Consider The Following Three Bond Quotes

Making the most of an experience: Living fully is extolled everywhere in popular culture. I have only to turn on the television at random to be assailed with the following messages: “It’s the best a man can get.” “It’s like having an angel by your side.” “Every move is smooth, every word is cool. I never want to lose that feeling.” “You look, they smile. You win, they go home.” What is being sold here? A fantasy of total sensory pleasure, social status, sexual attraction, and the self-image of a winner. As it happens, all these phrases come from the same commercial for razor blades, but living life fully is part of almost any ad campaign. What is left out, however, is the reality of what it actually means to fully experience something. Instead of looking for sensory overload that lasts forever, you’ll find that the experiences need to be engaged at the level of meaning and emotion. Meaning is essential. If this moment truly matters to you, you will experience it fully. Emotion brings in the dimension of bonding or tuning in: An experience that touches your heart makes the meaning that much more personal. Pure physical sensation, social status, sexual attraction, and feeling like a winner are generally superficial, which is why people hunger for them repeatedly. If you spend time with athletes who have won hundreds of games or with sexually active singles who have slept with hundreds of partners, you’ll find out two things very quickly: (1) Numbers don’t count very much. The athlete usually doesn’t feel like a winner deep down; the sexual conqueror doesn’t usually feel deeply attractive or worthy. (2) Each experience brings diminishing returns; the thrill of winning or going to bed becomes less and less exciting and lasts a shorter time. To experience this moment, or any moment, fully means to engage fully. Meeting a stranger can be totally fleeting and meaningless, for example, unless you enter the individual’s world by finding out at least one thing that is meaningful to his or her life and exchange at least one genuine feeling. Tuning in to others is a circular flow: You send yourself out toward people; you receive them as they respond to you. Notice how often you don’t do that. You stand back and insulate yourself, sending out only the most superficial signals and receive little or nothing back. The same circle must be present even when someone else isn’t involved. Consider the way three people might observe the same sunset. The first person is obsessing over a business deal and doesn’t even see the sunset, even though his eyes are registering the photons that fall on their retinas. The second person thinks, “Nice sunset. We haven’t had one in a while.” The third person is an artist who immediately begins a sketch of the scene. The differences among the three are that the first person sent nothing out and received nothing back; the second allowed his awareness to receive the sunset but had no awareness to give back to it—his response was rote; the third person was the only one to complete the circle: He took in the sunset and turned it into a creative response that sent his awareness back out into the world with something to give. If you want to fully experience life, you must close the circle.

CASE STUDY In 2012, investigators were trying to understand why supermarkets in the United States were being robbed every month of Tide detergent – and only Tide detergent. As with every investigation, they ‘followed the money’ only to find that Tide was the money. Bottles of Tide had become an ad hoc street currency, with 150-ounce bottles being exchanged for $5 or $10 worth of drugs, earning it the nickname ‘Liquid Gold’. As New York magazine pointed out: ‘this unlikely black market would not have formed if they weren’t so good at pushing their product’.37 It turns out that despite being considered a ‘low interest category’, people have very strong feelings about their detergents. Tide came in the top three brands that consumers were least likely to give up during tough times. This bond has allowed the producer, Procter & Gamble, to charge 50 per cent more than the average detergent and yet it still outsells its nearest competitor, which is also produced by P&G, by more than two to one. So, what is it about Tide that means more people will pay 50 per cent more for a functionally parity product from the same manufacturer? The investigating sergeant puts it well: ‘I’m a No. 1 Tide fan’, he says. ‘I don’t know if it’s all psychological, but you can tell the difference.’38

When Crick and Watson began, they knew very little about DNA for sure, and part of what they were most sure of was wrong. To consider DNA as a physical object, they wanted diameters, lengths, linkages and rotations, screw pitch, density, water content, bonds, and bonds and again bonds. The sport would be to see how little data they could make do with and still get it right: the less scaffolding visible, the more elegant and astonishing the structure. More than sport was involved. Crick, following Pauling, elevated this penurious elegance into a theoretical principle, the corollary of model-building. “You must remember, we were trying to solve it with the fewest possible assumptions,” Crick said. “There’s a perfectly sound reason—it isn’t just a matter of aesthetics or because we thought it was a nice game—why you should use the minimum of experimental data. The fact is, you remember, that we knew that Bragg and Kendrew and Perutz had been misled by the experimental data. And therefore every bit of experimental evidence we had got at any one time we were prepared to throw away, because we said it may be misleading just the way that 5.1 reflection in alpha keratin was misleading.” We were in his office in Cambridge; thinking out loud, he got up and began to pace back and forth, with long, loping steps, in the clear lane in front of his desk, speaking in the rhythm of his stride. “They missed the alpha helix because of that reflection! You see. And the fact that they didn’t put the peptide bond in right. The point is that evidence can be unreliable, and therefore you should use as little of it as you can. And when we confront problems today, we’re in exactly the same situation. We have three or four bits of data, we don’t know which one is reliable, so we say, now, if we discard that one and assume it’s wrong—even though we have no evidence that it’s wrong—then we can look at the rest of the data and see if we can make sense of that. And that’s what we do all the time. I mean, people don’t realize that not only can data be wrong in science, it can be misleading. There isn’t such a thing as a hard fact when you’re trying to discover something. It’s only afterwards that the facts become hard.