“It is the smallest things in life that make a big difference, so even the tiniest of deeds however short can have a deep influence on people.”

Of all these small deeds my dog definitely did a number on me. So this one is dedicated to my dog, Bobby

The tale of the Dodo

-Shyam Tenali

“He is an extremely well-behaved dog, believe me. In fact he is almost human. Docile, obedient and quiet. He has never bitten anybody in his life”, Mrs.B rambled on in one breath, looking hopefully at Mother.

She was standing at our front door holding a brown-coated dog of indiscriminate breed and a foolish smile. It had a tapered face, short, straight ears and was panting as if it had run a mile. Putu and I peeped from behind Mother’s sari fearfully, our evening play forgotten.

“I had no idea he was so big”, Mother replied in an unsure voice. She had always put up stiff resistance whenever any of us had wanted a pet.

“He is not big at all”, Mrs. B contradicted instantly. “He seems so because he is standing”, she contrived. Mother’s cool reception must have unsettled her. 

“Sit Dodo Sit!!” she thumped the dog’s behind in agitation but he stubbornly refused to oblige. I giggled and nudged my five-year old brother. Whoever had heard of a dog called Dodo?

“I am not sure I can handle him. He does not even listen to you,” Mother accused mildly.

Mother never wanted to look after someone else’s pet but had to give in because of my father. Mr.B was Father’s boss. He and his wife were going out of town to attend a family wedding.” They love their dog like their own child. They don’t want to leave him with anybody else,” he had said.

“There is nothing to worry,” Mrs.B assured Mother. “I have written all the do’s and don’ts down here.” She gave Mother a piece of paper which had things scribbled on it.”Give him two meals a day and keep him tied in one corner of your verandah. Then forget about him!!”

She smiled and snapped her fingers. Then she gave Mother a bag containing Dodo’s bowl, a smelly rug and his brush and soap.

“Do I have to give him a bath too?” Mother asked looking at the things.

“Only if he….you know, gets too dirty. Don’t worry; he will probably sleep like a log all day!!” A car honked in the street below. “I have to go now or I will miss the train,” she said. “Where should I tie him?”

“It is only for three days, right?” You will be back on Friday for sure?” Mother asked, leading the way to the inside balcony while we followed at a safe distance.

“Of course,” Mrs.B smiled reassuringly.” I don’t know how to thank you. Ever since we had Dodo we have rarely gone anywhere as a family. It is only because of your kindness that we can…”

The car honked again. This time loudly and impatiently, and Mrs.B left soon after in a hurry.

“What breed is he?” I asked Father when he came home. Dodo had been constantly fidgeting, pacing up and down, chewing his leash or barking his head off. He was a big dog, with a squarish-bulky body and large paws.

“Probably a cross between a German shepherd and….” He did not finish.

“German Shepherd, my foot! He is a pure Roadasian”, jeered Mother from the kitchen doorway.

“Roadasian? What breed is that?” I asked. At nine, I had a faint knowledge of breeds of dogs but this one was new.

“In plain English, it means a street dog!” Mother, now excited came to make her point.” Look at those black dots on his eyebrows. And the fact that he can’t sit in one place quietly. That is the giveaway that he is a hundred percent Roadasian!”

“Don’t believe her,” said Father. “He is probably a cross. See how friendly he is.” He let Dodo off the leash.However, Mother was not finished. “You just wait and see. Pedigreed dogs behave differently.”

Meanwhile, free at last, Dodo sprang towards us with a grin. Putu and I ran for life and climbed the bed screaming. Dodo raised his paws on the bed and wagged his tail. The he let out a yelp as Mother thwacked his behind. “Out!! Out! You are a bad dog!!”She rebuked him. And then to herself, ”Oh ! How on earth am I going to get through the next three days?”

The three days seemed like three years. Dodo hate being tied up. Whenever someone was at the door he had to bark his greetings. With the result the milkman, the vegetable vendor, our friends and neighbors stopped calling on us. He proved Mother right eventually. He piddled on the floor, chewed my best sandals and put his head in the garbage can. Mother ran after him with her rolling pin and Dodo shot across the room, his ears flattened and tail between the legs.

At mealtimes he hung about with a doleful expression waiting for scrap. I found this very convenient to dispose off my vegetables. Where food was concerned Dodo was a bottomless pit.

“Hasn’t he had his lunch? What did you give him?” Father asked in exasperation.

“Boiled rice and meat without salt just as Mrs.B told me,” replied Mother.

“Boiled meat!!” grimaced Father. “No wonder he is hovering around here. Come Dodo, I will give you some real food.” And he dropped a couple of paratha’s onto Dodo’s bowl. He gobbled it promptly and resumed his scrounging.

After dinner, Father took him out for a walk and did not return for an hour. When he did, he was dishelmed and was out of breath. “The rascal kept running all the time and then there was no sign of…!” Father didn’t finish his sentence. The next morning we found out why. Our maid had come from the terrace with her palla (the other end of the saree) on the nose. Dodo relieved himself there.

Then something happened. Dodo ran away. It was sometime in the morning after we had left for school and father for his office. Dodo found the door open and quietly took off. Mother searched the whole neighborhood frantically but he was nowhere to be seen. Father was summoned home and it was he who found him following a hunch.

Dodo was found squatting at Mrs.B’s door five kilometers from our house. How did he find the way? We could never figure it out.

“He does not like us”, Putu told Mother.” You always scold him.”

“Well, I can’t help it. He is always up to some mischief,” she replied.

The three days were up on Sunday and we all waited expectantly for Mrs.B’s arrival.

She did not turn up. She did not call or wire us either. Mother sent father to their house several times. He found it locked and the neighbors had no idea of their return. Then Father got news from the office. Mr.B had extended his leave for a couple of weeks. Mother flopped on a chair. “I had a bad feeling about this from the start,” she said. “I even suspect she had planned it all long. Or why would she tell me to give him a bath?” She was really upset.

Since, Dodo had overstayed his welcome; he became the proverbial uninvited guest. Mother and father ignored him as much as possible. Mother said that since Mrs.B had not kept her word, she did not deserve any consideration. It gave Puttu and me the ripe opportunity to get close to Dodo. By now we had both overcome our fear of him. After school he would leap at us and lick our faces. We took him upstairs to teach him new tricks. He just would not learn. Let alone learning new tricks, I used to think he did not even know one.

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks”, Mother said.

“How do you know he is old?” asked Putu who did not understand the proverb.

“Look at him. Lazing around all day and up to no good,” Mother replied.

She was the only one he was afraid of. She threatened Dodo with a bath every time he even stepped into the bedroom. So he would wait outside impatiently for the sugar lumps she distributed every morning after the morning puja.

When Father returned from work, Dodo followed him around like a shadow and sat near his feet. Occasionally, he would put his muzzle around his lap and wag his tail if he happened to look at him. Father got the hint.

“I think he is trying to tell me something”, he exclaimed in wonder. Nobody believed Dodo was capable of such an intelligent thought-process.

Within a couple of weeks, we got used to him. It was as if he was always our dog. I even wrote an essay on him tilted “My pet”. Putu made a drawing on him, though not very accurate one. The drawing looked more like a giraffe rather than a dog. Father bought him a new bowl and mother gave him an old rug throwing away the smelly one.

And then Mrs. B returned!! No one was glad to see her. Not even Dodo. Initially, he thumped his tail and pulled back his ears, but when he saw her he soon slipped under the sofa and refused to come out.

“I feel ill Sudha, right after the wedding and the doctor asked me not to travel, thus Ravi had to extend his leave…” she rambled on.

Gloom descended on the house when she finally took him away. Putu howled and I cried myself to sleep. Even mother looked sad. “He was not a bad sort,” she admitted ruefully consoling Putu. Well he was never our dog to start with.

Dinner was a torture as we kept looking under the table for him.

Early nest morning at dawn we were woken up by commotion at our house. Somebody was scratching our door desperately. Armed with a stick and light, Father opened the door a crack. A wet nose and whiskers and a grateful bark greeted him. Dodo had run away again. Only this time I felt he was home.

The many Glitches we have.....Part - 1

Human reason, in one sphere of its cognition, is called upon to consider questions, which it cannot decline, as they are presented by its own nature, but which it cannot answer, as they transcend every faculty of the mind.

It falls into this difficulty without any fault of its own. It begins with principles, which cannot be dispensed with in the field of experience, and the truth and sufficiency of which are, at the same time, insured by experience. With these principles it rises, in obedience to the laws of its own nature, to ever higher and more remote conditions. But it quickly discovers that, in this way, its labors must remain ever incomplete, because new questions never cease to present themselves; and thus it finds itself compelled to have recourse to principles which transcend the region of experience, while they are regarded by common sense without distrust. It thus falls into confusion and contradictions, from which it conjectures the presence of latent errors, which, however, it is unable to discover, because the principles it employs, transcending the limits of experience, cannot be tested by that criterion

 Man is flawed so much that he needs many other faculties to assist him in his continual growth. This is the first fact of life one has to accept before anything else. My fantasy of observing people in general and trying to figure out a generalized thought-process pattern was an addiction I caught pretty early in life, but it was just during my freshman year at college did I really draw a more mathematical approach to all this – credited to a senior.

     To begin with you as a reader would find this post more encapsulating if at all you had read my older post on - The Unified theory of Neuroscience (If not please do). Anyway, on my pursuits I observed many flaws in the general behavior of humans. After referring to many journals, I bring you today some of the common analogies(common errors) we all have.

Obviously none of them are life-threatening, huge mistakes, but they are really surprising and avoiding them could help us to make more sensible, reasonable decisions. Especially as we thrive for continual self-improvement, if we look at our values,being aware of the mistakes we naturally have in our thinking can make a big difference in avoiding them. But then again, most of them occur subconsciously, so it will take time and effort to avoid them -if even you want to.

#Glitch 1 - We surround ourselves with information that matches our beliefs

We tend to like people who think like us. If we agree with someone's beliefs, we're more likely to be friends with them. While this makes sense, it means that subconsciously we begin to ignore or dismiss anything that threatens our world views,since we surround ourselves with people and information that confirm what we already think.

This is called "conformation bias". If you have ever heard of the frequency illusion,this is very similar. The frequency illusion occurs when say you buy a new car, you will tend to see the same car model almost everywhere. Or when a pregnant women tends to notice other pregnant women all,over the place all of a sudden. It's a passive experience, where our brain seeks out information that's related to us, but I believe there been an increase in the frequency of these occurrences in the recent times, suggesting rise in anarchic viewpoints ( To put it in plain words increase of - "Misery loves company" phenomenon)

This is also the same reason why you tend to like only certain type of people or celebrities, over the rest, even though they haven't done anything to harm your perspectives. They just tend to give you a vibe that does not sync with your thought pattern.

#Glitch 2 - We believe in a "Swimmer's body" illusion.

This has to be one of my favorite thinking mistakes I came across. In Rolf Dobelli’s book, The Art of Thinking Clearly, he explains how our ideas about talent and extensive training are well off-track:

"Professional swimmers don’t have perfect bodies because they train extensively. Rather, they are good swimmers because of their physiques. How their bodies are designed is a factor for selection and not the result of their activities."

The “swimmer’s body illusion” occurs when we confuse selection factors with results. Another good example is top performing universities: are they actually the best schools, or do they choose the best students, who do well regardless of the school’s influence? Our mind often plays tricks on us and that is one of the key ones to be aware of.

Without this illusion, half of advertising campaigns would not work.

It makes perfect sense, when you think about it. If we believed that we were predisposed to be good at certain things (or not), we wouldn't buy into ad campaigns that promised to improve our skills in areas where it’s unlikely we’ll ever excel.

This is similar to the skill of learning to say no, or how our creativity actually works: Both diverge strongly to what we think is true, versus what actions will actually help us get the result we want.

#Glitch 3 - We incorrectly predict odds

Imagine you’re playing Heads or Tails with a friend. You flip a coin, over and over, each time guessing whether it will turn up heads or tails. You have a 50/50 chance of being right each time.

Now suppose you've flipped the coin five times already and it’s turned up heads every time. Surely,surely, the next one will be tails, right? The chances of it being tails must be higher now, right?

Well, no. The chances of tails turning up are 50/50. Every time. Even if you turned up heads the last twenty times. The odds don’t change.

The gambler’s fallacy is a glitch in our thinking—once again, we’re proven to be illogical creatures. The problem occurs when we place too much weight on past events and confuse our memory with how the world actually works, believing that they will have an effect on future outcomes (or, in the case of Heads or Tails, any weight, since past events make absolutely no difference to the odds).

Unfortunately, gambling addictions in particular are also affected by a similar mistake in thinking—the positive expectation bias. This is when we mistakenly think that eventually, our luck has to change for the better. Somehow, we find it impossible to accept bad results and give up—we often insist on keeping at it until we get positive results, regardless of what the odds of that happening actually are.

#Glitch 4 - We believe our memories more than facts

Our memories are highly fallible and plastic. And yet, we tend to subconsciously favor them over objective facts. The availability heuristic is a good example of this. It works like this:

Suppose you read a page of text and then you’re asked whether the page includes more words that end in “ing” or more words with “n” as the second-last letter. Obviously, it would be impossible for there to be more “ing” words than words with “n” as their penultimate letter (it took me a while to get that—read over the sentence again, carefully, if you’re not sure why that is). However, words ending in “ing” are easier to recall than words like hand, end, or and, which have “n” as their second-last letter, so we would naturally answer that there are more “ing” words

.

What’s happening here is that we are basing our answer of probability (i.e. whether it’s probable that there are more “ing” words on the page) on how available relevant examples are (i.e. how easily we can recall them). Our troubles in recalling words with “n” as the second last letter make us think those words don’t occur very often, and we subconsciously ignore the obvious facts in front of us.

The lesson here? Whenever possible, look at the facts. Examine the data. Don’t base a factual decision on your gut instinct without at least exploring the data objectively first. If we look at the psychology of language in general, we’ll find even more evidence that looking at facts first is necessary.

#Glitch 5- We rationalize purchases we don’t want

I’m as guilty of this as anyone. How many times have you gotten home after a shopping trip only to be less than satisfied with your purchase decisions and started rationalizing them to yourself? Maybe you didn’t really want it after all, or in hindsight you thought it was too expensive. Or maybe it didn’t do what you hoped, and was actually useless to you.

Regardless, we’re pretty good at convincing ourselves that those flashy, useless, badly thought-out purchases are necessary after all. This is known as post-purchase rationalization or Buyer’s Stockholm Syndrome.

Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort we get when we’re trying to hold onto two competing ideas or theories. For instance, if we think of ourselves as being nice to strangers, but then we see someone fall over and don’t stop to help them, we would then have conflicting views about ourselves: we are nice to strangers, but we weren't nice to the stranger who fell over. This creates so much discomfort that we have to change our thinking to match our actions—i.e. we start thinking of ourselves as someone who is not nice to strangers, since that’s what our actions proved.

So in the case of our impulse shopping trip, we would need to rationalize the purchases until we truly believe we needed to buy those things, so that our thoughts about ourselves line up with our actions (making the purchases).

The tricky thing in avoiding this mistake is that we generally act before we think (which can be one of the most important element that successful people have as traits!), leaving us to rationalize our actions afterwards.

Being aware of this mistake can help us avoid it by predicting it before taking action—for instance, as we’re considering a purchase, we often know that we will have to rationalize it to ourselves later. If we can recognize this, perhaps we can avoid it. It’s not an easy one to tackle, though!

#Glitch 6 - The Spotlight Effect - Your mistakes are not noticed as much as you think

The perception of our being under constant scrutiny is merely in our minds, and the paranoia and self-doubt that we feel each time we make a mistake does not truly reflect reality. According to the Spotlight Effect, people aren't paying attention at our moments of failure nearly as much as we think.

To test the Spotlight Effect, a team of psychologists at Cornell asked a group of test subjects to wear an embarrassing T-shirt (featuring a picture of Barry Manilow’s face) and estimate how many other people had noticed what they were wearing. The estimations of the test subjects were twice as high as the actual number

You are under the spotlight less often than you think. Acknowledging this should lead to increased comfortability and relaxation in public settings and more freedom to be yourself. More so, when you do make a mistake, you can rest easy knowing that its impact is far less than you think.