Bids For Attention: Love and Graffiti 2

(Read Part 1 Here.)

John Gottman is a well known psychologist and mathematician most famous for his predictions of divorce rates. He has posited that the biggest positive behavior present in loving relationships is responding sincerely to your partner's bids for attention.

A bid for attention is exactly what it sounds like, you ask someone for attention and they give it to you. Maybe you say "Check this out" or "Listen to this" and they do. Perhaps you make a physical bid, like reaching for their hand or a hug, and you get what you reached for. It is well known that children (and grown children) need attention so badly that in the absence of positive attention they will develop exaggerated, aggressive 'bad' behaviors to elicit a response. As far as we humans are concerned, negative attention is preferred over none. Lack of attention in relationships leads to contempt, and often escalation of conflict.

There is something deeply painful to us about being ignored. Obviously there are vary levels of needs for attention (bell curves baby), but most of us desire it in some form fairly frequently. There is growing evidence that babies actually need it to survive, and there are baby cuddling volunteer positions at hospitals. Feelings of isolation and lack of attention are being looked at as big players in the line between substance use and abuse. The medical field is starting to focus on attention: from the less 'scientific' idea that attention 'makes you feel good' to studies pointing to measurable changes in immune function. Even the ideas of mindfullness and meditation are, at their, core just practicing your attention. We have so many different ways of saying the same thing, but there is no mistaking: this is the good stuff ;)

We see the symptoms of lack of meaningful attention everywhere, and like any group of systems it takes on complex forms. Desperate forms. Here I am going to be careful, because many of the ways I see this desperation manifested are highly political and polarized. It would be naive to rattle off a bunch of problems we could 'fix' if we just gave them the ol' nebulous 'attention' and expect anything but heated debate. Instead, I'll just describe something that I think is analogous.

When studying the human body and disease something struck me. There may be a single enzyme or gene or nutrient missing, and that single missing piece, once amplified throughout the body's processes, created many different symptoms. If you have hypothyroidism (you don't produce enough thyroid hormone), your metabolism processes will be slowed. This can lead to feeling tired, feeling cold, weight gain, depression, hair loss, brittle nails, memory loss, weakness, constipation and more. It seems very complex but it's not. If your metabolism is slowed, you are not breaking food down at a normal rate, which would cause you to store more as fat. Since you aren't breaking as much down, you aren't getting enough energy from the food you eat. That energy is needed to run your body (weakness, tired) , your brain (memory, depression), circulate blood (which keeps you warm and delivers nutrients) and move your bowels. Symptoms that appear completely unrelated (brittle nails vs depression) do in fact have a common factor. Our bodies are complex chains of actions, and the further down the chain that a problem is present the more severe the disease's symptoms.

Disease is just dis-ease. Our bodys are healthy and 'at ease' or they are not. That is why anything that is not in our range of normal functions or behaviors is classified as a disease. Even though people have very strong opinions on, say, calling addiction a disease, an addict's behavior is outside 'normal healthy' human behavior, so it is by simple definition, a disease. The true argument is about why that behavior is present, meaning is it a biological malfunction, something measurable like a missing chromosome, or is it something else.

If we are truly social creatures that need attention, then not having our needs mets is unhealthy, and we will see unhealthy behaviors emerge. The big monkey wrench in behavioral science is the idea of choice. We cannot discount that we are not merely by-products of what has happened to us, but are capable of overcoming and compensating for lacks. But, when we hear stories of people overcoming the odds, we have to remember that that story is inspirational because there were odds, meaning we acknowledge that most people with the same background traits did not have that same outcome. As an individual, we have to focus on overcoming those odds, as a society we have to focus on changing those odds.

I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard.

Dr. King said that in his famous "I have a dream speech", and I have spent a tremendous amount of time thinking about it. I think of children and their behaviors when not given attention. I think of how we can argue that "adults are not children and shouldn't behave like them". But, the idea of what people should and shouldn't do is a question for the individual, the reality of what people do do is the problem of society. As a society we have to also be cognizant of shifts in behaviors as a whole. In the example of hypothyroidism, there are lots of reasons you could have it: you lack one of the many enzymes responsible for the assembly of the hormone, you have a problem with the pituitary gland which tells the thyroid when to make it, a defect with the thyroid itself or you lack the materials to make the hormone. Now, all of those except the last are individual 'problems', in a society of healthy people living in the same healthy conditions, a very small percentage of people will have an individual problem, and hypothyroidism will be low. If a large percentage of people start developing hypothyroidism, then it's time to look at the behaviors of the whole. In this case, a lack of iodine (a necessary material) did occur here in the US due to soil depletion and so iodine was added to salt and now the rates of this specific disease are back in line with rates of individual defects. If we see a small number of people exhibiting 'immature' reactions to lack of attention, then it is most likely an individual development issue, when we see large populations reacting that way, we can assume something outside the individual is not healthy.

So, without getting specific I will once again say that there are many problems happening in our society that may look unrelated, but I believe have a common core. I have seen evidence of this throughout my own life experiences, and I'm betting that you have too. In the above medical example it would have been a poor approach to try and address the weight gain, brittle nails, weakness and depression, when what we needed was iodine in our salt. And in the spirit of giving others attention, I'll let the streets have the last word:

and as the saying goes "sprinkle that shit on everything" ;)

Pics:
#1: https://pixabay.com/en/graffiti-wall-mural-painting-arts-569265/

#2: https://pixabay.com/en/architecture-graffiti-abandoned-3291806/

#3: https://pixabay.com/en/anatomy-human-transparency-bokeh-3408691/