Dan's Papers - August 29, 2008

Screenwriter Nora Ephron is the daughter of two writers of film and stage, and one of four sisters - all of whom are writers. When I interviewed Ephron a few months ago, I asked if she thought the literary talent that pervades her family was a result of nature or nurture.

Well, she didn't really know and didn't seem to care. But she did say she always wondered about "those twins who were separated at birth, and reunited as adults, and both drive Corvairs and have wives named Jane." Ephron was most curious about their sense of humor. Being raised in different environments, did the twins share that same sensibility?

I was curious about the nature/nurture question because I have a theory that the way a person's mind works is as much a result of learned behavior as it is genetics. I know. This isn't a new or startling theory, but it is particularly important to me since I have no genetic connection with our son. I had to believe that I could still influence how his mind works.

Years ago, my mentor at Carnegie-Mellon told me that knowledge is about remembering information, intelligence is about making connections. So I was hell bent on wiring Hudson's brain to make connections. I set out to do that in a most random, unscientific way when he was just a toddler. We'd read a little picture book, and if we came upon an image of, say, a clown, I'd get a toy clown from his shelf, then show him some other clown image. Eventually, he did it. We'd look at a picture of a ball, and I'd ask him to get his ball, which he did. Sometimes he'd bring me another image of a ball. But I knew I'd really achieved success one day when I was on the phone with my mother-in-law, writing down information she was giving me. Hudson, at about 20 months, kept hitting my leg with something and making a little grunting noise. I was doing the typical "Just a minute, honey," trying-to-be-patient-parent thing. He persisted. I realized he was giving me one of his fridge magnets - which were letters of the alphabet. He pointed to the letter, and pointed to what I was writing.

Success! He was making connections. My brain wiring experiment was working!

I still do that with him, but now it's with stories from books or film. We talk about characters, dialogue, plot - it's fodder for the connection game. Recently, we were talking about the pirates in Peter Pan who are in Hook's service, but take the first opportunity to escape from him. When Hook is being chased for the last time by the crocodile, it reads "and nobody cared to save him." We talked about how the pirates are similar to the Wicked Witch's henchmen in Wizard of Oz. In the dramatic scene when they realize the witch is dead, they glare at Dorothy, who thinks it's curtains for her. Then they say "All hail, Dorothy. The Wicked Witch is dead." It spurred a great discussion about loyalty and how people choose friends. (My only fear is that, by making these connections, Hudson will realize by the age of 6 that "Nothing is new under the sun.")

Speaking of the Wizard of Oz, I learned a very interesting tidbit of information about it on the beach last week, talking to a virtual stranger (our kids were playing). The Wicked Witch's henchmen are NOT just singing "Oh-EE-oh. Ee-OH-um." They are chanting "All we are, we owe her." The Wicked Witch obviously had her own theories on wiring the brain.