Brain Trust (14 page)

In a 2000 paper that Google Scholar shows cited 1,683 times and counting, Nobel Laureate and Berkeley economist George Akerlof writes that in married couples, “When men do all the outside work, they contribute on average about 10 percent of housework. But as their share of outside work falls, their share of housework rises to no more than 37 percent.” In other words, even when the wife is the primary breadwinner, she’s likely to also do more of the housework.

But why? Assuming spouses have equal bargaining power, they should settle on equal “personal utilities”—when utilities are out of whack, bad feelings ensue and to heal this rancor, fairness must be restored. So why do relationships in which the wife works more reach equilibrium when she also does most of the housework?

“Actually, it’s simple,” says Akerlof. “The idea is that in any situation, people have a notion as to who they are and how they should behave. And if you don’t behave according to your identity, you pay a cost.”

In this model, the red-blooded American male takes a hit to his identity when his wife earns more money than he does, and a further hit when he does housework (the size of the hit commensurate with how much he’s internalized the identity of “red-blooded American male”). To bring the “utilities” of husband and wife back into balance, she does more housework.

Similarly, if you adopt the identity of “host,” you maximize your utility by serving drinks, and if you adopt the identity of “life of the party,” you maximize your utility by consuming them. And within us are many, many identities—maybe you hold within
you the identities of father, husband, rock climber, professional speaker, Grateful Dead fan, and author, each to varying degrees and thus with different bonuses and penalties to identity and personal utility for acting certain ways in certain situations. (At a speaking gig, I’m unlikely to pick an audience member to fence with a foam sword, but in my capacity as father … well, you get the point.)

Identity bonuses and penalties also explain why soldiers charge machine gun nests, while wussified authors of pop-science books can’t imagine making the same decision in identical circumstances. Simply, the Army builds in recruits the identity of “soldier” and then the decision whether to charge is a balance with the chance of death sitting on one side and identity sitting firmly on the other. What’s the greater penalty: the chance of death for charging or the identity loss for cringing? If the Army’s done its job well, identity expectations of “soldier” overrule risk.

The same is true of schools and businesses. Organizations that help members adopt the identity of “student” or of “employee” create behaviors that would otherwise be illogical: Students learn; employees work. Akerlof also points to marketers of Marlboro or Virginia Slims cigarettes, who imply that to earn the identity bonus of “real man” or “sophisticated woman” you should set fire to and inhale their products.

Again, we act according to the social expectations of our identities or we pay a very real, tangible cost in personal utility. “The point is that you can socially engineer these things,” says Akerlof. Witness the Army, a good school, a good business, or good cigarette marketers.

If you want your spouse to do more housework, you too will learn to socially engineer these things. There are exactly two ways to do it. First, you can encourage your spouse to modify his or her identity. Social scientists have known for years that identity is influenced by surroundings. In fact, Akerlof points to this sculpting
power of culture as one of the (many) reasons poverty persists—by trying to transcend existing identity, a motivated teenager at a tough school forces identity penalties on all his or her peers. And so instead of applauding the motivated teen, peers tend to maximize the utility of their own identities by teasing away unwanted deviance. The use to you is this: Jumping directly into yoga class might be a stretch—no pun intended—but instead of nagging or cajoling or straight talk aimed at changing your spouse’s identity, find situations—friends, classes, TV shows, magazines, etc.—in which culture will do the work for you. People who cheer with the team become more cheerleader-like. Your challenge is to find the right team.

Or you can frame the desired behavior so that it aligns with the existing identity. For example, if you’re a wife trying to get your husband to put dirty clothes in the hamper rather than strewn around the floor near the hamper, how can you align this behavior with the identity of a real man? Is hitting the hamper like making the winning three-pointer? Is doing housework sexy? Does efficiently loading the dishwasher require manly spatial skills that only he can provide? Thus framed in terms of manliness, he can clean without paying an identity cost for it.

If you’re a husband trying to get your wife to do more housework … well, shame on you. (That said, these techniques should work equally well.)

Akerlof is best known for his paper “The Market
for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” for which he won the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences. The paper addresses not fruit but used cars, and shows that because a buyer can never be certain of a used car’s quality, it’s more advantageous for sellers to put lemons than cherries on the market because prices converge toward an assumed low point. His newest book (with Rachel Kranton), which occupies brave new territory between the previous encampments of economics and sociology, is
Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being
.

You know how it works. There are birds and bees. Daddy birds get together with mommy bees and they unzip their … chromosomes, throwing exactly half their genetic material into a pot. The stork, who’s an old-school synthetic biologist, stirs the pot with his long beak, and out flaps the pair’s unholy love child, feathers, stinger, and all.

Or something like that.

The point is this: Your child gets half its chromosomes from you and half from your mate. These form a tidy bundle known as a genome, and every cell in your child’s body gets a copy. If you get a good genome, you’ll be smart, beautiful, and happy. If you get a bad genome, you’re doomed to a life of loveless and tormented bell ringing at the nearest cathedral.

Or something like that.

And in the wiggle room implied by “something like that” lies extremely cool and extremely new science. It turns out that while
your genome is fixed, the expression of this genome is not. The software that controls this expression is the epigenome, and you can rewrite it.

On a basic level, “that’s why we have eye cells and ear cells and every other kind of cell, despite the same genes in each,” says Joseph Ecker, geneticist at the Salk Institute. It’s said that a cook’s only as good as his ingredients, but I’ll tell you what: With flour, butter, eggs, milk, and caramelized bacon, the epigenome of Anthony Bourdain creates a very different meal than does the epigenome of Garth Sundem (which expresses only pork-flavored, unleavened pancakes).

So if you want to be smart, beautiful, happy, and cancer-free, the trick becomes not only reaching back in time to select super-parents and thus the right ingredients in your genome, but also convincing your epigenome to make the most of the ingredients it’s got—to cook your genome like Bourdain.

Teaching your epigenome to cook depends on something called methylation. (Very) basically, attaching a methyl group silences part of a gene—in a cell that becomes eye tissue, all the other tissue types get the ball gag of a little methyl attachment, leaving only eye tissue to be expressed. When your eye cell copies itself to make more eye cells, it copies this methylation, too.

But over time, your DNA accumulates junk—viruses may insert snippets of Trojan code—and every time a cell duplicates itself, mutations may occur. So over time your genes generally get a bit messy. To avoid expressing the mess, you methylate everything you’d rather stayed quiet. It’s like living in Maoist China, where you constantly jail potential dissidents.

And if you fail to silence the proletariat, your cells may rise up against you. We call this cancer. A mismethylated cell is unbound by its history, has no direction in life, and can and very well may party like it’s 1999, leaving its directionless, cancerous progeny strewn about your body in places you wish it would not.

There are many drugs in the pipes to promote healthy methylation, troubleshoot mismethylation, and seek and destroy cells with the profiles of bad methylation. In fact, some of these are extremely promising alternatives to traditional chemotherapy. But until then, “there are bottles of folic acid on the shelves of Whole Foods,” says Ecker.

The body’s methyl comes from folic acid. Spread your folic acid too thin, and your epigenome doesn’t have enough ball gags to silence the junk. That’s why pregnant women take folic acid supplements—cells are duplicating at an abnormal pace and so need additional folic acid to keep pace with the epigenome’s massive methylation. The same overtime cell duplication is true if you get a bad sunburn or otherwise cause tissue damage that needs big-time repair—your cells go into copying mode, and you need enough folic acid to ensure correct methylation of these copies. You know that sunburn causes skin cancer, and now you know why: increased chances for bad methylation.

But on the flip side, Ecker points out that taking too much folic acid may aid cancers in replicating out of control. In fact, some of the first cancer drugs were “antifolates” that stopped methylation and thus cancer cells’ ability to reproduce.

So there are two things you can do right now, today, to ensure a happy epigenome: Please refrain from destroying your tissue and, barring that, take just enough folic acid to rebuild it properly. When you get a burn, pop a supplement but don’t make it a habit.

Joseph Ecker and other extremely cutting-
edge scientists are writing another chapter to the story of epigenomic effects. It turns out that in addition to rewriting your own epigenome and thus genetic expression through the way you live, you can pass elements of this rewritten epigenome to your children. For example, if you smoke before puberty, your grandchildren have a greater chance of reaching puberty early. And not only did Dutch mothers forced to near starvation during World War II have small babies, but their grandchildren were smaller too. Smoking and starving didn’t affect genes, but it affected how the epigenome expressed them.

So to the age-old question of nature or nurture is added another player that splits the difference—keeping the epigenome happy through nurture affects the very nature of your children and grandchildren. So don’t smoke, and eat right. Do it for the children. It’s true we make a better day, just you and me.

Why be content to fiddle benignly with the
epigenome when you can alter the very building blocks of life itself? Jim Collins, MacArthur genius and synthetic biologist at Boston University and Howard Hughes Medical Institute, inserted toggle switches into cells’ DNA that “allows cells to flip on and fluoresce in the presence of certain chemicals or heavy metals,” says Collins. These engineered cell mats are the new canaries in the coal mine. Then Collins inserted similar switches into yeast DNA, forcing the yeast to “commit cellular hara-kiri,” says Collins, after counting seven days. Naturally—for example in beer—yeast can clump together before dying, but Collins’s switches preempt this clumping and so can do away with the foul-tasting sediment in homebrew.

“When I studied tae kwon do as a teenager, my master always told me to aim a forward punch inside my opponent’s body,” says Jearl Walker, Cleveland State professor and author of the classic book
Flying Circus Physics
. And when he got the professor gig, he decided to investigate why. First, he filmed himself throwing forward punches and then measured the distance his hand traveled each frame to discover where the punch reached maximum velocity. Sure enough, a punching hand is fastest at 80 percent of arm extension. After that, it’s already slowing down to retract. Imagining a punch detonating behind the target’s surface helps to ensure maximum speed on impact.