The most surprising finding of my self-experimentation was that we need to see faces in the morning — every morning for most of us — to be in a good mood during the day. Morning faces push an oscillator that controls our mood. During the Stone Age, this need was fulfilled by talking to your neighbors. The function of this oscillator was to synchronize the moods of people who live together. It greased the wheels of cooperation. It’s much easier to work with someone in a good mood than someone in a bad mood.
Since I discovered this, I’ve wondered: What will this mean for everyday life? Will people chat via videophones? Watch YouTube videos (“This is my response to . . . “)? Look in a mirror? Gather in cafes? Or what? You need a community to make this work, since you need to see one or more faces for a half hour or more.
Last night at Teance, at a Slow Food event, I learned of two modern communities where people manage to get the needed face time. One is in Chaozhou, a city in Guangdong Province, China. Every morning retired people get together and drink tea. Where do they meet? I asked. “Anywhere,” I was told. They may meet in a park, for example. In Guangdong they drink more tea than anywhere else in China and, I was told, have better health than the rest of China.
The other community are those Cantonese, both in Hong Kong and in Guangdong Province, who eat dim sum every day for breakfast. They gather in restaurants that serve dim sum. You can come whenever you like but the the restaurants open around 5 am and the whole thing may last four hours. (My results imply that the face-to-face conversation should happen during the first hours or so after you get up. Wait till 10 am and there won’t be any effect.) You might have three business meetings during that time. You can stretch out eating dim sum in a way you can’t easily stretch out eating breakfast that appears all on one plate at once. So it lends itself to longer meals. The longer everyone spends at the dim sum restaurant, the easier it becomes to meet there.
Sometimes I wonder which is the more remarkable: your discovery itself, or the fact that a widespread appreciation of the discovery could take another fifty years.
That’s an interesting way to put it because countless times I have thought something with a similar logical structure but more positive: The remarkable thing about this discovery is that whatever recognition I get for it won’t bring me as much happiness as the discovery itself.