May your pain be short and your pleasure long!

I have always been bad with pain.  The tiniest cut, from an early age, brought forth howls of despair. Usually, this would be followed by requests for bandages, the bigger the better.  At times my mother was placing bandages on wounds that were so small she could not even see them.  As I grew older, I became aware that I had a remarkably low pain threshold.  Watching other children in school fall and bleed only to get up and run off amazed me.  As I progressed through adolescence my mother would remark, “What on earth are you going do when you have to give birth?”  It was one of those questions that an adolescence feels a parent asks just to manipulate you.  Akin, to her other favourite, “You must learn to cook and clean now because one day you will have your own house!”  To this I always smugly replied, “Don’t worry, I’ll always have servants!”  This must have been particularly abrasive to my sweet mother who carried trays of breakfast to all of us in bed every morning, while Don Williams filled the house with his songs.  I only have to hear one of his songs to find myself hungering for tea and toast on a tray.

Being a coward about pain I asked everyone about what giving birth was really like.  One said it was the most amazing experience of her life.  Another babbled on about this small baby and how beautiful it was.  A third said ominously that one soon forgets the pain.  My mother said, in her day, you were expected to give birth in silence, a slight whimpering was tolerated but not for long.  You were expected to approach birthing in a ladylike way.  She looked at me with a forlorn expression before repeating, “I really don’t know how you will ever get through it!”  When I was pregnant people became much more honest.  One friend told me it was like having a knife plunged into your innards and twisted.  This was altogether too frighteningly honest I felt.

True to form, I was racing to hospital with every little twinge convinced the birth was imminent.  Surely, such excruciating squeezes meant the baby was on their way.   Medical staff said, in ominous tones, I would know it when the real contractions began.  Then, when the murderous contractions actually kicked in I understood exactly what they meant.  I distinctly remember not being ladylike about the whole business.  When asked about pain relief, I retorted “give me everything you’ve got and if that doesn’t work get a big club and knock me out”. At one point, I remember clearly instructing the medical staff to cut off my head and haul the baby out that way.   

My sister-in-law had an even more painful birth but within a matter of hours was saying she would be happy to have another baby soon.  It was as if her memory had selectively eradicated all the pain and suffering.  Today when reading a book, it suddenly all made sense.  It is by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize winner, entitled Thinking Fast and Slow.  It helps you understand why we make the choices we do in life.  In one section they carry out an experiment on a group of subjects.  The experiment was simple; each person would have their hand immersed in cold water 14 degrees for 60 seconds and at the end would be given a warm towel.  The second experiment lasted 90 seconds, the first 60 seconds was identical to the first and then for the last 30 seconds warm water would be bringing the temperature up by one degree.  The third experiment subjects were told would be a repeat of either the short or long experiment.  They were allowed to choose which.  A surprising 80% chose the 90 second immersion.  Despite this being obviously longer that the first.  What was going on?  According to Kahneman,

“The subjects who preferred the long episode were not masochists and did not deliberately choose to expose themselves to the worst experience; they simple made a mistake.  They chose to repeat the episode of which they had the less aversive memory.  Their decision was governed by a simple rule of intuitive choice: pick the option you like the most, or dislike the least.”

We are strongly influenced by the peak and the end.  That feeling of warming water was such a relief after the pain of the cold it managed to over-ride our rational brain.  Obviously, endings when dramatic/traumatic enough reach parts of our brain that have little to do with rational fact but are emotionally powerful.  Our intuition has lead us to make a mistake.  So too, the pain of giving birth when followed by the joy of a baby is simply edited out.

I used to find when teaching a class you could give a truly awful 40-minute lesson, boring, stilted with little content and follow it with a five-minute exciting game to end.  The classes would invariably close with kids laughing delightedly and a feeling that the lesson had been brilliant.  They had been fooled by the end.  It had dominated their experience and effectively wiped out the previous dire 40 minutes.  This influence also indicates why coping with dementia or a pain filled death etc. creates such an overriding despair in relatives.  A whole lifetime is forgotten and the agony of the last months or years over rides everything.  It almost manages to wipe out every joyous memory of a loved one. 

Our intuition is a powerful tool but also a flawed one, on occasion.  Or, as Kahneman puts it,

“It seems an inconsistency is built into the design of our minds.” 

Our memory has evolved to register the most intense moment (pain or pleasure the peak) and the feelings at the end of the episode.  This neglect of the duration will not serve our desire for pain to be short and pleasure to last.  In other words our instinctive preferences may be seriously flawed.  He ends with this warning.

“This is a bad case of duration neglect.  You are giving the good and the bad part of your experience equal weight, although the good part lasted ten times as long as the other.”

My wish for you - May your pain be ever short and your pleasure exceedingly long!

“Do you think I got washed in on the tide?”

Sam was amused his watch had stopped.  It had become a running joke in the family because his father Ted had ruined watches consistently for decades.  Now that his father was gone Sam found his shared ability to either stop watches or make them run slow forged a vital link with his dad.

It wasn't because they manhandled them or smashed them against corners of tables by accident.  This unusual talent to mess with watches was weirder than simple carelessness.  

His father had been a young man on holiday in a small coastal village when his ability to interfere with such devices first occurred.  He'd treated himself to a cheap watch.  It had cost less than a fiver so he had not expected it to last forever.  It had stopped by the time he wore it back to his basic bed and breakfast that evening.  Taking it back to the shop, the reluctant shopkeeper replaced it.  Two days later that watch also stopped and Sam was back in the small shop.  This time the shopkeeper was belligerent.

“What are you doing to my watches?” He asked Ted.

Ted responded,

“If you had enough turnover your watches wouldn't be such old stock that they've stopped working.”

The shopkeeper, a high pitched red haired Scotchman was livid and pulling a battery tester from under his counter took the watch battery out and tested it.  The battery had lost a lot of its charge and Ted had gloated in being proved right.  He proceeded to lecture the shopkeeper on the lifespan of all batteries.

“You do realise, even on the shelves, in packets, batteries run down?”

The shopkeeper’s face was as red as his hair and he muttered,

“Do you think I don’t know my own business?”

As he blustered, he took a fresh battery tested it and then inserted it into the watch.  Feeling righteous and successfully assertive about the whole business Ted left with a working watch once more.

It lasted three days before stopping again.  Ted was back in the shop aware that there would be unpleasantness ahead but determined nonetheless.  However, this time the Scotchman would not countenance any exchange or another battery.  Despite all Ted’s arguments he would respond with the same line, red eyebrows high in outrage

“Do you think I got washed in on the tide?”

Ted walked home defeated with this effective one liner.  He told himself such isolated tiny shops were probably filled with obsolete batteries/watches.   What on earth had he expected from such a rural location, so little frequented. 

Later that year he’d bought a fancy watch.  The type young men go for when they want to impress!  Ted had just met Sam’s mother and in his excitement to create a favourable image had lashed out on a hundred pound watch.  It looked good and on their first date Ted had admired the young girl opposite almost as much as his swanky new expensive timepiece.  With such a girl on one arm and another beauty on his left ticking away Ted had experienced one of those rare moments of sweet triumph that come too rarely in life.  As it turned out he won the girl’s heart but the watch died almost as quickly as its cheap predecessor.

Ted was relieved that the five year guarantee on his new watch meant he was able to get it fixed for free in the sleek fancy city shop he’d bought it in.  However, after returning to the shop twice with the stopped watch he noted that the suave young salesman was becoming as suspicious as the red-haired Scotchman.  He commented to Ted,

“You do realise, sire, that the watch is not waterproof.  If you get it wet that will effect the mechanism.”

Ted pointed out that he didn't get it wet unless perhaps a drop of rain on the way to work.  The salesman seized on this and pointed out that if Ted had wanted to wear the watch in downpours he should have opted for the waterproof model in the first place.  There followed an insidiously pointless and fruitless argument about the type of rain Ted walked in.  Had it been the soft Irish rain as Ted claimed, or the tropical downpour the young salesman favoured.  The upshot was Ted left with a broken expensive watch.

Disgruntled by the whole affair Ted threw the wretched watch in a small dish and forgot about it.  By now his new wife was pregnant, with Sam, and Ted had discovered a new world beyond material possessions.  This tiny life growing inside his wife was a part of him and a part of her.  At times Ted thought his heart would explode with happiness.  Who knew the world could be filled with all this richness.  

It was years before Ted’s ability to stop/ruin timepieces became clear.  Only those he wore were affected.  If he carried the watch in his pocket, something he proceeded to do until well into his eighties, they worked fine.

Now, Sam had discovered he had inherited his father’s strange knack.  Instead of just accepting his lot Sam had gone online to do some amateur research.  Where there others like him and his late father?  What caused this unusual effect?  Was there a scientific explanation?  He discovered PEARS Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research which involved a scientific study of consciousness-related physical phenomena.  There was an interesting video of how the research began.

http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/implications.html

However, the following information on the project seemed to concentrate on selling dvds, lamps that changed colour with human consciousness, or devices that sent you random text messages based on your mood.  These were marketed at ridiculous prices to the gullible and desperate. Sam, gave up and accepted his lot.  He remembered his father’s last words in the hospice.

“Do you think I'll get washed out on the tide?”

  

His mother and he had loved that with his last breath he had used the red-haired Scotchman’s line and managed to touch them with his gentle humour.

My first Love

You can look back at relationships and see in hindsight the first hairline cracks.  You didn’t see them at the time but passion has blinkers.  Veils are gradually lifted, you not only get to know a bit more about yourself (there are veils between us and our own hearts after all) but also you see the people you know with different eyes.  This applies to other aspects of your life as well, like careers.  Looking back through the wreckage of my physics career many things have become clearer.

I hated physics at school, loathed it, in fact.  But I’d read enough about the subject to know that the awful tedious physics one ploughs through in class, bears little relation to the beauty of relativity, our galaxies, sub atomic particles etc and the practical applications for all that knowledge.  To me it all felt pure and noble – a search for truth.  Having good enough grades in every other subject, bar physics, I managed to get into university to study what I loved.  My physics degree was fun and I sailed through with a 1st class degree.  I started my PHD and was lucky enough to get a CAST award, which involved working in the prestigious Royal Signal and Radar Establishment (RSRE) in Malvern for a month every year.  During this month, I was put up in a lovely health farm and the healthy food, regular walks in the Malvern hills and physics research was a heady combination for me. 

The first cracks appeared when the Duke of Edinburgh came to the site, to give the RSRE an award for excellence in industry.  His security people, refused me entrance to the site that morning.  Somewhat bewildered, I was forced to spend the day outside in the hills and not cooped up in a lab with experiments.  No big deal, but the next day everyone including my supervisor was enraged on my behalf.  Apparently, being from Northern Ireland and technically a visitor, my presence constituted a threat to the royal party.  So, despite having security clearance and badges etc I was deemed too dangerous.  It’s quite amusing really and I could see the funny side of it.  Which was more than my fellow colleagues did.

Then, I did something which angered my supervisor.  That year, I married, despite being half way through my PHD.  His annoyance was not the distraction a marriage might bring but it was that my husband was from the Middle East.  At that time, relations between that region and Britain were as challenging as that between Britain and Ireland.  So my working in a Ministry of Defence centre like RSRE was causing him a major headache.  My security rating plummeted and that month I had to wear a red badge on site and was accompanied at all times by a security guard!  It all felt very ridiculous, my work was not rocket science.  All I did was study the metal-semiconductor interfaces and try to understand what was going on. 

In order to get rid of possible contaminants (which would complicate things) my experiments were done in an ultra high vacuum.  To make sure that these surfaces were totally clean, I cleaved them inside the vacuum.  Then, in this totally clean environment with a freshly exposed semiconductor surface I gradually evaporated down metals and studied them.  As I say, not rocket science, but while I was experimenting with antimony ( a metal), over in the USA, theorists were modelling how this metal would behave on my particular semiconductor and blow me down, my experimental results exactly matched their predictions.  It was particularly heartening as this happened independently; neither knew what the other was doing.  Science is lovely when something like this happens.  You really get the sense of a breakthrough of sorts.  A jump in understanding.  It may have been one particular interface but it felt like it was all exciting stuff with my papers published and presented. 

Given my security rating, however, my marriage was a real headache for my supervisor and he complained bitterly.  Exasperated by his nagging I told him my husband’s family were in the oil industry and really rich.  This he understood immediately and he dropped his belligerent attitude.  Mid conversation his objections melted away and a tone of respect was suddenly engendered towards me.  Ah, the respectability of wealth!  We talked for a half an hour in this vein and I accepted his warm congratulations on my marriage.  Then, I told him that actually there were no oil mines in my husband’s family.  No massive wealth that made my marriage sensible and wise in his eyes.  He was floored and speechless.  He could not now backtrack and change his tune, after all that would make obvious his real objections and how much money changed his attitude.  He told me, I was too clever for my own good and we laughed together. 

He had the last laugh.  During my last visit to RSRE, while heavily pregnant, he pumped me for ideas on how to make faster switches.  It was presented as a physics problem and I was encouraged to be as off the wall as I liked in coming up with unique ideas.  So I was creative and gave him a list of ideas of the top of my head from radioactive decay, to diodes, to lasers etc.  He took out a sheet and began scribbling some of the ideas down.  I laughed and said most of them were just brainstorming stuff with probably no real chance of practical implementation.  He retorted that only one had to work to make it all worthwhile – they could afford many to fail.  Perplexed, I asked what it was all for.  He told me that it was related to my PHD research.  Now, I was confused and he was eager to explain.  “We are trying to make faster switches for bombs, that’s what we’re after, that’s what’s funding the whole research you do here, each year.”

I remember my stomach clenched in shock and my hand went to my bump in an instinctive defensive reaction.  Making faster switches for bombs!!  All my work in understanding interfaces, the beautiful theoretical predictions, the scientific experiments to find the truth, the noble truth.  It was all to make us more effective at killing and destroying.  I finished my PHD but I never did any more research in my field again.  There was something about carrying a life that meant being a part of taking a life absolutely abhorrent.  My published papers all date from before my eldest son was born.  His presence in my life made me choose a different path.  I can have no regrets about that.  I look back at my relationship with physics like a bad affair, it started with passionate devotion and ended in acrimonious divorce.  It’s such a shame because I did love physics so much.