Last quarter, I took a class called “Seminar on Emotion” at the Psychology department at Stanford. Though the class had a lot of reading and some were rather dry, there were a few gems scattered around here and there which in the end, made it all worth it (of course it was also one of the few classes I had which in which the ratio favored the fairer-sex and so it was always a pleasure to attend!). Now I know I am probably going to get a lot of flack on this a particular blog entry and so before I do so I should probably mention that though I am writing this now, I actually thought of this stuff during my class last quarter. And so this is not precipitated by current events in my life and nor it is it targeted to anyone in particular. I am simply interested in hearing your opinions to help me ponder and solidify my own, so here goes…

One of the readings for my Emotion clas was by Nico Frijda, in which he tried to formulate Laws of Emotion. These were not intended as “laws” per se, but more as guidelines about emotion and to put forth some food for thought. In his paper was the following passage:

“Data from questionnaire studies (Rombouts, 1987) suggest that [falling in love] is triggered by a specific sequence of events, in which the qualities of the love-object are of minor importance. A person is ready to fall in love because of one of a number of reasons – loneliness, sexual need, dissatisfaction, or need or variety. A object then incites interest, again for one of a number of reasons, such as novelty, attractiveness, or mere proximity. Then give the person a moment of promise, a brief response from the object that suggests interest. It may be a confidence; it may be a single glance, such as a young girl may think she received from a pop star. The give the person a brief lapse of time – anywhere between half an hour or half a day, the self-report suggests – during which fantasies can develop. After that sequence, no more than a single confirmation, real or imagined is needed to precipitate falling in love.”

— Nico H. Frijda, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands in his paper on The Laws of Emotion.

Now, I haven’t had the time (yet) to go dig up the Rombouts paper and look at the data myself (would be very interesting to do this though — I looked on PsycInfo already but my preliminary search didn’t find this paper/data. If anyone finds a pointer, please do let me know), but I did feel that this is a rather bold and insightful statement which flies in the face of what all of us would like to believe. We are taught from childhoold, either throught friends, family, books and in a lot of ways by movies and the entertainment industry that there is something magical about falling in love. But after having read the above passage, I sincerely wonder, is it just the magic of having our own needs met? Feeling wanted. Having company. Fulfilling our need and desire for sex. Or is it really something about the person we fall in love with? How does one choose who he or she falls in love with??

The latter really is a curious question and so it begs for a little more explanation. I will pose it as a qustion to the reader — Think about your relationships. How did you initially meet the person you entered into a relationship with? What was the series of events that got you there? From the time that you saw or noticed or heard from the person the first time what was in your head. For a woman — what makes you go out wiht one guy over another? And what was your mental state at the time? What were your needs? What did you want out of the relationship? In summary, what was it the person you are in a relationship with that got you hooked?

Thinking about and even writing about the questions above scares me. It scares me to think about them because if there is any shred of truth to Frijda’s statement then I fear that it may shatter a widely held illusion. It scares me because I too may subscribe to the same illusion. It is easier to live under the protective shield of an illusion. However, my guess is that there is some level of veracity to Frijda’s statement. That human beings are indeed just as shallow as animals in more ways than they would like to hear of. To think that you are in a relationship with someone not because of any other reason that you are fulfilling some need for yourself would seem to suggest that the qualities of the the person who is the object of your affection do not matter. Put another way, someone loves you not for what you are, but for what you mean to them.

Falling in love, may not be a quest for waiting for the right person, but more for the right time and right environment. A time where you have a need — loneliness, sexual need, dissatisfaction or variety (as Frijda puts it) — and there is someone in the environment who happens to respond to your need and fulfill it. But then again don’t we always have one or more of these needs? I know I do. And isn’t it scary to think that this need-based dissection of falling in love could potentially explain all kinds of human behavior like love at first sight, infatuation, one-night-stands and even affairs and adultry!?(I’m assuming that is what he is referring to by the need for variety).

It is ironic that as much as people say that love is blind and there is a “soulmate” out there for everyone etc etc, at the end of it all, love itself may actually be more pragmatic than most people realize! Or is Frijda just on crack? Tell me what you think!

Here is my million dollar question of the moment (and I do have one for each moment, really, I do) — Do academics get off on making things sound more complicated than they really need to be?. I started wondering about this question about two years ago when I started attending talks at Carnegie Mellon. At the time, I wasn’t in an academic program and was busy running my second company, but every so often I felt the need to drive over to campus (CMU) and sit in on a talk here and there just to help pull me out of the day to day struggle and think creatively for a little bit. Get out of the rut and out of the box of and enter a bubble which facilitates creativity.

My experience with going to a lot of these talks was mixed. I wanted to go to talks in fields I knew nothing about. Psychology was one. HCI was another (okay, I had some practical experience with product design and development here…). I found that in some of the initial talks, I was completely lost. I really had no clue as to what the heck they were talking about. Bayesian Networks and all that stuff which at the time I knew nothing about (I’ve since become educated a little more believe it or not). And so I wondered, have I really lost the ability to deal with academia?

I decided to conduct my own little personal experiment. Instead of being intimidated by my lack of understanding of the subject at hand, I decided to continue to go to the talks and see if I could make sense of them by simply trying to break them down one word at a time. Take each little word and break it down to something simpler. And then take the sentence and break it down into something simpler and eventually get to the point of taking the concept and distilling it down to something simpler. And lo and behold, much to my surprise I was amazed to find how many topics which I had no clue about began to make sense… slowly and steadily. The problem with this approach is that it definitely takes longer to comprehend the tpic since there is a significant overheard of translating jargon into something simple and in coming up with analogies to help comprehend the concepts at hand.

I continued this experiement for about six months at CMU. Unfortunately being in Pittsburgh and running a company just wasn’t conducive to my need not only for a change in intellectual stimulation nor in just needing a change in atmosphere for personal reasons. (Not to diss Pittsburgh at all, but I just had too many experiences, both good and bad in the place and I just needed a change.) And so I applied to Stanford and joined the Ph.D. program here. Similar to my experience when I first joined CMU as an undergraduate, when I came to Stanford, I found that there are lots of brilliant people here. And everyday, my respect for them increases as I watch different people excel in different fields. But I also found that I had the same problem here at Stanford with academic-talk that I did at CMU. And so I’ve recently begun to wonder if there is a pattern here.

So my hypothesis, based on personal experience of course is this: Once academics (myself included in that category now), have an innate tendency to take topics they understand and try to complicate them. Somehow, once they understand a topic, it goes through a transformation when they try to explain it to someone else that often makes it un-intelligible. Maybe it becomes too formal. Maybe they are just trying to appear more knowledgeable than the next person. But the fundamental thing that happens is that they may understand it one way, but when it comes to explaianing it, they screw it up.

I believe that this ma be the key between being a good teacher and not-so-good-teacher. A good teacher will remember how he learnt something and what was it that made it click in his head when he saw this concept for the first time and then be able to simplify that even more so that students can understand that same concept just as easily. I understand by analogies. Whenever I am presented a concept I need to come up with a real world example that I can visualize to get a better sense of what the concept is. And it is only when I can construct such an analogy in my head can I really get a grasp of the subject at hand. So when I teach, I tend to use the same approach in teaching. I need to come up with an analogy and hopefully the analogy will be strong enough to convey the concept, but real enough to not introduce any side-effects.

And since I am writing about explaining things, I should eat my own dog food and explain with an example right :). One of the topics I had to explain recently was threading and mutual exclusion. Now this is generally a hard topic for most students and there are tons of cases and different places where Murphy comes in and screws things up. But, what I realized when I was forced to explain it was that, this isn’t such a hard concept — because we encounter it every single day in our lives. A person who has absolutely no background in computer science can understand threading and mutual exclusion. How, you may ask? Well, think about it… Lets say you have a party at your house. And since you don’t want to mess up your house, you leave only one bathroom open for guests to use. This bathroom is now the equivalent of a critical section. And using that, you can now explain critical section, you can explain a lock and mutual exclusion. You can explain that bad things happen when there isn’t a lock. Extend that metaphor even further and lets say you are now in a theatre. And during the intermission everyone runs tot he bathroom. But the bathroom has only a limited number of stalls. Whoops! We just explained counting semaphores. So the idea without getting into too much detail is to take rather obscure concepts and map them to real-world analogies. (I explained streams in Java by using water pipes and filters as the example).

Analogies not only make it a lot more fun — because you can make them amusing, but also provide a framework for thinking. A framework, which then becomes etched in the students mid often because it was so silly that it just made sense! That is wha I consider good teaching.

So with that I’ll end my most recent rant about my own problems in often understanding academics and what I think would be a better approach to teaching. Comments as always are welcome, from academics and non-academics alike!