Chapter 22 Don't get too close to me!

Taking the train is somewhat like doing scientific research.Trains are a wonderful invention that can take you from one place to another quickly, unless the time of departure or arrival doesn't match your schedule, and they are more environmentally friendly than cars.To a behavioral biologist, the train is a laboratory.Passengers are all in their seats and it's always fun to watch.They will communicate with each other by talking, arguing, flirting, etc., or just sticking to the laws of spatial relations.Look! First class has fewer passengers than second class, especially after rush hour.It's perfect to sit there and read, and it's also an ideal environment to observe human territorial behavior.Every time I take a train, I am the first to get on the train, and I hope to maintain this "exclusive right".But as far as that goes, I'm always unlucky, and someone always walks into the car afterward.As spatial relations predicted, they would choose a seat far away from me.Not because I stink, but no one wants to sit next to an already seated passenger unless they know each other.The situation in the waiting room is less interesting than on the train, but the same phenomenon occurs, that is, we always keep our distance from strangers.The only time someone is compelled to sit next to someone else is when there are not enough seats in a train carriage or in a waiting room.

Many people think that this phenomenon is related to privacy. From a scientific point of view, it is called spatial relations.The object of study of this discipline is an innate tendency of human beings.People are used to keeping a certain space for themselves, that is, a kind of territory around the body. The line behind it is: This is my territory, you cannot enter it.Of course, this is not the same as a real territory like a garden or a house, where strangers can be kept out, but it is quite comparable.Your body is your personal domain, and strangers should be kept out. How big is that so-called physical territory?This is the object of the study of spatial relations, and its size is related to its efficacy.The most common is social distance, ranging from one meter to four meters.If you're walking down the street, asking the police for directions, standing in an elevator, or taking a seat on a train, in a waiting room, in a restaurant, then those spaces have to be treated with a certain amount of respect.If the other person doesn't pay attention, it can cause you discomfort, make you resentful, and even lead to fear and anger.People you know can stay closer to you, however, friends and family also keep a certain distance, anywhere from half a meter to a meter.If there are some intimate behaviors between people, such as touching, stroking, whispering softly, etc., we will reduce the space to an intimate distance, usually less than 50 centimeters.If the distance between physical spaces does not shrink, there will be no intimacy, and people will not be able to have children.This phenomenon is not unique to humans, but to all animals that reproduce through internal mating.We usually have to keep our distance, but not today.Now you can get closer to me, even inside me.However, at the other end of spatial behavior, the distance that should be respected has been expanded, such as the public distance between the speaker and the audience.Public speakers always want to keep a certain distance from their audience, but this is a special case, perhaps more to do with culture and biology.

On the crowded streets, you will find that people keep their distance from each other, at least everyone makes an effort.When you bump into a pedestrian walking across the road, you can quickly arouse that person's anger, attracting angry eyes or cursing.This is because he is not respected personally - or intimately - by others.By the way, extremely fat people have a hard time navigating through crowd torrents, and it's hard to avoid those personal spaces.However, this has more to do with their lack of control over body movements than their bulky size. From an evolutionary perspective, these spatial relationship laws are well understood.People never trust strangers, they may carry contagious germs, or have some bad intentions, or steal things.If our ancestors kept a necessary and safe distance from strangers, they would not get sick often; food, tools, medicines, etc. would not be stolen from time to time, then they might have lived longer and had more children. Children come - like you and me.Hundreds of thousands of years later, this system is embedded in our behavioral patterns.

One day, I sat comfortably in the empty compartment of "me" again, took out a magazine from my bag, and planned to prepare lessons.Just then, I caught a glimpse of a lady walking in.The lady did not choose to sit at the other end of the car, as predicted by spatial relations science.In this empty carriage, she actually sat across from me!This time my plans were completely disrupted.My blood vessels start to constrict, my heart beats faster, and if I were to measure the conductivity of my skin right now, I would definitely be sweating.If it's a young, pretty lady, that's fine, then I'm fine with that.But this lady is about my age!Oops, there is danger!

Spatialism identifies the personal space we need, and behavioral biology describes how we behave when this space is not respected by others—that is, strangers.We feel uncomfortable, perceive the situation as a mild threat, and this creates a reaction, the mild response of the body to flee from danger or prepare to attack another person.The hormones are primed, the blood in the skin and guts rushes to the muscles, the heart beats faster, the pupils dilate.If someone gets too close to you on the street, you don't immediately show this flight or attack response, but a much diminished version of it, through jumping behavior or meaningless tiny gestures. The action is shown, which creates a certain tension.Scratching your hair, grinding your feet on the ground, rubbing your hands over your face, everyone has their own way of coping with this little tension.A trained observer of behavior can spot the discomfort people display when their personal territory is not respected by others.

In the opposite case, we also feel uncomfortable when we violate the privacy of others.This is also accompanied by a mild nervousness, expressed through jumping behavior.Imagine someone who is late to the movie and has to move from one knee to the other in order to pass a row of already seated audience.Not only does this person apologize verbally, but he also arches his back and adopts a "sneaky" posture, which means: "Don't hit me, I didn't mean to make you angry." In open-air cafes, we don't like to choose It is not enough to sit at a table that is already occupied, even if there is only one person, even though the five chairs around the table are all vacant.It is true that those chairs are empty, we can sit in them of course, but the table is already taken!So, that table immediately becomes the territory of that "inhabitant", and we have to respect that.If we had to move to a table that was already occupied, it would be accompanied by a lot of "excuse me" and jumping behavior.By the way, the Dutch don't see this as much of a problem compared to people from the Flemish region of Belgium.

The lady sitting across from me stared into my eyes.Is she going to attack me?My heart was pounding.I just heard her say: "Hello sir, I have read your book..." Then she attacked me, luckily it was just a series of endless words.It turned out that she only recognized me after looking at the photos on my website, so she didn't want to destroy the laws of spatial relations.Because she recognized me, so from her point of view, we are acquaintances, so she is not considered an intruder and can get closer to me.To me, however, she was a stranger, and that's why I had a mild flight and attack response.This is another interesting human behavior.If we see someone in a photo or on TV, we feel like we know him or her.That's another story, though.

The next time I'm on the train, I'll just sit across from a young super-beautiful woman, look at her without fear and say, "Hi ma'am, I can see in your eyes..." There's nothing wrong with that. Help, I don't exist anymore! I sometimes want to write about humans outside of my field—behavioral biology.A shoemaker can't live without a shoe mold, so I figured I'd throw that mold away from time to time and have some other fun for myself.As I lie on a sun lounger next to the hotel pool on vacation, looking at the vacationing people around me, the desire to have fun starts to heat and itch in my head and fingertips.Among them were young and old, men and women, quiet and rowdy children.Some people have fair skin, some people have been sunburned; some people have big stomachs, and some are even bigger... Looking at them, a philosophical thought related to human beings gradually rose in my mind.It's a question about "me" - who am I?This is a philosophical question first, but a closer look is also a very interesting biological question related to the body and the brain.

The human body is very unstable.Take blood, which is constantly renewed, decomposed, and make new blood cells, and the same is true for skin.Surface skin cells will continue to die and fall off, up to tens of thousands in a minute, and most of the dust in our homes comes from this.In this way, new cells replace old ones.In a few weeks, it's time to find my skin in the vacuum cleaner.I even shed my skin!My blood and skin aren't what they were a week ago, let alone a month ago. Compared with blood and skin, our bones can accompany us for several years, but they are not stable enough.It has been hypothesized that one-tenth of the bone tissue in the human body breaks down every year and is replaced by new tissue.That said, I'll have a new skeleton in a few years.The vast majority of the body is constantly being replaced in this way.However, some tissues are special cases, such as cartilage, which can sometimes be troublesome.For example, if the meniscus is broken, it can only be broken.In addition, nervous tissue is also out of this game of decomposition and regeneration, which means that trauma to the nervous system is very dangerous and the possibility of repair is very small.Contrary to what I have taught for decades, research in recent years has shown that brain cells still decompose, which means that some parts of the brain can be repaired, but the extent is still quite limited.Throughout our lives, the vast majority of our brains remain the same.All in all, I have a different body in my later years than I did when I was younger.The specific "I" now is different from the "I" in the period of birth, development, rebellion, school, and retirement.Whose body is this body that carries "I"?Whose body is it now, after birth, and on its 32nd birthday?

You might say that that "I" has nothing to do with matter, but consists of personality, character, knowledge and consciousness, which is the brain.Ah, you uttered that classic theorem, concluding: I am still the same person, the same "I".This fits perfectly with the fact that our brains are almost immutable, and that all of the personality and consciousness just mentioned seem to be explained by an unchanging brain organization.A piece of liver does its job, a cup of blood has the characteristics of blood, but a piece of brain does nothing.The functions of the brain, such as directing movement, creating sensations, arousing interest, creating consciousness, etc., are carried out through a complex structure composed of millions of neurons scattered in every corner of the brain.Those neurons transmit signals to each other through complex circuits, so that the signal spreads to more cells, and also gathers the "products" of multiple neurons into a single cell, adding gas here and braking there.In this way, a collective game has emerged that we have not been able to control until now, but we know that this game will not remain static.

The classic theorem that explains that "I" does not change based on the brain is incorrect.The hundreds of millions of connections between the wires and neurons in the brain are constantly changing under the influence of the environment.Every time we learn something new, no matter how big or small, new connections are made.In a lifetime, we learn countless things, not only the views of the ancient Greek philosopher Pythagoras, but also such trivial things as the whole wheat bread at the bakery on the corner costing fifty cents.As far as information is concerned, our brain is a greedy antenna, always busy synthesizing that information in existing or emerging circuits.If our brains are a library of thousands of books, then a learning process can be seen as a record made in the margins of a book.People keep so many records throughout their lives that new books appear and libraries expand.Therefore, although the vast majority of brain tissue does not change during our lifetime, the microscopic structure at the level of cell connections changes at a rate comparable to that of molted skin. All neuronal circuits form an invisible whole, which we call consciousness, personality, character, etc., and some people call it soul.If those thousands of circuits are constantly changing, so will the overall consciousness.Summarizing all these, there is only one conclusion that can be drawn: the "I" based on character and consciousness is also constantly changing.The daily experience established in the new neuron connection is consistent with the "I" at the micro level, and the collection of countless micro changes finally leads to the change of the whole. If every drop of water were changed, the sea would not be the same sea.In the same way, the human brain is constantly changing. Would it be difficult for everyone to accept the fact that the brain is changing?For many, that may be true, but we are witnessing those changes, though not fully understanding them.We can see changes in personality and consciousness, we just need someone to prompt us.Here's how it goes: The older you get, the better your brain becomes at seeing evolution from a bird's-eye view.My interests today are very different from those I had thirty-five years ago.While some interests—such as Darwinism—have been preserved but adapted to the circumstances, others have been completely changed or refurbished.As a teenager, I disliked economics, finding it extremely boring and not fun at all.Nowadays, I try not to read such books because I am worried that I will be absorbed in an interesting field and exhaust my energy.The way I like colors, food, art, humor, interests, being with people and vacationing has all changed now.As they grow older, how many people still have the same political or religious beliefs as their frivolous 20s and 30s?So what, isn't the memory still there?Let me grab the little tail, shall I?You're right, but memories are recolored every year, and the value and feel are different.Memory is a souvenir left over from the previous life, which is constantly being rewritten. Therefore, the memory part of the human brain is not static. To sum it up, I have come to the conclusion that I am a different "me" today than I was a decade ago.I became another entity, another person, the same person I was when I was younger, even though we had the same name. Just imagine, if there is a time machine that can go back to the past, as written in the comics.Now imagine that I flew back to my childhood in that time machine and met the "me" back then. I'm not going to tell the young man that I'm a molted, sane version of him in the future, or he's going to glar at me angrily and realize that I look like his father.My father would be very happy to hear that.Will I get along with that young guy?What would he think of the older man?There's still a good chance we'll get on friendly terms, but then I'll have to make eye contact with him—a man with the same name as me.God, I don't exist anymore!Different "Is" exist or have existed.I have to be careful when making this kind of inference because it means that I can no longer use the degree I have earned, it is another person's learning, and I have to take all the exams again.Also, my marriage is long gone, someone else married another woman, and she is no longer the one wearing the ring I gave you, so we'll have to go back to City Hall.I'm also no longer a father, grandpa, brother...I'm benefiting from the efforts of those who came before me, who studied hard, passed exams, fell in love, got married, had kids.Is my house still mine?Why do I have the same name as the previous "I"s?Can't I have a new name?It's time for someone to tell me that this is reincarnation, that each "I" is a rebirth of the previous "I". The person you were born with is no longer there, which sounds exciting, right?But now is the time to calm down.It's like the plot of a movie is suddenly interrupted by a person who kills the scenery, and all tension disappears.In my story, the douchebag was unchanged from birth, that is, his genetic base—all his genes—had not changed at all.Except for a few mutations that have no effect on the human genetic core, we still carry the genes we got earlier from our parents.Genes are carriers of information that determine how a certain characteristic of the human body or behavior will develop in a certain environment.Genes lay out the rules that body tissues must undergo replacement, and the brain reorganize its systems when the environment changes.When everything is exhausted, the body is discarded, but mostly after new bodies—that is, the children—come into the world.They will preserve and pass on their genetic information. Now that we line everything up, we will find that the body with its appearance and behavior is constantly being discarded, and the benefits embodied by the body are temporary.Genes, on the other hand, pay more attention to long-term effects. Their ultimate goal (certainly not a conscious goal) is to pass information on from generation to generation.For this reason, the body is used as a mechanism for genes to continuously announce and disseminate information.Just like paper is used as a carrier of an idea, and the idea on the paper is widely advertised through copying.Paper may burn out, but ideas don't.Richard Dawkins stated in his 1976 book that the body is a vehicle for carrying human genes, but this statement has not been recognized by everyone.But this is also understandable, because it is necessary to accept that human existence, work, love and ultimate death all have only one purpose - to preserve the information carried by genes. This is undoubtedly a basin of cold water for the hard work of human beings.Applause, Dawkins didn't get it, but what he said is very true, the disposable human body and brain serve the information carried by genes. It's an annoying thought, and it doesn't make any sense at all.I'm not going to sit around in the sun any more and it's not going to lead to anything good.Thinking should not be done by the pool.Wouldn't it be nice to just sit quietly and look at the people around you?