The Jigsaw

Life is wondrous. Both in the biological as well as the social sense. There is so much to observe, to understand and to be amazed. To wonder and to ponder. How each piece fits into another. How the cogs connect and translate a cause at one end into effects across the whole scape. How the interconnectedness leads to surprising, wholly unexpected and sometimes irreproducible results. How it all makes sense, whether it's the cosmos or evolution or history or technology, when you can see the underlying web of connections, when you are able to trace the causes to the myriad effects. This breadth of vision is however possible only when you are standing far away and looking at the picture. A picture that comes together from years of study, years of individual jigsaw pieces fitting together. Each piece with its colours and contours and edges are beautiful, but each piece on its own makes such a minuscule difference. So much study has to go into figuring out its position, its role and its connection to the neighbours. This is one jigsaw puzzle where you don't get a colour printout of the final picture to guide your assembly. 

The picture lends itself to interpretation only when it has come together. So what is one to do if one is stuck in the middle of a vast unbuilt picture fiddling with a few tiny pieces in one's hand. What is one to do when all one wants is to fly up, high up there, so one can look down and survey the whole scape where the tiny pieces of unfinished jigsaw are not even noticeable. Where one or two missing pieces do not even make a difference to the larger picture. Where the bigger picture is so much more seductive but one is distracted by the clutter of the tiny pieces.

Photo by Hans-Peter Gauster on Unsplash

The 'lazy' dyslexics!

Mumtaz does not like reading. Books fill her room; fairy tales, biographies and adventure stories. She used to love sitting with the colourful board-books as an infant, but now at 10, she does not have the patience. She can manage basic stories, but reading leaves her tired and irritable. She loves stories though, dramas with lots of tears and laughter; she loves watching movies and serials, always fascinated by the interplay of emotions and how people work within relationships. But even the lure of a well-written story cannot coax her into reading. She does not do storytelling either. When recounting a story, there would be a lot of details, a lot of inconsequential chatter, but the story itself would not make any sense. The beginning, middle and end would be all jumbled up. You could see all the emotions playing out in her narration; the excitement, the animation, she certainly is a dramatist, but the story would be lost in the telling. Then there are the funny words Hopsital (for hospital), Strachedy (for strategy). She is a comedian, always the life of a party, be it new friends in the park or family gatherings. 

But all was not well. Her school grades were falling; her teachers loved her but pushed her parents to give her ‘more practice’. Her mother who helped her with the homework began noticing that something was not right. For an otherwise multilingual chatterbox, she appeared to lack an intuitive understanding of phonics. Her vocabulary was lagging, her comprehension lacking. Her father could somehow relate to her better. A successful financial analyst, he still avoids books. He vividly remembers being labelled ‘tube light’ or ‘lazy’ by friends and teachers for his inability to multitask and poor grades in class. He was dismissive of his wife’s concerns. “There is nothing wrong with my daughter, she will be fine,” he would say. He was uneasy about labels. Six months of internal struggle and the undeniable social withdrawal of their bright and happy child drove them to finally approach a child psychologist. A Cognitive Assessment was conducted where Mumtaz met with the psychologist, played block games, told stories and drew cartoons. Finally, they had an assessment. 

Mumtaz has a Specific Learning Disorder or SLD, in her case, Dyslexia. A condition that makes it difficult to read and write, often accompanied with difficulties in math. Reading is in fact two separate activities; decoding or translating the written symbols into sounds and comprehension or understanding the meaning of the words. Dyslexics may have difficulty in both or only one of these. Phonological awareness is the ability to recognize similarities and differences in sounds, for example in rhyming words and dyslexic children have trouble with this. In addition, there are sometimes other associated difficulties that dyslexic children face. They may have trouble sequencing; for instance they may find it tough to remember sequences such as days of the week, syllables in a word (hence hopsital), steps in a long division, or the order of events in a story they are narrating. They may also sometimes have a weak working memory. Working memory is like the RAM of a computer, the place where you store small bits of information for a very short time to be retrieved for daily activities. Examples include taking notes while also listening to the teacher speak, following mother’s multi-step instructions, keeping track of steps in a long division. Children with a weak working memory may look like they are not paying attention, but in reality they are struggling to keep it all in their head. Dyslexia is a very diverse condition with one or more of these associated problems. Mumtaz is one example while young Ishaan of the movie Taare Zameen Par is another, with different combinations of deficits.

Homo sapiens have existed for nearly 200,000 years on earth. We have likely the most sophisticated brain on earth, capable of learning everything from tool making to music compositions to computer algorithms. For most of our existence we have communicated verbally. Some 5000 or so years ago we began devising codes for jotting down our thoughts for greater efficiency. Then 500 years ago we began relying on books to communicate knowledge, but it was still only the scholars who needed to read. It is in the last one century as societies began favouring universal school-based standardized education, instead of apprenticeship for vocational training, that we stumbled upon this problem that put a significant number of us at a disadvantage.  

Dyslexia often runs in the family and may show up as mild difficulties in reading to severe and identified dyslexia in the family history. Comparisons of genomes of dyslexic people with proficient readers have found changes in many genes that could be associated with dyslexia. This knowledge is helping scientists understand how genes control neurons that in turn control how we learn. The brain is however too complex for us to yet be able to figure out whether these genes have any direct role in reading deficits. In humans, the area known as Visual Word Form Area (VWFA-that recognizes written words) in the brain is connected to the language  region even before children have learned to read.  This must be one of those evolutionary inventions that set us up to be linguists and decoders meant for greater things.  Functional MRI (fMRI) scans of brains of skilled readers and dyslexic readers clearly show differences in the regions related to reading and language processing. But they show many other differences as well. The many differences in the brains of any two individuals show up as differences in their sociability, moods, imagination, learning styles, behaviour and skills. Thus these larger differences in the brains of dyslexics manifest in the way they see the world, think about, and solve problems. Dyslexic individuals are more likely to miss the details while being able to see the larger picture. They may have better pattern recognition and visual-spatial abilities even as they struggle with reading and sequencing. They may be better at dealing with social interactions and managing people. Perhaps these are the traits that helped Albert Einstein and Agatha Christie and Steve Jobs, all dyslexics, to make their mark in the world. But this blooming generally happens after they leave the trauma of school and discover for themselves where their strengths lay. 

Could we forgo this traumatic childhood and bolster their strengths in the school itself? Armed with the diagnosis, Mumtaz’s parents entered her into a remedial program where special education teachers worked with her individually to strengthen her phonological awareness, her sequencing skills and helped her discover simple tricks and hacks to improve her reading, writing and math. The school started providing accommodations in the class and gave her extra time and extra help in understanding the questions during tests. Slowly she began to regain her footing in school. She is still way behind her classmates in academics, but with encouragement from teachers and parents she has discovered a talent for music and sports. She received this support and help thanks to her getting identified as a dyslexic. Dyslexia is so diverse and covers such a wide spectrum that there is a movement in the world of educational psychology to remove the label dyslexia altogether so that everyone with difficulties can get the help they need to flourish. Every school-teacher will agree that there are always a few children in their class who have difficulties with language and math. But these deficits do not get formally identified. There is a lack of awareness among teachers and parents. To add to this, cognitive assessments and remedial classes are very expensive and not within the reach of all.

Some of these issues can be remedied by making cognitive assessments compulsory in junior school. The National Education Policy 2020 mandates inclusive education for all children with disabilities. It states that teachers should be provided with help to identify children with learning disabilities early, so that they can be supported from the beginning. It lists out specific actions such as using appropriate technology, allowing students to work at their own pace and making curricula flexible to make education accessible to all. There is a framework in place now to implement such changes in our educational institutions. When inclusive teaching strategies become mainstream then each student in the class will begin realizing their self-worth. A child who believes in herself and feels confident to face her own personal challenges, is a child set on a path to success and happiness.   

October is Dyslexia Awareness Month.

A shorter version of this article was published in The Hindu on 29th October 2020

Photo by Bruno Martins on Unsplash

Original

Original, novel, hitherto unheard of, unthought of. Why are humans so obsessed with originality? Have we always been so obsessed? It has been said, by these same humans, that whatever needs to be said has been said, whatever has to be written, has already been written, in the scriptures, with Bible, in the Koran. But there too, the claim is not a denial of originality. It is rather an acknowledgement of ideas once original, once revolutionary. It is only a warning that all original thought has been thought already, there is no more to be said. But it has only spurred humans on, has always challenged someone new to think something new, newer still.
Whenever man has journeyed far into new and novel places and reached his island of comfort, there have always been some kids who stood at the beach, shaded their eyes and looked at the vast open ocean and said let’s set sail again, find something new, yet again. From the men and women who tramped across the globe in their animal skins to people who made thinking a profession to the mavericks who cannot stop creating something new we have been at it. For 10, 20, 30 thousand years. Are there still new thoughts to be thought? Or are we recycling thoughts now? But in each time, each circumstance, an old thought has to be reinvented to fit the present.
There have perhaps been a 100 billion pairs of feet that have walked this earth. So, if each of 100 billion with their 8600 billion billion neurons are thinking, would that be a minimum of 100 billion and a maximum of infinite number of thoughts? Can there be more thoughts than there are stars in the universe? Can there be more thoughts that there are atoms in the universe? If there have already been an infinite number of thoughts in the world, could I really now think an original thought?
Image courtesy Muneesh Pal and Beena Pillai

Storytellers

 

Recently chanced upon a discussion on Twitter about how to present science. The contention was whether writing a paper means telling a story or not. Physicists seemed to think that story is for people whose data is incomplete. That set me thinking.

I am a reader and teller and listener of stories. If there is no story it does not interest me. If there is no story to tell, it makes me feel inadequate. So, what's the best way to present science? How can there be any science or economics or sociology or history without a story? Mathematics? Now that I do not have an intuitive feel for. Pure mathematics, I don't know whether it lends to a story or not.

But everything else that I can think of tells a story. All that we learn new fits into a jigsaw, a tapestry, of something we knew before and something more we anticipate finding. A past, a present and a future. There is usually a question we had, some findings we made and some new questions raised. Some whats and hows and whys and wheres. A story with a beginning, a middle and a direction to keep moving unless we actually have an end. But mostly as Victor Hugo said,' Science says the first word on everything and the last word on nothing! This is something that everyone other than scientists have trouble digesting. Science is held up to ridicule frequently because of this very reason. The scientists never appear to agree on anything and never appear to settle a debate clearly. But that is the very essence of science. So always an incomplete story. But a story nevertheless. And if scientists are not storytellers then what are they? What is the point of finding something if not in the context of the rest of the landscape. Either an incongruity or a perfect fit. Either way referenced to context. 

Photo by Reuben Juarez on Unsplash

Data!

Having a large amount of data in your hands sounds like a great end to a project in the beginning. By the end, you realize that it was really only a beginning and not such a great one at that. It is like you went to a yard sale and brought all this junk for free. At that time it sounded like a great idea. Now you have no idea what to do with it.

As you begin your analysis you start getting these ‘very significant’ changes, large sets of genes are heaving up into a wave and falling back down, or dipping down into the abyss and then pulling themselves up in a joint effort! Wow! There you stand like Columbus, at the helm of Santa Maria, about to discover the new land, full of possibilities, new stories, new animals, new riches. And then suddenly there emerges from the forest a man, then another and then another with that ‘been-here-done-it’ look. They have found, killed the animals, domesticated the plants, built their huts and tamed the rivers. And you gingerly step into the land and try to edge your way between them into the thick forest knowing you are just another traveller, just another of those wandering species that goes about disrupting the homeostasis. As you cut away the heavy loaded branches blocking your path and push the undergrowth out of the way and scare the small animals off as you take each step, you are hoping that there is something left in this forest, something for you to find, discover, for the first time and hold it aloft like the Statue of Liberty and shout or rather mutter hesitantly that here, I have found a plant, looks a bit like the ivy, is just less poisonous, something like the bird of paradise, just a little less flamboyant, but here it is!

Photo by Francesco Ungaro from Pexels

Anxious about anxiety

Imagine somebody has signed you up for a skydiving experience. You are standing inside the aircraft. The hatch is open. Your guide is telling you to go ahead, jump. Nothing to worry, they will take care of you. All the others have taken the plunge. There is a yawning emptiness in the pit of your stomach. Your heart is racing; your throat is dry. You are barely standing. You take a deep breath, a tremulous smile. Yes, you can do it. You take that step forward. No! You cannot do it. You shrink back. Do they think you are crazy to rely on their words? What if the parachute does not open? What if you can't breathe? What if you lose consciousness? All manner of horrors are possible. Voices are screaming around you. You are a coward! Everyone can do it, what's special about you? You shrink into yourself. You are hyperventilating; eyes darting back and forth. What if one of these monsters pushes you? You feel totally powerless. You are losing control. My daughter goes through this crisis every single morning when we reach the gates of the school.

 

For the last two years I have watched my daughter go through this torture, refusing to go to school, time and again. Sometimes it is a couple of days, sometimes a week, at the worst, a whole fortnight. I have battled my feelings swinging from sympathy to frustration to anger. I have vacillated between giving her a break, cajoling, bribing, threatening, shaming and I am sad to say, hitting. They have all worked at times, forcing her into the school against her better sense, but many times not. I have marvelled at her stubbornness and the power of her refusal. She just wouldn’t bend, be it threats, shaming, authority or love. The refusal turned to stomachache, headache, nausea, fever, you name it. Every day she would turn up at the school clinic with a complaint and I would regularly get calls to pick her up from school. Then the clinic staff started shouting at her for making things up, ‘there is nothing the matter with you!’ One day they sent her to the headmistress who told her kids don't have headaches and sent her back to class. Being a huge school, with a large student strength, perhaps made them ill equipped to deal with the out of ordinary.

 

Through this all, I industriously Googled^® for answers. The keyword that jumped out at me repeatedly was, anxiety. Anxiety, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is an apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill. It is an ever-present emotion for most people and it protects us from reckless behaviour. But sometimes the amygdala, a deep-seated organ within the brain which controls our emotions, becomes overactive. Then, the mind inflates the spectre of the ‘impending ill’ interfering with our ability to function in the society. And there you have an anxiety disorder, panic attacks and in some cases, phobia.

 

I discovered that regular complaints about apparently unrelated physical problems that do not seem to go away with symptomatic treatment is a classic warning sign of anxiety. I wondered if the professionals in the school clinic had not learned this in their medical training, or simply did not care. The scientist in me started looking for triggers for this anxiety. I tried placebo treatment for her symptoms. We 'scientifically' changed her diet, gave her vitamin syrups with magical properties. And slowly things settled. She started attending class, enjoying the daily banter with her classmates, loving her teachers. She identified 'good’ teachers who took her troubles seriously and helped her and 'bad' teachers who did not believe her and scolded her.

 

The PTMs and discussions with her teachers gave me the impression of well-meaning but overburdened teachers. They were compassionate about her absenteeism but more worried about the effect it was having on her academic performance. With each class nearing a strength of 40, and multiple classes to teach, it was not surprising that they didn’t have much time to think deeply about each student. No time to think beyond academics, no time to discover what other talents and strengths the kids might have. The system was designed to select academic high-achievers and extroverted talents; others were invisible. 

 

I decided that a move would be good for her in the long run, although it might turn out to be traumatic at the moment. I looked for a smaller strength school, where they could work with the kids, where they respected other talents beyond academics, where they took the time to discover hidden talents and nurture their strengths. Although such paragons of educational virtue are hard to come by, I did manage to move her to a smaller school with small class strength and a little more respect for non-academic achievements.

 

But soon after the excitement of new uniform and new books was over, she began refusing to go to school again. Now I knew it was not school specific. It put to rest that unspoken fear that had gnawed at my mind that there was something that happened in the previous school that had triggered her fear. The response of this school was dramatically different. After a few days of her not making it to school, I was called in by the teacher. The principal madam talked to me. I had a meeting with the school counsellor and my daughter’s class teacher to discuss what the triggers might be and how they can help. She stood outside the meeting room the whole time, right in front of the principals' office and cried, and nobody shouted at her! My self-doubt and unsureness at having moved schools was put to rest.

 

I decided it was time to bite the bullet and visit a mental health professional. The decision was not easy. Whatever science you know, however progressive your views may be, mental health problem still meant ‘an inability to control our minds’. A sign of weakness. An acknowledgement of defeat. But all my research, reading and discussions with my scientist colleagues convinced me that my daughter is suffering

and I needed to get help. The first visit turned out to be more of a therapy for me. I talked for an hour about my daughter. I discovered how much I loved her, how much I worried about her and how many dreams and fears I carried around with me. Then came the psychiatric evaluation. Again, it was a step that I would rather not have taken, but in for a penny in for a pound. Instead of the veiled discussions with parents and sugar coating for the child, the psychiatrist sat us both down and talked straight to my 9-year-old daughter. He discussed her complaints. He drew a graph! A graph of anxiety vs performance to explain the issue to her. She sat and listened to him, sometimes nodding sometimes disagreeing! I guess that is what we all want first and foremost, respect. She started therapy.

 

I was going through my personal unofficial not-paid-for therapy. I learned that when she is anxious what she needs around her is a calm presence. Not a stressed-out soul who extrapolates 20 years ahead and who foresees a bleak future projected from her every current action. I have realized that as a parent it is the fear of the future that drives us to our actions; the scolding, the pushing and pressurizing, the nagging, the berating. I discovered that if I just provide a safe environment for her, where she doesn’t have to constantly keep looking over her shoulder, where she doesn’t have to second guess if mom is lying and where she doesn’t have to constantly feel she is not measuring up, then she will take that tentative step forward, take that small risk, and buoyed by the success, take that next step… The trick is to ‘just chill mom’ as she says.

 

But then while we are still on this journey of self-discovery, my daughter and I…the world turned upside down. Today there is not a person who is not anxious; fearful of an invisible but very real virus, fearful of not finding a hospital bed, fearful of finding one but only to die on it alone.

 

As the world struggles to fight, then hide from and then come to terms with this new enemy, schools have shut. Kids, and adults, have been cooped up within four walls for days at end. My little one was very excited about home schooling, when it all began. But two months of it and now all she wants is to go back to school. But what would schools be like in post-COVID era, one wonders. What new monsters will be lurking around the corner? What new terrors await us?

This article appeared in The Indian Express on June 11, 2020 

Putting out to pasture

20100604 used to be my password. The day I started in my new role; as an independent scientist. It was a momentous day. A place I had dreamed to be and then arrived. So it felt then. That was 10 years ago!

The truth was that I was quite unprepared. I, in fact, had no clue what being a scientist entailed. All the ‘un-scientist like’ things I had to do. Lots and lots of paperwork, lots of learning of administrative lingo, learning the rules and how to wiggle through them. Lots of arguing with colleagues, shouting in corridors, losing my temper (definitely not part of my routine as a pre-PI), fuming alone in my office, taking the simmering dissatisfaction and anger home. Then learning to lower the heat slowly, finding my own comfortable temperature on the settings, learning the ropes of dealing with the director, senior colleagues, equals, juniors (oh the invisible hierarchy!). 

Yes, I was quite unprepared for the students who did not understand the point of controls. Students who had no eye for detail. No idea on how to deal with students having babies, having break-ups and breakdowns, having spats and chronic incompatibilities, having self-doubt or no doubt at all! The anger and frustration (at what I can’t now remember) that left me shaking, sweat beading on my forehead and afraid of having a breakdown myself. Then slowly learning to let it all wash over me, watching my students learn to take my out-of-the-blue ideas (or counter-ideas) and then walk away blithely without paying any heed, discovering my students discover the joy of science and process of it. Reaching that homeostasis that worked for me; perhaps for them too.

I was also quite unprepared for the tangents that threw me around. The trouble with the idea of unfettered freedom (such a thing does not exist). The 9 students and the 9 different fields we explored! The lack of space in my brain for so many compartments. The fits and starts that each project brought and took away with it. The pace at which you need to switch gears! The realization that what I called multitasking was not it at all! 

However, as we say in papers, there was also enjoying the banter of colleagues in the lunchroom, cracking wisecracks and then suffering for it on WhatsApp groups, chilling a wee bit uncomfortably on the lab trips and picnics, relaxing on those evenings with alcohol with colleagues across the country at conferences. There was also the sheer joy of sitting back on my comfy chair and gorging on beautiful data brought in by students who worked hard at it, now displayed on my 26” HD screen (and not feeling any guilt for it). 

Yes, it has been 10 years. Longer than I have ever stayed in one place  physically or mentally, ever in my life, be it school, college, PhD or post-doc. It also has been 70 days that I have stayed at home. Longer than I have ever stayed home since I was six years old! 40 years. 10 years. 70 days. Too many numbers. Too much inactivity. Too much social distancing. Too much time to think (and stress and hyperventilate too). It is definitely time to move a bit, if not in body, then certainly in mind. Feet are tied down, but the mind is free to wander. Time for some new challenges, some new pastures. Let us nibble away to the far end of the field and see how the grass tastes there.  

Making it work

It has been exactly 10 years since my first post. 10 years since I accepted that job offer. The person who agonized about that decision a decade ago sounds a very different one from the one ruminating those memories now. But that 36 year old was a realist. And I should thank that younger woman for where I am today, for I think you do really go on as you start. That day, when she wrote that post, all she knew was that she intended to make it work. She had no idea where she was going and she had no idea how she meant to get there. Ten years into the marathon, and along the way the problems have changed, conditions have changed, priorities have changed. Health and wealth have changed, the joys and pleasures have changed, the cause for angst and tears have changed. But this 46 year old is certainly still at it. Making it work.

Along the way, there were those who gave up and moved back to the predictable path of the west. The many who survived are as diverse as the country they came into. Some worked their skin off, on the bench, off the bench, day and night, their students dropping like flies after a Hit. Some picked up every piece of scrap they could find and designed it into a piece of art. Some lived in their own little world as if the rest of it did not matter, plodding along slowly but very steadily. Some fibbed their way through, tricking and treating as they went. Some hung onto their umbilical cords, tugging and pulling those connections, dropping the hollowed names and twitching those magic wands. Some acquired new godfathers and custom-designed their wares to suit the new customer. Some even decided to take it a bit easy and walk through corridors without ruffling any feathers, serving the ever-changing masters with no particular ambition but to exist. But all had one thing in common. They came committed to stick around. They were not on a reconnaissance mission they were in the battle heart and soul.