Parrot tongues and other people’s thoughts
Both are strange and foreign
Tongues are weird things – fleshy and bumpy and a wee bit alien. I don’t generally think about human ones, much less those of birds, but last week my daughter came home with a photo of one. It was sticking out of a rainbow lorikeet’s beak, with what looked like a cross between an elephant’s trunk and a toilet brush at its end.
It turns out that lorikeets’ tongues are designed for doing what parrots do – reaching delicious nectar and pollen. Our tongues – peculiar, fat, fleshy things that they are – are designed perfectly for what we need them to do: talking, eating, swallowing, drinking, tasting, kissing. And because they’re the only tongues we’ve ever had, we assume that all tongues are like ours.
When we take the time to think, we know tongues are not one-model-fits-all: that cats’ tongues have backward-facing barbs like the harsh side of Velcro; that dogs have long, loose, lolling ones; snakes’ are forked and used to smell; that a giraffe tongue is super long and blue, like a kid who’s eaten too many Warheads.
Each tongue is designed to do the specific thing it needs to, a little miracle refined by millions of years of evolution. And the strange old things also contain a little lesson in empathy.
Because vaguely assuming that all species’ tongues are roughly the same isn’t where it ends: we also assume that everyone has similar tastes. This doesn’t stand up to much interrogation – just watch a non-Australian eat Vegemite or a toddler eat an olive and the idea is blown to smithereens. But we think what is ‘normal’ for us is normal for all, and the same goes for what is good and bad.
If we share the same taste with someone – eat similar diets; think the same things are delicious and foul – then we put more value on their opinion. ‘Everything on the menu is good’, we’ll say at our favourite restaurant, while sticking to the standards at the Mongolian place down the road.
And what is true for taste is also true for thoughts. If we don’t stop and question it, we assume that everyone thinks like us, or as we think they do. We colonise their minds with our own interpretations of how they think, and then compound this by judging their actions accordingly. If they’re someone we like, who is part of our tribe, we think their thinking is a) like ours and b) broadly right. And if they are not part of our gang, the thoughts we give them are stereotypical, cartoon versions: Gen Z are lazy and entitled; right wingers are stupid and selfish. And we take these assumptions with us, applying them as a filter to every interaction.
This happens on a broad scale – different cultures, gender, political views – as well as the personal. It even happens with people you know well, when something they say makes you realise how different it is inside their head and how rarely you remember that.
A couple of years ago Guy and I were talking about the complexity involved in having an affair – all the effort and deceit and time and energy required - and why and how people do. Guy said, offhand, ‘The sex would have to be pretty amazing.’
I paused, taken aback. I hadn’t even considered sex. For me, the appeal of an affair would in being seen differently, having another role and life, one where I was not viewed as a mother, finder of lost things and organiser of daily life, but as someone fun, exotic and surprising.
We project how we think on to other people, extrapolate our own personal way of navigating the world on to them, and then get frustrated with all the ways they don’t comply. And the further they are from us (in terms of culture, shared background and understanding), the more effort is required to bridge the gap.
Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said: ‘If a lion could speak, we couldn’t understand him.’ He was musing on how communication doesn’t just require a shared language, but also shared understanding, and how humans and massive carnivorous felines (whose tongue is so rough it can lick meat off bones) just don’t share enough to be able to chat. And yet in everything from Aesop’s Tales to Hollywood movies, lions don’t just share a language we can understand, but have similar motives and reasoning as well.
Understanding other people takes shared experiences and a whole bunch of work. Having a generous mindset helps: one that assumes that the world is amazing and inherently positive; that people generally have good intentions; that there is more that connects than divides us.
We can’t control where we are born, how people see us, or most of what happens. But we can cultivate this kind of mindset, which positively influences both how we see the world and how we are in it. And this, in turn, affects pretty much everything else.
This is water
Author David Foster Wallace’s commencement speech is amazing. It’s all about compassion and the freedom of consciously deciding what has meaning; of being able to choose what you worship.
‘The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day. That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing.’
Everyday creativity (and synchronicity)
I’ve been saying I’d love to take more photos (and actually remember how to use my SLR!) for years now, the last time only a week ago. Then my 15-year-old set up a family photo challenge, and now I have no choice! Love a bit of synchronicity, and teenage bullying.
Hi Megan, I enjoyed this post, I have a pet cockatoo!