The Things We Learn to Notice
When I was a kid, I never looked at the crowns of balding men. Which is silly, because what business would a kid even have making a mental note of which men in their vicinity were dealing with androgenetic alopecia? I was far too concerned with things I felt were more important, like learning new yo-yo tricks, getting my homework done on time, and trying to figure out what my parents were getting me and my siblings for Christmas.
Toward the end of the year in 2024, I was going through a bit of a rough time. I have a tendency to let anxious thoughts stick with me for a while, and every day for a few months, I would feel my cortisol spike as soon as I woke up in the morning. No amount of rumination could solve my problems, so it took a lot of effort to slowly develop better strategies and a healthier mindset to deal with my emotions. The physical toll of holding onto those feelings for so long soon manifested in an unsettling way: in the shower, I would comb my hands through my hair, and see far too many strands lingering between my fingers. I felt like a shedding dog.
My wet hair suddenly showed more scalp than it did in college. And for the first time, I found myself taking pictures of the top of my head each week, hoping that I wouldn’t see a bald spot when I turned the camera around. Doctor Google told me that during periods of high stress, the body can lose a lot of hair at once, and it can grow back rather quickly. My dermatologist, however, did mention that I have balding relatives on my mom’s side, and my dad started losing his hair around the age of 23, too. I was terrified of losing something that gave me so much confidence, and instead of having just one thing to be worried about, I had two, where worrying about the first directly caused the second.
And then, unlike my 10-year-old self, my 23-year-old self began to notice the crowns of balding men. On the subway, or on walks in Central Park, I began to look for certain details in the crowds around me. I looked for people with thinning hair to validate that “yes, this is something that happens to people”. I looked for faces that might contain the same sadness that I was feeling at the time. Psychologically, I sought evidence that my human experience was in some ways not so unique. But I also began to notice, more than balding men, people in the wild with seemingly perfect hairstyles. Somewhere between jealousy and sonder, my mind did everything it could to reinforce the idea that the concerns I was having about myself were valid.
My hair today is back to being healthy, despite all of the new stressors and old genetics in my life that threaten to take it from me (thank you, rosemary oil shampoo + conditioner). The healthier mindset is taking longer; honestly, I still have a long ways to go. But zooming out a bit, I see this type of observation loop happening to me fairly often. It’s not out of vanity, or pure ego, but it definitely comes from a place of unhelpful self-awareness. We build our model of the world through repeated pattern recognition. When we update our world model based on an observation that we make about ourselves, it follows that our brain will seek out evidence of this in other people. We all try to predict our movement throughout the world just as much as we make predictions about the world itself. One of my favorite ideas of Scott Alexander’s is that our job, as humans, can be thought of as being really good at next-sensory input prediction, which is done by creating our own model of the world:
In other words, the brain organizes itself/learns things by constantly trying to predict the next sense-datum, then updating synaptic weights towards whatever form would have predicted the next sense-datum most efficiently… [this] process organizes the brain into a form capable of predicting sense-data, called a “world-model”.
For example, if you encounter a tiger, the best way of predicting the resulting sense-data (the appearance of the tiger pouncing, the sound of the tiger’s roar, the burst of pain at the tiger’s jaws closing around your arm) is to know things about tigers. On the highest and most abstract levels, these are things like “tigers are orange”, “tigers often pounce”, and “tigers like to bite people”. On lower levels, they involve the ability to translate high-level facts like “tigers often pounce” into a probabilistic prediction of the tiger’s exact trajectory. All of this is done via neural circuits we don’t entirely understand, and implemented through the usual neuroscience stuff like synapses and neurotransmitters. To you it just feels like “IDK, I thought about it and realized the tiger would pounce over there.” 1
When you’re starting to get in shape, or feeling particularly conscious about the way you look, you notice the fit physiques in the gym around you. When you’re unhappy with your career, you notice people posting their promotions on LinkedIn more. It’s not that the universe has conspired against you in such a way that it kicks you when you’re down. It’s more similar to a Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, a frequency bias that comes from a place of lack. It’s your primitive “tiger detector” getting better at noticing tigers that aren’t actually out to get you. When you make mistakes, or act outside of your optimal policy (as defined by your values and beliefs), this can feel even more isolating. It’s a surprise, a tiger in the brush that you couldn’t predict. Every stranger suddenly becomes a person who didn’t mess up in the same way that you did.
But the good news is that the loop runs in both directions. Your tiger detector doesn’t care what it’s trained to find, it just gets better at finding what you keep looking for. Anxiety, stress, and dread can point toward what is important to you, and following these feelings is how unhelpful self-awareness becomes helpful. This is why acceptance is the first step in enacting meaningful change: it allows us to detach who we are today from who we were yesterday. We may seek out what we think we lack, but we also seek out what we think we deserve.
Choosing to believe that we deserve kindness, love, empathy, and grace teaches our brain to start gathering evidence of it. And the more we notice, the better our brain gets at identifying it, which begets us noticing it more. It’s the same flywheel finally spinning the right way.
As for me, I choose not to pay attention to the tops of people’s heads anymore. I now find their smiles far more interesting.