What a Tool

The Washington Post reports that a handful of colleges recently dropped the ubiquitous dining hall tray, and found that wasted food decreased by as much as 25-30% as a result.

An excellent result from so small a change, and one that makes intuitive sense: without a tray to pile upon, the amount of food people can carry apparently much better matches the amount they can actually eat.

But that glosses over an interesting question: why do people take more than they want to eat, even if they can carry it? Because, it turns out, they have no idea how much they want. Research has increasingly shown that, across the board, we’re terrible at assessing up front what’s going to make us happy at some point later, even if that just means determining how much food will make us feel pleasantly full fifteen minutes from now.

And, I think, it glosses over a second, even more interesting issue: we hugely underestimate the degree to which our tools affect our behavior. While scientists may not have previously researched trays, they’ve repeatedly researched plates, demonstrating, for example, that manipulating the size of plate on which we serve food changes the amount of that food we eat before feeling full; smaller plates lead to eating smaller portions, though with people thinking they’ve actually eaten more.

Of course, it isn’t just dinner plates and dining hall trays. Indeed, nearly all of modern life seems to operate at the same juncture of manufactured stuff and unclear self-assessment; thus, we make things, which in turn re-make us. Which is to say, we create technology (say, a plate) to assist us with an ill-understood instinctive behavior (eating food), and then find that the technology has led to unexpected consequences in the very behavior itself (how much of the food we eat).

For the behavior of communication, we’ve at least long acknowledged that we’re shaped by our tools – it’s been more than 45 years since McLuhan pointed out that the medium is the message. But as more of our life becomes mediated by technology – how we share with friends, how we find our mates – the effect becomes exponentially greater. We’ve thrown ourselves into this crazy experiment without much thought, and we plow ahead, increasingly unthinkingly, shaped by our tools, unable to self-assess or future-predict, each brand new day.

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Yelling to the Sky premiered last week at Berlin, and is headed off next to SxSW; trying to figure out if I therefore need to head there, too.

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Brain Drained

A few years back, Google introduced an experimental Google Labs feature for Gmail, called Mail Goggles. The idea was simple: at certain hours of the day (or, more likely, night), a Gmail user with Mail Goggles turned on would need to answer a series of easy math problems before sending an outgoing message. Back when I was in college, the drunk dial still outweighed the drunk email in overall popularity. But, even then, I’m sure there were enough embarrassing late-night proclamations of love, enough angry breakups entirely forgotten by the following morning, and enough incoherently rambling drunken messages in general to have made Mail Goggles a reasonable idea. In today’s digital world, those Mail Goggles seem like more than reasonable idea, and nearly collegiate necessity.

In my own life, however, well post-college, I’m rarely up and emailing at 3:00am regardless of sobriety. Still, on occasion, I do end up having a drink (or, god forbid, two) at a business lunch. After which, I would usually come back to the office, plunk down at the keyboard, and launch into a burst of unrivaled productivity. Only later on those afternoons, once I’d sobered back up, would I re-read those ‘productive’ emails, and begin to worry that Yale might be calling shortly to request my degree back. I think of myself as someone who can hold his liquor. But, really, even a glass of lunchtime Riesling is apparently enough to knock me down to a roughly fourth grade writing level.

Fortunately, with age comes at least a little wisdom, and, by now, if I’m foolish enough to have a lunchtime drink, I generally manage to stay off email completely for an hour or two after, averting potential disaster.

But, it turns out, it’s not just liquor than can addle my email brain. Two nights back, I came down with a pretty spectacular stomach flu, and proceded to toss my cookies nonstop for 24 hours. Well enough, in fact, that I actually lost about seven pounds in a single day. (Bulimia: it works!) Of course, rapid weight loss is usually just dehydration. And since more of the water in your body is in your brain than anywhere else (your brain being made up primarily of water), it turns out that quickly losing 5-8% of the water in your body (as I just did) probably isn’t a great booster of mental function.

All of which is to say, if you got an email from me yesterday or this morning, and it makes absolutely no sense at all, please disregard. I’ve been easing my way back to solid food, and getting as much fluid as my stomach can currently handle. And I think, by now, I’ve edged up to largely coherent. But, really, I’m in no position to self-judge. So if this post is also a total mess, give me another 24 hours grace period, and accept my advance apologies for anything wildly offensive I manage to pull off before then.

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