, his “Neil Armstrong moment,” as one announcer said. Indeed, Kipchoge himself—a soft-spoken 34-year-old Kenyan who dulls the pain of distance running by smiling mid-competition—has repeatedly equated his feat to reaching the moon. That comparison is audacious on the scale of human achievement, but in the galaxy of running, it might actually be an understatement. Running’s original moon landing, the sub-four-minute mile, took place back in 1954. Yesterday, Kipchoge launched running to Mars.

Like the moon landing, Kipchoge’s run was a technical achievement that required unprecedented planning and support. In fact, it was so heavily engineered that his new time will not count as a world record. Kipchoge ran the fastest time ever over the marathon distance, but for heated reasons that get at the heart of the sport, he did not run a marathon.

One hour and 59 minutes is fast in a way that’s difficult to comprehend. Despite the formidable distance, Kipchoge ripped through each mile of his run in about four and a half minutes. This speed would feel like an all-out sprint to almost anyone who could keep up with him in the first place. To sustain this blistering pace, Kipchoge ran under conditions that had been painstakingly and exclusively arranged to push him beyond the two-hour barrier. The INEOS 1:59 Challenge was not a race by any strict definition: It was simply Kipchoge, joined by a rotating phalanx of pacesetters, rocketing along the pavement against the clock.

The planning that went into the event was a fantasy of perfectionism. The organizers scouted out a six-mile circuit along the Danube River that was flat, straight, and close to sea level. Parts of the road were marked with the fastest possible route, and a car guided the runners by projecting its own disco-like laser in front of them to show the correct pace. The pacesetters, a murderers’ row of Olympians and other distance stars, ran seven-at-a-time in a wind-blocking formation devised by an expert of aerodynamics. (Imagine the Mighty Ducks’ “flying V,” but reversed.)

[Read: Can food and drink improve your athletic performance?]

Kipchoge himself came equipped with an updated, still-unreleased version of Nike’s controversial Vaporfly shoes, which, research appears to confirm, lower marathoners’ times. He had unfettered access to his favorite carbohydrate-rich drink, courtesy of a cyclist who rode alongside the group. And the event’s start time was scheduled within an eight-day window to ensure the best possible weather. The whole thing was as close as you can get to a mobile marathon spa treatment—if going to a spa were paired with the worst discomfort of your life.

Such an extensive level of support, combined with the fact that Kipchoge wasn’t actually competing against anybody, pushed the event outside of official marathon conditions and prevented his performance from counting as a true record. The organizers were fully aware of this; the event, as Outside magazine aptly referred to it, is perhaps best understood as an “exhibition marathon.” It was a time trial, albeit one that had been scienced to an almost entirely unrivaled level. The only professional marathon competition that has resembled it was 2017’s Breaking2, a much-hyped Nike campaign that put Kipchoge and two other athletes on an Italian motor-racing track under similar top conditions. They all failed at breaking the two-hour barrier, but Kipchoge got close enough to convince INEOS, a U.K.-based chemical company that owns several sports franchises, that two hours could be broken with just a little more optimization.

But with great optimization comes great controversy. Looked at one way, the INEOS 1:59 Challenge is a straightforward testament to how money can buy anything, including a branded sub-two-hour marathon. INEOS, which is owned by Jim Ratcliffe, Britain’s richest man, appeared to spare no expense when it came to either the groundbreaking science or the marketing blitz leading up to the event. “As much as they might like to present this as such, the first sub-2:00 marathon is not like the first sub-4:00 mile, or the first summit of Everest, much less the moon landing,” the running commentator Toni Reavis wrote before the event. “All those challenges carried in the public consciousness the possibility of death. This is a second-chance marketing exhibition for a plastics manufacturer and springy shoes.”

[Read: How unhealthy are marathons?]

Corporate sponsorship is, of course, nothing new in sports, but when it arrives at the marathon with a monomaniacal focus on time, it rubs against the nature of the race itself. The 1:59 Challenge was less about Kipchoge exhibiting new abilities than it was about improving the marathon’s running conditions. But the marathon as it is popularly run is not really designed for records in the first place, precisely because of its shifting variables. It would be hard for a race organizer to design an ideal 26.2-mile course that would still attract spectators, entertain competitors, and net enough money to justify a race’s costs. (Imagine running a major marathon on an indoor track.)

By necessity, then, the marathon has resisted optimization. Different cities have different courses that are known for their unique challenges. Berlin has become the go-to race of late for official world records, but while that course is flat and fast, no one thinks it’s the ideal marathon path. (In fact, Kenya’s Brigid Kosgei set a jaw-dropping new women’s world record this morning in Chicago.) Presciently, the journalist Ed Caesar wrote in Two Hours, a 2015 book about the future of marathoning, that the only way to pull someone under the two-hour mark would be to manufacture a marathon entirely for the purpose of speed. Kipchoge’s new time suggests that part of the reason no one had broken two hours until yesterday is that marathoning simply hasn’t prioritized it.

“It’s meaningless,” the sports scientist Yannis Pitsiladis said of the new record in an interview with The Times of London. Pitsiladis was once a vocal advocate of sub-two attempts, but according to the running website Letsrun.com, he recently tried to pull together a marathon that sped runners down a mountain, so that he could point out that two hours can be broken with relative ease under extreme enough conditions.

And yet, and yet—the most compelling counterpoint to a cynical view of the performance is Eliud Kipchoge himself. Among a pack of mostly Kenyan runners who have recently pushed marathoning into a golden age, Kipchoge stands head and shoulders above the rest. He is the distance’s Michael Jordan, an era-defining and Kelly Clarkson–loving talent whose credentials—which include an Olympic gold medal and multiple big-city-marathon titles, on top of the official marathon world record—were secure well before yesterday.

If INEOS had found a way to usher any lesser runner beyond the two-hour barrier, its hyper-calculated efforts could easily be dismissed as too contrived to merit admiration. But perfect conditions and unavoidable INEOS logos can’t diminish Kipchoge’s magic. At the heart of the spectacle was still one of history’s most extraordinary athletes, flexing his skinny legs and giving the world yet another opportunity to behold him. Kipchoge’s performance was not necessarily better than some of his other great feats, but it’s hard to argue that it was any worse.

Yesterday leaves marathoning with a paradox. The INEOS 1:59 Challenge was indeed a brazen defiance of the marathon’s spirit. It was also a triumph of humanity. As the science of running continues to improve and new technologies creep in, that tension is only going to grow.

In a televised interview after he crossed the finish line, Kipchoge offered some characteristic platitudes: Running can make the world a more peaceful and beautiful place, and he wants to inspire people to get outside and move. But there was a glimmer in this invitation. He said he wants to inspire his competitors to move, too—to join him in what is now marathoning’s most exclusive club.

He didn’t really have to break 2 to motivate them, though. Two weeks ago, while Kipchoge was merely dreaming of landing on the moon, a legendary Ethiopian distance runner named Kenenisa Bekele arrived on Berlin’s famously fast course and dropped a 2:01:41—two seconds away from Kipchoge’s official world record.

Bad News for People Who Can’t Remember Names

2018-10-10T15:18:37-04:00

A good friend of one of my good friends forgets me every time I see him. We’ve hung out four times in the past several years, and on each occasion he’s greeted me with a beaming smile and an outstretched hand. “Hi, I’m Jerkface,” he says. (Jerkface’s name has been changed to avoid unnecessary shaming.)

“Hi, yes,” I reply. “We saw each other at that bar that one time, and at our friend’s apartment before that.”

“Oh, yeahhh,” he says, clearly not remembering.

Nothing knocks you down a notch like learning you don’t make much of an impression. Nevertheless, people forget each other all the time. It happens between the newest acquaintances and the oldest friends: Names, faces, occupations, birthdays, invitations, and promises evaporate so often that entire adult interactions can revolve around avoiding the awkwardness of a blank stare.

[Why childhood memories disappear].

I’ve been a Jerkface myself plenty of times. At a wedding this summer, I made it halfway through a conversation with a woman without realizing I already knew her. Devin Ray has been a Jerkface, too. Ray is a psychologist who admits his head is usually “in the clouds.” “I’ve swapped some strange names with people’s names,” he says. Recently, Ray became curious about the lasting effects of such blunders, and led a largely unprecedented investigation into what being forgotten does to people. Fair warning: His findings are going to make you sorry you’re not better at remembering things.

With colleagues at Scotland’s University of Aberdeen, Ray ran four experiments that measured how people interpret forgetting. One had 56 students keep online “diaries” at the beginning of the school year, asking them to detail every single time they were forgotten. Their entries, recorded daily for two weeks, captured all the ways forgetting can play out. For the most part, it was loose acquaintances forgetting basic facts—names, class years, majors—or experiences they’d shared with the diary keepers, like attending the same party. But there were also broken commitments (“My friend was supposed to meet me at the library today”), dramatic exclusions (“My friends organized a night out and forgot to ask me”), and confusions of one person for someone else.

Ray and his team were surprised by how consistently damaging all this forgetting was. Statistical analyses of both the students’ reports and a follow-up, controlled study found that people who were forgotten felt less close to those who had forgotten them, regardless of whether the forgetter was a family member or someone they’d just met. Mercifully, the people who were forgotten were almost always eager to excuse the memory lapses: The university students, for instance, would explain away potential slights with comments like “she already met too many people in the last couple of days.” But such rationalizations only softened the blow in the end. “The good news is that this happens a lot, and people will try their best to be forgiving,” Ray says. “The bad news is that, on average, they can’t quite get there.”

These results, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, suggest that forgetting someone does indeed send the message everyone seems to fear it does: You simply weren’t interested or invested in that person enough to remember things about them. The impression might be inescapable. “It’s such a big deal to admit that you don’t remember a person,” says Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who has separately studied the social consequences of forgetting. “It’s an insult, even though it’s completely innocent and we have absolutely no desire to hurt the person’s feelings. You just told that person they’re a zero.”

In a subtle way, doing so might harm the people who are forgotten, on top of their relationships with the forgetters. Ray’s team asked the research subjects to do a little soul searching during the experiments, instructing participants to rate their general feelings of belonging, self-esteem, meaningful existence, and other abstract emotions after they were forgotten or remembered. The effects were marginal but reliable: People who were forgotten reported decreased senses of belonging and meaning in the world. It was as if they’d received an ever-so-faint existential zap.

Jerkfaces can take heart knowing that if they fail to remember someone’s favorite song or what she had for lunch, no one’s life is going to crumble. Being forgotten had little to no bearing on people’s self-esteem and other measures of self-comportment, and even the most pronounced changes were matters of fractions of scale points. Moreover, as King points out, research has shown that people generally consider their lives fairly meaningful to begin with.

But Ray’s minute findings leave open the possibility of a cumulative impact. Like other small stressors, being forgotten could take a toll on people who deal with it often—especially if it coincides with other elements of discrimination. Ray’s earliest inspiration for looking into forgetting, he says, came from witnessing a professor constantly mix up the names of two of his “non-white” graduate students. (Ray refrained from providing identifying details in his account.)

“Your relationship with your supervisor is a big deal. You work with that person for years,” Ray says. “[Being forgotten] is an important and layered experience. It can lead to these ‘Funny, haha, I forgot your name at a party’ stories. But it can also lead to more serious, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe you did that’ crushing moments.”

There’s a lot left for researchers to unpack. Charles Stone, a psychologist at the City University of New York who specializes in memory, ran through a laundry list of nuances and variables likely to shape how being forgotten is received, from how pertinent the thing forgotten is to the relationship between the forgetter and forgettee, to the power dynamic between the two. He also notes that the incongruity between remembering and forgetting could be what’s damaging, rather than forgetting itself: If two people realize they’ve both forgotten the other’s name, there might be no bad vibes, or the pair could conceivably even feel closer.

Ray’s work reveals nothing of forgetters’ actual feelings or intentions, only how they’re perceived. It’s reassuring that participants tried to give forgetters the benefit of the doubt. “Forgetting is the rule, not the exception,” Stone says. “We forget most of our past. Think about how many days, how many hours, how many minutes everyone’s been on this planet.” The big question for scientists isn’t why people forget, he says, but why people remember certain things.

The scope of forgetting can make even the most boring social interactions poignant. There’s something miraculous about any two people’s lives intersecting among all those days, hours, and minutes, whether they bump into each other on campus or sit down for coffee. Sharing a moment with someone is a reminder that we’re all here, that connection is possible. At least, until Jerkface forgets it.

Are Cities Making Animals Smarter?

2018-08-16T10:02:00-04:00

The goldfish were the first to vanish. Every so often, a few would go missing overnight from the office’s tiny outdoor pond. But goldfish were cheap, so no one in the building—an environmental nonprofit in the bustling, sweaty center of Colombo, Sri Lanka—bothered investigating.

Then the dragon koi began to disappear. Lustrous and ethereal, each of these whiskered Japanese carp cost around 10,000 Sri Lankan rupees, or $65. In a fit of extravagance, the building’s landlord had bought 10. Soon, he had seven. Then three.

Panicked, the landlord installed four security cameras to catch the thief. The pond rested at the end of a narrow driveway surrounded by tall concrete walls, so whoever was swiping the carp had either a key or the superhuman ability to bound up nearby roofs and drop in undetected. The landlord couldn’t imagine what kind of person would steal a fish, but he was eager to find out.

A couple of days after the cameras went up, Anya Ratnayaka woke to a string of text messages bursting with exclamation points. Ratnayaka, an obsessive young conservationist, worked a desk job at the nonprofit at the time. She’d paid little attention to the mystery of the dwindling koi. But when she unlocked her phone and saw a grainy security-camera image of the thief, she realized her life was about to change.

The thief was a cat. A big cat. Not a lithe house cat on the prowl, nor a bony feral cat scavenging for scraps. It looked like a miniature leopard—or a domestic cat that had gotten serious about boxing. The creature had black spots, compact ears, and burly shoulders. Under the cover of night, it had slunk along the ledges of the office complex, slipped under an awning, and descended on the pond. In the photo, it crouched at the water’s edge, patiently waiting to pounce on a $65 midnight snack.

Ratnayaka immediately recognized the animal: a fishing cat. Unlike almost every other species in the feline family, fishing cats love water. They live in swamps—specifically, the reedy wetlands that dot Asian nations from India to Malaysia. And they swim. With partially webbed feet and short, rudder-like tails, they coast along the waterways of their riparian homes, making grumbly chirps that sound like duck quacks. True to their name, they dive like Olympians from riverbanks to snag unsuspecting fish.

Ratnayaka is one of the world’s few fishing-cat experts. While studying the cats that roam the wetlands around Colombo, she had occasionally heard rumors of sightings within the city itself. But no one had ever documented a fishing cat in the remote metropolis—or, for that matter, in any city on the planet—until the spring of 2015, when the koi thief was recorded outside her office. Now, on her phone, Ratnayaka held the first evidence that something could be calling—or forcing—the reclusive animals into the heart of one of Asia’s most rapidly developing urban landscapes.

Since then, Ratnayaka has launched the first-ever study of urban fishing cats, identifying and tracking a small, scattered population of the animals in Colombo as they caper over roofs and wiggle through storm drains. As Ratnayaka considers how they may be adapting to this unlikely setting—and whether they’re doing so fast enough to make the city, which has been bulldozing its way into their natural habitat, a sustainable home—she has stumbled into a provocative theory. Some scientists speculate that only the most intelligent members of a species can survive in a hazardous and ever-changing urban world. If so, cities may be making animals smarter than their rural counterparts.

What city life does to fishing cats’ brains is one of many factors that will determine the fate of Ratnayaka’s unwitting urban pioneers. But untangling its influence requires wildlife researchers to confront one of the most daunting questions in cognitive science: What is the definition of intelligence?

Colombo is in the midst of an expansion that’s startling even by South Asian standards. Stretched along the shores of the Indian Ocean, the city has been an international-trading center since the days of the Silk Road. But Sri Lanka’s modern economy was crippled by a brutal civil war that lasted from the early 1980s to the late 2000s. Colombo has sprinted to recover prosperity since. Flush with new businesses and tropics-hungry tourists, its Western-style north end is now crowded with glittering skyscrapers, immaculate coffee shops, and thumping nightclubs. The city’s grittier borders, meanwhile, have pressed ever deeper into the surrounding jungle.

On a simmering morning in February, Ratnayaka took me on a tour of the district inhabited by her former office’s mischievous koi-hunting cat. She picked me up in the back of a motorized rickshaw, and we honked our way north through the jammed streets. Buddha statues with flashing halos studded the intersections; everything smelled like incense, garbage, or gasoline.

A fishing cat dashes by a motion-sensor camera in one of Colombo’s wetland parks. (Sebastian Kennerknecht / Urban Fishing Cat Conservation Project)

As we rattled along, Ratnayaka—a purple-haired 29-year-old who once stored fishing-cat poop in a Nutella jar in her family’s freezer—gleefully pointed out the unlikely hangouts of the furry thief, a young male cat she’d named Mizuchi after a mythical Japanese dragon that lives in water. Mizuchi’s GPS-collar data had placed him not only in local ponds and canals, but also in the parking lot of a neon-lit movie theater and in the middle of a multilane traffic circle. His territory, which stretched about two square miles, was mostly covered with asphalt and packed with cars.

After a couple of short turns onto leafy side roads, our rickshaw abruptly arrived at a more languid cul-de-sac. Swaying palms shaded the street’s sun-bleached buildings, several of which had ponds and gardens. One of the buildings was Ratnayaka’s old workplace. With a furtive glance, she led me around the corner of an unoccupied house. We passed a line of parked motorcycles and ducked under a balcony, stopping at a small window that opened into an empty, dusty room. Dirt smudges ran up the wall beneath the window. It took me a moment to realize they were paw prints. The derelict room, Ratnayaka said, was Mizuchi’s favorite hideout.

In the middle of Colombo’s mayhem, Ratnayaka’s cats have woven sneaky passages and dark hideaways into a network, within the human world, that remains largely invisible to us. At night, Ratnayaka told me, Mizuchi would skulk along the neighborhood’s high walls and dart through patches of greenery to the low bank of a nearby canal. From there, he could scamper to the cinema, then sneak back home to fish from the ponds before morning. “The collar data showed a very comfortable cat,” Ratnayaka said. “He knew what he was doing. He had a set path; he never veered out of it.”

For now, at least, this covert strategy seems to be working. Ratnayaka has already identified 10 other fishing cats throughout Colombo. Some—possibly Mizuchi’s direct relatives—roam its chaotic precincts. Others stick to wetland parks throughout the city. In both settings, the cats move confidently along established routes, and Ratnayaka feels certain that many were born within Colombo itself. The city’s unique design may have provided the foothold, she says: Colombo has an arterial system of spacious canals, and Mizuchi and his urban cousins have turned them into feline highways.

Ratnayaka and I ended our tour on an old bridge that arched over one of the canals. We shaded our eyes with our hands and looked out over the green water as a portly man in a motorboat slowly chopped through. The canal had an elevated grassy towpath that was partially hidden by flowers and trees, and it was easy to imagine fishing cats bounding along it. In fact, the owner of a nearby music school had already spotted one cat swiping fish from his property’s pond.

Still, most Colombo residents have never seen a fishing cat in the city—if they even know what one is. On the bridge, Ratnayaka and I asked two daytime traffic guards about the cats, and they waved us away. “You don’t get fishing cats in Colombo,” one reassured us.

Construction in downtown Colombo, viewed from a park (Paul Bisceglio / The Atlantic)

Later that night , I spent 10 minutes trying to explain fishing cats to my Airbnb’s genial owner, Chandana Pathirage. It wasn’t until I Googled pictures on my phone and told him the cats sometimes munch on people’s chickens and house kittens that his eyes lit up. “Yes, I have heard stories!” Pathirage said. “People say they come from the outside. They come at night. They kill baby cats, eat squirrels, small birds, rats. They take fish from the ponds.”

People call them hora pusa, he told me. “Thief cat.”

By 2030, it’s estimated that nearly 10 percent of the planet’s land will be covered by cities. More than half the human population now lives in urban areas, and an untold number of animals do, too—from mosquitoes that have buzzed around the London Underground for so long they’ve become genetically distinct, to leopards that stalk stray dogs around villages in Mumbai. Colombo is at the forefront of this global trend. Its trees are filled with resplendent magpies and lorikeets, all chirping like arcade machines. Geckos climb its walls, and thick-bellied monitor lizards scurry around its bushes. One evening, I saw a crocodile as long as a canoe casually paddling in one of its lakes.

Sometimes animals end up in cities because they have nowhere else to go. Other times they happily move in, finding readily available food or other advantages over life in the wild. Chicago’s coyotes, for instance, escape year-round hunting and trapping by staying within the city’s borders. “The city actually serves as a huge refuge for them,” says Stan Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist at Ohio State University who has been studying the canines for almost two decades. “There are a lot of nooks and crannies in the landscape, places that people don’t use, that coyotes are really good at exploiting.”

One of the great mysteries of urban adaptation is what, if anything, living in cities does to animal minds. Research on urban wildlife has already shown that cities can have jaw-dropping effects on animals’ behavior. Gehrt’s coyotes have not only learned where it’s safest to cross roads, but have also learned to avoid traffic based on its speed and volume. Do behavioral shifts like this reflect deeper changes in how urban animals think? In what urban animals are?

These questions vex the small subset of wildlife ecologists that is wading into the murky waters of urban-animal intelligence. In several metropolitan areas, researchers have devised simple puzzles—usually difficult-to-open boxes of food—in order to compare the problem-solving abilities of city-dwelling creatures with those of their wild relatives. The results have been tantalizing: Urban animals as varied as Canadian raccoons and Barbadian bullfinches can outperform their rural counterparts. While it pays to be cunning in almost any setting, some scientists propose that foreign, volatile environments like cities demand an especially broad range of cognitive abilities. Eventually, the thinking goes, cities may bend evolution enough to make whole populations of animals within them smarter—if, of course, the animals can survive city life in the first place.

Anya Ratnayaka inspects fishing-cat paw prints in one of Colombo’s wetland parks. She somehow spotted them from a tower about 15 feet above. (Paul Bisceglio / The Atlantic)

This is a controversial theory. Even researchers who back it are quick to warn that intelligence is complicated. No one is suggesting that new situations are the only driver of animal smarts: The ways animals interact, how they learn from one another, and the nature of their physical surroundings are all thought to influence how individual animals behave and how their brains take shape over generations, no matter where they live.

And what is intelligence, anyway? Any attempt to test the notion that cities make animals smarter brings researchers into a debate that has raged within psychology for more than a century. There’s no universally accepted way to measure how smart someone is. Human intelligence is slippery and multifaceted, and its origins are vague. Defining intelligence in other species is even harder.

“One of the big challenges in our field is thinking about how to even ask the questions that we’re trying to answer,” says Sarah Benson-Amram, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Wyoming who studies raccoon intelligence. “We don’t speak the same language, we don’t know exactly how each animal perceives the world. How do you pose a fair intelligence test to a variety of species, or even one species in particular?”

But studying animals in new environments may help scientists develop a definition of intelligence that applies across species. Along with others in her field, Benson-Amram has zeroed in on flexibility, long considered an essential criterion for intelligence. “When the environment is changing, you’re able to change your behavioral response, and you don’t perseverate on old responses that used to work but no longer do,” Benson-Amram says. This way of defining intelligence—which researchers also call “behavioral plasticity”—is notably distinct from what could be considered an animal’s specific intelligence. A scrub jay that hides away thousands of seeds and remembers the location of each one certainly has a particular kind of acuity, Benson-Amram notes. But an animal needs a diverse, general set of mental skills—perceptiveness, resourcefulness, foresight, and so on—to tackle the foreign obstacles of cities, she posits.

Whether Colombo’s fishing cats are more flexible than their cousins outside the city is a question Ratnayaka is pursuing as she gathers data on the group’s diet, sleep habits, territory, and other behaviors. If Colombo is making fishing cats smarter, though, there could be a grim twist: The animals most likely to thrive in cities may also be the first to die.

The first fishing cat I encountered in Sri Lanka was frozen like a popsicle. I met it by chance; late one afternoon, I hiked to the wetlands at the city’s border and stumbled upon a wildlife-rehabilitation center. Enticed by a muddied sign for the complex and some monkeys dancing through the trees, I followed a wooded path to a clearing of large cages full of injured animals from Colombo and its surroundings: a one-legged eagle, a sickly wild boar, a bandaged porcupine. A fresh-faced attendant named Vibushana Bandara told me that the facility was closed to the public, but graciously offered to show me around instead of calling the police.

After teaching me to hand small bananas to several endangered purple-faced leaf monkeys—a species decimated by Colombo’s rapid urbanization—Bandara brought me to an industrial chest freezer outside a rickety office, opening it to show me a stack of dead animals preserved for future study. He dug a hand into the ice and pulled out a fishing cat. Solid as a rock, the spotted creature was locked into a folded position with its four paws together. When Bandara lifted it upright by a leg to unravel a protective cloth, its whole body held rigid in the air.

The cat, a small female, had recently been hit by a car just outside the city. The rehabilitation center receives one or two fishing cats a month, Bandara explained, and most are already dead. Cars and motorcycles are often the culprits. Bandara plunked the cat down before us on the grass. Frost speckled her paws and snout. Some blood was frozen around her mouth, and a deep wound on one of her thighs had turned blue during the freezing process.

A frozen fishing cat, preserved for research after it was hit by a car (Paul Bisceglio / The Atlantic)

Some conservationists in Colombo speculate that Sri Lanka’s civil war actually protected fishing cats near the city. Though the violence dealt a major blow to wildlife in the country’s northern regions, where fighting was heavy and sustained, the sporadic bombings and other outbursts of violence in Colombo stunted the city’s growth while leaving the wetlands—and all their wild inhabitants—undisturbed for decades. Now, as Colombo expands, the animals that are adapting to the city also have to deal with its greatest peril: us.

In a recent paper in the journal Animal Behavior, Benson-Amram and two co-authors propose that this situation is especially—and paradoxically—problematic for the animals best able to take advantage of the resources and opportunities that cities offer. Yes, the perpetual puzzle of city living could select for traits that are hallmarks of intelligence, like innovation, learning, memory, boldness, and curiosity, the researchers write. But those traits can also drive a raccoon to break into your trash can, a mountain lion to smash your window and land on you while you’re sleeping, or a fishing cat to nab a fuzzy house kitten outside a hut door.

Encounters like these are often as bad for the intruding animals as they are for the humans involved. In Sri Lanka, cars—which have killed more than 100 fishing cats in the past three years—are far from the only threat to the felines. In villages north of Colombo, people have been known to pour boiling water in the eyes of fishing cats that get trapped in coops while attempting to steal chickens. Throughout the country, the cats are sometimes chased and killed because they’re confused with leopards, which Sri Lankans tend to revere at a distance but fear if they’re close enough to pounce. (Unlike leopards, fishing cats have no record of ever attacking a person.)

Ratnayaka imagines that life for a Colombo fishing cat is, for the most part, terrifying. Crossing the city’s roads is scary enough for humans, she says. “Then you’ve got all these houses with dogs. And people use rat poison to kill rats, and then the cats go and eat the rats, so there’s a risk of dying there.”

Given a choice, Ratnayaka suspects fishing cats would opt for the jungle over the city any day. Even when they benefit from the urban environment, Colombo’s dangers have a way of catching up to them. Back when Ratnayaka first learned about Mizuchi, she kept replenishing the fish in her office’s pond so that he would return each night and she could observe more of his behavior. The bait worked like a charm—until the night he stopped showing up. Soon, she got a call from the city’s wildlife department: Someone had found an angry fishing cat stuck in a storm drain. He might have gotten so fat that he could no longer squeeze himself out.

Toward the end of my stay in Sri Lanka, I began to worry that I was wasting my time chasing after the idea of intelligence. There’s so much uncertainty, so many variables. If the fishing cats were showing me something, perhaps it was simply that generalizations about how urban environments affect animals’ brains are too broad to mean much at all.

A fishing cat peers out of the darkness while guarding kittens at a zoo in Anuradhapura. (Paul Bisceglio / The Atlantic)

I hoped that seeing the cats for myself in Sri Lanka—alive, not frozen—would show me what theories couldn’t. So one morning, I forced myself out of bed to catch a 5 a.m. train to Anuradhapura, an ancient city 125 miles north of Colombo. My destination was an active military base that operates, of all things, a small zoo for disabled animals.

Ratnayaka and her colleagues had reassured me that this zoo, which is free and open to the public, is a rare boon for conservation in Sri Lanka. But many of its animals were unkempt and neurotic. When I arrived, I was greeted by a petulant turkey that puffed at visitors and a lone monkey that paced back and forth in a cage full of ducks. Two free-standing, fenced-in enclosures were supposed to house rescued fishing cats, but no cats were in sight. Nervous about this whole situation, I circled around one and peered through a rusted grate into a dark den. Then my nose caught an extraordinary odor of oil, onions, and musk—the room-clearing smell of a fishing cat. In the blackness of the den, a pair of steady, pale eyes gleamed.

This cat, I learned, was silently guarding a litter of three-week-old kittens. None of them would emerge during the daytime, so a burly zookeeper led me over to the second enclosure. Before I realized what he was doing, the keeper unlocked a door to the enclosure, walked over to a wooden shelter, and unceremoniously slammed his fist on the roof. Out launched another fishing cat, hissing like mad. It bounded over a low-slung tree branch and snaked along the perimeter, scanning for whatever had scared it.

Anuradhapura’s fishing cats weren’t eager to make friends. (Paul Bisceglio / The Atlantic)

Here was the creature I had spent the week tracking through wetlands, traffic, and quiet alleys. The cat, a male, was considerably beefier than the frozen female I’d seen, thanks in part to a generous zoo diet. His fur was a cool shade of gray, and he had a raw, pink wound—likely the result of compulsive scratching—beneath his right ear. We locked eyes and he greeted me with bared teeth, as if to make it clear that my enthusiasm wasn’t mutual.

The keeper exited the enclosure and pointed to a tree within it. I realized that a third fishing cat had been hiding among the branches. This one had cloudy eyes, probably blinded by a hot-water attack in the nearby jungle.

The keeper then wandered away and left me alone with the irritated animals. If they had secrets to share, now was my time to receive them. I sat on the grass outside the fence, notebook open, ready for some profound sign of what was going on beneath the cats’ broad foreheads. But as I should have expected, they simply acted like cats. The beefy cat plopped down near the wooden shelter, eyeing me warily as I scooted toward him. He soon fell asleep, occasionally stirring awake to lick his limbs and bite at his nails. His ears perked whenever the park’s colorful birds swooped nearby.

As the three of us lazed in the heavy afternoon heat, I mulled over the mystery of animal cognition—how creatures close enough to touch remain so far outside our understanding. But some animal researchers believe they can, in fact, nail intelligence down. Kay Holekamp, a veteran zoologist at Michigan State University, is one of several scientists who have proposed to quantify animal intelligence with personality tests. Since intelligence already tends to be defined in terms of behavioral characteristics—boldness, curiosity, persistence, and so forth—Holekamp reasons that researchers should be able to comprehensively examine all the known traits tied to intelligence, then algorithmically combine the results into a single overall score: g, for general intelligence.

Building on her colleagues’ popular puzzle-box experiments, Holekamp has started piloting this idea by posing six challenges to rural, urban, and suburban populations of hyenas in Kenya. The challenges involve devices like giant metal bins with changing access points to food, and multicolored buckets that test pattern recognition. By measuring individual hyenas’ performances, Holekamp is collecting hard numbers on which animals are the quickest learners, the fastest to adjust to new situations, and the best at controlling their impulses. Eventually, she wants to see if the hyenas’ different habitats influence the “g” scores they achieve.

Like so much work in the field of animal intelligence, the effectiveness of this “psychometric factor-analytical approach,” as Holekamp calls it, remains to be determined. She envisions that an exhaustive series of tests could one day give scientists a mathematical basis for animal intelligence, both within and across species. What such measurements truly mean will be as debatable—and potentially as ethically fraught—as the results of personality and intelligence tests for humans. Moreover, whatever gamut of tests would be equally valid for a hyena and, say, a hummingbird is anyone’s guess.

Still, Holekamp argues the approach is the most sensible way to unknot all the possible effects cities could have on animals’ brains—and, more fundamentally, to bridge the as-yet-impassable gap between humans and the creatures among us.

She also throws in a curveball. “If we can begin to understand what the forces are that shaped the evolution of general intelligence in animals, there’s no reason that you can’t build those forces into the environment experienced by digital organisms and evolve intelligence in that way,” she says. She means artificial intelligence: Figuring out how animal smarts evolve, she believes, could teach us how to manufacture intelligence for ourselves.

For Ratnayaka, any inquiry into animals’ intelligence is strictly a pragmatic step toward protecting them. She’s darkly pessimistic about the future of fishing cats in her unrelentingly modernizing city, whether the cats are getting smarter. “When you look at it short-term, it can seem like a city is helping,” she says. “But long-term, unless everything is done sustainably, I don’t think the species will survive.”

Vidhya Nagarajan

Once she has consolidated her data from tracking collars and motion-sensor-camera traps, Ratnayaka will compare her enigmatic urbanites to a group of their jungle-dwelling cousins studied by one of her colleagues, Ashan Thudugala. Trading notes on the cats’ behavior, the two researchers will look at how Colombo may be changing Ratnayaka’s cats, then use those insights to recommend ways to conserve the city’s wetlands and make its crowded neighborhoods more hospitable to cats and other wildlife. “The things I’m suggesting don’t mean that you have to clear a bunch of buildings and make sure people don’t go into the wetlands,” Ratnayaka says. “I’m saying very simple things, like grow some plants on the sidewalk, grow some trees on the pavement so that birds can come and sit.”

Jim Sanderson, a small-cat expert and a mentor to Ratnayaka, envisions one day achieving a publicity campaign for Colombo’s fishing cats on the scale of the effort to protect the Iriomote cat in Japan. Endemic to a remote but urbanizing island, this endangered cat has benefited in recent years from a government-backed push to construct road underpasses, paste pictures of the cat on the sides of buses, and even trim bushes to look like the rare creature. “There’s no initiative yet that says, ‘Okay, we’re going to build a landscape that accommodates fishing cats,’” Sanderson says. “So far, it’s the other way: ‘Well, we need storm drains,’ then the cats take advantage of them. But we can create these idyllic landscapes for both animals and humans if we just do a little bit.”

On my last day in Colombo, Ratnayaka, Sanderson, Thudugala, and several volunteers put on a public fishing-cat expo. It was a delightfully dorky event: a short march around a lake, with learning-station stopovers, followed by a series of lectures on small cats in Sri Lanka. The lectures were held in a spacious hut in the middle of one of the city’s wetland parks, and attendees—mostly affluent, well-educated members of Colombo’s small but growing conservation community—sat among the scattered island thickets where some of the city’s fishing cats live. Unsurprisingly, the cats were nowhere to be seen. They were present but invisible, hidden somewhere in the tall grass and flowered branches.

As the sun began to set, I strolled along the residential streets that border the park’s perimeter, wondering if I could spot a cat out for an early dinner. I made my way to the dead end of an alley, where, suddenly, a motion caught my eye and a creature tumbled out of a nearby shrub. My heart jumped—but it wasn’t a fishing cat. I’d cornered one of the city’s ubiquitous monitor lizards. Stuck between me and a closed driveway gate, the bow-legged reptile scurried back and forth, then flopped up against the barrier, flaccidly sliding back down. I stepped aside and let it sprint back into the greenery.

The most reliable measurement of an animal’s intelligence may turn out to be how good it is at staying out of our way. Half a year after Ratnayaka began tracking Mizuchi, his GPS collar broke, likely caught in a drain or ruined by swimming. He continued to pop up in photos from camera traps for a month or two, but then went missing entirely. Ratnayaka hasn’t seen him in two years. It’s very possible he’s dead. But Ratnayaka believes someone would have reported a body if so, given all the busy places Mizuchi was known to wander. Maybe he got tired of city life, and cruised down Colombo’s canals to the riparian world of his forebears. More likely, he still roams the streets—a craftier thief than ever, diving into koi ponds and quacking triumphantly into the night.

The Wisdom of Running a 2,189-Mile Marathon

2018-05-13T09:00:00-04:00

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here.

Of all the things that could have broken Scott Jurek on a 2,189-mile run, it was a small tree root that crushed his spirit. He was 38 days into an attempt to beat the speed record for completing the full length of the Appalachian Trail, the mountainous hiking path that snakes along America’s East Coast, from northern Georgia to the top of Mount Katahdin, in Maine. Jurek, one of the greatest ultramarathoners of all times, was in trouble. After battling through a succession of leg injuries, then slogging through Vermont’s wettest June in centuries, he had to make up ground over a particularly merciless stretch of the trail, New Hampshire’s White Mountains. Delirious from just two hours of sleep following 26 straight hours of hiking, he was stumbling along the trail when he encountered the root in his path.

“As I saw it coming, I didn’t know what to do,” Jurek recalls in his new memoir, North: Finding My Way While Running the Appalachian Trail, co-written with his wife, Jenny. “Was I supposed to step around it or over it? I just couldn’t remember.” So he hit it and toppled. “I’d forgotten how to raise my legs,” he writes. “How to run like a sane person.”

Jurek’s victories in punishing 100-mile races since the late 1990s—plus a starring role in the writer Christopher McDougall’s best seller, Born to Run—have made him a distance-running celebrity. But tackling the Appalachian Trail forced him to dig deeper than he ever had before. Five weeks in, he was down more than a dozen pounds, and his ribs were visible. His eyes bulged, feral and unfocused. His body reeked of apple-cider vinegar as his sweat excreted excess ammonia. And his mind was beginning to crack. Late one night, he was mystified by the lights of a house he spotted on top of a mountain. A running partner had to explain that what he saw was the moon.

Jurek joins a tried-and-true literary tradition: the extreme athlete telling a harrowing tale of making it to the edge and back. From Edmund Hillary’s account of scaling Mount Everest to the long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad’s Find a Way, the genre offers athletes a chance to articulate how and why the toughest humans on the planet are capable of persevering when so many others would give up. The implicit promise is that readers will get a chance to learn something about how far the rest of us can push ourselves. And while we’re at it, perhaps we’ll glean the insight we really want: how far we should push ourselves. But what if extreme athletes are the worst sources of wisdom, and that is precisely what makes them fascinating?

Little, Brown

To hear Jurek tell it, forcing himself to the limit is purifying and transformational. “Though man’s soul finds solace in natural beauty, it is forged in the fire of pain,” he writes. But listen closely, and bodily transcendence is not exactly grist for motivational posters. Jurek’s pages are haunted by comrades who didn’t make it through the fire unscathed. He was joined for part of the trail by Aron Ralston, the hiker famous for amputating his own arm to free himself from a boulder. Jurek’s friend Dean Potter, a legendary climber and base jumper, died in a wing-suit accident days before Jurek began his trek. “I had known ultrarunners to finish races as their kidneys were shutting down and they were losing control of their bowels,” Jurek reports. He recalls a runner who fought through debilitating headaches to finish a 100-mile race and then died of a brain aneurysm.

Jurek and his kind are masters of walking themselves to the brink, but how they get there is only dimly understood. North, in fact, makes the case that a lack of curiosity on that score has been a secret of Jurek’s success. While he eagerly experiments with unconventional ways to improve his performance—veganism, Abraham Maslow’s theory of self-actualization, the samurai code—he has spent most of his career willfully ignoring the basic question of what possesses him to compete in such a punishing sport in the first place. “You rarely ask why when you win,” Jurek writes. For athletes at his level, endurance justifies itself: “We all kept going.”

Science backs up the notion that this unflinching drive forward is as essential as physical talent for competitors like Jurek, if not more so. Endurance is not all in your head, but as the journalist Alex Hutchinson explains in Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance, the brain plays a pivotal role in gauging exertion and ultimately dictating when it’s time to stop. “The psychology and physiology of endurance are inextricably linked,” Hutchinson writes. “Any task lasting longer than a dozen or so seconds requires decisions, whether conscious or unconscious, on how hard to push and when.” As things get tough, the mind constantly takes stock of physical reserves and negotiates with the body over just how long it can hold out.

This feedback loop is a relatively new model of endurance. Living creatures were long thought to be powered by some inscrutable, vital force. That belief gave way in the 20th century to what Hutchinson calls a “mechanistic—almost mathematical—view of human limits: Like a car with a brick on its gas pedal, you go until the tank runs out of gas or the radiator boils over, then you stop.” But more-recent research into the mind’s influence has made for much trickier analogies. All runners know that the racing experience is rarely linear. You might feel strong at the start, pained in the middle, then catch a second wind and charge to the finish. Some days you float; others you barely crawl. Physiologists broadly concur—despite plenty of heated debate over the specifics—that how your brain interprets your body’s signals sets the limit on the effort you can put in at any given moment. Tweak your mentality, and your sense of that limit can change.

William Morrow

Hutchinson tallies the conventional tools that any coach would recommend: positive thinking and visualization, good diet and hydration. He also delves into the more unsettling vanguard of expertise on breaking through the brain’s barriers. It includes “brain endurance training,” a weeks-long program of painfully boring computer tasks designed to help people fight off mental fatigue. Researchers, as well as an ever-growing scene of DIY enthusiasts, are trying transcranial direct-current stimulation (or “brain zapping”), which involves sticking dual electrodes to a subject’s skull in an effort to unlock the brain’s hidden reserves. (The practice is controversial, but some evidence indicates that it can enhance endurance and power.) In one series of experiments, scientists injected the powerful opioid fentanyl into the spines of cyclists so that they couldn’t register pain at all. The volunteers rode so hard that they couldn’t walk afterward—and they ended up pacing themselves so poorly that their times weren’t faster than usual.

Still, Hutchinson suggests, the single greatest impetus for stretching beyond your limits appears to be good old belief. No out-of-shape runner can crush a four-minute mile with motivation alone. But research shows that having an unshakable confidence in one’s ability and commitment reliably compels athletes to find that extra gear. “Training is the cake and belief is the icing,” Hutchinson reflects, “but sometimes that thin smear of frosting makes all the difference.” He offers a long list of studies that have sneakily goaded subjects into better performances:

Telling runners they look relaxed makes them burn measurably less energy to sustain the same pace. Giving rugby players a postgame debriefing that focuses on what they did right rather than what they did wrong has effects that continue to linger a full week later, when the positive-feedback group will have higher testosterone levels and perform better in the next game. Even doing a good deed—or simply imagining yourself doing a good deed—can enhance your endurance by reinforcing your sense of agency.

But beyond the boosts of trickery and experimental nudges, how is such belief instilled? How do you get the unrelenting sense of purpose that sustains, say, one of the world’s greatest ultra-marathoners? Not the way you might think: Avoiding introspection seems to be key. Hutchinson, a creditable runner himself (though his career never came close to matching Jurek’s), spends long passages puzzling over the mysteries of his own peak performances and dissecting his failures. Jurek, meanwhile, gives the impression that doubting his commitment hardly ever even occurred to him—until he hit the Appalachian Trail.

That challenge was different from any other he had attempted. His reflexive faith in glory was gone. This time he was motivated by an endurance athlete’s equivalent of a midlife crisis. In May 2015, Jurek was 41. He was a year past a promised retirement, and had been underperforming in races as he’d approached 40. His wife, Jenny, had just suffered a second miscarriage. Jurek felt buried under medical bills and a new mortgage, and he glimpsed salvation in running 84 consecutive marathons over “the gnarliest and oldest mountains in the world.”

Here was a chance to look inside himself and find direction. But beware self-scrutiny! Just seven days into navigating the rocky, often rain-soaked path, Jurek was already overcome by doubt. In agony, one quadriceps torn and the kneecap on his other leg severely inflamed, he was overtaken by the demon that success had so long shielded him from: “Why was I even out here in the first place?” he asked, hobbling beneath a canopy of oak branches. A mantra favored by one of the many veteran ultra-runners who accompanied Jurek for parts of the trail provided his answer: “This is who I am, and this is what I do.”

In other words, don’t ask why. Breaking through his own limits makes Scott Jurek Scott Jurek, for whom the mantra served to help reaffirm the value of his long-guarded myopia. Damp and miserable in North Carolina, he wrapped athletic tape around his battered legs and limped onward.

In her own more reflective way, Jennifer Pharr Davis—the very person whose record Jurek set out to break—ends up confirming the power of compulsive determination in her book The Pursuit of Endurance: Harnessing the Record-Breaking Power of Strength and Resilience. In 2011, she blitzed the Appalachian Trail in 46 days, 11 hours, and 20 minutes—an average of 47 miles a day. Though Davis’s ultrarunning credentials pale in comparison to Jurek’s, she’s no slouch: She’d already completed the trail twice and set the fastest time for women.

“Endurance isn’t a human trait; it is the human trait,” she writes, giving Jurek’s borrowed mantra more philosophical sweep. “We exist only as long as we persist.” Thanks to her gender, she had a sort of built-in Why? goading her. Male runners hold the world record in all commonly contested distances—from sprints to ultramarathons—by considerable margins. The best physical traits for taking on extreme distances on the scale of the Appalachian Trail, though, remain mysterious; men’s larger muscles and greater lung capacity may not hold up against women’s lighter frames and superior fat-burning abilities. As a sample of one, Davis couldn’t clinch the case, of course, but being a woman impelled her to prove herself on the trail.

Viking

Being a woman also gave her a reason to hang up her hiking shoes once the proof was in. “After the birth of my daughter, a part of me knew that I would never again be able to pursue an extended [trail record] with success,” she writes. Her body wasn’t the obstacle. You could say blinkered obsession was. “My transition to motherhood did not take a physical toll that would prevent me from setting a trail record, but emotionally I am no longer capable of putting my needs first for forty-six days.”

In detailing the loss of her competitive drive, Davis converges with Jurek, for whom extreme endurance is more a calling than a choice: Trail feats could no longer define her when something else did. Davis still glorifies endurance, and as she interviews many of the trail’s aging former record holders, she confesses to a certain envy of those who have never given up arduous regimens. “They have kept a part of themselves that I have let go,” she writes wistfully, a woman long wedded to tackling extreme physical challenges outdoors. But her admiration is tinged with an awareness that forging on, too, demands sacrifices. Most people find that there are many things well worth stopping for.

Not Jurek. After tripping over the root in New Hampshire, he picked himself up, charged forward in his delirium for another week, and defeated Davis’s time by a slim three hours: He finished in 46 days, 8 hours, and 7 minutes. Since then, two people have already beaten his record.

This article appears in the June 2018 print edition with the headline “The 2,189-Mile Marathon.”

Why Is This Deer Licking This Fox?

2017-10-23T10:19:36-04:00

When Chris Lowe first saw the buck stoop to lick the small, silver-speckled fox, he thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him. He’d just gotten back from a run on Santa Catalina, a remote Southern Californian island where he studies sharks, and came upon the two animals in the scrub. Mule deer and island foxes, the rascally miniature descendants of gray foxes, are everyday sights on Catalina’s grassy hills. But to see them nuzzling was downright weird.

Was the buck simply nibbling on a plant behind the fox? Had the fox happened to hop in front of the buck’s face? Lowe dashed into his apartment to grab his camera, and made it to the window to catch the deer taking another lick. The fox, docile in the shade of its antlered friend, wasn’t just tolerating the apparent cleaning, Lowe realized. “It looked like it was actually enjoying this,” he says.

Lowe tweeted a picture of the curious scene a few hours later, and it quickly racked up several thousand likes and retweets. In the image, the buck has its pursed lips planted on the fox’s forehead. The fox, its eyes closed, resembles a dog getting a good behind-the-ears scratch. People responding to Lowe’s tweet were captivated by the strange pairing. It was adorable—in one person’s words, “a Disney moment!” And no one had ever seen anything quite like it.

Well, no one except Michael Cove. To match Lowe’s tweet, Cove offered picture of his own: a lean doe in a forest rubbing noses with a cat. “We get this all the time in the Keys ... interesting that it is happening on islands,” he wrote. Then he brought the party down: “Certainly a pathway for disease transmission.”

One of a few cat-licking incidents Michael Cove’s motion-triggered cameras have captured (Michael Cove)

Cove, a mammologist at North Carolina State University who spends several months each year on the Florida Keys, has in fact spotted several peculiar meetings between the islands’ diminutive Key deer and other creatures. Motion-triggered cameras he’s set up around a wildlife refuge on one of the islands have photographed a deer dancing around a peacock, and a deer getting its face groomed by raccoon. There are a few more cases with cats, including a time off-camera that Cove passed a dumpster and saw two deer licking the same cat at once. (“The Florida Keys are an interesting place,” he says.)

Cove speculates that cut-off places like the Keys and Catalina, which is one of California’s eight Channel Islands, have two features that could encourage such interspecies intermingling. The most prominent is a lack of large predators. The islands’ deer have lived for generations on verdant floating worlds devoid of wolves, mountain lions, and other sharp-toothed threats. It’s possible their isolation has granted them a peace of mind that mainland deer can’t afford. Perhaps by now they don’t even know they could be afraid of other curious creatures.

The second is geography. Since an island’s inhabitants have limited land to roam, it’s easy for them to bump into each other. And as Cove points out in a new research paper in the journal Mammalian Biology, the scattered centers of human activity in the Keys attract animals that can find easy meals, pulling them into an even tighter orbit. The paper focuses on the Key deer and raccoons, but the same could likely be said of cats and island foxes, the latter of which are known to beg tourists for food and sneak off with your peanut butter even though you left it safely on your campsite’s picnic table, you swear.

These two factors account for a greater probability of animal-to-animal encounters on islands, but they don’t explain what would convince a deer to run its tongue over a cat or fox in the first place. Moreover, there’s evidence that this licking isn’t an island thing exclusively: Deer are occasionally spotted giving tongue baths to cats, at least, in mainland backyards. The exact motivation behind this behavior is much harder to pin down.

There’s a temptation to describe their interactions as mutually beneficial, in line with the natural world’s other astounding instances of species-to-species symbiosis. When Lowe first saw the buck and fox together, for example, he was reminded of underwater “safe zones,” where “predators and prey all line up to get cleaned” by small fish that munch on parasites.

Yet as Gary Roemer, an ecologist at New Mexico State University, points out, scientists reserve the concept of mutualism specifically for relationships in which both sides benefit in ways that help them survive. The dynamic is conceivable for Key deer and raccoons; in Cove’s camera-trap photos, a slinking raccoon takes a doe’s snout into its paws and nibbles around the patient animal’s eyes and ears, probably hungry for a snack of ticks. Neither Cove nor Roemer, who spent years studying island foxes earlier in his career, however, are convinced licking does much for the ecological fitness of deer, foxes, or cats.

This raccoon has also been photographed by a camera trap grooming a doe. (Michael Cove)

Both researchers suggested what might be a more obvious benefit for the foxes and cats: Getting licked feels good. “Maybe deer are getting those hard to reach places,” Cove says. As for the deer, ocean breezes cover islands—foxes and cats included—in salt. Cove has a theory that deer on islands particularly might be lured into the cleanings by a little extra seasoning.

But Cove’s tweet about disease transmission also underscores the much more ominous way these pictures can be read. Even if it feels and tastes nice, contact between animals isn’t necessarily positive, because it can cripple populations by passing along rabies, roundworms, and plenty of other viruses and parasites. These dangers are especially threatening in locations where the entirety of a species resides. Key deer and island foxes, both endemic to their respective coastal islands, have each been pushed to the edge of extinction in the past. If their newly observed canoodling sessions hint at any larger changes in island ecosystems, they conceivably are causes of concern.

But Roemer cautions against the impulse to read anything more into a few documented instances of deer licking smaller and probably salty animals than what they perhaps most clearly seem to be: two wild creatures inquisitive enough to give each other a closer look. “This is probably a novel, random, curious interaction,” he says of the buck and the fox. “It probably doesn’t have much significance either from an evolutionary or an ecological standpoint.”

(Roemer doesn’t buy the salt theory, either: If plants and rocks are also coated by the breeze, he reasons, it wouldn’t make sense for a deer to go through the trouble of tracking down a moving, claw-possessing island resident for tastiness alone.)

Busted (Chris Lowe / California State University Shark Lab)

Still, randomness leaves open two opposite conclusions about interspecies encounters like these. It’s possible—if not certain—that animals bump into each other in all kinds of undiscovered ways. “[Camera traps] are opening our eyes to just how fascinating the natural world is,” Cove says. “There are tons of species interactions that we might have never noticed just casually walking around the woods and stuff.” Key deer might not lick cats for a reason, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do it often.

Then again, it might be misguided to say what all deer on an island do in the first place. “More and more, we’re recognizing that, just like us, animals have different personalities,” Roemer says. “Sometimes they do bizarre things.” While working on one of the Channel Islands, he befriended an exuberant island fox named Josie, who made a game of goading a nature conservancy’s surly hunting dog into chasing her up trees.

So maybe it was an especially bold buck and a uniquely lonely fox that met under that fading afternoon sun on Santa Catalina Island. They neared each other in the brush of the only land they’ve ever known. And when they were close enough to touch, they were both filled with enough wonder to decide: why not?

The Dark Side of That Personality Quiz You Just Took

2017-07-13T11:58:00-04:00

I am the Danube River.

My spirit is sparkling and swift. I yearn for new experiences and deep connections with people. I’m adaptable, but to a fault; I rarely see danger ahead. I’m capable of infidelity without much remorse. I’m also great at ceramics.

So says Meet Yourself As You Really Are, the oldest, longest, and WTF-est personality quiz I’ve taken. Published in 1936, Meet Yourself is a 336-page home-psychoanalysis test that promises to “‘X-ray’ the reader’s fundamental character.” It does so with an interminable line of questions both probing and random. Are your parents dead? Have you ever had the sensation of standing outside your own body? Do Mickey Mouse cartoons freak you out? What do you think of unskimmed milk?

As you tally “yes” and “no” answers, the book directs you to new sections based on your responses. Somewhere in the middle, you’re categorized as one of 15 rivers—the Nile, Seine, Thames, Missouri, and so on—and eventually you’re offered long-winded personality breakdowns. “As you travel across the network of questions and data by your private track, your story unfolds and your character is explained,” the introduction teases. The book has been described as a Freudian Choose Your Own Adventure, which is accurate enough: It’s like Give Yourself Goosebumps, but instead of escaping the Carnival of Horrors at the end, you learn that you have commitment problems.

Clearly, personality quizzes have some sort of perennial appeal. Facebook newsfeeds are filled with BuzzFeed quizzes and other oddball questionnaires that tell you which city you should actually live in, which ousted Arab Spring ruler you are, and which Hogwarts house you belong in. But these new online quizzes have a dark edge that their analog predecessors didn’t. In the wake of the U.S. election, a secretive data firm hired by Donald Trump’s campaign boasted that it has been using quizzes for years to gather personal information about millions of voters. Its goal: the creation of digital profiles that can predict—and possibly exploit—Americans’ values, anxieties, and political leanings.

Whether this firm, Cambridge Analytica, has actually used predictive profiles to influence people isn’t certain; reports suggest it hasn’t, at least not directly. But the company’s methods nonetheless expose the growing scale of personality analysis online—and the dangers that come with it. On the internet, anything you do is like taking a personality quiz: Everywhere you click reveals something about you. And you’re not the only one who sees the results.

On Meet Yourself’s spine, a silver-painted mirror depicts the personality quiz’s allure: See yourself as you really are. What happens when the mirror is two-way?

* * *

No one seems to know when the personality quiz first gained a foothold in popular culture. The journalist Sarah Laskow has traced its origin in America at least as far back as the late 19th century, “when ladies’ magazines started gaining traction and the yellow press would try anything to sell papers.” But the quiz has persisted with remarkable consistency since, with spikes in popularity during a quick magazine boom immediately post-WWII, the Cosmopolitan quizzes of the 1960s and ’70s, and today’s ubiquitous BuzzFeed quizzes.

This stretch neatly overlaps with the history of the popular quiz’s buttoned-up, high-achieving sibling: the personality test. In-depth psychological assessments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator began popping up in the first half of the 20th century for the purpose of scanning and sorting employees in industrial workplaces. While many of these tests, including the Myers-Briggs, have since been dismissed by the scientific community as unreliable—if not dangerously discriminatory—they, too, have persisted, perhaps in part because they at least provide a framework for otherwise-difficult office conversations. Somewhere around 10,000 companies, 2,500 colleges and universities, and 200 government agencies still use the Myers-Briggs in the U.S. today, including the majority of Fortune 500 companies.

Affiliation with these more legitimate-seeming forms of personality analysis has always given the personality quiz a vague air of authority. Indeed, if there’s any one way to characterize quizzes’ mystique, it’s probably that, through all their many iterations, they have somehow managed to tightrope-walk the line between entertainment and science, or at least something approaching science. “BuzzFeed quizzes are crafted to create the illusion of truth, or potential truth,” writes the journalist Caroline O’Donovan, in explaining the fad. She quotes Summer Anne Burton, one of BuzzFeed’s editors: “You sort of write them like horoscopes, with tidbits people can relate to.”

Meet Yourself discovered this strategy long before today’s click-miners. The book’s co-authors, the British novelist William Gerhardie and the Spanish aristocrat Prince Leopold Loewenstein—whose son, incidentally, went on to be the financial manager of the Rolling Stones—flip freely between promises of profound insights and guarantees of fun.

If the limited information out there about the book’s critical reception is any indication, people have never taken Meet Yourself too seriously. A short review in a March 1937 issue of Ohio’s Piqua Daily Call deems it “a fairly amusing way of filling in an odd hour or so,” and includes this sick 1930s burn: “If you sit down prayerfully with it and answer all of its impertinent questions, you will never again be phased by any little thing like an income tax or civil service examination blank.” Decades later, a columnist for The Independent ran into the book on a trip with her boyfriend to her parents’ house, and cracked up when it announced to the family that the boyfriend was “a conqueror of women.”

As BuzzFeed’s quizzes really started gaining steam a few years ago, a deluge of think-pieces attempted to make sense of why people just can’t get enough of them, even when they clearly have little to do with reality. Reasons included narcissism, existential searching, and boredom. Laskow made the case that people simply like talking about themselves. These probably are all true, to some extent. But they overlook something deeper about the nature of personality itself.

* * *

Simine Vazire believes that a good personality test rarely tells you anything you don’t already know. As director of the Personality and Self-Knowledge Lab at the University of California, Davis, she studies how people come to understand who they are. “We know a lot just by being in our bodies, by being ourselves,” she says. Tests promising to unveil hidden truths about their takers—tests known as projective in psychology—are mostly bogus.

What tests offer instead, Vazire suggests, is reflection. “When you have someone summarize to you what you just told them, it gives you a sense of, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s what I was trying to say.’ I think this is just a version of that,” she says. “Because you’re talking about yourself, and you’re answering a bunch of questions about yourself, a test can summarize this information for you. It can give you a precise or better language for summarizing yourself, even if it’s based on what you told it.”

This reflection isn’t the quasi-mystical type of self-knowledge Meet Yourself claims to be after. It doesn’t show you as you really are, but rather helps you articulate who you know yourself to be.

That distinction might sound trivial, but it actually makes a critical point about how personality functions. In its textbook definition, personality is all about patterns: “individual differences in characteristic patterns of thinking, feeling, and behaving,” as the American Psychological Association puts it. Personality, in other words, is not some set thing. It’s the result of a messy web of tendencies and habits, all informed by some incalculable mix of biology, disposition, and learned behavior.

That makes personality slippery. While psychologists debate the granular details of its definition, what it amounts to is that personality is something of a paradox. People tend to have a sense of their own character, but this sense is never complete. We know ourselves, but we don’t.

This is why people love personality quizzes. Beyond vanity and narcissism and harmless fun, taking a personality quiz helps me get out of my own head, to see whether my experience of myself matches up with how others experience me. This is the same reason I sometimes catch myself staring into the mirror even after I’ve double-checked that my fly is zipped and fretted over my oh-so-slightly thinning hair. There’s an element of affirmation, even awe and wonder, to the reflection. That is me in the world.

In this light, personality quizzes actually appear pretty beneficial, or at least innocuous. And maybe they would be, if they left me to my own musings and no one else ever saw the results. But a psychological need for self-reflection gets complicated when the mirror also snatches up information for other people to use.

* * *

In 2008, Michal Kosinski joined a research project that helped revolutionize how data about people is collected. As a graduate student in Cambridge University’s Psychometrics Centre, a department that studies online psychological assessment, he and his classmate David Stillwell distributed a short personality quiz on Facebook that told people how they rated among psychology’s “big five” personality traits: openness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism (OCEAN, for short). Upon receiving their results, quiz-takers had the option of sharing their Facebook profiles with Kosinski and Stillwell.

It didn’t take long for the two researchers to amass the largest-ever collection of psychometric scores paired with Facebook profiles. “It was surprisingly easy to get people engaged,” says Kosinski, who’s now a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford’s graduate school of business. “[Stillwell] just sent it to his friends on Facebook. Those friends took the questionnaire, then shared it on their profiles, and suddenly you had thousands of people taking it every day.” Over a few years, Kosinski and Stillwell gathered info from millions of Facebook users.

The two researchers used this data to build a new system for predicting people’s personalities. With access to their subjects’ OCEAN traits and Facebook information side by side, Kosinski was able to correlate what people were like with the personal details available about them online—Facebook likes, gender, age, and so on. Soon, he had an algorithm that, based on analyzing Facebook likes alone, could guess how people think, feel, and act—that messy web of tendencies and habits—with startling accuracy. With 70 likes, the model could predict someone’s personality, as measured by a 100-question personality test, better than that person’s friends could. With 300 likes, it could outperform a husband or wife.

This predictive approach pioneered by Kosinski is what stirred up so much controversy in the U.S. election. Kosinski himself had nothing to do with the data firm hired by Trump’s campaign. Motherboard and Das Magazin have reported that his research appears to have been brought over to Cambridge Analytica by a young colleague of his with ties to the firm’s parent company, the London-based Strategic Communication Laboratories Group, or SCL. (Cambridge Analytica denies that the company or its methodologies have any connection to Kosinski.) After the election, the firm first declared that its brand of “psychographic” profiling played a major role in Trump’s victory, then conceded that it never actually used the approach to influence voters.

Whatever the impact so far, predictive methods like Kosinski’s and Cambridge Analytica’s are pushing open the door to a new—and unsettling—stage of personality analysis. It’s no revelation that personal data can be collected online, and there are already plenty of ways this data can be used to influence people: In politics, for instance, Barack Obama targeted individual voters with psychometrics well before Cambridge Analytica was even formed. But Kosinski saw just how much information can be gained. With personality quizzes, he found what might be the most direct route into people’s hearts and minds yet.

Kosinski never requires Facebook users to give up their profiles to take his quizzes. But the worrying implication of his kind of approach is that online personality analysis can easily blur the line between opting in and opting out. When algorithms can be trained to accurately infer your personality based on anything you do, the internet is a personality quiz—or, at least, it can be, so long as each page visit, web search, and “like” can be gathered and correlated.

Online, before you even click on a quiz, you’re already filling something out.

* * *

There are a lot of good reasons to worry about this technology. Imagine an advertising company that knows you’re self-conscious about your weight, so tries to sell you diet pills. Or—in a hypothetical that often comes up in this kind of discussion—imagine a political campaign that knows you’re prone to anxiety, so targets you with ads about the dangers of the Islamic State. “Big data companies already know your age, income, favorite cereal and when you last voted,” notes a New York Times report on Cambridge Analytica. “But the company that can perfect psychological targeting could offer far more potent tools: the ability to manipulate behavior by understanding how someone thinks and what he or she fears.”

While Kosinski thinks people’s rapidly diminishing privacy online is indeed dangerous, he’s quick to point out that there are potential benefits to personality profiling, too. Targeted ad campaigns could get kids to quit smoking, he suggests. Personalized political messages could inform voters, not pull their strings.

Companies like Cambridge Analytica have a commercial stake in exaggerating their techniques’ reach, as well. “What they’re selling is not exactly snake oil, though it can work as a placebo for panicky candidates who are down in the polls with weeks to go before Election Day,” the journalist Leonid Bershidsky has argued. “But just like artificial intelligence or, say, the blockchain, [data science has yet to produce] killer apps that can ensure a political victory or business success.”

I’m not convinced the nerdy podcasts and obscure track-and-field clubs I like on Facebook will hand the reins of my life to some shadowy corporation anytime soon. But I do think the threat is real—real enough, at least, that I wouldn’t give away my profile information for a personality assessment.

Something Kosinski told me gave me an uneasy feeling I haven’t been able to shake, too. There’s research that has been done on people’s trust in algorithms. A subject talks to an expert on a topic, and the expert offers some sort of insight on that topic, backed by one of two possible justifications: either a) the expert has thought about this for a long time, or b) the expert’s computer calculated the solution. The results show that people are more likely to trust the computer. “We’re being trained by algorithms that they’re always right,” Kosinski says.

Surely, such trust isn’t always misplaced. Vazire, the UC Davis psychologist, admits that she’d probably trust an algorithm over an expert—if she knew the algorithm to be accurate. But what if it’s not? What if, say, it’s built upon data collected by researchers who are prone to error and bias? Or what if it’s intentionally incorrect—sneakily incorrect? Conceivably, an algorithm could know so much about you that it could say exactly what would make you think, act, or feel a certain way.

That’s where the impulse to take a personality quiz keeps me up at night. I’m wired to seek out ways to reflect on who I am, but who I am is slippery—and that makes me open to suggestions. If people’s faith in algorithms continues to grow, it might not be long before I trust a computer to tell me about my personality more than I trust friends or family—or more than I trust myself.

That’s a strange future to imagine. But, hey, I am the Danube River. I’m adaptable. I’m sure I’ll adjust.

Your Stories of Battling Unconscious Bias

2017-06-07T15:05:43-04:00

Editor’s Note: This article previously appeared in a different format as part of The Atlantic’s Notes section, retired in 2021.

Is it possible to be prejudiced without realizing it? In “Is This How Discrimination Ends?,” the writer Jessica Nordell unpacked the complex and controversial science of implicit racial bias—the idea that people can act in biased ways even when they sincerely reject discriminatory ideas. Many readers responded with stories of their own experiences with bias, whether witnessing it, being the victim of it, or recognizing it in themselves.

On the receiving end, Sherletta McCaskill, who’s black, detailed her time working at an organization that serves homeless youth:

I was promoted to a new position but paid less than my male white co-worker, though I had more experience. This same co-worker revealed to me that management said I needed to “prove myself” first. To the organization’s credit, this division of the company did invest in diversity and anti-racism training. However, the results were very shallow. Workers of color who spoke up were seen as divisive, while workers who “stayed in their place” were rewarded. We could speak about issues of race as long as we didn't make white people feel uncomfortable.

Another reader recalled a bank manager’s two reasons for why he brought a white man with a high-school degree into a management-training program, but not the head teller—a black woman who’d graduated college:

“He reminded me of myself when I was just starting out.” And, even more damning (but still totally unconscious): “He just looked like a banker.”

And then there’s this cringe-worthy story, from Marilyn Mackay:

In 1961, I moved to the U.S. Virgin Islands, which at that time was populated easily by 85 percent black residents. It was Saturday morning as I walked down the main street of Charlotte Amalie and saw a large crowd of white tourists who had just disembarked from a cruise ship. They had all stopped walking down the street staring at something behind me. As I reached them, a gentleman asked me what was happening. I turned around and saw a large group of black teenagers leaving our movie theater en masse. I looked at him puzzled and asked, “What do you mean ‘what’s happening?’” He said, “that mob over there.”

I smiled as kindly as I could and said, “It’s Saturday morning and those teenagers just left the movie theater.” One could see their terror turn to mortification as they realized their reactions and why.

Other readers admitted times they caught their own biases in action. For this woman, it happened while she was playing tennis with three friends:

We were the only people on the courts when we started. After about an hour or so, a young black male with a hoodie pulled up over his head wearing baggy sweat pants came to the tennis courts and started walking the perimeter just outside of the fence where we were playing.

Although I don’t live in the development where I was playing tennis, I know there aren’t many people of color who live there. There was an immediate tension and distraction among the tennis players, and though no one said anything out loud, all turned their attention towards the hooded interloper. What is he doing here? He doesn’t belong here. Is he here to hurt us? Steal from us? Break into our cars?

I can only imagine what was going through everyone’s heads, because, sadly, these questions were going through mine. You see, I am a black female.

The other three players on the court were white females. While I was able to quickly de-escalate my alarm because of my personal experience and who I am (He’s not doing anything but walking around, he may be new to the area and is just out exploring … ), I don’t think my tennis friends were able to get there quite that quickly.

Then I realized something: I wouldn’t have been uncomfortable at all if I wasn’t with my white friends. I was channeling their alarm in this situation. So, I started talking to them and getting everyone to focus on the tennis match and soon, everyone seemed to calm down. The black male was soon joined by three black young ladies, and after checking out the courts, they went to the playground area and sat around on the swings talking.

A retired English teacher, Jerry Wowk, shared an embarrassing moment in working with lower-level high-school students, which his school classified as “13s”:

One day I had booked my 13s into the computer lab, and about 10 minutes into the class, a social studies teacher came in with his class. Apparently we’d accidentally been double-booked into the same space. I recognized some of his students from my own higher-level classes. Being relatively new at the school and wanting to get along with everyone, I asked him if he was perhaps in a bind for lab time, as in my case it was just my 13s. He looked at me, and replied, “Just?” I never forgot that, right to the end of my career and in the decade-plus I’ve been retired.

I edited “Is This How Discrimination Ends?,” and the big question motivating the investigation was whether or not prejudice could be nipped at the bud before playing out in these different ways. The story profiles a team of researchers at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who are working on an approach to reducing bias. In the tech industry and other progressive fields, “unconscious-bias trainings” are already a fad—but unlike many of these trainings, the Madison team’s approach has produced scientific evidence that it actually works:

Many psychology experiments that try to change implicit bias treat it as something like blood pressure—a condition that can be adjusted, not a behavior to be overcome. The Madison approach aims to make unconscious patterns conscious and intentional. “The problem is big. It’s going to require a variety of different strategies,” Devine says. “But if people can address it within themselves, then I think it’s a start. If those individuals become part of institutions, they may carry messages forward.”

A handful of readers wrote to highlight other programs that they found effective in stomping out unintended prejudice. Lark Birdsong mentioned Jefferson Unitarian Church, a religious organization “steeped in programs for helping folks realize their bias.” And a few others pointed to a Brooklyn-based program called Be More America:

It was a six-week program that examined how biases are formed in the mind, and then taught the participants an array of mindfulness techniques (such as meditation and stereotype replacement) to become aware of and release the habits and predispositions they held with regards to race.

The impact of these training programs is incredibly difficult to study, so hopefully research can shed more light on what techniques are most effective. If you have a detailed story to share about a training that succeeded (or didn’t) in your workplace, let us know.

Retracing Our Steps

2016-03-10T08:00:00-05:00

Ten years ago, Beth Py-Lieberman learned she had breast cancer. She was fairly certain it was going to kill her. It didn’t matter that her odds of survival were great. She’d watched her mother die from the disease several years earlier, and now the end felt inevitable.

What upset Beth the most was that she was too young. At 46, she was 15 years below the median age of diagnosis in America. She had two kids, a good career. She ate well. She swam. In the past few years, she’d taken up jogging, mostly up and down Sligo Creek Park, a stretch of woods along a creek that meandered by her house in Silver Spring, Maryland.

During chemotherapy, Beth kept running. She’d wait a few days to get over the wooziness from the chemicals pumped into her veins, then force herself out the door, running every two days until her next treatment, three weeks later. To get through a few miles, she’d play a game with herself: Her route in the park took her by four bridges along a creek, so she equated each bridge with one of the four chemo sessions she had to endure. You’ve made it to one, she’d tell herself as she passed the first bridge. Now just get to the next.

Sure enough, the treatment worked. Today, Beth, who was my boss a few years ago at Smithsonian magazine, is as animated as ever—and, surprisingly, still goes for runs by those bridges in Sligo Creek Park. While the route has never stopped reminding her of that awful period of her life, her perspective on feeling so close to death has shifted.

“This is a weird thing to say, but sometimes I’m nostalgic for that period,” she says. “A huge part of maturing for me was saying, ‘Oh my god, I could die soon. I want my kids to remember me as a kind mother. I want my husband to remember me as a kind wife.’ So I became a gentler mother. I became a better wife. I’d never had a transformation like that before in my life.”

All runners know that a familiar trail is a time machine. Like Beth’s bridges, the landmarks along any frequent route become mementos of every variety of experience. A look at the science behind memory suggests runners’ most trodden paths have a secret benefit, too: They not only have the power to transport us back to the past, but help us deal with it when we arrive—even look back on it more fondly. How this happens gets at the very heart of how memories are made.

* * *

Many of running’s psychological benefits already are well-known. It releases dopamine and increases blood flow in the brain, which not only makes people feel better than if they’d stayed on the couch, but helps them think sharper and more creatively, too. In a study published this month in the Journal of Psychology, a group of Finnish and American researchers found that—in lab rats, at least—distance running actually generates more new brain cells in adults than other types of exercise. And earlier studies have shown that running especially increases neurons in mice’s hippocampus, the area of the brain that plays a key role in learning and memory.

So far, experiments that have looked at running’s effects on memory almost exclusively have tested its benefits for retention and voluntary recollection—i.e., concerted efforts to hold onto stuff like where you left the car keys. But what about memories that come to mind that you’ve made no conscious effort to recollect—things you might not have thought of otherwise, maybe even would like to forget? What effect does running have on involuntary memories, like Beth’s associations with the four bridges—and how does it influence what we do with these memories once they show up?

In college, I ran track. A lot of the most triumphant moments in my life came from racing, as well as some of my most depressing failures. In early 2009, my senior year, for instance, my goal was to qualify for a distance relay team at the Division-III National Championships. But I ran a string of slow races and watched that dream go down the toilet.

While training for that relay, I’d sometimes run for miles and think of nothing besides it. I fell into a particularly vivid fantasy one morning on a trail around campus, where my mind played out every step of the perfect race, from the taut silence before the starter’s pistol to hugs and tears on the medal stand. The next day, I caught my mind repeating the same fantasy—on the exact same section of that trail. I’d somehow managed to associate the vision with a pair of two thick wooden fence posts, which seemed to nudge the memory back into my thoughts whenever I passed them.

A reminder of my ambitions was great while I was still chasing them, but horrible after I’d missed my chance. The fence posts brought that imagined glory to mind for months beyond the track season, repeatedly forcing me to think about how I’d fallen short.

According to John Mace, a cognitive psychologist at Eastern Illinois University, involuntary memories like this “tend to come to mind when the mind is wandering, when you’re not focused on a particular task and daydreaming while doing something routine”—something like scrubbing dishes, riding the bus, or, yes, running. (Running itself has yet to be tested for prompting involuntary recollections, as far as Mace knows, but it’s common for people to have them “while they’re driving, especially familiar routes, and what’s going on mentally in running should be very similar,” he says)

The reason the fence posts haunted me is that they acted as “perfect cues”—physical signs that pull a wandering mind back to whatever it was focused on the last time you encountered them. Perfect cues aren’t required for involuntary memories to take place, Mace says—and certainly they aren’t limited to running—but the long stretches that runners cover day after day provide plenty of opportunities for triggers.

To anyone who runs often, this shouldn’t be very surprising. Thinking back on a decade’s worth of routes, I’ve realized whole periods of my life are mapped onto buildings, benches, and trail markers, all of which conjure memories years after they’re made. On Manhattan's Lower East Side, a crop of storefronts makes me think of a podcast I listened to one time as I ran by. Outside of Philadelphia, a park's playground rekindles anger I once tried to run off after a fight with a woman I was dating.

I asked a bunch of runners, from casual joggers to professional racers, if they have similar connections, and their answers included a dip in a road that evokes the movie Red Dawn and a house that brings to mind a Vivaldi Violin concerto. Elkanah Kibet, a Kenyan-born American marathoner, thinks of nursing tendonitis when he runs by a cold river on visits to his home village, where he grew up without ice.

Mace couldn’t offer a definitive explanation for why involuntary memories actually occur, because psychologists haven’t been able to pin them down to any single mental apparatus. But regardless of exact mechanical definition, no one disagrees involuntary memories can pack a special punch. They put the past in front of us whether we want to see it or not. And while that can be vexing—or damaging, in extreme cases like trauma—it’s also the source of a running route’s powers.

* * *

To gain insight into the past, you need what’s called psychological distance. “You want to see [an event] in a different light—in your mind’s eye, if you will, from a third person perspective,” says Kevin Ochsner, a social psychologist at Columbia University.

Why psychological distance is effective has a lot to do with how memories are made. Memory, it turns out, has a dirty secret—it’s an illusion, it doesn’t show us the past as it was, but rather as what we think it should be. “How you feel about a past emotional event now always will color the way you recollect it,” Ochsner says. “If you feel differently about an event now, you’ll misrecollect it to be more consistent with your current feelings than it might have originally been.”

This applies to recollections both voluntary and involuntary. When the brain encodes a memory, it takes in all the sensory elements of an experience and scatters them to different neural regions throughout the cerebral cortex. To retrieve them, it has to reassemble the memory piece by piece. So even though memories seem instantaneous and unified when they appear, our minds actually have remarkable agency in reshaping them.

“There’s no VCR tape that’s an exact record of your life that’s ever stored,” Ochsner says. “[Memory’s] more like working with a document in Microsoft Word without track changes on. You open the document, edit it, and then stored it in the edited form. So when you bring it back to rework it, you don’t have the original anymore.”

This will terrify anyone who wants to cling to the notion that memory infallibly preserves your life’s most precious moments, but the truth is that memory’s built for adaptation, not conservation. It’s a tool for making sense of who and what we are in a big, confusing world. As Ochsner points out, we automatically rely on memories when we have to make snap decisions in new situations, for instance. We appear hardwired to take liberties in assembling memories into clear, usable narratives.

In the month’s following my bad college track season, my feelings about it changed. Running by the fence posts forced me to do the grunt work of sorting through my emotions instead of allowing time to bury them, so I slowly unknotted the tangle of disappointment and shame I carried from not living up to expectations. This was only half-intentional; mostly I’d just bounce my feelings around in the back of my mind for a mile or two, rarely making any conscious effort to clarify them. But I started to appreciate the chance I’d had to invest myself so deeply in something, even though I failed. Success is about process as much as achievement, right? Gradually, the memory turned into a lesson.

* * *

At the risk of sounding like I’m pitching a self-help book, I’d say that running a favorite route turns the wheels of a two-fold therapeutic process—a “physical and emotional context,” in Ochsner’s words, for working stuff out. A familiar route provide cues that encourage involuntary memories; the act of running it relaxes the mind to receive them, and—thanks to dopamine and running’s other cognitive boosters—puts us in the best possible state to deal with them when they come.

Running familiar routes, in other words, conjures our demons and gives us the tools we need to conquer them. It irons out the past, makes us see ourselves in a more positive light. The process isn’t always quick—it might take some months running by some fence posts, or a decade of passing some bridges—but runners orchestrate it every mile simply by letting their minds wander.

Beth doesn’t remember specifically how she developed a rose-tinted outlook on her illness, but she doesn’t doubt her runs in Sligo Creek Park helped. “I’m sure I was thinking through what the experience meant to me, and making slight adjustments as I processed how I was going to make the best of life,” she says.

She would have thought about her struggle without running, sure. But those four bridges have given her an opportunity to reflect on it in ways she wouldn’t have had without hitting the pavement all these years. She walks in the park more than she jogs in it now, out of a creeping worry about injury as she ages. But she admits it’ll be hard to hold back the pace once the weather gets nice. She misses the rush of a good run—and the clarity it brings. “I’m cleanly open to all sorts of things in the midst of a hard run,” she says. “My body is exhausted. My mind is earnest and sweet.”

How Social Media Is Changing The Way We Approach Death

2013-08-20T08:15:00-04:00

For a week last month, Scott Simon, the popular radio host of NPR's “Weekend Edition Saturday,” stayed by his mother's side in a Chicago hospital as she died. She ate and slept little, and spent her final nights singing show tunes with Simon and holding his hand. “We can get through this, baby,” she told him at one point. “The hardest part will be for you when it's over.”

I know these intimate details because I, like more than a million others, followed Simon on Twitter when news that he was sharing his hospital experience went viral. From July 22 to 29, @nprscottsimon tweeted about everything from the kindness of ICU nurses to the hassle of finding something comfortable to sleep on to his mother's tear-inducing deathbed wit.

Mother groans w/ pleasure--over flossing. "When they mention great little things in life, they usually forget flossing."
— Scott Simon (@nprscottsimon) July 28, 2013

Since his mother's passing, Simon's tweets have stirred up a national debate on social media's place in mourning and the appropriateness of making a matter as personal (and morbid) as death so public. The consensus seems to be that as social media-savvy generations age, death will creep its way onto platforms like Facebook and Twitter more and more. But questions remain. What will this do to us? How does talking more about death change the way we approach it, both when it’s close at hand and during our everyday, healthy lives?

Pictures of death as public as Simon's violate a century-old American taboo against the topic, says Lawrence Samuel, author of Death, American Style: A Cultural History of Dying in America. According to him, a handful of factors throughout the first half of the 20th century—World War I, the 1918 flu epidemic, modern medicine and the decline of religion—turned death into “this horrible little secret we have, instead of being the most natural thing in the world. Denial became the operative word, because death is oppositional to our culture's defining values, like youth, progress, and achievement.”

Death has now been able to make its way back into the conversation, he believes, thanks to “the narcissism of the self-esteem movement”—our culture's growing enthusiasm for sharing personal information, which opens “a very rare window into a forbidden dimension of life, which makes death part of everyday experience,” he says.

“People are very out and proud about their illnesses,” says Christian Sinclair, a hospice and palliative medicine doctor who co-founded the end-of-life care tweetchat #HPM. “Even before we had social media, we were beginning to see the story lines of 'I have cancer and this is what it's like to go through the treatments.' Social media encourages a lot more of that.”

T1: Important to recognize that families often refuse more comfort meds than just opioids. Anti-nausea, anti-anxiety, steroids, etc #hpm
— Christian Sinclair (@ctsinclair) August 15, 2013

Sinclair has watched numerous terminal patients turn to social platforms to share what it's like to live with their conditions, so followers can see their dying process unfold in real time alongside food photos, article links and vacation updates. “Social media is a natural extension of 'I want to share my illness experience with you,' because it allows you to develop a social network of both support and attention,” he says.

These online networks often help those suffering serious illnesses face down death in some of their darkest moments.

Chris: My biggest fear is that one day when you're gone I'll forget what you look like & what your voice sounds like... #heartbreaking
— Kate Granger (@GrangerKate) August 16, 2013

“The whole process is really therapeutic. Writing a tweet helps me rationalize things or reassure myself,” says Kate Granger, a British doctor who made headlines this year when she decided to forgo treatment for terminal cancer after five rounds of chemotherapy. She started tweeting about the last stages of her illness. Granger had originally taken up Twitter professionally to network and fundraise, but found a home for her struggles as her followers encouraged her to talk openly about her experience with the disease.

Social media support networks tend to enable more frequent and lower-stakes conversations about dying than traditional hospital support groups, which helps stave off the sense of isolation that usually accompanies life-threatening conditions, says Alicia Staley, a three-time cancer survivor and co-founder of the weekly tweetchat Breast Cancer Social Media (#BCSM). During Staley's most recent treatment, she found herself alone in a hospital bed at 3 a.m., in pain and scared. “Any of my west coast friends up?” she tweeted, and spent the next hour and a half talking through her worries with her followers. In the morning, a nurse told Staley she looked a lot better than the night before.

Okay - 5 minutes left! Tweet out your best advice for other cancer survivors that are braving the dating world. GO! #bcsm
— Alicia C. Staley (@stales) August 13, 2013

“It's hard to explain that kind of comfort,” says Staley. “When you create this virtual community, it's great because you get a glimpse into people's everyday lives. You see the good, you see the bad, you see the ups and downs. It's a great reminder of what life is really all about, how things keep moving, no matter how you're doing.”

Still, there are concerns that an increasing focus on social media might interrupt the lives of those approaching death more than improve them. “I sometimes worry that tweeting and sharing my experiences may detract my attention from focusing on my family at a crucial time,” says Granger, who has refused multiple requests from documentarians to film the end of her life. Tweeting only two or three times on each of her final days, she hopes, won't take too much of her time away from those actually by her side. “I want to share my experiences to open up the conversation about dying, and that is going to take a little sacrifice on my part,” she says.

It's easy to forget: cancer stomps on your confidence. Part of healing is regaining and sometimes redefining your best self. #bcsm
— Jody Schoger (@jodyms) August 13, 2013

For people following the sick and dying, Jody Schoger, another cancer survivor and BCSM co-founder, worries about the emotional toll of a growing conversation about death. The more you invest yourself in broad online networks, after all, the more deaths you're going to have to come to terms with. “You're getting this perception of death that we didn't have before,” she says. “It can seem like everyone has cancer. This is an aspect of social media that I'm not sure we're entirely emotionally caught up to.”

Yet for those in good health, Schoger and others agree that the potential benefits of digital talk about death still seem to outweigh its negative consequences.

For one, more conversations about the experience of dying open more channels for spreading accurate information about end-of-life options, says Sinclair. “The asymmetry of information that healthcare professionals hold over the rest of the public is diminishing because of tools on the internet,” he says. “I think where social media has the best possible impact is giving professionals a very easy medium to share good information about healthcare issues with the public at large.”

Schoger believes the more we talk and write about death, the easier dying becomes. “You can't control everything,” she says, “but if you know what's going to happen, and how it can happen, you can make some plans, know what kind of questions to ask, make your wishes known so that your family and your doctor know what you want.”

Others suggest that the most profound consequence of a greater openness about death on social media, though, will be less pragmatic, harder to grasp.

“Death is not like in the movies, with last words and your life flashing before your eyes. It is really sort of boring. It's normal and it happens to everybody,” Samuel says. “The point, I believe, is not that we should just be talking about death or tweeting about it [for its own sake], but that a fuller awareness of one's death makes life more meaningful. The best use of the technology is to share stories and to reach out to other people in real time. Death is one of the few universals that we have. It brings us together.”

Reading through so many nice message about my mother, it's so nice to see so many say, "I held my mother's hand today..."
— Scott Simon (@nprscottsimon) August 9, 2013

Simon, for his part, still hasn't given much thought to the larger implications of tweeting about his mother's death, but says he's open to the possibility that his 140-character windows into the end we must all eventually face helped pave the way for a conversation that will give our lives a bit more meaning.

“It's not that I think people should spend a lot of time thinking about death, but that they should spend more time thinking about the fact that our lives are precious and finite,” he says. “If we understand that death is manifest and it's ahead of all of us, I think that helps us appreciate the fact that every second and every hour is utterly precious, and we should spend it doing things that are worthwhile, that are uplifting, that make things better for those we love and strangers who deserve our care.”