The Chameleon
"We continue to shape our personality all our life."
- Albert Camus.
"The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed."
- Carl Jung.
Last month I mentioned how our environment can help to shape us. Houses in particular. Our built and natural environments influence how we interact with each other and even how we feel about ourselves. But what is the self that these environments are shaping?
I feel there is a constant tension between what’s possible and what’s not. I’ve always been obsessed with possibilities, with potential. What am I capable of? What are we capable of?
I had a (former) friend once call me a social chameleon. Personally I find this to be an asset but I don’t think she meant it as a compliment or counted it as a skill. I was, in her eyes, being disingenuous somehow.
“I know you.” She kept saying. “And lately you’re just so different. And you hang out with such different groups of people.” Mind you, she did not say these were bad people nor did she think they were bad influences. Just that they were “different”.
I found this proclamation so very reductive.
You know me, huh? Well, lady, I’ll tell ya, I’m just learning to know myself. But I’m glad you have me pegged, categorized, and put away. As if you could sum up a human being in a sentence or two. I never responded to her. Not in words. In fact, I haven’t spoken or interacted with her in more than 5 years now.
Needless to say that there were other reasons I stopped talking with this friend, not just that one statement. But this was definitely a breaking point for me. I mourned the loss. This woman meant a lot to me. We had been friends since the 4th grade.
I’ve spent years pondering why this statement ruffled so many of my feathers.
Most likely because of how little compassion there was in her perception of me. So little understanding of how complex emotions and behaviors can be. So little accountability on her own end.
After high school, I found myself distancing myself from certain friends and friend groups. Not because those people were bad people, but because as we grew and explored our world and ourselves, we found we were not as compatible as we once were. Maybe our values didn’t line up any more. Or were they always different and we just never realized it?
I think there’s this illusion of familiarity that made people want to control and police who they thought I was. And maybe I realized I couldn’t wholly be myself around certain people. My family included at times.
Change scares the hell out of people. “I know you.” They’ll say. Be who I think you are! Be who I want you to be.
Isn’t “Never Change” one of the most common yearbook taglines?
How pedestrian.
Another reason being called a chameleon by a white woman was so insulting is that she, being one of my closest childhood friends, knew my family. She knew I had a completely different culture at home to cater to. Different expectations. A different language. A whole other personae.
But to call either one duplicitous is so…wrong. We contain multitudes.
I am both Gurpreet and Gia. And everything that comes with both those identities.
But what does that mean exactly? And why study the self anyway? I’m still figuring it out, but mostly what I find is that You are the instrument through which you filter reality. Learning more about yourself is learning more about everything else too. And vice versa. I have more access to myself than any other item of study. So that’s where I start.
There’s no coincidence that I call my website giaology. The study of Gia. Gia or Jiya in Sanskrit means life force.
It seems the study of the self has been a hot topic of discussion through the ages. It’s something notoriously difficult to pin down and honestly, mostly ineffable. Just like describing the sunrise. It’s something you can mostly just witness and feel.
The Chinese thought it came down to the elements of fire, air, water, and earth. The Greeks thought it was the four humors (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm). I’m sure each culture has some sort of breakdown of how to read people and categorize them.
This includes Freud’s id, ego, and superego theory. (Why it wasn’t uber ego, I’ll never understand.)
Anyway, I happened upon an encore episode of one of my favorite podcasts, Ologies with Allie Ward. She had a personality psychologist, Samine Vazire of the University of Melbourne, Australia break down the latest standard for gauging personality. It’s called the Big Five theory and can be remembered by the acronym OCEAN.
OCEAN stands for:
1. Openness 2. Conscientiousness 3. Extroversion 4. Agreeableness 5. Neuroticism.
(In later years they have added Honesty and Humility as a 6th trait but I couldn’t think of a good acronym that included them.)
All of these traits exist on a continuum/spectrum and you and most people are usually some fun combo of traits. The essentials can be broken down like this:
Most people are a mishmash of each of the spectrums, I suppose.
A great deal of these traits are genetic. New parents often comment to me how their baby’s personality is present from the get go. I knew this was the case, though I was surprised to learn just how much genetics influence personality and how difficult it is to change. Vazire in particular seemed pretty convinced that personality is pretty stagnant and difficult to change regardless of environment.
I respect Vazire’s perspective - she’s studied this much more than I have. Yet, I will say that I had some questions when I listened to Vazire’s views.
Like, if we don’t change that much, why do cognitive behavioral therapy? Do we believe ex-convicts can turn over a new leaf? Do people deserve second chances if we don’t really change?
What about epigenetics? Genes are responsible for our personality and genes can change in response to the environment.
What about neural plasticity? Our brain can rewire itself. And change - it does all the time. In fact, in cases of multiple personality disorder, the personality change can even trigger physiological alterations in the individual - so much so that it can flip diabetes on and off.
The mind is no joke. Our mindset is responsible for much of our reality. If not all of it.
If we don’t really change that easily, why did some people consider me a chameleon? My personality seemed different to different people and depending on what situation I was in. Was I an outlier? Was I really changing my personality or was fluidity a part of my personality?
Many of my friends are having children so I’m learning about babies and development by proxy. One of the more fascinating facts I encountered is that human babies have to be taught how to breastfeed. They don’t instinctively latch on correctly. It’s a process for both the mother and child.
“She had no idea what to do and neither did I. Somehow my husband knew the proper latch posture and adjusted her head. He read about it somewhere and she caught on quickly.”
I thought this was rather odd considering that most infant mammals make a beeline for their mother’s nipples with unnerving enthusiasm and accuracy. Even infants born blind like puppies and kittens can smell their way. Human infants are shockingly pathetic in that regard. We don’t seem to have much of an instinct for anything!
I also learned that a 9 month gestation period is technically premature for humans. Many larger mammals, like elephants, gestate for nearly 2 years before their babies are fully cooked. So why do our bodies eject babies out at 9 months?
Our large heads are largely to blame for this premature birthing.
The birth canal is simply not large enough to comfortably pass much of any kind of baby, but if we continued our gestation until we were functional, we would destroy our mothers’ bodies (even more) on the exit, or not be able to be birthed at all due to our large melonheads.
So our big brains are both the reason we are so pathetic at birth, needing to be ejected early, and the reason we survive; even though human babies may not even be able to feed themselves on their own, the one thing they are wired to do immediately, is learn.
This capacity is what allowed us to do all that we have done. Every road paved, every structure built, every war waged, every symphony composed, every star mapped, everything.
This slab of meat sitting in our skulls is still such a profound source of befuddlement across fields. Such a wonder and mystery and both a source of awe and terror considering all that our minds are capable of. I happen to think that our brain's capacity to re-wire itself and change is evidence that we have the capacity to alter our personalities, much more than we may be seeing in current psychological studies.
Even Vazire agrees it’s possible for personalities to change. She doesn’t believe it happens often or quickly - the leading cause of personality changes are trauma or extremely positive events. Even the addition of responsibilities like marriage, parenthood,or even a new job can alter people’s personalities.
I can agree with most of that. But my question is why is it that personality seems so static? Why is our culture so insistent that it stay the same? I personally believe personality is more fluid. And then I realized, that was the key. I believed I could change. And I didn’t think change was a negative thing. I have a growth mindset about life. I also believe in embracing discomfort. Learning happens only when the mind is in “disequilibrium”, confused, maybe even frustrated and working hard. This is uncomfortable. But I think this discomfort is important. And not something to fear.
Many of the people I surround myself with also have similar beliefs. They often support me when things get scary or uncomfortable. I think this is why I’m able to explore ideas and change behaviors and create/alter habits a bit more readily than the average person. I’m not attached to any one version or interpretation of myself.
Alia Crum, an American psychologist who is the principal investigator of the Stanford Mind and Body Lab, is probably more aligned with my own view of mindset. She might even disagree with Samine Vazire’s more static view of personality.
Crum’s research supports how mindsets and beliefs affect human behavior and in turn physical and mental health outcomes. Her work is a deep dive into the placebo effect. An effect that is such a strong indicator of recovery in patients that all scientific studies conducted in the US have to have a control group for placebo!
Crum has found startling changes in people’s behavior and physiology that stem from nothing more than a change in perception. Just a thought entering the mind and the mind believing it wholly can create physical changes in the mind and body.
How absolutely remarkable!
I will link to her TedTalk and research here: https://youtu.be/0tqq66zwa7g
Essentially her research further solidified in my mind that our personality can be much more fluid, but we as a society and our mindsets often keep people in little boxes their whole lives. And if we change - we are accused of being chameleons, disingenuous.
Some of our personality is performance. A holding on to an identity. We don’t like changing our Brand. And this is such a complex and social function. Charles Horton Cooley, an American sociologist at the start of the 20th century, said: “I am not who you think I am; I am not who I think I am; I am who I think you think I am“. We are constantly engaging in an act of self creation and that involves such an intricate dance of internal and external variables.
And then there’s the physiology of it all. I learned about the default mode network a few years ago. The default mode network refers to several areas of the brain that work in conjunction to form what we would refer to as the ego. This is the brain’s “autopilot mode” - it carries out certain tasks quickly and with little thought/effort and activates whenever you aren’t focused on a specific task or idea. What monks call the monkey mind. This is the opposite of the flow state or state of focus. The DMN is also the part of us that ruminates constantly on social interactions, how we come across, and where we fit in. It’s the part of us that processes the past and the future and imbues them with emotional significance. It’s the part of us that feels we are separate from others. It is, scientifically, where the self lives.
And this structure is what fears death. The death of the self. Or what it perceives to be the self.
See, it all comes down to self perception and belief. So much of who we are comes down to stories we tell ourselves about ourselves. The inner chatter. “I think therefore I am.” These thoughts can be positive or negative. We need to understand that what we believe about ourselves or what we believe about our experiences influence how we respond to others and events in our lives and how we behave day to day. “We are what we repeatedly do,” according to Aristotle.
One of the main functions of the default mode network is to help us avoid death as long as possible. If this structure, influenced by either nature or your cultural/social perceptions of identity, views a change of personality as a death of sorts, there’s reason to believe the default mode network will try to avoid large changes in personality. The brain has a strong filter for anything that doesn’t line up with its existing notion of reality. The left hemisphere in particular hates uncertainty. It likes predictable routines and measurables and control. However, it is the right hemisphere that really is responsible for emotion, compassion and whole picture thinking. If you remove the lens of the default mode network for a bit and realize the self is often illusory, and a construct, then you are free to reform it. To re-write your story.
Some psychoactive drugs can temporarily dissolve the default mode network, or quiet it’s neural activity. This brings one firmly into the present and removes the feeling of separateness. An almost god-like state. This can cause lasting changes on individuals including increased feelings of compassion and generosity. This temporary disabling can allow people to forge healthier neural pathways and decrease negative ruminations. Decrease this and you effectively lower levels of neuroticism and even increase levels of openness. These are key factors of personality. So you can effectively change aspects of personality by re-setting the default mode network, in my opinion. Here's Michael Pollan explaining it some: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c71BY2RzZjY
Psychedelics and medication certainly influence our default mode network, but so does meditation.
Much like Alia Crum demonstrated with the placebo effect studies at Stanford, Dan Harris, linked here (https://youtu.be/FAcTIrA2Qhk), can be found quoting studies coming out of Harvard documenting the benefits, both mental and physical, of meditation. The original psychedelic.
Mediation is so powerful, it is not only documented as boosting the immune system but creating such profound changes as increasing gray matter in key areas of the brain associated with compassion and self awareness, and decreasing gray matter in areas of the brain associated with stress and anxiety.
Meditators can actually alter and control their default mode network more readily than non-meditators. They can create happier healthier selves. And they are not born this way. Meditation is a learned behavior. It is a skill anyone can learn.
I can guarantee you that the top performers across the world are gifted meditators. Athletes, actors, dancers, soldiers, teachers, musicians, none of them could do what they do so well without being able to quiet the default mode network and focus on the present. Without controlling fear. It’s something anyone can learn to do with the right help and practice.
I myself was an anxious and sickly child. Some of those neural pathways still flare up for me. But I have gotten so much better at creating new paths for my mind to travel with meditation and chemical aid that I know I’m a different person now than I was when I was younger. Stronger and kinder, even. I still get scared, I still lose focus, I still fail. I’m just way better at reducing the damage these things do to me and way better at having more positives than negatives. I spend less and less time being a prisoner of my default settings.
I also had a toxic competitive streak. With training, I’ve gotten better at viewing others as collaborators rather than competitors. And I’ve learned to let old notions of myself go so that I can better distill who I’m becoming.
I hope more and more people will view changing one’s personality not as disingenuous but as more fully embracing one’s own complexity and possibilities. Because where would the world be if caterpillars were too afraid to become butterflies?
