Question (The Moody Blues)

I've been saving this column for two months - when I read today's poem, I knew I'd found a cosmic match... :-)

Study says many studies suck
Research shows we are far too drunk on stupid studies that tell us what research shows
By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist
Friday, February 1, 2008

Here is this lovely questionnaire. It is part of a big national study designed by a major medical clinic/university/government body and it is therefore presumably quite important and serious and high-minded and its conclusions might very well go a long way toward telling us a great deal more about who we are as a people, as a species, as a weird semi-intelligent flesh-eating creature of this vast and impenetrable galaxy. Please respond accordingly.

Question No. 1 (please be as specific as possible): Exactly how much of an idiot are you? More to the point: How arrogant and ignorant and out of touch with your body, your heart, your mind, your divine sense of self do you feel you are on a day to day basis? Are you, in short, a moron? How much of a moron? Too much of a moron to actually understand this paragraph? Please check the little box on the right. No, the other right. Thank you.

From what I have gleaned from glancing through a whole slew of recent studies, these are, apparently, the questions we most need answered. These are the questions that plague us and torment us and, oh my God, if we only had the answers to these questions and the many, many other urgent queries like them, such as: Is sunlight necessary? Is breathing compulsory? Is having a dog around sort of nice? If you eat less crap, will you feel better? Sleep: Who cares? Should humans move? God: WTF? — we might just figure out how to live long enough to, you know, accidentally stab ourselves in the eye with a fork and bleed to death.

Which is perhaps an overly snarky way of saying: Many of these studies are getting dangerously inane. And insulting. And actually harmful. Because if you believe many of these deceptive factoids that fill our newspapers and magazines and universities, if you take them as they're meant to be taken, as helpful guidelines for behavior or even as some sort of serious demarcation of human understanding, well, we are doomed indeed.

Why? Just look. Here is a nice study, from just recently. It concluded that if men between the ages of 40-70 get even a tiny bit of moderate exercise a few days a week — and by "tiny bit" we mean merely getting their beer-bellied Cheetos-sagged asses off the couch and away from the plasma for a meager half an hour a day just to walk down the street at a pace only slightly faster than a tree sloth — they will "halve the risk of premature death from all causes."

Is this not incredibly helpful? At long last, humanity shall no longer believe that fat, lazy, stupid older men who never ambulate are actually fit and healthy and will live to be 100. What's more, it turns out actually moving the human meatsack in a vertical, mobile manner appears to be moderately beneficial to the various biological systems that struggle every single minute to keep us from falling over and dying. Wow. Who knew?

Here is another, along with its actual headline: "A Little Wine, Sunlight Help Boost Women's Health." Well, grab my brain stem and yank it like a weed, really? This hunk of genius reporting was, in truth, the combination of two astonishing studies, one that found women who drink 6.8 ounces of wine per day (i.e.; two glasses) might boost their "good" cholesterol, and another that says getting a bit of sunshine cranks up your vitamin D and hey gosh we all need a little vitamin D and therefore after one million years of human evolution we can finally say that a little wine and sunshine might be good for oh my God just kill me now with the relentless mind-numbing inanity of it all.

OK fine, one more: "Spouses Who Fight Live Longer." Cute. Pithy. Bordering on mildly interesting, something about how letting off steam makes you healthier in a relationship and duh duh duh THIS IS A TOTAL INSIDIOUS BULLS- LIE!

Whoops, sorry. But really now. Let us examine this for a sec: Sure, couples who can discuss their issues and share emotions and who actually respect their mates, yes, they might live longer because, well, they're healthier overall than the numb thick dolts who repress their rage and beat the dog and then get sick all the time and suffer depression and alcoholism because they're shut down miserable meatwads and oh by the way THIS ALL HAS ABSOLUTELY ZERO TO DO WITH COUPLEHOOD OR FIGHTING and everything to do with whether or not you're a tolerable and decent and somewhat emotionally open person regardless of marital status or whether you scream at your husband about the dishes, and therefore "Spouses Who Fight Live Longer" is complete misleading crap and it should be "Emotionally Functional Humans Are Better Off Than Repressed Stunted Time Bombs Gosh What A Shock But We Had To Make Something Up To Get Our Goddamn Funding."

Look, I know. Studies rule. Studies are our cultural cocaine. We cannot get enough. I cite them all the time myself in this very column. Many studies are incredibly helpful and informative, and without the trillions of formal scientific studies we've enjoyed to date we would know precious little about everything from medicine to human behavior to how many orgasms a woman can have in a day (unlimited!) to the average number of erections a healthy male gets in his sleep (5.3!) and the exact number of times George W. Bush and his scabrous lizards lied to the nation so as to lead us into a disgusting and horrid war (935!) and, well, a million other Very Important Things.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe we have reached — or rather, far surpassed — Inane Study Saturation. Maybe the scientific method we rely on so desperately to illuminate every single microfacet of our lives has become far too much of a fanatical religion unto itself, a bloody altar of ostensibly infallible truth to which we have gladly sacrificed the nubile virgins of common sense and intuition and consciousness and spiritual intelligence. You think?

This, then, is the danger: Despite the frequent inanity, despite the insulting silliness of much of the information, we've been led to believe that it is only through a relentless obsession with tiny, data-driven studies that we can obtain real knowledge, real understanding of what we're about and how we should eat, sleep, screw, breathe.

As such, we risk perhaps the most vital and precious aspect of human understanding, our innate sense that everything is far, far more complicated and messy and juicy and fluidly interconnected, far more non-dissectible than we like to imagine, and in fact trying to dismember human experience into its drab components merely destroys the holistic integrity of the whole damnable circus.

Look at it this way: It's a bit like touching your lover softly, carefully on the lips. It's either a dry, mappable array of specific nerve endings and chemicals and saliva glands and swarms of bacteria and random synapses screaming their desperate need to procreate, or it's, well, pure goddamn poetry. Study says: Your choice.

SONG: Question by The Moody Blues

BOOK: The Three-Pound Enigma: The Human Brain and the Quest to Unlock Its Mysteries by Shannon Moffett

POEM: The Enigma We Answer by Living by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Einstein didn't speak as a child

waiting till a sentence formed and

emerged full-blown from his head.

I do the thing, he later wrote, which

nature drives me to do. Does a fish

know the water in which he swims?

This came up in conversation

with a man I met by chance,

friend of a friend of a friend,

who passed through town carrying

three specimen boxes of insect

she'd collected in the Grand Canyon-

one for mosquitoes, one for honeybees,

one for butterflies and skippers,

each lined up in a row, pinned and labeled,

tiny morphologic differences

revealing how adaptation

happened over time. The deeper down

he hiked, the older the rock

and the younger

the strategy for living in that place.

And in my dining room the universe

found its way into this man

bent on cataloguing each innovation,

though he knows it will all disappear-

the labels, the skippers, the canyon.

We agreed then, the old friends and the new,

that it's wrong to think people are a thing apart

from the whole, as if we'd sprung

from an idea out in space, rather than emerging

from the sequenced larval mess of creation

that binds us with the others,

all playing the endgame of a beautiful planet

that's made us want to name

each thing and try to tell

its story against the vanishing.

QUOTE: To the question of your life you are the answer, and to the problems of your life you are the solution." ~ Joe Cordare