Hopeless in Tehran

I teach in a summer course called NeuroBridges, which brings students from the countries of the Middle East, including Israel and Iran, to a village in France for 10 days. The course teaches the students about the brain, but more importantly, by having them live together, eat their meals together, and do projects together, the course teaches them about each other. 

Today I received a note from one of those students. She lives in Tehran. Her note gives you firsthand experience of what it’s like to live in a city that is being bombed, and what it’s like to be young and feel despair about your future. Below is an excerpt of her letter, followed by my response.

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I finally managed to connect to the internet, and I was wondering if you might have a little time for me. I really just wanted to talk for a moment and share what’s been on my mind. You’ve always been such a valuable mentor to me, and I truly trust your wisdom.

In Iran, every day things get worse than the day before. People are slain. Infrastructure is being targeted — historical sites, hospitals, schools. We constantly hear the sounds of air defenses and missiles, and every time it happens I feel a wave of anxiety, wondering whose loved ones might be lost next… or whether the next missile might hit my own loved ones. I remember your wife saying that even in the worst situations, you always manage to find positive points — something to be grateful for. I’ve thought about that a lot. I truly tried to look at things the way you do and find some positive meaning in all of this… but honestly, I couldn’t.

If you were in my place, how would you endure this situation? And what positive point would you try to hold onto?

I am deeply worried about the future — not just mine, but everyone’s. Even if the war ends, there will be severe economic hardship, instabilities...

I’m also afraid that I might not be able to reach my long-time dream of starting a PhD in Europe. With the situation worsening, there will probably be more sanctions, and universities may become even more hesitant to accept Iranian students.

At the same time, because of the war and constant internet disruptions, research in the country has almost completely stopped. Universities are closed. We were working on an animal neuroscience project that had progressed really well, but because of the current conditions we had to sacrifice the mice and stop the project. You might imagine how hard that feels

Sometimes I feel that when a professor chooses a PhD student, they will tend to choose someone who has had uninterrupted research opportunities in a first-world country, rather than someone like me who has fallen behind simply because of war, instability, and internet shutdowns. They might not even be able to imagine what it’s like to continue doing research while worrying about basic financial survival, or while your country is going through so much turmoil. I used the PhD example just to explain how unfair and discouraging things can feel right now.

And it’s not just me. There are hundreds, maybe thousands, of ambitious young students who love science and are facing the same uncertainty.

If you have the time, I would really appreciate hearing your thoughts. If you were in my place, in a situation where your home, your dreams, your goals, and the safety of your loved ones all feel threatened at once, how would you keep going?

Excuse me for taking your time.

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I read your note with great concern. I’m so glad that you’re OK. Thank you for writing.

War is often the consequence of a long series of bad decisions by misguided leaders on both sides of the conflict. You are an innocent citizen who is suffering because of their mistakes. I am so very sorry.

It hurts to have lost the research that you had invested so much time in. These bombs are not just killing people and destroying buildings, but the rubble that they have produced might forever block the path that you had planned for building your future.  

When the bombs stop falling, and they will, life will restart, tentatively at first, but then with vigor. You will see small ordinary things anew. Like a child, you will examine the new leaves on a tree and smell its bark with delight. You will share a cup of tea with a friend and look in her eyes and listen to her voice as if for the first time. You will travel to the Caspian and place your toes in the sea and close your eyes and feel joy.

And you will restart your research, and you will apply for graduate schools in Europe and America. And when the professors read your application, they will see something extraordinary: a young woman of magnificent perseverance who pursued her dreams despite war, bombs, and despair.  

As Walt Whitman wrote, “What good amid these, O me, O life? Answer: That you are here—that life exists and identity, That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.”

 

image credit: Atta Kenare/AFP 

 

 

Neurobridges: from synapses to understanding

Neurobridges is a summer school that brings together students from countries in the middle east so that they can learn about the brain, as well as each others' cultures. The aim is to take a small step that might reduce tension and build understanding. Perhaps the best way to show you what Neurobridges is about is by telling you about a few of the conversations that took place during the course.

At lunch, I sat with two students, an Israeli student from Jerusalem. and an Iranian student  from Tehran. After a bit of talk about their individual areas of study, we talked about the summer course. The Iranian student said: "Here the idea is to use science to bring people together, with the purpose of seeing each other’s humanity, to reduce our perception of differences." Then the Israeli student added: "This is much better than bringing people together and having them talk about their cultural differences or similarities. Science is a better excuse to start the conversation."

At another meal, a young lady from Macedonia mentioned that she learned from an Iranian student that the two cultures shared a custom: "when the host offered you food, you politely declined. When they offered it again, you again declined. Only on the third time you accepted. I was delighted to learn that this was the measure of etiquette in both cultures."

The Palestinian Israeli young woman, born and raised in Haifa, now studying for her PhD in Europe, was sitting across the lunch table from a Jewish Israeli young woman, a postdoc in America. The Palestinian woman called herself Palestinian, but she said: "The Jewish Israelis don’t like it when I call myself Palestinian. They’d prefer if I called myself Arab Israeli."

She continued: "Until college it was rare for me to have any interaction with kids of my own age who were not Palestinian. This is because there are 4 types of schools, 3 of which are Jewish, and the fourth one which is for Arabs. There are rare schools that admit both. When I graduated from college and wanted to apply for grad school, there were many foundations that offered scholarships, but all of them required military or public service. I didn’t have those."  

The Israeli woman replied: “Why didn’t you volunteer for civil service?”

The Palestinian woman said: “How could I serve a government that is oppressing me and my people?”

The Israeli woman replied: “But you are Israeli, this is your country.”

The Palestinian woman replied: “I am Palestinian. I live in an occupied land. Right now my whole people are just trying to survive. I can’t think about helping Israel.” She continued: “When you go to Ben Gurion airport and try to leave the country, if you are Palestinian, you are taken aside for extra searches. When someone asks the authorities why, they say, "What's a little inconvenience to search your body and suitcase if it improves safety?”

The Israeli woman said: "I'm sorry about that. I know that's not fair."

But the conversations are not just bridges that help build understanding among young people, they are also a conduit for learning among the professors, who also come from diverse backgrounds. Here is a sampling:

At breakfast each morning, the professors sit together and talk. I learned that at Hebrew University, the admissions officers are encouraged to enroll students from East Jerusalem, i.e., Arab Israelis. My colleague said: "the university receives more funding for graduating this population of students than Jewish students."

He continued: “If the Arab Israelis participated more, for example, by voting, they would have more power in the government. The fact that they don’t seem to want to participate tells me that they don’t seem to want to be a part of Israel.” Another colleague mentioned that look at the Druze people in Israel. They participate in the Army, and other aspects of being an Israeli. "Recently I heard that the best high school in the country is one in the Druze region."

Listening to these exchanges, I'm reminded that the value of Neurobridges is not that it dissolves political realities or resolves historical wounds, but that it creates a space where curiosity takes precedence over fear, and where the first move toward understanding is made not through slogans or diplomacy but through shared pursuit of ideas. When students and faculty discover that science can be a neutral ground on which difficult identities can coexist, and even converse, they begin to see one another with more dimensionality. That shift is small and fragile, but it is real, and it accumulates. In a region where young people are more often taught to imagine an adversary than a colleague, the act of studying synapses, brain circuits, and behavior side by side becomes a modest but profound counterexample. Neurobridges does not claim to fix the world; it simply gives the next generation a better starting point.

Visting a synagogue in New York

On Yom Kippur, which marks the beginning of the Jewish new year and the end of a 24 hour fasting period, I went to a synagogue in New York at the invitation of one of my students, Salomon, who is a cantor, which is the person that leads the service through singing from the Torah. 

The synagogue is a couple of blocks from my hotel and not knowing anything about what to do, I decided to wait until I saw men with skullcaps and just follow them and see what they did. This worked well: I saw the men open their jackets to show themselves to the security people in front, and that's what I did too. They waved me in like I was a regular. 

Once inside, I saw that men went in one door, and women went in another door. I walked in the correct door and saw that the men had donned skullcaps and a white & black shawl. I got myself a skullcap (yamaka), but didn’t feel right putting on the shawl. I stood near a wall, trying not to be seen. Someone came over and handed me a Torah and pointed me to the right page. It was Hebrew on one side, and English on the other, with the pages going from right to left, just like Persian. 

Fortunately, today I wore a jacket, a white shirt, and black pants. This was amazingly appropriate because every other man was also wearing a jacket, white shirt, and black pants. Unfortunately, I also wore leather shoes, which I later learned is a no-no because men are supposed to avoid it (men wore canvas tennis shoes etc., women seem to not care, perhaps the rules don't apply to them). Women were seated in a separate (back) section, men in front. Honestly it seemed to me that women were largely excluded from the whole ceremony. 

After about 10 minutes against the wall Salomon saw me and brought me to a pew and introduced me to his congregation as his professor from Johns Hopkins. He then went to the center of the room and began reading from the Torah by singing it. Occasionally, the congregation would join him, signing and swaying their bodies. The rabbi, a young man, only said a few words to start the service, then opened a door at the front of the room where they housed the Torah in scroll form but then closed it after a couple of songs. The front of the synagogue was a wall of stained glass, mostly red colors. 

The service, which lasted about 1.5 hours, was entirely in Hebrew but I was able to follow it because of the translations in my Torah. The service was about asking for forgiveness for your sins and praising Hashem, which means “the name”, a reference to God. I imagined that this same service was probably performed 2000 years ago. 

We mostly stood throughout the service, and I tried to closely follow things by flipping my pages when I saw others do so. It was particularly lovely listening to Salomon’s amazing voice, who sings like an opera star. A couple of times his two sons joined him and sang with him. 

 As the service ended, men around me wished me a good year, and Salomon was surrounded by the congregation who shook his hand and thanked him. We then gathered outside the main room and there was a nice spread of bagels, cream cheese, salmon, egg salad, tuna salad, tomatoes, and cucumbers. I was very much at home with this kind of food. 

 I kept the yamaka.

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.