Building bridges between Muslims and Jews through neuroscience

The newspaper had images of bombs and rockets falling on Beirut, desperate people trying to escape, faces of sadness. On days like this I feel hopeless--that it’s all getting worse, and there is nothing I can do. Yet, as I looked around me in my classroom in the Cluny abbey at a French village near the Swiss border, I could count around 30 graduate students who a few days ago had traveled from Israel, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, Turkey, etc., sitting together, waiting for me to teach them about the brain.

I could see that a few of the ladies were wearing head scarves, and some of the guys had donned yamakas. Here, they were not separated by a security wall. Rather, they were sitting next to each other, having coffee and tea. The 10-day course had housed them in dormitories so that a Jewish girl from Haifa was sharing a room with a Muslim girl from Tehran.  At lunch, some got kosher meals, and some vegan, but they ate together, at the same table.

The idea of the course was born in 2015 during a conversation between two friends taking a walk in Jerusalem, Yonatan Loewenstein, a professor at the Hebrew University, and Ahmed El Hady, a professor at the Max Plank Institute in Germany. They imagined a summer school where Jews and Muslims would come for a few days and learn about the brain, and then leave having also learned a little about each other. They scraped together the funds from the Simons Foundation, and from an anonymous donor in the UK, and began organizing the course with the help of David Hansel and Carole Levens, both at the CNRS, Paris. They named the course NeuroBridges.

But the organizers paid a price for their efforts. Ahmed got emails with pictures of blood on it, calling him a traitor. Yonatan had a paper that was in review for over a year, the reviewer trying to punish him. Academia is full of calls for disengagement and boycott. But the saddest thing for the organizers was not these petty retributions. Rather, the Palestinian students who were accepted in the course, and had planned to come, then canceled at the last minute.

I was one of the handful of scientists that had come to help. Curious about how the students felt about their experience, I probed them at our meals, asking them to tell me what had surprised them.

One student said, “After I applied and got accepted, I looked at the schedule and got a bit scared. I thought it might be overwhelming, spending so much time in such close quarters with people that I didn’t know. Almost every waking hour! I thought for sure I would need to have some time apart. But now, after a week of being together, I realize that my roommate is like a sister that I never knew I had.”

Another student said: “I wear a headscarf both here, and in Iran. But when you’re in Iran, wearing a scarf signifies to others something about your political beliefs, that you are supporting the government. Maybe here in France it’s the same way. But I’m not trying to send a signal about which side I’m on. I cover my hair because it’s a personal statement between myself and god. When I mentioned this to my roommate, it surprised her.”

A young lady turned and said: “When I was a kid, I would read the Koran, but one day I came across a verse in which in the matters of inheritance, boys were given much more than girls. I felt uneasy. The god that I loved did not quite love me back.”

The young lady sitting next to her, from Tel Aviv, smiled and said, “That’s exactly how I feel!”, “You see, two years ago I got married, but not in the official way. I didn’t register with the ministry of religion and didn’t perform the ceremony in a synagogue. You see, getting married that way made it so that, if god forbid, I came to ask for a divorce, I will have to do it in an official setting where they usually humiliate the woman.”

In that classroom, looking up at their beautiful faces, I thought that rather than diving into the lecture, I read them a quote from St. Augustine, who some 1700 years ago wrote: “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”

Yonatan Loewenstein and Ahmed El Hady, organizers of the course.

The course was held at in a historic abbey in Cluny, France, where there were ongoing excavations to uncover artifacts.

Site of the course, Cluny abbey.

Lecture hall.

Two little ants

On the beige sandstone patio there are a few tiny ants.
There is one who is closely following another.
He occasionally makes contact with the one in front,
but then quickly backs off.

Once he actually passed the leader, then circled back.
He knows his place.

The two of them are walking along the edge,
but then suddenly,
the leader turns and goes toward the plants.
The guy behind misses this turn, and keeps going.

After a foot of going about it alone, he stops and notices
something's wrong.
He's all alone.

He abandons the straight line and starts doing short, exploratory circles,
but his circles are too far from the leader.
Sometimes he comes across another ant,
They touch, but he turns away,
restarting his circle.

I wonder when he will give up,
I wonder who will take him home.

Lost in Dallas: a short story

"I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow in Dallas", I texted my cousin Jason, a 40 something father of two teenagers. "Do you want to get together for dinner?"

He texted back: "I've lost my mother! She walked out a couple of days ago and we can't find her anywhere!!"

Oh my god. I knew that she wasn’t well, having suffered from schizophrenia for much of her life. Jason’s father had been taking care of her, but he passed away last year. Like any worthy son, he moved her from Houston up to his house in Dallas, becoming her caregiver.

"I'm so sorry Jason." I texted back, figuring that we won’t be seeing each other on my trip down to Dallas tomorrow, which I’m going because some months ago I was invited to give a talk there. I had planned to take my mom with me, thinking that it would be good to have a small family get together.

The next day comes and my 83 year old mom and I make our way (slowly) through the airport. She prefers that I get her a wheelchair as it makes it easier to board the plane, and indeed we get to sit in the front row, with her taking the window seat and me taking the aisle, and a young lady joining us later in the middle seat. I take out my computer and start working on the talk that I'm supposed to give, and the young lady takes out her crochet needle and starts working on what I later learn is a sweater. She asks me about the slides on my computer, and I ask her about her crocheting, and my mom joins in, mentioning that she loves to knit. She has brought sandwiches and gives the spare one to the young lady. I close my computer and put it away in the pocket in front of me and spend the rest of the flight engaged in the conversation.

As we are landing, I text Jason and ask about his mom. He replies "I found her! A policeman found her walking barefoot and took her to the hospital. She's been there for three days as Jane Doe."

“Oh my god that’s wonderful”, I text back. We make plans to meet later that day and have dinner together.

The university has sent a driver, and he takes us to the hotel, which is only about 10 minutes away. We check in and go to the room and unpack. That's when I realize that I can’t find my computer. “I must’ve left it on seat pocket on the plane!”, I hysterically tell my mom.

In my mind I’m going over the possibilities. Perhaps the cleaning crew found the computer, in which case it would be stored somewhere in the airport. But the plane was late, and they were boarding immediately after we deplaned, which makes it more likely that the computer and the plane are now on the other side of the country.

A million things are going through my head. I can buy another laptop. I can give a chalk-talk. I kick myself for not having backed things up for more than a week. But that won’t help now as I don’t have the backup here with me. That conversation with the crocheting lady distracted me. But honestly, I really want to blame my mom, who is sitting with me in the hotel room calmly having a cup of tea.

Using my phone, I search for information on what to do if you’ve done something stupid like this and learn that if the airline finds the computer, they will take it to the lost luggage office at the airport. There is a phone number and I call them, only to get their answering machine. I leave a message.

The hotel has a pool. I’m going nuts, so to reduce the stress I go for a swim. Then with nothing to do, I collect my mom and we take a ride back to the airport. There is a line at the lost luggage counter, I can hear the phone ringing and no one answering it. We slowly make our way to the front and the lady says “I’m sorry, but no one has turned in a computer.” “Please give us a call later tonight.” I want to scream “but you don’t answer the phone!”, but silently turn and head back to the car.

We go back to the hotel and have a cup of tea. I realize that it’s the uncertainty of not knowing that’s hard to take, boiling up my anxiety. Indeed, I’d be happy to pay someone a few hundred dollars right now just so I would know whether the computer is going to be found or not. It’s an illogical thing to do because knowing about the outcome in advance will have no impact on the outcome, yet I’m willing to pay for it just so I wouldn’t have to suffer not knowing. But why is it that not knowing something can produce anxiety?

Emma Pierson and Noah Goodman at Stanford University have studied this phenomenon. In 2014, they ran an online study where volunteers were asked to imagine being locked in a room for an hour. At the end of the hour there was a chance that they would win or lose an amount of money. Would they prefer to be told at the beginning of the hour whether they will be winning or losing?

They found that people craved advance information, and this desire increased with the probability of winning or losing, especially as the stakes increased. Indeed, people were willing to pay for that information, despite the fact that having advanced information had no bearing on the outcome. Pierson and Goodman explained this behavior by noting that information allowed people to plan for the future, and this was valuable because we have limited cognitive resources. Knowing the outcome in advance allowed us to plan for how we would conduct our affairs after the key event revealed itself.

Bilal Bari and Sam Gershman followed up this work in 2024 with a similar study, replicating the Pierson and Goodman results. They found that if there was a good chance that we would earn $1000, we would be willing to pay to find out at the beginning of the hour, but we would rather avoid knowing if there was a good chance that we would lose money. Bari and Gershman then performed psychological testing on the subjects to assess their susceptibility to anxiety and found that the subjects with high anxiety traits exhibited a greater desire to pay for the advance information. That is, people who suffered from anxiety placed a higher value on the information that would inform them of the outcome.

For me, knowing if they would find my computer or not relieved me of the various conflicting plans that I would otherwise have to carry with me until the event. That relief, that lifting of the dark cloud that was consuming my thoughts, is what I was willing to pay for.

Fortunately, distraction arrives in the form of my cousin and his two beautiful kids, which he’s been raising pretty much on his own. You see, it’s not just his mom that has schizophrenia, it’s also his wife, a brilliant physicist whom he had to divorce a few years ago. Despite the separation, he takes care of her as well. I can’t find words to tell him how much I admired his love of family.

He picks us up and we go to his house. I ask about the search for his mom. He says “I was out driving the neighborhood each moment of my waking hours for 3 days. I knocked on doors, put up flyers, called the police and the hospitals.” “I was just going out of my mind.”

He continues: “The police wanted a doctor’s note saying my mom had dementia. Apparently, they don’t search for a missing person with schizophrenia.” “And the hospitals said they had no one under with that description in the emergency room.”

Then he says: “You know who helped me the most?”

“Who?” I ask.

“The homeless. They would give me a hug, and sometimes cry with me. They understood what it meant to be lost.”

“So how did you find her?” I ask.

“The city hospital had her in their psychiatric ward. She eventually calmed down to the point where she could tell them her name and they contacted me.”

“Oh my god. I’m so glad she’s OK.” I reply.

“I decided that as long as she’s in the hospital, let’s have them do some of the routine stuff that she should’ve done years ago, you know, mammogram, etc., before I bring her home.”

As we are talking, his daughter, who is perhaps 12, is making tea, while his son, who is maybe a year or two older, is cleaning the kitchen. The kids are running the house, which perhaps is not surprising given the situation with their mom and grandmother.

We go out to dinner, and as we are waiting for the check, I step outside to call the airport. Once again, it’s the answering machine. On the drive back to the hotel Jason suggests, “let’s try the airport.” We drive over and as they wait in the no-parking zone, I go over to the lost luggage office. There is no one around, except for the lady behind the counter. I walk over and ask if the cleaning crew happened to have found my computer on the flight down from Baltimore. She glances down to the counter and keeps looking down. I follow her gaze and shout “That’s my computer!”

References

Emma Pierson and Noah Goodman (2014) Uncertainty and denial: a resource-rational model of the value of information. PLOS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0113342

Bari, B. A., & Gershman, S. J. (2024). The value of non-instrumental information in anxiety: insights from a resource-rational model of planning. PsyArXiv Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/hwm78

 

Charm City Junction

There were only 4 of them, but the band could barely fit on the tiny stage. Even their instruments were small, a banjo, a fiddle, an accordion, and a bass. The room was small too, maybe 25 rows of seats, packed so we would take up every inch. It was Friday night, and we were here to listen to bluegrass, Charm City Junction, we being the 2-year-old whose young mom was trying to pacify, all the way up to the white haired lady who must have been in her 80s, hoping to experience a moment of joy, a wish to be moved.

A lady walked up to introduce the band, but before she did that, she pulled out a piece of paper and read a paragraph, describing how the building was built on the land that originally belonged to a long-gone Indian tribe, by white settlers that likely had African slaves. Then the young men got up on the stage and started playing.

Slowly, like a slight wind on a lake, the music rose, and we were each an anchored boat that reacted by swaying imperceptibly. Each beat a small wave, lifting our shoulders, our feet, our fingers, and then returning them in synchrony, only to start again. As the music built, the rhythms deepened, the whole room swaying to the faster, taller waves. A young lady and her sister got up and started tap dancing, the 2-year-old found space to swing.

Occasionally, the band would invite a family member or friend to join them for a song. When it was the accordionist’s turn, he invited his dad, who also played the accordion. The two of them, sitting next to each other, the energy in one entraining the other, playing an Irish tune. Their waves were like a storm now, moving our bodies, stomping and clapping, cheering and shouting.

On the way out, I saw the dad, sitting next to his grandchildren. They were playing with his white hair, making a mohawk.

Travel story: Chipiona Spain

 

 

Southern Spain, in a little village called Chipiona, I’m spending an evening at my rented condo, watching the sun go down.

Travel is difficult these days, and mine was no different, with 3 hour delay for departure from the US, missing my connecting flight from Madrid to Seville. But with a little bit of money, much can be solved, and so it was for me. I went to the train station, caught the train, and took a long nap until we arrived. I rented a car and started my drive down to a coastal village called Chipiona.

Along the road there were farms full of sun flowers, each about 3 feet tall, row after row, their yellow halo surrounding a red center, standing in the sun, bending to the breeze. They looked like teenagers, shoulder to shoulder, standing on a beach with the wind blowing through their curly blond hair.

I arrived at my condo and called the number I was given. Marina, the cleaning lady I believe, spoke not a word of English, but she found me and gave me the keys. It’s a beautiful condo complex, with a gorgeous pool in the middle, and my 8^th floor balcony overlooks the ocean. Wonderful. But there is no internet, and unbelievably, no towels of any kind. I messaged the owner and he said that because of COVID, he hadn’t placed towels in the place. I walked around thinking that, well, this being a beach town, it shouldn’t be too hard buying a towel from somewhere nearby. Fortunately, by the pool I find a young man that looks like he might work here and ask him. Yes, he finds me a towel. Nice.

That evening I found a fruit stand and bought some apricots, cherries, and grapes. The grapes were local, and quite good. Then I met with some colleagues and we walked to a seafood place by the water. One of the colleagues is from this region, and orders for us. Plate after plate is nothing short of amazing. Flavors that are new to me, like a dish made with rice and squid, all black, served in a large cast iron black pan. The final piece, a fish baked entirely enveloped in a mountain of salt, with the waiter chiseling the fish out of the salt, slowly skinning it, de-boning it, and then serving small pieces for each person. There was so much skill in making this food, and more skill in serving it. And then came the bill: $30 per person, that’s for all the wine and a 7-course meal. A similar scene repeats every dinner.

Thursday arrived and I took a nice long shower and headed down to the conference hotel and gave my talk. In the afternoon they took us on a bus and then a ferry to a nearby national park, where my binoculars were useful, spotting a wild pig, and a rather beautiful small bird which I think was a swallow, but blue and black. Then the bus took us to a winery, where we learned about making sherry in American Oak barrels. During this whole time, the best part was not so much the scenery, but rather the people. Sitting with someone on the bus, walking with another person in the park, standing next to a third person in the winery, each a book of stories, willing to share a chapter. I loved listening. In some ways, this is the best part of small conferences; the people you meet for the first time, and get to spend time an hour or two learning from.

During one of the conversations, I listened to a person who was trained in the US, then decided to go to China because they promised her directorship of a neuroscience institute. Last year, China instituted a policy where every single person has an app on their phone which is either green or red, determining their status based on a nationwide tracking of COVID exposure. She was traveling in some city in China when she found that her app had turned red. No taxi would take her, she couldn’t get back on a plane and go home, and she could not ride the metro. She even was unable to check in at her hotel. She started walking and found a shopkeeper who agreed to let her sleep in the store, on the floor. While at the store she started calling people and found someone high up in the university who knew someone in the government who was able to turn her app back to green. She lives in terror of this app turning red. China’s economic power attracted many scientists, but they are now showing their people the real face of dictatorships.

This part of Spain is special. The mansions have hints of Islamic style architecture, with many of them featuring a shallow pool, a fountain at the center, blue-green colored tile. On the beach, young people wear the usual swimsuits, but there are also others who are in hijab. On the concrete strand that borders the beach, women balancing a tray of jewelry on their head, selling their wares. The diversity is beautiful, a convergence of civilizations, peacefully coexisting.

I was swimming in the ocean when I heard a bell, and then on the loudspeaker, something in Spanish. Not knowing what it was I kept on swimming, but then noticed that people were leaving the water. I thought, hmm, maybe it’s a shark, so I got out. At the conference I was telling the story to my Spanish speaking friend, and he said, it was probably the lunch special that they were advertising.

Returning home from Cambridge

 

Looking through my window on the right side of the plane, with the afternoon sun gently warming me, we are about two hours out of Iceland, with another 4 to go  before we land in Baltimore. Here, over the very northern Canada, the land below is only hills, lakes, and rivers, with the occasional patches of snow that are brightly lit by the encouraging May sun. There are no trees, no signs of man.

Slowly the first indications of humanity appear. They are not houses, but roads, winding and alone, curving with the bends of a valley. About an hour later, the geometric pattern has changed from fractal borders of land and water to Cartesian borders of lines and sharp angles. Now we have property and farms, straight roads, and intersections. Far on the horizon, I can imagine the curvature of the earth, as the clouds bend and fall away.

Along the journey, I am reading a collection of essays on migration. One tells the story of a Jewish group, having fled Russia, along with a group of Italians, who have landed in Ellis Island (which the author calls, Elli’s Island). He is in his early twenties, and though he cannot understand the language of the Italians, he notes that they really stress their “r’s”. He laments that the rich are simply waved in, while the poor are separated, sent to a large hall, observed and marked with chalk on their coats, and then questioned. 

The 12 year old girl is being asked how old she is, and whether she can count from 1 to 12, which she does fine. Then she is asked if she can count from 12 to 1. She is having trouble, so she is separated from her family, because she might be “feeble minded”. You are asked to name people that know you in the US, their addresses, and they are contacted by telegram, and you wait to see if they come to claim you. The essay ends as they are standing in Manhattan, facing the water, and one of them starts shouting to no one, gleefully telling the Russians that you didn’t want us, but you will miss us, and we are never coming back. It’s better to be free in a strange land than not be wanted in your own.

Now the scenery is shores of Maryland. The plane is descending. There are tiny islands, a curved coastline, and houses with piers sending out feelers into the water, like synapses on a neuron's dendrite. The boats are docked along the piers, but some are traveling, like neurotransmitters, sending messages from one neuron to another.

It’s been more than two years since I have seen this magnificent land from above. My god it’s a beautiful place.

Michelangelo's poem

On the train back from Manhattan, the magazine in the seat-pocket had an article about the drummer Questlove. He had written a book, which the magazine described this way:

"he's put all that he's learned about inspiration into a new book, ... which is packed with patient, deliberate breadcrumbs intended to help people get unstuck creatively."

What an interesting way to describe a self-help book, "deliberate breadcrumbs".

It was a lovely day that started in Baltimore with the view from the train window: occasional coastlines, bridges, towns, and bare trees. We saw the sun rise, red horizon above the water. Outside of Philly, a group of rowers synchronized their colorful paddles as we crossed a bridge. One of those brief moments that leaves a picture in your memory.

I walked over to the cafe car and got us some tea. It felt wonderful holding it warm in my hands. Breakfast was cheese and tomato sandwiches that I brought, along with butter and jam sandwiches that my mom brought.

We arrived in Penn Station and took the metro to Central Park, then walked across the park to the Met. We met my daughter (and her friend) there, who surprised me with a box of macaroons, and my mom surprised her with two small paintings that she had bought on her recent trip to Iran.

This was the last weekend for the Michelangelo exhibit, so it was crowded. But the crowds were kind, and polite, as we inevitably ran into each other in front of this drawing or that. I reveled in the myriad of languages that I heard, so many ways to say "wow", followed by something that I couldn't understand.

The exhibit was all about Michelangelo’s "studies", drawings that he had made before he painted or sculpted the final piece. Almost all of them in pencil or another monochrome tool.

Because the pieces were studies, if you looked close, there was a story there, depicting a day in his life, some 600 years ago. On one of those days, he started with a piece of paper and drew a man, fully clothed, sitting, with detail that looked as though the drawing itself was chiseled in stone. Then he turned the paper around, and now doodled, drawing another man, this one naked, standing. Finally, he used the rest of the paper to write a poem.

How can it be, Lady, as one can see,
from long experience, that the live image,
sculpted in the hard alpine stone, lasts longer
than its maker, whom the years return to ashes?