A Conversation Between Sama Ahmed & Z Yan Wang
Sama Ahmed
Okay, to start: what drew you to your current work? And why? Actually, maybe start with what is your current work? I know what it is!
Z Yan Wang
I'm a wee cog in the machine of academia. And I'm a researcher on mechanisms of death and dying, from a biological perspective using invertebrate animals, particularly, or in particular, the octopus and the bumblebee. So my work is in the field of neuroscience. And I teach and write and think about that.
SA
And what drew you to studying death and dying in invertebrates?
ZYW
It's funny, because when you first asked that, I was just like, wow, slow gravity. I don't know. Okay, circumstantially, in my life, I think it was just kind of stochastic. I just bumped into different things. And then I ended up there. But I think that I stayed there, and maybe that's the more interesting question, not what drew me there, not what drew me to the flame, but what kept me flying towards it. It’s that death is so pervasive, and it's such an important part of living, and that seemed like a really interesting tension or tightrope to walk across as a scholar. And I think that's why I stayed. Because even as we live, it seems like the anxiety of death is just always at our fingertips. How about you? What is your line of work?
SA
I study, in shorthand, how multitasking works in the nervous system, also looking at invertebrate models. I guess that's something that kind of ties us together. I study multitasking because I find it to be an interesting question about how the nervous system is constrained. And that you can do so many amazing things. You have language, you have complex behaviors, you have posture control. And there’s social communication, and all these amazing things that the nervous system can produce through the body of the animal. And yet, there are certain things that the animal struggles to do. For example: I can hold a conversation and go on a walk with you. And there are other things, like texting and driving that are just really downright scary. So I find that multitasking is an interesting paradigm to look at. Because it's really asking the question as to why certain things are constrained and others aren’t. And what can that teach us about how the brain and how the nervous system are generally structured, and where the rules that can be learned from from working on invertebrates can apply across across organisms. It was like a very slow gravitational pull. I've always been interested in animal behavior, and brains and behavior.
And I just find that to be a really profound thing that I can contribute to. It's a really humbling science. Given that we know so little about the link between brains and behavior, in health or disease. And I think getting a chance to kind of contribute to that, It's been really, really amazing in that, I entered it thinking one set of things, and then slowly, you start to move away to these topics. I don't think five years ago I would have even known what I meant by constraints of the nervous system, or that I had even used those terms. And even the idea of studying multitasking is relatively new for me. I think before, I was kind of thinking about it as what I called state modulation. Or: how does movement change how the brain functions? And that's a slightly different framing than multitasking.
ZYW
Can you tell me what you mean by that you find studying animal behavior to be humbling?
SA
I specifically work on fruit flies. And I think ever since I saw them as a teenager under a microscope, I was blown away by the amount of detail that you can notice just on the body of the fly, these little hairs and bristles and big eyes. And you don't really get to appreciate them in your day to day life, but they have such fascinating complex interiority. I think, you know, who knows what a fly's life is like? These teeny tiny organisms that do so many cool, interesting things. They fly and walk and dance and communicate socially, with other flies and with other organisms. And they've sort of taken over the planet. Anywhere you find humans, you'll find flies. And we know so little about them, even though they're one of the main organisms that we study in neuroscience. So I find it to be really humbling. I think I'm not the only one who works on this system and is humbled by it, the amount of complexity that there is in this one millimeter long creature. It's the size of a comma on a piece of paper. Maybe a little bit bigger than that, but it's not that much bigger. Helvetica, 16 point font!
And yet, it has a super complex nervous system. And the stuff that we're learning is really that it's tractable, in some ways. You can make actual, real progress in understanding the link between how the nervous system is structured, how it gets structured, how it develops. And the link between that and all these complex, interesting behaviors that an animal does. I don't know. I mean, I feel like studying death and dying is also very humbling.
ZYW
Well, I was gonna say that I love that you use that word because I don't know that I know what humbling means. I think what I've been struggling with, or a particular attention I've been working with in my research recently is, is this pursuit hubristic? And if it is hubristic, or let's say it is hubristic. Does that mean it is not worth it? Or does that mean it is still worth it? Yeah, I mean, I love what you were saying about being humbled by the fly or that this pursuit is humbling. And there's so much that you can do in a fly that I can't do in octopuses or in bumblebees from a logistical or technological or methodological standpoint. I just wonder if they're two sides of the same coin, something that is humbling versus something that is hubristic. Or maybe to feel hubris, you have to be humble.
I think in the face of something as large as death, or for me, what I think about is female reproduction. And that is, female reproduction, to me, permeates literally every aspect of life. And I feel like I look through life more through a lens of female reproduction then through death, but certainly through the intersection of both of them. And they're related, right? For example, in a quite literal sense death in childbirth is a possibility, a huge possibility. But that's not what I study— I study how reproductive aging and reproduction can trigger death and things like that. But in the face of something so large like that, I just wonder, is it something we ever get? Can we ever?
SA
Interesting. We’ve got a different question now. Okay, this question says, how do your concerns about ecology shape your view of the world? And of the work you do in response to what you see? It's an interesting question. How do you think about ecology?
ZYW
I think that I only think about ecology through the lens of evolution. What about you?
SA
Yeah, that's kind of how I'm thinking about it too.
ZYW
Yeah. Because I think as people who do work that's based in a lab, I'm only ever thinking about the ecology of the animal in an abstract sense. And more approximately it’s thinking about the evolutionary forces that shaped the circumstances that we see ourselves in and these animals that we study.
SA
I've been thinking about it in terms of, well, also situated in evolution. And that we tend to think, at least I've been trained to think about the individual animal as the agent. And to sort of disembody it and think about what its neurons and brain cells are doing to give it behavior. I think that very recently, we’ve come to see a limitation in that perspective and started to think about behavior as something that's emerging out of the intersection between the body organism, its brain and the environment. Which leads to thinking about ecology, thinking about how the environment is changing rapidly. How that changes how animals interact with each other and the world. Humans included.
ZYW
I think this also gets to something that you and I have been thinking a lot about, and particularly I feel like you've been trying to incorporate into your work and also how you do work, how you labor. Which is thinking about systems rather than individuals, and thinking about emergent properties of systems, rather than, additive properties.
SA
I’ve been trained as a reductionist in a way, I think a lot of neuroscientists have been. And I think there's a lot of value in that, but I see a lot of value in the scale jumping, where you have go up to the level of context and interaction. And then you can come down to particular interaction, which is the link between this set of brain cells and this set of behaviors or something like that. But yeah, now, I've been reading a lot recently about geometry of space, and how that constrains the behaviors that animals do in those spaces. At a very simple level where like, if you walk into a room, and there's a chair in it, you're more likely to sit then not. But also, fruit flies behave differently, and like circular arenas better then square. And it's like, well, the only thing that’s really changed is the shape of the arena. And we get to see different behaviors come up. So what does that say about the importance of the environment and allowing those behaviors to emerge?
ZYW
Yeah, I really like that. The importance of space for facilitating or prohibiting certain things from happening. It reminds me of… I don't remember the name of this scholar. But I remember in undergrad listening to this talk from somebody in ethnic studies, and what they were studying was the impact of dedicated spaces on college campuses for what we would now call affinity groups, and how that led to cross-racial alliance building in the 60s and 70s. And how some of these spaces are really under threat. Now, today, right? Today at lunch, we were just talking about how there are no, like, no women of color yoga spaces in Seattle for some reason! And it's, you know, what happens when there are those spaces? And what happens when those spaces are taken away?
SA
Yeah, exactly. You can't create a vacuum, right? Every decision to exclude a particular kind of space for people is essentially, you’re creating a different kind of space that allows for different outcomes to emerge.
ZYW
And I think what you're seeing too is this idea of latent properties, or latent networks, this idea that cells in our brain are wired for something, some type of behavior, but we don't necessarily know what that behavior is until it gets revealed by the right context. And that context could be physical space, it could be social environment, it could be a variety of contexts.
SA
I like to think of the world as being very dynamic. And, you know, from a systems perspective, where there are snapshots and everything seems static, but actually, things are changing all the time. Maybe it's homeostatic, you know? Things that aren't moving from equilibrium too much. Or maybe every once in a while, you have a really big shift, who knows? So I don't know... I think my work is taking into account context a lot more than it did even a few years ago.
ZYW
Do you think as a scientist or scholar, you also are primed to think about environment, space, ecology? I think when you were repeating the question, I was just thinking about how we're both immigrants and we grew up as outsiders. And I think that when you are an outsider, you're aware of space in a way that you aren't when you're an insider.
SA
Yeah. It's like the concept Jenny Odell wrote about in “How to Do Nothing”. She talks a little bit about this. I think it's in her book where she talks about living as a marginalized person. As in, literally in the margins of the city, right? If you think about the city as being like a big circle, the people who live on the circumference and the perimeter are the marginalized people. And those people actually have a much better understanding of the city than those who live in the center of it and they can see things that people who live in the center don't see and have to travel in ways that the people in the center don't have to travel. So I think by being a marginalized person, whether that means outsider, or an immigrant, or a person of color in a homogenous white space. You get to see things in ways that those in the in-crowd don't. So for sure, I think it's growing up in the US and being a Black academic. I got the chance to experience the importance of context and environment and my own sense of safety. And then later my own development as a scholar, it has a huge impact. And the fact that it's kind of trickling into my work is really interesting to me, because I don't think I consciously made that choice.
ZYW
Do you think it would have been possible five years ago or ten years ago?
SA
No, I don't think I had the confidence back then. I think I was still in the “I don't know what's going on, I’m here to just learn, being a grad student.” And I think part of that meant figuring out what the foundation to work in is. And only now, I think I have a sense of a good foundation to work with. What are your thoughts on this question?
ZYW
I think to a certain extent, I've always had to insert myself into my work. I don’t know. Maybe I am a particularly self centered scholar in this way. I don't always explain it to others as that, but I think it's that being socialized as a woman, you are very aware, or one can be very aware, of how much anxiety there is on a societal level, on a family level, on a human civilization level, with your reproduction. Constantly. And it can be really annoying. And it can be very intriguing. It can be very exciting to study, for me, from a biological perspective, it can be very beautiful to read about or witness art about. It feels like great fodder for a variety of emotions. Something that you can pick apart or look at, from many different angles, as an academic, if you're interested in that. But I think that has always been really central to my drive as a scholar. Again, I don't always explain it as that. But I do think that deep down the essence of that is there. It is bizarre to me. It's actually kind of bizarre to me how obsessed we are with female reproduction, with controlling female reproduction, with socializing women the way that we do. It’s something that I try to incorporate in my life and part of that is taking a biological, scientific approach to it.
SA
Your work is tapped into a much grander socio-political question. And I think it’s also a very deep question, almost a philosophical question about how to look at life through death and dying. There's a very serious link between that and reproduction.
ZYW
Yeah, maybe that's what I study. It's just the things that we have anxieties about. *laughs*
So, what should education prepare us to do, and why?
SA
I always have two answers. I always have a shallow answer, and then I have a, “let me think about this and get back to you” answer. Sometimes I wonder if the point of education is to teach people how they best learn. I think that's a huge part of education. There's always other stuff that comes with that— It's about critical thinking. It's about reflection. It's about developing socially. I think all that's true. Probably at its core, the way education is built, it’s about building people for the labor force. Teaching people how to work. We have homework, instead of ‘home things you do at home to further your education’. I think this education is kind of built around that idea. But I actually think a huge part of it is to figure out how you best learn and how you interact with people. I'm now a person who's on the teaching side of this. I’m really trying to lean into that for my students, to help them learn how they best learn. It’s a metacognition kind of thing which is really hard. And part of that means I can't tell them “this is the way to do it”. I have to have a lot of trust in them. And that they're willing and interested in learning about themselves through material that we cover.
ZYW
What's the distinction between education and learning?
SA
As in, if you learn on your own, is that education? I think the answer is probably yes. But I’m trying to find a way that it's not. I think there's something about a classroom or an institute of learning that is different than just taking a Coursera course or strictly online learning via YouTube videos— which I do, also. I do a combination of those things. If I understand the question correctly, it's education being this very formal thing that you go through before you “enter the rest of life”. And I think that in terms of it being a preparatory phase of your life, a huge part of it should be about identifying and giving you the tools and space to practice learning on your own, about how you best learn.
ZYW
I'm hearing a lot about formalized education. And I want to bring it back to the first question, and ask you: do you feel like your interests, your scholarly and academic interests, did they come from a moment that you can pinpoint in formal education? Or did they come from a moment of self learning, self teaching? Did it come from something else?
SA
The things I remember most from college, that I was the most engaged in, I was doing research in the lab. And that had nothing to do with me being at that college. It was not part of the college, it was an institute that was in the same area in Philly. So I would rush, run over after classes to do more research.
ZYW
*laughing* Nerd!
SA
Such a nerd thing to do, but I just loved it. I’m trying to remember why I loved it so much. I think part of it was that it was very curiosity driven, no one knew the answers. And that was very different from taking Bio 101 or Chem 101. It was just so difficult to pay attention in those 300 person lectures. So I can't really pinpoint my interest in science stemming from a class that I took, at least not in college. I would maybe argue high school biology where Mr. Earl signed me up for a research intensive biology class, where you did research on your own. It was very hands on. I don't remember any of the lectures, unfortunately. But I do remember getting a chance to go to Fox Chase Cancer Center, working in a lab there for a few days or a few weeks, whatever it was. That was just so much fun. I think that was the seed planting happening. And then small classrooms. I remember my Russian literature classes a lot more than my biology classes. I remember graphic design with Professor Szarka. And unfortunately, I can't name the biology professors, because I can't remember. It's those small classrooms that were very hands on, where no one knew the answers. There wasn't one right or wrong way to do graphic design. But you knew it when you were done. And you didn't know exactly why, but you were like, “I'm trying to follow these principles”, as opposed to a Scantron sheet kind of situation.
ZYW
This is reminding me a lot of what you're saying about space, the learning environment, the physical space that may have stoked or stifled interests.
SA
Okay, when what needs to happen to ensure a livable future? Wrong answers only!
ZYW
We just keep doing what we’ve been doing (laughs) it's sustainable, don't worry.
I mean, to me, that ties into what I feel like education should prepare us to do, perhaps, which is liberation. And I think that that is related to creating the future that we want to live in and a future that we can live in. It means liberation from the momentum of the current trajectory that we're on, which I think requires a remarkable amount of creative imagining, and really courageous imagining, from all of us. And I don't think that education is necessarily the route to that. I know that you didn't ask me about how education impinges on this, but I'm thinking about that. I don't think that education is the only way where we can think about how to work collectively together. It can be a way, but I think that's not the only way.
It's a scary thing to look in the eye. That we actually do not have a livable future, We’re of the age, too– we’re in our early to mid 30s. That's very different from being 14 right now. And seeing that there is not a livable future. By which, I do literally mean that. the Earth is not habitable for humans, and many other species around us, as a direct result of…
SA
Rampant growth due to capitalism, just to put words in your mouth.
ZYW
*laughs* That, but I was thinking about a way of summing that up. I'm not sure how to talk about humans as a part of the environment and also humans and their interactions with the environment. We are of the environment. But also, we toy with it in a way where we think we're above it or entitlement over it. I don't have to convince you that it's our carelessness, with nourishing that particular relationship and our complete infatuation with nourishing other types of relationships that we have, be it power, money, greed, etc. So what's required is just a really courageous reimagining of what it means to be a human in the future. A thing that I struggle with is this idea of: given the end of the world, what do you do as an individual? Right? Given that the Titanic is sinking, are you going to play the violin? In the face of that, like, what do you do? I think that's a hard thing, because it's hard to figure out where our individual responsibilities and collective responsibilities lie and it's difficult to act on that even if we can identify it.
ZYW
What do you think? Also, what is a livable future? I want to get beyond the point of livable.
SA
Oh boy. The question itself suggests a survival or a scarcity mindset as opposed to: what needs to happen to ensure an abundant future or an unimaginable future or a loving future. I think livable is interesting, because it’s essentially saying that we're coasting towards destruction. Which is probably true, if things stay the same.
ZYW
I guess the bigger question here to me is that in the face of something dire, why do we aim for the bottom of what is tolerable? In the face of the fact that climate catastrophe is real. So given these dire circumstances, given that this is happening, and it's only gonna get worse and more extreme and more unpredictable, when we imagine or when we think about the future, why do we aim for what is minimally tolerable, rather than what is possible?
SA
Yeah, that's right. I need a complete reimagining of what we want that future to be. And not just be like, “how do I survive it?” I'm not so interested in a Mad Max future.
ZYW
I'm staunchly not interested in that.
SA
Yeah *laughs*. But what needs to happen… I really like the Jason Hickel book, “Less is More”. It solidly unpacks the reason that we're here and proposes a different economic model. That some countries, very few actually, are trying to attempt to do, which is degrowth. Ramping everything down, stop making stuff, and stop making growth be the marker of progress. We have everything we really need, you don't need more of it. Because the planet is finite. We're not living in a simulation. There's finite resources, you can't just spring up new resources from nothing. So I think that a livable future… we probably should have started degrowing maybe 40 years ago. But for an imagined future of abundance, care, love, compassion and empathy. I think some of the questions are about compassion. What would it take to assure that? That would probably also be good.
How about the next question, I really like this question. What role do you see art playing in our climate crisis? I think that's a great question to ask scientists.
ZYW
What do you like about it?
SA
Well, I think a scientist might say, “we need more science”. *laughs*
ZYW
Not these scientists!
I think fundamentally, there is an aspect to our work. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong. But I think fundamentally, the reason why this is an interesting question, too, is that there is an aspect to us doing our work that we don't see as different. There are many aspects where we do see it as different from art, but there are also many in which we do not see it as fundamentally different.
SA
Yeah, exactly. I think that's it. The arts and sciences are inseparable.
I see art playing a profoundly important role in changing our perspectives on climate crisis. I always try to imagine if a data driven scientist had to, for instance, make a pitch that we should, for example, stop keeping orcas in captivity at SeaWorld. What would that look like? Compared to a documentarian, who would have had the biggest impact in terms of stopping the orcas from being kept captive? Which has happened.
That's an example of art having an actual impact. There's a lot of these examples. There's the one example I always come back to: in the 1970s, in Boston, there’s a fire at an apartment, a woman and child were trying to escape via the fire escape, and the fire escape collapsed, and they fell. And as they were falling, a photojournalist was able to capture them midfall. It's this really harrowing photograph. And I think about that photo, how it's an aesthetic object. And the impact it had, which was that the next day, there were citywide policy changes in order to improve the fire escapes around the whole city. And I was like, “man, if a scientist was trying to do this, how would they?” Would they collect data from different fire escapes about if the screws were robust or rusted? Or what’s the probability of a fire escape falling? And then maybe, all of that would be really useful and important to have. But the amount of work that would have taken to have the same impact as this one photograph is hard to measure.
So I think art has a huge role to play in the climate crisis. I see it as being very, very similar to the role that science will end up playing in addressing the climate crisis. The two need each other. And in some places, they're exactly the same. I don't see one being better or worse than the other.
ZYW
I feel that art is so fundamentally part of what makes us human. If we did not have art, then we wouldn't even be asking this question, because we wouldn't be so concerned with our survival in the future. Or our livability in the future or our thriving in the future. Because art allows us to think about that, and allows us to imagine that, and creates the circumstances for us to see that, and for us to relate with other humans. And I think in measurable ways, as you've described, and also in really immeasurable ways, as well. At least I think that's the hope of art, right? I don't mean that that's the function of all art. Certainly, there's function for bad art, too. Not to be particularly bleak, but why live, if not for beauty? Why live if not being moved by another living being? What is the point of perpetuating a civilization, of preserving what we have if there isn't something worth living for? And I think that in a really broad sense, art, or science or culture, or you know, for some, religion, the sublime, all of these things can be the thing to live for. Because they add texture and taste to our lived experience. And that is ultimately what we're concerned about.