Acting without thinking

I have a friend, who has a cousin, who knows a guy… who, even though he was dating the most beautiful girl at the party, couldn’t NOT looking at any skirt that passed in front of him. I’m not saying he did that in front of his girlfriend (somehow he could control that). I’m talking about when she hit the dance floor alone and he, for a song or two, was left alone with his beer. It was in that moment, where the risks – and also guilt – were minimal, that he was struck by his complete inability to resist ‘wanting’ to look at any girl. Tall or short, fat or thin, ugly or beautiful… He looked just looking for the whatever in her could draw his attention and justify his uncontrollable desire to check her out.

This friend of the guy’s cousin had already done years and years of psychoanalysis and knew that it had nothing to do with insecurities, hidden desires for his mother or revolt against his father. It wasn’t also because he had been dumped by his dearest girlfriend, nor because another one had cheated him with his best friend. It wasn’t because the girls weren’t interested in him; or because he wasn’t handsome. I’m not sure I can fully explain: the guy simply couldn’t stop thinking about ‘that’. He couldn’t avoid it. It wasn’t anything psychological, social or cultural: It was biological!

He wasn’t alone: 

​​”I believe there are two types of men: those who think about women 90% of the time and those who think about women 99% of the time” .

James Watson

No, it wasn’t Woody Allen or another pervert who said that: it was James Watson¹, that’s right, one of the discoverers of the DNA double helix. “I was in the first group and I think that’s the only reason I managed to win a Nobel Prize” he wrote in his book ‘Genes, Girls and Gamow’ .

But of course I didn’t mention Woody Allen for nothing. It’s his, in the 1999 film ‘Deconstructing Harry’ , the best quote of all: 

“I can’t look at any woman on the street without thinking about how she looks naked and what it would be like to make love with her.” ²

Woody Allen

And if you’ll allow me one more quote, I’ll try to raise the level a little more to try to send away my female readers. It’s by the Carioca journalist Carlos Eduardo Novaes, in an old book of his, said:

“Life, for me, only makes sense when tempered by encounter, desire, passion. Without the women, I see the world as myopic (18 degrees) without glasses. Everything seems out of focus. The only place I allow myself to go without worrying about the presence of Women is the football stadium. Still, in the break from the first to the second half, I risk a look around me. In all other places – churches, banks, christenings, supermarkets, volleyball courts, wakes, beaches – I am always looking for the Woman who will give a new meaning to my presence there. When I discover her – even if only to contemplate her – the place transforms as if touched by a magic wand.”

Carlos Eduardo Novaes

Whenever someone, scientist friend or researcher in the field of humanities, argues with me about the strength of culture or the social, I am obliged to answer. Yes, we control our impulses, but they are there. “Life is chance and circumstance” says Sonia Rodrigues. Of course, preparation and competence are important, but everyone, with more or less effort, can have this. And then… being in the right place at the right time can make all the difference. Well, I think that’s the same with instincts too. They let us control them until they are no longer needed or… chance and circumstance: if an opportunity presents itself and no one is looking, a flood of hormones dominate (and determine) our actions.

And now that I have a subscription to Scientific American magazine, I always end up bumping into cool things that give scientific support to the things I thought and observed, albeit with a scientist’s eye, without factual verification. This was the case of Christof Koch ‘s article ‘Finding free will’.

He uses a situation in which a man (but it could very well be a woman) well married, who faced with a fortuitous meeting, even having full rational awareness of the error from the moral and ethical point of view, of the low probability of success (measured in terms productive or happiness) and the high risk of disaster for different lives, starts a chain of events that leads to an affair. In this situation, so typical (after all, everyone has a friend, who has a cousin, who knows a guy who has already been through this), he decided to leave behind all the millennial philosophical discussion on the subject to seek an answer only in what physics , neurobiology and psychology had to offer, but that will be for another post.

Posted originally in 2012 in the “Voce que é biólogo…” blog in Portuguese

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1 – Actually, Watson, I (and the world) would find out later, is not a pervert but a racist, and made absurd claims about genetics of races.

2 – That was the sentence as I remembered it. The actual sentence was:  “Actually, I never looked at a woman, without wondering what she would be like in bed”