Sibling Effects, Bilingualism, Peers over Parents - Judith Rich Harris

More from Judith Rich Harris (Excerpts from pages 50-100):

"The patterns of behavior that are acquired in sibling relationships neither help us nor hinder us in our dealings with other people. They leave no permanent marks on our character. If they did, researchers would be able to see their effects on personality tests given to adults: firstborns and laterborns would have somewhat different personalities in adulthood. As I reported in the previous chapter (also see Appendix 1), birth order effects do not turn up in the majority of studies of adult personality. They do, however, turn up in the majority of studies of one particular kind: the kind in which subjects’ personalities are judged by their parents or siblings. When parents are asked to describe their children, they are likely to say that their firstborn is more serious, methodical, responsible, and anxious than their laterborns. When a younger brother or sister is asked to describe the firstborn, a word that often turns up is “bossy.” What we’re getting is a picture of the way the subject behaves at home. At home there are birth order effects, no question about it, and I believe that is why it’s so hard to shake people’s faith in them. If you see people with their parents or their siblings, you do see the differences you expect to see. The oldest does seem more serious, responsible, and bossy. The youngest does behave in a more carefree fashion. But that’s how they act when they’re together. These patterns of behavior are not like albatrosses that we have to drag along with us wherever we go, all through our lives. We don’t even drag them to nursery school.”

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“If immigrant parents insist that their children continue to address them in their native language—that is, the parents’ native language—the children may do so, but their ability to communicate in that language will remain childish, while their ability to communicate in the outside-the-home language continues to grow. Here’s a young Chinese-American woman, the child of immigrants, who went to Harvard: 

I had never discussed literature or philosophy with my parents. We talked about our health, the weather, that night’s dinner—all in Cantonese, since they do not speak English. While at Harvard, I ran out of words to communicate with my parents.

I literally did not have the Cantonese vocabulary to explain the classes I was taking or my field of concentration. 

Many immigrant parents see their children losing the language and culture of their homeland and try very hard to prevent it.

They dream in English. It makes no difference whether the first language they learned from their parents was English or Bengali, English has become their “native language.” Joseph spoke nothing but Polish for the first seven and a half years of his life, but if he remains in the United States his “native language” will not be Polish. As an adult he will think in English, dream in English, do his arithmetic and his calculus in English. He may forget his Polish entirely. Parents do not have to teach their children the language of their community; in fact—hard as it may be for you to accept this—they do not have to teach their children any language at all. The language lessons we give our infants and toddlers are a peculiarity of our culture.

Bilingualism is simply the most conspicuous marker of context-specific socialization—socialization that is tied to a particular social context.”

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“Our ancestors spent the past six million years—all but the last little bit of it—as hunter-gatherers, living in small nomadic groups. They survived by triumphing over a hazardous environment, and the greatest hazard in that environment was the enemy group. The lives of hunter-gatherer children depended more on their group’s survival than on their parents’, because even if their parents died they had a chance of surviving if their group did. Their best hope of success was to become a valuable group member as quickly and convincingly as possible. Once they were past the age of weaning they belonged, not just to their parents, but to the group. Their future prospects depended, not on making their parents love them, but on getting along with the other members of the group—in particular, the members of their own generation, the people with whom they would spend the rest of their lives. The child’s mind—the mind of the modern child—is a product of those six million years of evolutionary history. In the next chapter you will see how it reveals itself in the child’s social behavior."

Genes, Heritability, IQ, Big 5, Peers - Judith Rich Harris

Such a good book that it will necessitate multiple blogposts. Robust and true when it was published in 1998. Still robust and true today. Excerpts from the first 50 pages: 

"Let me take this opportunity to clear up some misunderstandings about the role of peers in “how we turn out.” I’m talking about something that begins as soon as children go out of the house and find themselves in a place where there are other children. It can begin as early as age two and certainly, for most children, by age three. Group socialization theory has to do with the way a child’s mind works. Children’s minds work no differently today than they did in earlier times.

The fact that only children don’t differ in any important way from children with siblings, for example. Or that young children who go to day-care centers don’t differ in any important way from those cared for at home by their parents. Or that those who have two parents of the same sex don’t differ in any important way from those who have one of each sex. And so on. You’ll find lots of other observations in this book that don’t fit into the standard view of child development.

Over time, the early, angry response to The Nurture Assumption has softened noticeably, both within and outside of academia. Today, the book is widely cited in textbooks and journal articles.9 It’s assigned and discussed in courses in many colleges and universities; it shows up on exams.

My primary interest is environment, not genes. But we cannot tell what the environment does to a child unless we know what the child brings to that environment.

One of my hopes was that I could make child-rearing a little easier, a little less stressful for parents. Alas, it has not happened, as far as I can tell. Parents are still using the anxiety-ridden, labor-intensive style of parenting prescribed by their culture; they’ve paid no attention to my well-meaning advice to lighten up. Even my own daughters are rearing their children that way. But why should I expect to have an influence on my own daughters?

A strange factoid in our True-But-Inconvenient file is that children always end up with the language and accent of their peers, not of their parents. Children of immigrants pick up language from the playground so well that they are soon ridiculing their parents’ grammatical errors. Acquiring the particulars of a native language is an example of cultural learning. Children in Japan speak Japanese, children in Italy speak Italian, and these differences have nothing to do with their genes.

The thesis of The Nurture Assumption—that in the formation of an adult, genes matter and peers matter, but parents don’t matter—raises issues about children and parents that could not be more profound. It calls into question the standard social science model of the child as a bundle of reflexes and a blank cortex waiting to be programmed by benevolent parents.

Today, children win or lose by their ability to prosper in this milieu; in the past they lived or died by it. It makes sense that they should take their calories and protection from their parents, because their parents are the only ones willing to provide them, but that they should get their information from the best sources they can find, which might not be their parents. The child will have to compete for mates, and before that for the status necessary to find and keep them, in groups other than the family—groups that play by different rules. Nature surely did not design children to be putty in their parents’ hands.

The data showed that growing up in the same home, being reared by the same parents, had little or no effect on the adult personalities of siblings. Reared-together siblings are alike in personality only to the degree that they are alike genetically. The genes they share can entirely account for any resemblances between them; there are no leftover similarities for the shared environment to explain.8 For some psychological characteristics, notably intelligence, there is evidence of a transient effect of the home environment during childhood—the IQ scores of preadolescent adoptive siblings show a modest correlation. But by late adolescence all nongenetic resemblances have faded away. For IQ as for personality, the correlation between adult adoptees reared in the same home hovers around zero.

Results in behavioral genetics are what statisticians call “robust.” Study after study shows the same thing: almost all the similarities between adult siblings can be attributed to their shared genes. There are very few similarities that can be attributed to the environment they shared in childhood."

"The Art of Learning" - Josh Waitzkin

Favorite excerpt from one of my favorite books. Finding meaning and purpose: 

"I recall one tournament in Las Vegas: I was a young International Master in a field of a thousand competitors including twenty-six strong Grandmasters from around the world. As an up-and-coming player, I had huge respect for the great sages around me. I had studied their masterpieces for hundreds of hours and was awed by the artistry of these men. Before first-round play began I was seated at my board, deep in thought about my opening preparation, when the public address system announced that the subject of Searching for Bobby Fischer was at the event. A tournament director placed a poster of the movie next to my table, and immediately a sea of fans surged around the ropes separating the top boards from the audience. As the games progressed, when I rose to clear my mind young girls gave me their phone numbers and asked me to autograph their stomachs or legs. 

This might sound like a dream for a seventeen-year-old boy, and I won’t deny enjoying the attention, but professionally it was a nightmare. My game began to unravel. I caught myself thinking about how I looked thinking instead of losing myself in thought. The Grandmasters, my elders, were ignored and scowled at me. Some of them treated me like a pariah. I had won eight national championships and had more fans, public support and recognition than I could dream of, but none of this was helping my search for excellence, let alone for happiness. 

At a young age I came to know that there is something profoundly hollow about the nature of fame. I had spent my life devoted to artistic growth and was used to the sweaty-palmed sense of contentment one gets after many hours of intense reflection. This peaceful feeling had nothing to do with external adulation, and I yearned for a return to that innocent, fertile time. I missed just being a student of the game, but there was no escaping the spotlight. I found myself dreading chess, miserable before leaving for tournaments. I played without inspiration and was invited to appear on television shows. I smiled. Then when I was eighteen years old I stumbled upon a little book called the Tao Te Ching, and my life took a turn. I was moved by the book’s natural wisdom and I started delving into other Buddhist and Taoist philosophical texts. I recognized that being at the pinnacle in other people’s eyes had nothing to do with quality of life, and I was drawn to the potential for inner tranquility."

Hydration and Exercise

Best parts of Christie Aschwanden’s book, “Good to Go”:

"We do lose electrolytes through sweat, but even when you exercise continuously for many hours, you will simply correct any losses via your normal appetite and hunger mechanisms. (You’ve already experienced this if you’ve ever had a hankering for a salty snack.) One small study of cyclists and triathletes found that it didn’t really matter whether they drank plain water, a sports drink or a milk-based beverage after an hour of hard exercise. As long as they drank some liquids along with a meal, they restored their fluid levels just fine.

The problem with this model of hydration is that it overlooks basic physiology. It turns out, your body is highly adapted to cope with losing multiple liters of fluid, especially during exercise. When you exercise, you lose fluid and salts through sweat, and that translates into a small change in what’s called your “plasma osmolality” — the concentration of salts and other soluble compounds in your blood. You need enough fluid and electrolytes in your blood for your cells to function properly, and this balance is tightly regulated by a feedback loop.

When you sweat, your brain senses the corresponding rise in plasma osmolality and directs the release of antidiuretic hormone (ADH), which prods the kidneys to activate aquaporins, which are like tiny straws that poke into the kidneys to draw water back into the blood. It’s a pathway to conserve water. As your body reabsorbs water, your plasma osmolality returns to normal, your brain senses the change, and it shuts down ADH. This feedback loop is finely tuned to keep plasma osmolality in a safe range. Even a tiny drop in electrolytes will activate this system to keep your fluid balance in check. People always worry they’re going to be dehydrated when the reality is, it’s much easier to over- hydrate because our bodies are so good at conserving water. Being a little dehydrated is not a bad thing. Our bodies can handle it.

Athletes who develop hyponatremia during exercise usually get there by drinking too much because they’ve been conditioned to think they need to drink beyond thirst. Even if you don’t drink anything (which she does not recommend), your blood sodium levels will rise in response to sweat losses, and as a result, your body will shift fluid into the blood to maintain your fluid balance.

The same feedback loop that calls in the aquaporins also activates your thirst. “You don’t have to drink above thirst — you’ll be fine!” she says. Just as sleepiness is your body’s way of telling you that it’s time to sleep, thirst is how your body ensures that you seek fluids when you need them. No one tells you to sleep before you’re tired, and unless you’re in a situation where you can’t drink for a prolonged period, there’s no sense in drinking before you feel thirsty either. Your body is a finely tuned machine that that is capable of adapting to changing conditions, and it’s not usually necessary to try to outsmart it.

You can also forget those pee charts that look like paint swatches for urine, and ignore anyone who says that yellow pee is a sign that you need to drink more water. If you think about hydration from the standpoint of what’s going on inside your body, it’s easy to see why urine hue isn’t helpful. The color of your pee is essentially just a measure of how concentrated your urine is. If it contains more waste than water, it looks dark, and if it’s mostly water, it’s light or almost clear. But that’s not what’s important. What you really want to know is what’s going on in your blood, and your urine can’t tell you that. Dark pee might mean that you’re running low on fluid, but it could also mean that your kidneys are keeping your plasma osmolality in check by conserving water. Very light or clear urine just means that you’ve drunk more water than your body needs, and that’s not necessarily a good thing, especially right before an athletic event.

 If our bodies are so good at adapting to moderate fluid loss and letting us know when we need to drink, why are there still so many messages out there urging us to drink before we feel thirsty?

An obvious explanation for this is that most of what we hear about hydration comes from companies and researchers with a vested interest in making it all seem complex and highly scientific. The current guidelines from the ACSMand the National Athletic Trainers’ Association have been updated to warn about hyponatremia, but they still promote the ideas that thirst is a poor indicator of hydration and that more than a 2 percent body weight loss should be avoided. The ACSM, NSCA and NATA all receive funding from sports drink makers, as do some of their members. If staying hydrated were as simple as just drinking to thirst, you wouldn’t need expert advice or scientifically formulated products like Gatorade.

From a biological perspective, it’s hard to imagine that the human body is so delicate that it can’t function properly without scientists (or football stars) swooping in with calculators to tell us how to keep it running properly. “You have to trust your body,” Knepper says. Humans have evolved to survive exercising without chugging water or sports drink on some rigid schedule. “You get clues about what you need if you listen to your own body,” he says. “You don’t have to know chemistry to survive.”

After examining the science, I can’t help thinking we’ve made hydration unduly complicated. I take my dog running with me most of the time, and I’ve never measured the color of her pee or forced her to drink (as if I could). I make sure she has regular access to water, but she doesn’t always take it. At times, she won’t drink at all during a long run, and on those occasions, she always goes straight to her water dish when we get home and slurps until she’s satisfied. I’ve never had to give her an emergency IV for low fluid levels. If drinking to thirst is good enough for her, it’s probably good enough for me too.”

Although hydration guidelines instruct athletes to drink according to how much weight they’re losing through sweat and respiration, “drinking according to the dictate of thirst throughout a marathon seems to confer no major disadvantage over drinking to replace all fluid losses, and there is no evidence that full fluid replacement is superior to drinking to thirst,” the study’s authors wrote. Furthermore, athletes who lose the most body mass during marathons, ultramarathons, and Ironman triathlons are usually the most successful, which suggests that fluid losses are not as tightly linked to performance as sports drink makers claim. Instead, the results imply that there must be some tolerable range for dehydration that doesn’t impair performance.

Hoffman’s guidelines also recognize that dehydration is rarely a cause of heat illness and say that most muscle cramps are not caused by electrolyte loss. (The latest science on cramps suggests that they have more to do with neuromuscular fatigue than with hydration or electrolytes, Hoffman says.)”

The Disappointment of Sports Memoirs (David Foster Wallace)

David Foster Wallace at his finest. “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart”: 

"The obvious point: Great athletes usually turn out to be stunningly inarticulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitute their fascination. For me, though, the important question is why this is always so bitterly disappointing. And why I keep buying these sports memoirs with expectations that my own experience with the genre should long ago have modified…and why I nearly always feel thwarted and pissed when I finish them. One sort of answer, of course, is that commercial autobiographies like these promise something they cannot deliver: personal and verbal access to an intrinsically public and performative kind of genius. The problem with this answer is that I and the rest of the US book market aren’t that stupid — if impossible promises were all there was to it, we’d catch on after a while, and it would stop being so profitable for publishers to churn these memoirs out. 

Maybe what keeps us buying in the face of constant disappointment is some deep compulsion both to experience genius in the concrete and to universalize genius in the abstract. Real indisputable genius is so impossible to define, and true techne so rarely visible (much less televisable), that maybe we automatically expect people who are geniuses as athletes to be geniuses also as speakers and writers, to be articulate, perceptive, truthful, profound. If it’s just that we naively expect geniuses-in-motion to be also geniuses-in-reflection, then their failure to be that shouldn’t really seem any crueler or more disillusioning than Kant’s glass jaw or Eliot’s inability to hit the curve. 

It is not an accident that great athletes are often called “naturals”, because they can, in performance, be totally present: they can proceed on instinct and muscle-memory and autonomic will such that agent and action are one. Great athletes can do this even — and, for the truly great ones like Borg and Bird and Nicklaus and Jordan and Austin, especially — under wilting pressure and scrutiny. They can withstand forces of distraction that would break a mind prone to self-conscious fear in two. 

The real secret behind top athletes’ genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself. The real, many-veil answer to the question of just what goes through a great player’s mind as he stands at the center of hostile crowd-noise and lines up at the the free-throw that will decide the game might well be: nothing at all. 

How can great athletes shut off the Iago-like voice of the self? How can they bypass the head and simply and superbly act? How, at the critical moment, can they invoke for themselves as cliché as trite as “One ball at a time” or “Gotta concentrate here”, and MEAN it, then DO it? Maybe it’s because, for top athletes, cliches present themselves not as trite but simply as true, or perhaps not even as declarative expressions with qualities like depth or triteness or faslehood or truth but as simple imperatives that are either useful or not and, if useful, to be invoked and obeyed and that’s all there is to it. 

This is, for me, the real mystery — whether such a person is an idiot or a mystic or both and/or neither. The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir. That plain empirical fact may be the best way to eplain how Tracy Austin’s actual history can be so compelling and important and her verbal account of that history not even alive. It may also, in starting to address the differences in communicability between thinking and doing and between doing and being, yield the key to why top athlete’s autobiographies are at once so seductive and so disappointing for us readers. As is so often SOP with the truth, there’s a cruel paradox involved. It may well be that we spectators, who are not divinely gifted as athletes, are the only ones able truly to see, articulate, and animate the experience of the gift we are denied. And that those who receive and act out the gift of athletic genius must,  perforce, be blind and dumb about it — and not because blindness and dumbness are the price of the gift, but because they are its essence."

"Trading Up" - Venketesh Rao

“Trading Up” - Venketesh Rao:

"The middle class script is basically “Trade time (in units of years) for money, invest money to make more money.”; the rich script is more like “trade money and time (in hours) for more money and time at the best exchange rates possible.” The poor script is “Trade time (in units of hours) for money and spend the money.

So to Venkat’s point, Matlab is not considered an asset by Kiyosaki and the middle class because it doesn’t return money; saving time is not considered valuable because it can’t yield more money. To the middle class, pirating Matlab is okay, even if it takes two weeks of spare time, because their money is finite while their time is relatively abundant. To the rich, buying Matlab is fine because the time saved can be reinvested to make more money or time.

I was (and remain to some extent) guilty of what science fiction writer Bruce Sterling calls acting dead: being irrationally averse to spending money where it matters, in a misguided attempt to “save” money to the point that the behavior paralyzes you. A large segment of the middle class is starting to act dead these days. Which makes sense since the class itself is dying. To stop acting dead, you have to resolve to exit the traditional middle class as well, unless you want to go down with it.

Not acting dead involves a strategic spending pattern that marketers are starting to call trading up: buying premium in some areas of your life, while buying budget or entirely forgoing spending in other areas. This effect is a sort of the opposite of what I called Gollumization earlier this year: unthinking, undiscriminating consumption to the point that consumption defines you.

While spartan frugality is a virtue, when it becomes the entire purpose of your life, there’s a problem. For a portion of the dying American middle class, frugality has turned into a life purpose.

An example is extreme couponing, which is why I used that as an example of radical Gollumization. It is saving gone amok: never buying anything not on sale (and therefore never buying things that never go on sale)

The characteristic sign that you are practicing unhealthy acting-dead frugality is that you cut back on core expenses that might help you be more generative, in order to keep up appearances as long as possible

Waiting for Godot is your classic arrival fallacy. You fixate on specific narrative elements (like moving to Bali or working for 4 hours a week), make the few big moves, and spend the rest of your life waiting for the Big Event signifying that it is working, while slipping slowly into destitution and denial. I see a lot of people in this mode right now. They’ve never really stopped to analyze the logic of the script, but accepted it on faith based on assurances from a few for whom it has worked.

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In the first two cases, I tried to do it all myself, even though I have an aversion to fussy kinds of technical formatting work and paperwork to the point that they should count as phobias.  When I finally pulled the trigger and outsourced the work, it was like a major load being taken off my mind, coupled with severe regret for the time already spent on pointless frustration.

In the third case, it was again about saving money. I spent months mucking around with Python, R and various other open source alternatives to Matlab. Here, the messiness of having to deal with a unwieldy and weakly integrated open-source tools, along with my own serious aversion (similar to my paperwork aversion) to fussy configuration issues, and my generally poor ability to pick up new programming skills, had me wasting months in frustrated spinning-of-wheels.

And in the meantime, I was not doing things I wanted to do, simply because I was too cheap to buy a quality tool that I was familiar with, and could save me months of painful learning (especially painful now due to the Python 2.x to 3.x transition).  As with the other two cases, finally pulling the trigger made me intensely relieved.

The middle class financial script is simple really. It involves uniform spending habits within a large class, based on norms that are learned via imitation."

What is Expertise?

Good Writing

“Good Sentences Are Why We Read” - Joe Moran: 

“I can let a book fall open and tell, just from reading a few sentences, if I will like it. However compelling the subject of a book might be, I find it hard to carry on reading if its sentences are boring. You think you are looking past this sentence into what it is saying—about life, love, the existence of angels, the design of the injection-molded polypropylene stacking chair, whatever it is— but no. You think you care what this is about, but really you care how it sounds. You are reading it for its sentences.

I read cookery books by my favorite food writers with no intention of cooking any of the recipes. (I am of the school of cuisine that believes you can eat well by learning how to shop.) I read and love these books not for instruction but for the sentences. For good food writing is, like all good writing, both precise and evocative. Elizabeth David wrote well, I suspect, because she saw what the culinary and writing arts have in common. A good sentence is the verbal fulfillment of her kitchen credo, borrowed from Escoffier: Faites simple. She thought of good cooking as lucid and sincere—as a sentence should seem to be. She disliked rich sauces and other rococo effects that hid the true flavors of food. A sentence, too, should rely more on quality ingredients than baroque artifice. She frowned on kitchens weighed down with needless gizmos and other advertisements of culinary activity. A sentence, too, should not advertise the labor that went into its making. A sentence, too, should be—at least for the reader—an uncompromised joy.

A sentence is more than its meaning. It is a line of words where logic and lyric meet—a piece of both sense and sound, even if that sound is heard only in the head. Things often thought to be peculiar to poetry—meter, rhythm, music—are there in prose as well, or should be. When John Betjeman began a BBC radio talk with the sentence “We came to Looe by unimportant lanes,” he must have known it sounded better than “We drove to Looe via the minor roads.” His version is ten syllables with the stress on each second syllable: a perfect iambic pentameter.

The rest of us just have a foggy sense that a sentence needs an extra beat. But we still know that a sentence is not just what it says but how it says it.

Rookie sentence writers are often too busy worrying about the something they are trying to say to worry enough about how that something looks and sounds. They look straight past the words into the meaning that they have strong-armed into them. They fasten on content and forget about form— forgetting that content and form are the same thing, that what a sentence says is how it says it, and vice versa.

Rhythm is so basic to language that it does not need to be taught. You can correct a child’s syntax and pronunciation, but if they have no feel for the rhythms of speech, they will not sound human. The rhythm of English stresses certain syllables within each word and certain words within each sentence. It makes us linger on nouns, adjectives and verbs and skip lightly over pronouns, conjunctions and prepositions.

Rhythm holds meaning. Great orators make the rhythm of the words resound in our brains and bones before we work out what they have said. The rhythm wins us over—is “proved upon our pulses,” as Keats put it—and then the sense catches up. Bad grammar is usually a sign of something deeper amiss with the rhythm. More can go awry in a sentence than syntactical exactitude. Worse than the words being wrongly arranged is putting them in an order that neither moves nor sings. The sentence just limps and wheezes along to its sad end with a tuneless clank. When the writer has a tin ear for the sound of a sentence then the reader knows, just as when she hears flat or pitchy singing, that something is wrong, even if she can’t quite say why."

"How to Be Alone” -Maria Popova

Maria Popova:

"How have we arrived, in the relatively prosperous developed world, at least, at a cultural moment which values autonomy, personal freedom, fulfillment and human rights, and above all individualism, more highly than they have ever been valued before in human history, but at the same time these autonomous, free, self-fulfilling individuals are terrified of being alone with themselves?

Curiously, and importantly, mastering the art of solitude doesn’t make us more antisocial but, to the contrary, better able to connect.

Nothing is more destructive of warm relations than the person who endlessly “doesn’t mind.” They do not seem to be a full individual if they have nothing of their own to “bring to the table,” so to speak. This suggests that even those who know that they are best and most fully themselves in relationships (of whatever kind) need a capacity to be alone, and probably at least some occasions to use that ability. If you know who you are and know that you are relating to others because you want to, rather than because you are trapped (unfree), in desperate need and greed, because you fear you will not exist without someone to affirm that fact, then you are free. Some solitude can in fact create better relationships, because they will be freer ones."

Multi-tasking

One of my favorite articles on multi-tasking from Julie Beck. “The Zen of Adult Coloring Books”: 

"In the admittedly brief time that I have had this coloring book, it has filled a particular activity niche for me, which is “something to do with my hands while I watch Netflix.” Other activities in this niche include: knitting, painting my nails, texting, putting candy in my mouth. End of list. 

Why do I need to do two things at once? Why can’t I just sit quietly and enjoy a TV show?

I’m watching TV in the first place to relax, to quiet my mind, and often my mind is loud enough that it shouts over Coach Taylor. If the front of my mind is occupied by the show, and the back is focused on picking colors and staying in the lines, there’s not room for much else. It’s a sort of mindfulness that’s more like mind-fullness."