2006. “God Gene”. In Encyclopedia of Anthropology. H. James Birx, ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications. Pp. 1093-4.
This is my self-archive version of this article; published version may vary slightly.
The belief in and attempt to manipulate the supernatural is widespread among human cultures. Although the particular content of any people’s religious or spiritual beliefs is dependent on their specific environment, lifestyle, social configuration, and history, the presence of spiritual or supernatural beliefs of some sort in virtually every society suggests that there may be a biological basis to the capacity to believe. Dean Hamer, a biologist and head of the genetic unit of the National Cancer Institute, believes that he may have discovered at least one of the biological traits that fosters spiritual belief: a gene responsible for the production of one of the chemicals used to regulate emotion in the brain.
The God Gene is the title of Hamer’s book presenting his research on the relationship between genes and spirituality. Specifically, the god gene is his name for a particular gene that codes for the production of the protein VMAT2, which plays an important role in regulating levels of serotonin and dopamine in the brain. Although all people produce VMAT2, Hamer focused on what he sees as a key variation, a polymorphism named A33050C. Two of the variations include ether one or two molecules of cytosine, the other two molecules of adenine. Those with cytosine in this particular location scored, on average, much higher on tests designed to measure spirituality than those without.
In the course of research on smoking and addiction, Hamer administered a set of psychological tests to 1,388 subjects. Included was a set of questions intended to measure a subject’s self-transcendence, based on the research of psychiatrist Robert Cloninger. Cloninger’s test measures three qualities: self-forgetfulness, the tendency to become so absorbed in one’s actions as to lose track of the world around them; transpersonal identification, the feeling of connectedness to the universe and its inhabitants; and mysticism, the willingness to believe in things not approachable through reason. Based on his research of historical, psychological, and theological sources, Cloninger’s test is intended to measure individual spiritualism, divorced from the particular content of organized religious belief and orthodoxy.
Hamer’s findings suggested a strong link between the presence of one of the cystosine variants of the VMAT2 gene and spirituality as measured by Cloninger’s test. In test cases where one sibling had a cystosine variant, almost all scored markedly higher for self-transcendence than their non-cystosine bearing siblings. After correcting for other possible influences, Hamer was convinced that a significant correlation existed. What was left was to propose a mechanism by which VMAT2 might influence spirituality.
VMAT2 is short for vesicular monoamine transporter, a chemical crucial to the brain’s use of monoamines, brain chemicals that play a crucial role in both motor control and emotional status. Monoamines are stored in the brain in bubble-like vesicles; when a signal is generated by a neuron, calcium ions are released which bind to the VMAT2 molecules, causing them to separate and allowing the monoamine within – serotonin, domapine, adrenaline, or noradrenalin – to flow into the synapse. In laboratory tests, mice genetically altered to be incapable of producing VMAT2 were born at much smaller sizes than untreated mice, and were inactive, unwilling to move even to eat. All of the test subjects died within two weeks, almost half within three days.
Among other things, monamines- and thus VMAT2- play an important role in coordinating the responses of the thalamocortical complex, responsible for perception and reflection, and the limbic-brain stem system, which produces emotional responses. During periods of heightened spiritual awareness- the Buddhist’s meditative state, for instance, or the shaman’s trance- the thalamocortical system draws more and more of the brain’s blood flow and energy to itself, reducing the efficacy of the other centers of the brain in a process called “deafferentation”. One system affected by deafferentation is the part of the brain responsible for locating the body in space, which as it senses a drop in blood flow, signals to the limbic system, which in turn signals the thalamocortical system, forcing the thalamocortical system to draw even more energy to itself and setting up a feedback loop in the brain that produces a greater and greater feeling of detachment from or expansion beyond the body- a situation easily understood by most as describing a mystical experience. According to Hamer, those with one variant of the VMAT2 gene might find it far easier and more common to produce these kinds of feedback loops than those with the other- and thus be more open to mystical experiences.
Hamer himself notes that VMAT2 likely plays only a small, if essential role in spirituality, noting that spirituality is too complex a phenomenon to be reduced to a single gene or even a single neurological process. Even so, his work as it stands presents a number of difficulties. The first is the way in which he, following Cloninger, defines spirituality itself. Cloninger based his tests on a study of people he considered to be extremely spiritual – Albert Schweitzer, Mahatma Gandhi, Catholic saints, Buddhist monks – and then chose the traits that he felt marked them as spiritual. It is hard not to wonder if his criteria represent anything more than a Western notion of individual spirituality that may not have much meaning outside of a limited selection of major societies. Although they have been administered to Americans from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, the fact remains that they have yet to be administered outside of the United States, and may very likely reflect widely shared Western notions of spirituality, or even notions common to all centralized, state-based peoples. One has to ask if statements like “I am fascinated by the many things in life that cannot be scientifically explained” or “I believe that miracles happen” would tell us anything useful about the spirituality of, say, an Amazonian hunter-gatherer or South Pacific horticulturalist.
Hamer’s hypothesis is further burdened by his uncertainty about how to weight religious behaviour as evidence. Early in The God Gene, Hamer insists on the non-commensurability of religion and spirituality, noting that members of organized religions tend to score low for self-transcendence, while high scorers were almost always non- or even anti-religious. However, when Hamer attempts to build an evolutionary argument for the contribution of the god gene to human adaptive fitness, he relies primarily on aspects of religious behavior- for instance, the role of religion in fostering and maintaining social solidarity.
This contradiction reflects a more fundamental and possibly irreconcilable opposition in Hamer’s research. On one hand, he builds a case for individual variability, linking different levels of spirituality to the presence or absence of a particular gene. On the other hand, he tries to make a case for spirituality as a species trait, as part of the shared evolutionary heritage of humanity as a whole. In the first case, religion is opposed to spirituality, reflecting contemporary usage that associates “spirituality” with the individual and “religion” with the community. In the second, religion is presented as interchangeable with spirituality, so that the Venus figurines of Eastern Europe or the cave bear clans of Paleolithic France are seen as evidence for early human spirituality.
Ultimately, Hamer’s work presents more questions than answers. While his fundamental reasoning is sound- regardless of what we believe, there must be some neurological structure within which believing occurs- his conclusions are far broader than his research and evidence support. Basing universalist arguments about human biology on very culture-specific evidence seems hasty and even dangerous. Instead, he has provided us with a very preliminary hypothesis about one possible factor in spiritual behavior, one that probably deserves much more rigorous testing. Unfortunately, Hamer has only published his research for a popular audience, and has so far failed to provide the methodology, data, and detailed results on which he has based his conclusions, making it difficult, if even possible, for other scientists to follow up his work or compare their research to his. Until that happens, it is unlikely that the questions he raises will be adequately addressed.
2007. “Book Review: Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture”. Archives of Sexual Behavior 36(3): 471 – 472.
This is my self-archive version of this article. It is available online to those with access to the SpringerLink service, and be in print with the release of the July issue.
BOOK REVIEW: Sex and Pleasure in Western Culture
By Gail Hawkes, Polity Press, Cambridge, England, 2004, 207 pp., £50.00 (hardback); £15.99 (paperback).
The regulation and management of sexual desire is one of only a few well-documented cultural universals. In every society that has been studied, there exists some form of restriction as to whom one can or cannot view as potential sexual partners, whether this takes the form of incest taboos that forbid sexual relationships with family members, marriage rules that prevent access to other people’s partners, legal frameworks that restrict one to one’s own racial, class, or other grouping, or informal aesthetic restrictions that do the same. These restrictions are often thought of in terms of minimizing conflict between individuals, controlling reproduction, and promoting the formation of alliances between groups or group segments, but Hawkes’ volume suggests that these restrictions also need to be understood in the wider context of control over the social order. In this perspective, discourses on the sexual body express anxieties over the control—and potential loss of control—of the body politic, and suggest as well the channels through which social control will be asserted.
This volume explores the ramifications of this thesis in the development of Western society, beginning with the Greece of Plato and Socrates and moving through early Christianity and the establishment of the Church, through the rise of modernity in the Renaissance and Enlightenment, through the Victorian era, and up to the present. Along the way, Hawkes tracks concerns over sex and sexuality as embedded in philosophical, religious, medical, legal, and, finally, popular discourses, revealing both the mutability of attitudes towards desire and pleasure and the endurance of the underlying need to establish social order through the instrument of the sexual body. Although her argument rests on discourse analysis and thus is subject to some of the shortcomings of that mode of analysis, the depth of Hawkes’ timeline makes this book an important resource for situating attitudes towards sex in their proper historical and political perspective.
Hawkes’ primary concern is the relation between the control of sexual pleasure and the maintenance of the social order. Although this connection could theoretically take several different forms, Hawkes notes that, in Western culture, the relationship has been profoundly shaped by concerns about sex, sin, and the body held by early Gnostic Christians and carried forward with Christianity’s ascension to state power. By way of comparison, she offers classical Greece, with its stress on ”balance” as the key to a healthy mind and body. For Plato and his fellow citizens, sexual pleasure, particularly as taken in the aesthetic enjoyment of the male form, was one element among many essential to human accomplishment and even survival, provided that enjoyment be taken in moderation. Too little sexual pleasure could prove harmful to the body and mind, while too much signified something worse, a loss of control over and eventual enslavement to the need for pleasure.
For the early Christians, balance was considered neither healthy nor desirable—sex was not merely a temptation to sin, but sin in and of itself. Guided by a belief in sex as the source of original sin, and thus in celibacy as a means to became untenable, the social reproduction of the state being dependent on the sexual reproduction of its subjects. Augustine tempered but did not wholly repudiate the earlier view, establishing sex within the bonds of marriage as a duty to God and to Church, to be enjoyed not as a source of pleasure but as the fulfillment of an obligation. To discourage the ”wrong” kind of sex, Augustine and his successors advocated a sexuality explicitly intended to minimize sexual pleasure.
By the dawn of the modern era, Augustine’s compromise was fully ensconced in Western understandings of sexuality—so much so, in fact, that when alternative views of sex and pleasure began to emerge in the courtly literature of the late Middle Ages and the medical discourse of the Renaissance, they took for granted marriage as the only acceptable site for sexual pleasure. Adulterous, homosexual, and onanistic pleasures were defined as deviant and unhealthy, the transfer of pleasure into domains in which pleasure had no (acceptable) place. These unauthorized pleasures were placed under regimes of surveillance that intensified steadily until the 20th century when, with the advent and acceptance of scientific approaches to the study of sex, authorities like Freud, Stopes, and Kinsey recast pleasure of any sort as a natural, healthy, and necessary function of the human body. The new scientific literature was taken up by both activists and the general populace, and within a few decades, legal and medical regimes began crumbling—clearing the way for new sets of sexual controls to slide into place with the commodification of sex, pleasure, and desire through the medium of advertisement, fashion, and popular entertainment.
Although this volume is convincingly and engagingly written as a whole, Hawkes is at her best when she focuses on ”the Sexual Century,” the last hundred years with its apparent explosion of pleasures rapidly channeled into bland consumerism. However, the work is not without its problems. The first, more minor issue is that Hawkes’ dependence on literature either written in or translated to English greatly limits the scope of her work. By the middle of the text, she has essentially forsaken ”Western culture” as a whole for one small English-speaking corner of it. Later chapters expand the scope to include the USA and redemption and ultimate salvation, sex even between husband and wife was deeply problematic for the early Christians—given the imminence of the Second Coming, it was unnecessary for the continuation of the Christian community. With the elevation of Christianity to a state religion following the conversion of Constantine, and the realization that the Second Coming might be further away than was originally thought, the early Christian view of sex Australia, but we are left to our own devices to determine how representative the trends described here are of Western culture overall.
Second, and more importantly, Hawkes’ use of fairly straight-forward discourse analysis limits her to the attitudes and understandings set down by the relatively small number of literate elites, and raises the question of how the concerns and understandings of those who wrote and consumed these documents relates to the sexual practices of the non-elites allegedly controlled. While her argument that concerns about the social order found their outlet in concerns about sex and pleasure is well-formed, the fact that the same concerns emerge repeatedly over the course of over two millennia suggests that the documents she presents functioned as little more than elite hand-wringing over a sexual and social order continuously slipping out of their control. With a couple of exceptions—the particularly harsh public confessions of the early Church, a handful of laws passed in the Middle Ages and the early Modern period—Hawkes avoids detailing the mechanism by which concerns about social order translated into actual social control. On a related note, the reliance on written documents means our only insight into the sexual attitudes of ”the people” is through the imaginings of literate—and anxious—elites.
These issues should not detract overmuch from Hawkes’ overall accomplishment; rather, they suggest areas for further improvement and research to test the framework she has erected. Primarily a work of literary analysis, the book suggests avenues for exploration using the tools of historical, anthropological, and sociological investigation. It also opens up the possibility of cross-cultural examination to explore how different social orders might produce drastically different notions of sex and pleasure. Hawkes herself recognizes the necessarily limited scope of her work, which, after all, reviews nearly three millennia of sexual history in just under 200 pages. Within these restraints of length and disciplinary orientation, this volume largely succeeds as a general overview of changing ideas about sex over a vast time span, illuminating an important connection between these notions and the social order of which they are a part.
A site I hadn’t seen before called Scholarships Around the US offers a list of 118 money management tips for college students. The list offers pretty good advice for saving, spending, and even earning wisely while making your way through college, as well as links to several articles and websites for more information. Here’s a taste:
To save money you need to manage it. I hate to get on the topic of money management right off the bat, but if you expect to save money you need to be a bit savvy with the little bit of cash you have:
- Get a free checking and savings account. The bank will nickel and dime you on dumb stuff like too many ATM withdrawals, too many checks written, or a funds transfer. Shop the town for banks catering to students. Make sure you can access online banking, pay
bills and manage your account without attached fees.
- Take the free checks that the bank offers in the maximum amount they allow – mine was initially going to give me 50, but for some reason I thought I needed more right away and paid $4.95 for another 50. If you need more, you simply go online and order more, but leftover checks are more typical than not, especially with online bill pay options becoming more commonplace. Extra checks become nothing more than wasted paper and wasted dollars.
Maybe a whole planner system, like the DIY Planner I mentioned a few posts ago, seems like overkill to you — too much to carry and worry about? What about a simple, customizable, pocket-sized, use-it-and-toss-it approach?
PocketMod is a custom planner you design, print out, fold up, and eventually throw away and replace. The website allows you to choose from an assortment of templates for each page (appointment schedulers, calendars, blank lines, graph-paper grids, even guitar tabs; a new feature I haven’t tried allows you to upload your own pdf’s to add to your PocketMod, too) and arrange them however you want. Once you’re satisfied, you print it out, cut and fold it, and voila! A tiny pocketsize notebook to scribble on; when it’s full, or when it starts to fall apart, just toss it out and print up a new one.
If you’re a procrastinator (and you are, trust me on this), GTD Wannabe’s list of procrastination hacks may well be a life-saver. Ultimately, dealing with procrastination means sitting down and actually getting to work, but these tricks might help you get to that point a little quicker. For example:
- Turn off the TV. I always thought I could work with the TV on. Nope, it’s a fallacy. I can do mind-numbing things, like paying bills, or recreational surfing, but I can’t do anything serious. It’s true – I cannot actually multi-task, no more than my single-processor does true concurrency. I am a one-processor machine – I can do exactly one thing at a time. True, I might be able to switch quickly between tasks, but only one thing at a time has my focus.
- Techno Kicks It. I love listening to music when I work. At home because I can, without headphones on, and at school because having headphones on is the only way to survive in a computer lab environment. I actually switch between 80’s and Techno/Electronica. 80’s because it’s the stuff I went to high school on, and it tends to fade into the background, while making me bouncy happy. Techno because it tends not to have distracting vocals, and the songs last forever, putting me into an excellent writing/coding groove.
Techno might not be your thing (it’s not mine) but the idea is a good one — find out what kind of music energizes you (the “background music” you’re playing now is probably relaxing you, not energizing you) and see if it helps you stay focused. Some studies show that music is generally not an aid to studying, that it actually makes us less productive even though it often makes us feel more productive. Here’s the thing, though: if you have a problem with procrastination, maybe feeling more productive is more important than actually being more productive, because the alternative is not being productive at all!
Who says education has to stay within classroom walls? Take your education with you with one of the podcasts from Open Cult’s University Podcast Collection. Each series is a recording of an actual class, posted for the world’s use by the professor or university. Subjects cover the range from law and business to arts and humanities to the physical and social sciences. You might also find useful stuff at the foreign language podcasts section on the same site.
Santa Fe Community College has a page chock-full of good information for students trying to manage their time as well as possible. The entire page merits a close reading, but I especially like the section on making to-do lists, a little step that can have huge payoffs in productivity, if taken seriously.
- Review your To-Do lists from the previous week and cross off those items which you completed. Briefly study the items which you did not complete and decide whether you want to rewrite them for some other week or eliminate them altogether. For items you know are important but you can not get to this week is to just turn over a few pages and write them several weeks ahead. As you cross off the incomplete items do it with a different type of marker so that you can later tell the items that were done from those that were not. Focus on your positive accomplishments by asking yourself whether you are completing the items with the highest priorities first. If so by putting off the less important items you could think of yourself as using good time management not procrastinating.
- Review obvious and externally imposed To-Dos such as assignments and projects your course syllabi.
- Before you begin your activities each week, you should sit down and list all of the tasks you need to get done during the week. If your schedule is tight you may want to assign tasks to given days of the week. If assigning tasks to given days refer to your master or weekly schedule. To plan ahead for large tasks be sure to check your monthly calendar. On bigger projects try doing small steps regularly each week.
- Prioritize each item on your list in order of importance and according to deadlines by applying the following “test.” Is this something I must get done, should get done, or could complete? Assign each task to a category according to its priority, using a 1, 2, 3 system, an A, B, C arrangement; or (M)ust, (S)hould, (C)ould. If you anticipate a very hectic day ahead you may even want to assign times to the “l’s”, “A’s”, or M’s.
- Carry your To-Do list with you during the day and refer to it when needed to make sure that you at least complete your “l’s” or “M’s” during the course of the day. Try to complete tasks with a minimum of interruptions.
- At the end of each day review your list . Then reward yourself for tasks completed on schedule and make any adjustments needed during the rest of the week.
- At the end of the week you should make time to reflect on how you have been feeling during the past week and how you feel about yourself in relation to your personal values, goals, and objectives. End the week with a positive feeling so you can begin the next week with zest.
The rest of the page includes pointers on organizing your work area, studying effectively, reviewing for exams, planning a research paper , and a lot more.
DegreeTutor.com’s 57 Tips for Writing Your Term Paper is an incredible resource, extending far beyond 3×5 cards and proper citations. It’s almost a holistic approach to writing that encompasses where, when, and how to research, write, and format your work. My favorite part is the first, “Know Thy Professor” — a pretty keen insight into the life of us academics, and excellent advice for students to whom our lives are, I think, something of a mystery:
Professors and teaching assistants are theoretically there to help you. Understanding their role will help you utilize them appropriately. These tips are very general, mostly non-study related tips that can go a ways to helping your grades.
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3. Don’t lie to your professor. Ever. They smell the stench of your lie before you open your mouth. They’ve heard it all before. If you need an extension for your term paper, approach them like a human being, with professional respect.
4. No sob stories. If you intend to ask for a deadline extension because life got in the way, be prepared to at least show the professor how much work you have already done. Showing willingness to learn may be sufficient to win that extension.
5. Don’t wait to the last minute. Don’t be like the student who went to the teaching assistant five minutes before a paper was due to profess that they didn’t understand the assignment. No one is going to give you an extension at that point.
6. Think like a professor. Most professors say it takes about two minutes of preparation for each minute of lecture. Participate in the learning process by previewing topics before a lecture. If you want to go a step beyond, understand what a lecturer has to consider when preparing exams, assignments and term paper options.
Most of the time, if you treat your professors like real people and not as adversaries, they’ll treat you the same way. This means, of course, dropping the illusion that you’re very very clever and original, at least when it comes to excuse-making — most professors start with the assumption that we’re being played, and when the excuse you’ve worked so long to work out turns out to be the same one the 6 students before you came up with, well… let’s just say, it’s not likely to be very convincing. Instead, keep in mind that your professor wants you to do the work, even if it means bending the rules — when faced with a student who honestly wants to learn, it’s a hard professor indeed who won’t cut them a little slack.
Every project you undertake in school — a class, a paper, an extracurricular activity, a social event, even downtime — should have a goal (or more than one). Take a moment to figure out what the goal of each task you’ve accumulated is. Be honest with yourself; I’ve heard dozens of students say they took a class (often my class) just because “it meets a requirement”. That may be true, but there’s always several classes that meet any given requirement; what made you choose this one? You don’t have to have a lofty purpose for everything, either — maybe you like watching “The Daily Show” every night to relax and have a laugh, or maybe you signed up for intramural sports just to have fun. That’s fine — the important thing is simply to know what your goals are.
A common piece of writing advice is to “write to your thesis” — that is, to keep in mind the point you’re trying to make, and to evaluate each line and paragraph to make sure it brings you closer to making that point. Setting goals works the same way — live towards your goals. If by some unfortunate turn of events “The Daily Show” is no longer funny, or your weekly rugby game is no longer fun, then have a choice:
- Determine why the project is no longer meeting your goals, and fix it; or
- Accept that this project isn’t the best way to meet your goals, and stop doing it.
- Or, in some instances, you might change your goals.
Consider your classes, for example. Let’s say you are taking Introduction to Anthropology (a class I teach, by the way). You could have taken Sociology or Economics or Political Science to meet your social science requirement, but you chose anthropology. Perhaps you’re interested in foreign cultures and hope to learn more about them. Day after day passes, and the professor spends the whole time talking about theories and the lives of anthropology’s great figures, and never mentions the specifics of any particular culture. The class isn’t meeting your goals!
Now, if you were truly just taking the class because it meets a requirement, you’d happily come to class each day, absorbing whatever the professor has to offer, taking your tests and handing in your assignments, and never complaining. What’s more likely, though, is that you will start to feel frustrated, angry at the professor for wasting your time, and bored. If you haven’t taken the time to determine what your goals are in taking the class, you probably won’t be able to express what’s eating at you; instead, you might develop a distaste for anthropology, or a dislike for a perfectly fine professor, or simply start dragging your feet on your assignments until you finish the class with a low grade. Not a great outcome, right?
If, on the other hand, you’ve taken the time to figure out just what it is you hope to gain from this class, it will be easy to articulate. You might pay a visit to the professor and explain why you took the class and what you feel is missing (believe me, unless the professor is the worst sort of scoundrel, they’ll appreciate your input — professors who care about teaching thrive on student input, even when it’s critical). Perhaps the professor can let you know if upcoming material might better meet your goal, or maybe s/he’ll allow you to substitute outside research for an assigned paper that would allow you to apply the ideas in the class to some foreign culture. Or maybe she’ll add material to the class that will be more engaging for you.
Or, maybe not. Maybe you’ve misunderstood the class description or had the wrong idea about what anthropology is, and the teacher doesn’t plan to cover material that might be better suited to your personal reasons for taking the class. If it’s early enough in the semester, you might be able to transfer into a class that better meets your goals. Or, if they’re a good enough professor, they should be able to offer you enough incentive to stay in the class while helping you to adopt more suitable goals.
But unless you can easily explain what your goals are — to yourself as well as to your professor — you’re going to have a hard time creating a satisfactory outcome. It’s a good idea to keep track of your tasks and projects (writers often post their thesis on the wall above their desk so it’s always right in front of them) and a short line or two about what you hope to accomplish — I keep a small pocket notebook with all my projects listed and space for writing down my goals for each. Sure, a lot of things won’t seem to merit that kind of formality — deciding to go bar-hopping with your friends (Goals: have fun, socialize, meet an obliging member of your preferred sex, blow off steam) might not merit an entry in your book, but just about anything you do on a regular basis or that has an “official” air to it certainly does.
Takea few minutes to write down your projects and their goals right now. Then take a few minutes each week or so to review your list and decide whether that project is still moving you towards your goals. Don’t forget about the big stuff, either: going to college is a project, dating someone is a project, becoming a lawyer (or doctor, or professor, or politician, or nurse, or air conditioner tech, or programmer, or artist, or whatever) is a project. Especially in college, our goals often change, and you might find that your goals and your big life decisions no longer seem to line up after a while. Keeping on top of those shifts while they happen is, at the very least, a good way to avoid the kinds of crises graduates often face when they realize the degree they’re holding in their hand has absolutely nothing to do with who they have become or what they want from life.
About.com’s College Life editor presents this simple process for keeping track of and prioritizing your assignments. Her system is deceptively simple — we often don’t think about priorities because it seems obvious what’s most important; in fact, what we’re doing when we say something is “obvious” is filing the same kind of record this system creates, only in our heads instead of on paper. Getting in the habit of “off-loading” that kind of work to a trusted pen-and-paper (or electronic, if you’re comfortable with that) system can really help free up “mental RAM” for thinking and learning — the stuff that you’re (hopefully) in college for in the first place.
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