Many pages into Daniel Dennett’s latest opus, I’ve Been Thinking—by turns informative, entertaining, and maddening (“an engaging, vexing memoir with a humility bypass,” as the Guardian headline writer puts it)—one encounters a passage answering to the first two adjectives above, at least for this reader. It involves a time-honored habit of the tradition-bound British: pouring your tea into a cup containing milk, rather than the reverse, which is what a barbaric American would do, if such a Yank should, for some strange reason, think of putting milk in tea. (Whispered aside: I’ve actually done it. It’s not bad.)
A cup of coffee, not tea!
One of Dennett’s many, many good friends, Seymour Papert, spent some time in a London hospital and volunteered to wheel the tea wagon around to his fellow patients. He noticed how many of them insisted on having milk poured into their cup first, then the tea. He subjected them to a little test to see if they could tell the difference. Many of them could. Papert wondered: “What were they sensing?” What sets Papert apart from someone like, say, me is that he decided to take his wonderment a step further. In Dennett’s words (chapter 26):
Opportunistically, he decided to try for a simple, low-budget test first: he smeared some tea of both varieties on glass slides and put them under a microscope. Eureka! The tea poured into milk exhibited tiny globules of milk partly cooked by the hot tea; the milk poured into tea had long stringy strands of milk. Mystery solved.
Has anyone confirmed this result—both the physical findings and the ability of humans to detect (and, as a bonus, describe) the difference? Dennett doesn’t say, and in the true modern spirit of not taking advantage of the vast resources the internet places at one’s fingertips, I have not pursued the question further. Just sharing. 😉
Okay, I lied. I did do a little sleuthing. I started by looking for a photo of tea being poured into milk. Sorry, I lied again. That’s all I was doing: looking for a pic to go with the post.* I wasn’t really “sleuthing” at all. Anyway, strange to say, almost all the photos I found showed the opposite (i.e, barbaric) way. But I eventually located an article with the “proper” approach. As an added bonus, it discusses both techniques, and offers a perhaps scientific explanation of the “preferred” one. The article itself punts on a final disposition of the issue, leaving it to readers to try both techniques and decide for themselves which they prefer.
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*If you have a “featured image” associated with the post, it shows up in the mobile version of the site, which is nice. Maybe it shows up elsewhere as well.
Having reached the end of I’ve Been Thinking, I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that at least part of what made it “maddening” was envy. Although his prehistory made much of his rich, action-packed story possible, Dennett has made exemplary use of what he was given at life’s starting gate. By the time I reached the last chapter, titled “What if I’m wrong?” and serving as a fine coda to hundreds of pages of apparent cock-surety, I was clear in thinking I would have liked to have known Dennett personally—to have been lucky to be one of his “many, many friends.”
Alternatively, I am left with diving into an earlier books of his: Consciousness Explained. With occasional side-trips into his Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking. (And other occasional breaks with non-Dennett books!)