Pushing the Limits

Once I did something almost unthinkable for me: I bought a magazine off the supermarket shelf while waiting in the checkout line. No, it wasn’t a gossip magazine—that would be too much! It was the surf magazine TRIP. The gorgeous Annelyse Schoenberger was showing her left nipple and inviting readers to delve into the main feature: “Limits: Break? Understand? Extend? Expand? How do we relate today to the limits of our body, the planet, ethics, the mind, and our patience.”

It got me! I put it in the cart and paid the R$9.90 to see what it was about.

I’ve talked about limits several times before. The first limit I found myself discovering far beyond what I actually believed was my patience. I thought I had much less than I actually do. And it was only when it was forced, stretched, crumpled, and ground that I discovered how resilient it was. Still, it also had a limit, and it ran out.

“You can only really know how much you can take after you can’t take it anymore.”

At the time, what life was teaching me, I was teaching my undergrad students. I put this phrase on a slide about homeostasis in one of my biophysics classes. I’m not quite sure, but it seemed like the students widened their eyes when they saw it on the board.

“Dude… Wow, like… is that really it?!?”

But maybe they were just yawns (even though they close instead of open the eyes). But that was until last week when a student told me, “I’ll never forget that thing (phrase) about ‘not being able to take it anymore’ that you said in class.” Someone was paying attention.

The human body, all organisms, every cell, has limits. Some are obvious, like extension and volume given by skin. Others are well-known and defined, like our body temperature that cannot rise above 42°C or drop below 35°C without serious consequences; or the acidity of the blood, or pH—which is the correct term— that stays at 7.4 and practically doesn’t vary. Some other limits, like how much we can handle of a hormone or a drug (legal or illegal), are less known. And we can’t determine these limits without testing and seeing how far the body can endure. Here comes the tricky part: to establish the threshold for something, you must, necessarily, overcome the threshold. One has to sacrifice.

You can decide to stop the ‘experiment’ a little before sacrificing the organism, but then you’ll never be sure of the limit. Only by observing the damage caused can we know what the limit is when exceeded that causes harm. (And that’s why we can never give up biological testing. At least as long as we want to understand the mechanisms of toxicity that help save lives.)

They say imagination has no limits. But that’s not true, is it? There are around 100 billion neurons in the brain. Your personality, your memories, emotions, unconscious, subconscious—it’s all within those hundred billion. The connections made between them, and how you associate the things that are there, determine whether you’re creative or not. You might be amazed at your ability to create new things by associating what you know and are familiar with—a kind of ’emergent property.’ But imagining something without knowing or being aware of anything else? That you cannot do.

We can only see because our visual cells identify regions of high contrast at the edges of objects, creating the limits between one thing and another, forming sharp images on our retina, which the brain interprets as a soccer ball or a cup of coffee.

Back to the magazine: a surfer who came back from drugs, a biologist who found salvation from a mental disorder in weightlifting, a dwarf delivery man—the idea of limits permeated the entire issue. But the best article of all was with the sociologist Roberto DaMatta: ‘Do you know who you’re talking to?’

We don’t like limits. Total freedom is a noble cause. The popular hero is the one who goes beyond limits, expands borders, extends youth, increases wealth, enhances the power to do whatever he wants without submitting to anything or anyone. This naive heroism ensures the effectiveness of most advertising appeals. That’s why the coolest credit card has no limit. But without limits, life doesn’t exist. Limits of time and space define what life is. (…) Liking limits, embracing them, understanding their function and meaning allows us to grow inward—in quality, consistency, depth, and creativity.

For Roberto, Brazil is a country where the fulfillment of individual desires confronts the construction of life in society, creating dilemmas that culminate in our resistance to obeying authority, even when it comes to stopping at a red light. On the other hand, the “queue” would be the best example that Brazil is becoming a serious country because it is in the queue that limits operate in their greatest clarity and simplicity: first come, first served. Arrive last, you’ll be served last. But you will also be served because if we’re sure of one thing, it’s that the queue moves.

I don’t know if you realize it, but it’s stunningly beautiful!

The first time I saw Roberto DaMatta speaking was in 2007 at FLIP, about how football saved Brazilians because it taught them the importance of limits. After all, no team can extend the match until they score another goal (well, except Flamengo last week), and that’s what makes the game enjoyable, turns people into passionate fans, and championship celebrations into apotheotic parties. I rushed to buy his 1979 book: Carnivals, Rogues, and Heroes.

I remembered Barry Schwartz’s TED talk on the paradox of choice. He develops a similar argument, saying that the craving for freedom of choice—which leads us to be able to choose from 175 varieties of salad dressing on the supermarket shelf—only brings us unhappiness:

“When you have more choices, your expectations increase. The higher your expectations, the greater the chances of frustration. When I leave a store with 47 options of jeans after spending an hour choosing and find out that my jeans aren’t ‘perfect,’ I can’t avoid the frustration.”

I’ve already talked about limits several times, specially here. Limit is respect in theory and ethics in practice. It’s love and life. It’s creativity and innovation.

Limits, who would have thought, are liberating!

Originally published in Portuguese in February 2011 at ‘Você que é biólogo…’ blog.