The music we play on each other
Emotional contagion, predictive processing and a poem
Let me confess a pet peeve. I try and cycle most places in London, but when I do have to use public transport there always seems to be one person in the carriage or bus who has forgotten their headphones. Or just doesn’t bother with them, leaving us all exposed to the staccato blare of social media videos, passing repeatedly like an ambulance siren as they swipe, or their tinny music. Now I’m of the age and gender dangerously close to being called “formidable” I’ve decided I might as well lean into the trope. My standard approach, rather than silently seething with everyone else, is to lean over with a big smile and say, hyperpolitely, “I’m sorry to disturb you, would you mind very much turning the volume down or popping in some headphones?” (Have you ever noticed how the verb “to pop” is always useful when wielding the weapon of passive aggression?).
I do attempt to add some real warmth, to indicate I totally understand how easy it is to underestimate the volume of our devices, that I often forget my headphones too. It’s a lot to communicate in a smile and one line, I grant you. By being ultra nice about it, I am hoping to avoid making said phone-blarer feel defensive and becoming aggressive, and it almost always works. They tend to just smile back, nod sheepishly, and hit the volume button. Peace descends. I have felt pretty good about it, generally, my tiny act in defence of the common good, like some extremely entry level public transport superhero. I imagine the other passengers silently thanking me, though no one ever actually has aloud.
I don’t feel good about it today.
Last week, I was on a train with a phone blarer. She was smartly dressed and south Asian. I’m an equal opportunity busybody, so I leaned over and gave my request. Her reply was slightly muffled, with an accent, and I wasn’t sure she’d understood. I didn’t fully register that her face was white and exhausted. This is when it all went wrong.
Without giving it any thought at all, I made a “turning the volume down” gesture with my hands. Yes, yes I did. She smiled with no warmth in her eyes at all and said, clearly and icily, “thank you. I understood you the first time”.
Oh God.
I could see myself, suddenly, in her eyes. Am I a “Karen?”, I thought? Not a public transport superhero, but a potentially racist woman who has just made someone’s bad day worse? I sat there, not meeting anyone’s eye, trying to figure out what to do. We both changed onto a different train, but by the time I got up the courage to walk through the carriages to find her and say “I’m so sorry for being a patronising idiot”, she’d already got off. I felt huge relief that I didn’t have to.
Also this week, I was back on a canal boat. I love canal boat holidays. Despite their dubious ecological credentials (it must be better than flying somewhere surely? I haven’t checked. Don’t tell me I’m wrong) they are so wholesome. We putter about in the countryside, getting good exercise by walking miles and opening and closing locks. This is a clearly pointless and also deeply satisfying activity. We turn our phones off and play games and read books and sit in pubs and feel incredibly grateful for the loan of a boat.
One of the other lovely things, generally, is the camaraderie. In double locks you have to work with others because two boats go in side by side. Even in single locks, scratch teamwork with strangers is common, sometimes for one lock, sometimes for whole long flights which take all day. The totally surface level chit chat as you raise and lower paddles, open and close heavy gates (how far are you going? Oooh, the Braunston Tunnel. Don’t miss The Folly pub at Napton, best chips on the cut) doesn’t drive me mad like normal small talk, but soothes me.
Occasionally, though, you end up having to get through a lock with someone you’d ordinarily avoid. This trip, my kids had got really confident and were mainly working solo, puffed up with joy at their own competence. A man steered into a lock they had carefully got ready for him (our boat was waiting to go next) and complained to his wife what a “misery guts” the man on the last lock had been. He then immediately shouted at my son, poised to raise the paddles, in a booming, irritated, public school voice. “Not yet! Wait till I say! And then only half way”.
Well. I was irked. I know if you see a smallish child working a lock you might assume they don’t know what they are doing, but he could have waited to see. Also, we were doing him a favour. Also, who the hell was this man to shout at my child?
Typical retired buffoon I thought. I was surprised he was not wearing red trousers. His face was red, though, as he banged into the sides of the lock, and I rolled my eyes and then glanced sympathetically at his wife, who was sporting a padded navy gilet. Bet he’s a nightmare to live with, I thought.
By the time the lock emptied, four minutes later I had compiled an entire profile of this man in my head, and was still seething. I was sorely tempted to tell him I thought *he* was the misery guts. Granted, my son seemed fine, but well. Manners cost nothing.
As the kids opened the gate and his boat chugged out of the lock I saw the gilet-clad wife bend down and ask, concerned, “are you alright, love?”. He nodded, somewhat sheepishly, and blew her a kiss. Hmmm. Then, as he passed my son, he shouted “great work, my lad! Great work” and saluted. My son saluted back, beaming.
The balloon of annoyance that had been taking up all the room in my chest popped, instantly. I could see how the encounter with the misery guts had left this man irked, and he’d carried that irkedness right into our lock, and splashed it, accidentally, on to me. If I’d stomped away before seeing him recover himself I would, I’m sure, have passed it onto someone else (probably my husband) and carried a reinforced story about “people like him” that was both faulty and dehumanising. As it was I felt chastised, and weirdly affectionate. He’d been a bit of an idiot and then tried to make up for it. Haven’t we all.
Neither of these two incidents were significant in normal terms. I’m sure my days are full of them, these moments of fracture and disconnection, the magnetic pushing apart or pulling together at play in all our myriad interactions. I happened to catch myself in them because an obvious, every day thing has become strange to me again: how entangled humans are, how easily we can misunderstand each other, the power and responsibility we have for each other’s mental states. Even strangers.
I increasingly see humans as highly strung musical instruments, walking around. We are both instrument and bow, drum and beater. Every interaction creates a tiny symphony, whether discordant or harmonious, because we cannot help but affect each other. We leave traces all over each other, notes still vibrating in the air behind us. Psychologists call the basic mechanism of this emotional contagion. It is obvious, as old as the book of Proverbs which says
A gentle answer turns away wrath,
but a harsh word stirs up anger.
It is also not obvious, if you’re working on a highly individualist understanding of humans. If someone is angry around me, or at me, I will likely also feel anger, or perhaps fear, even if it’s not about me at all. Other people’s sadness makes us sad, including in films, or songs, when we have no stake at all in the inciting events. It is hard not to laugh when we hear others laughing, even if we don’t know what has prompted it. It is a clue to our deep, irreconcilable interdependence, the threads of connection between humans, even ones we don’t know and don’t in theory care about.
Psychologists also speak about predictive processing. This is a model of cognition which posits that in order to save energy our brains create mental models, or guesses, about what we expect to see in the world. We then sort sensory data against that model, rather than starting from scratch every time. We don’t, unless we are paying very close attention, initially see every tree in all its vivid and extraordinary particularity, we just see “tree” or perhaps “fir tree”. These mental shortcuts obviously also affect how we are able to perceive each other. This is part of where stereotypes come from, and unhelpful but incredibly sticky concepts like “Karen” and the two dimensional rugby-loving, entitled Etonian stereotype I had projected on the canal man based on nothing more than his voice. We can’t help but have a set of associations with certain types of people, to create unconscious patterns and types.
These guesses can then interact with another element of our psychology: the fact we really, really love to be right. There is something deeply satisfying in predicting something and having it be proved true. When the man in the boat tried to make amends, my very first emotion, if I’m being honest, was mild annoyance. I had been enjoying building up a head of self-righteous steam. I did not especially want to have to see him as a full human being. When I asked the woman on the train to turn down her music, my model of her was simply someone insensitive to those around her. The short sharp realisation of my own insensitivity was profoundly unwelcome, though, of course, necessary.
Most of the time, we don’t take these tiny twangs of emotional music seriously. Perhaps we should. I increasingly believe it really matters. It matters which mental models we are using, how tightly we hold onto them. I am trying to be more intentional about the music I play on others, both in the models I semiconciously carry and the emotions I sneeze all over them. In my intimate relationships, and in our community house, of course, but also more generally. The trouble is, we lack the moral vocabulary for taking these practices seriously. All the language for what I mean is cringe, cringe adjacent or just too soft. You might call it how we “show up in the world” (this is the best I’ve found), or the “energy” we bring. Our “vibe”. I loved this piece by
about charisma precisely because it treats the traces we leave on each other seriously, as something worthy of analysis.
When we try and systemise taking seriously these traces, you get trite sounding #bekind campaigns. All the language is semiotically evacuated somehow, can’t get purchase on the gritty reality of our own power.
I don’t know how to change this obviously, but in a small way awareness is helping. Catching myself in unlovely moments like these, and being honest about them, is helping.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments. Feel free to share your unflattering stories in solidarity if you feel able, or just what this made you think about. Where might emotional contagion be a way we can actually bless others, love our neighbours? How might growing up our souls (mine clearly still has a way to go) make it all easier? I want to end with an excerpt from a poem from Martin Wroe, which you can find in the collection Julian of Norwich’s Teabag
Morning‘Morning’He looks up at me, astonished‘Morning’Disturbed, surprised, briefly baffled‘Morning’A smile, a courtesy, a nod of the head‘Morning’One word plus eye contactA small act of resistanceAgainst the anonymity of our urban village‘Morning’Two women look at me, then at each other,Giggling as I pass‘Morning’His expression is making a calculation of me:‘Is this man getting the help he needs?’‘Morning’I smile and look openly at each one I passBut sometimes I read a thought in their startled eyes– in that nano-second before they avert them –‘How far is it to safety?’‘Morning’It started when I recognised someone on the canal path‘Morning’I said, before realising, as he replied, uncertainly,‘Morning’– looking at me with a face that said, ‘we’ve never met’–That recognising someone is not knowing themAnd that I recognised his face only from his picture by-lineIn The Guardian newspaper, which was the buildingI’d just walked pastAnd he was walking towardsDoubtless already wonderingIf I could be worked into the opening of a columnAbout mental health and urban deprivation.‘Morning’I said to the next person,As they jumped physically from the world inside their phone‘Morning’I was starting to feel defiantWhy shouldn’t we greet each otherJust because we don’t know each other?‘Morning’I changed the ringtone slightly,Going up a note on the second syllable‘Mor - ning’Next time down on the first‘Mor – ning’To see if I could draw someone’s gazeFrom inside their universe and into mine‘Morning’I didn’t want to alarm anyoneBetter to let them see it was me, with the greetingA tall, bespectacled, middle-aged man,Albeit smiling toward them,Weirdly – they might think –‘Morning’The man from The Guardian hadReminded me of the night I met a famous womanIn The Coronet on Holloway RoadShe was standing by me at the barA household name in a household I couldn’t placeAs I studied her from my side eyeGoogling my memory to establish her celebrity credentialsScanning the image files of my internal film and TV database– Who is she? What’s she been in? –She glanced back at me,As if she also knew me.Or maybe it was just a funny look.Only when I took everyone’s drinks back to the table,Did it dawn on me,Of courseShe’s another of those people I don’t know but do knowAlthough her fame is limited and fairly localThat’s how I know her,From the checkout, at Waitrose.We know each other and we don’t, I thought– now back on the tow path – connectedTo those we think we’re notMaybe that’s why I said ‘Morning’To the next person I passedA modest insurrectionIn favour of connection
On Thursday evenings, I take my cello and bow to the neighborhood ukulele group sing-along. I’ve only recently joined this group, since retiring from being a professional music teacher/performer because I thought it would do me good socially. My problem is that I’ve been finding it incredibly difficult to enjoy myself amongst a group of amateur musicians where I am not the teacher. On top of this I’m usually sleep deprived due to health issues so I hate to think of the negative energy emanating from me and the emotional contagion that I am instigating when people look at me sitting there bored or trying to hide my annoyance at the out of tune cacophony. We have a family joke created by my husband, who has always found humility a challenge, and who one day blurted out the humorous phrase, “It’s hard to be humble, given my strengths.”! This is exactly how I truly feel because my level of musicianship is way above anyone else’s in the group and on top of that I’m grieving the loss of my ability to play the cello at a level that I could do in just the last year or so. Pride is the number one sin and in joining this group, I’ve been given a huge challenge. I welcome any advice because tonight is ukelele group!
Ps. The group doesn’t sound as bad as I make it out to be or I wouldn’t have lasted more than one rehearsal. 😄And they’re all quite happy to have me as a cellist playing the melody or a harmony.
Great observations which I shared excerpts of with my family, and told them I do much repenting. ( I do wish the "Karen" could be left it...it is hard not to feel slapped by it when your name is Karen...)