Ambiguity and Stuff…

This poster, just outside the library at the Asian University for Women, took up a lot of my time this afternoon as I tried to untangle the competing fonts. When I finally saw that it read “Embrace Ambiguity” I felt a bit hoodwinked. Annoyed, even. There I stood, flummoxed, doing the very thing the poster was imploring me not to do: I was losing my patience. Classic.

Even more karmically comical, I had just tried out some improv exercises with my psychology students, telling them (no lie) that I was “going to create some ambiguous situations” that would make them “uncomfortable,” but if they were willing to “be in the discomfort” they would “gain some insight” into how they could take some control over their reactions and “discover the opportunities in the moment.”

This is me, being in my discomfort, just before I read the admonishing poster and after a walk around sweaty, dripping Chittagong:

Despite my personality and the profound humidity, the psych/improv experience was a success. Because the course is Intro Psych, we spend about 45 minutes on each topic before swerving to the next one (history of psych; statistics; research design; neuropsych; childhood development; tears and blaming; exam one). This can lead to rapid-fire lecturing with everyone desperately trying to write down everything I say. It’s ridiculous, like those home renovation shows where the hosts have to knock down a non-load bearing wall, re-tile the backsplash, and be sure the marble for the open-concept kitchen island doesn’t crack because it all has to be done in three days or something arbitrarily awful will happen involving shame and disgrace. I hate feeling stampeded by time, both on TV and in my class.

So…instead of rushing through a lecture on the various functions of the hind-, mid-, and forebrain, we did a few exercises that evoked some panic (as improv does), required attention, involved our senses, taxed our memory, and insisted on human connection and collaboration. After all the running around (and the laughter…lots of laughter) we debriefed to identify which structures of the nervous system had been activated at various times in the game.

The students did a great job of discussing the fight-or-flight response, the hippocampus and memory, the frontal lobe and its role in deciding whom to zip-zap-or-zop. We talked about eye contact and vocal cues and how to listen with our mammalian bodies. We tried to describe what it felt like to be in an ambiguous, unfamiliar (oceanic?) situation and how when we didn’t allow ourselves to check out our bodies and brains reacted in surprising and adaptive ways.

It was fun.

Along with the laughter, improv also gave the students a stake in the class. They couldn’t be spectators and I couldn’t be the sole expert. A huge relief. We could actually converse because of this shared experience we had all created. Time flew. I think people learned.

While we were rummaging through the topic of research design we also considered the Dunning-Kruger effect and the dangers it presents (I looked this up on Wikipedia: “The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of a task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge”). I bring this up because I’m about to write about Bangladesh from the perspective of a person who has been teaching here for six whole days. Buckle up.

The traffic is impressive, seemingly free of road rage (although my Bangla consists of the numbers one through five and the word “shamosa,” which means problem, so I don’t know what the drivers are saying). “We are bad drivers!” a colleague in the university shuttle said to me on the way back to faculty housing. I disagree! Maybe it comes from living in one of the most densely populated places on earth (“Dunning, table for Kruger”), but Bangladeshi drivers’ and pedestrians’ spatial intelligence seems nothing short of genius.

Yesterday, during a break in the rain (northern Bangladesh has been hit, again, with catastrophic flooding; climate change is accelerating these historic events at a terrible rate), I walked around the university neighborhood. I love being here. Chittagong is green and fecund (it is) and filled with pockets of silence amidst the overwhelming noise and motion. Some photos:

I also love the aspirational names of the apartments:

And:

Some signs that gave me pause and hope:

And finally, this, from the AUW dining hall. I think each sign reinforces the other (and, just before taking this photo, I put a heaping table spoon of salt in my tea) (it wasn’t all that bad) (and it wasn’t all that good) (it wasn’t intentional) (“every direction is a possibility”).