When We Can't See the Trees for the Forest

"They can't see the forest for the trees."

It's an idiom used to mean that someone is so focused on the details that they neglect the big picture, but the opposite can also be true: We can't see the trees for the forest.

Looking at this metaphor in concrete terms, when we fly over, say, the Tongass National Forest at 40,000 feet, all we can see is a mass of green. Of course, we know that forests are, almost by definition, made of thousands of individual trees, not to mention fungus, grasses, vines, shrubbery, and even animals, but from this perspective we can only "see" the forest.

In his book Reality is Not What it Seems, physicist Carlo Rovelli discusses what he calls the granular structure of space. His argument, which draws on loop quantum gravity, is that space may not be infinitely divisible. At sufficiently small scales, quantities such as volume may have discrete possible values rather than varying continuously. In other words, the theory is that space itself may have a kind of graininess at the smallest scales, rather than being infinitely smooth and divisible. We just can't "see" that graininess for the, you know, space.

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a neuroscientist and one of the world's most cited researchers in psychology, is interested in what she refers to as emotional granularity, which is the ability to distinguish between different emotional experiences.

She asserts, "Granularity is really about the capacity to construct categories that are specifically tailored to the situation you are in." A forest is a kind of category, but within that category are firs and pines and oaks and saplings and seedlings and nurse logs and, well, all the other categories that make a forest. The basic metaphor behind granularity is the fineness of the distinctions we can make within something that initially appears to be a single category.

The closer you look, the more distinctions you can make.

For example, imagine two people who are experiencing an unpleasant emotional state.

One says, "I feel bad."

The other says, "I'm disappointed, a little embarrassed, and worried that I've let someone down."

The second person is demonstrating a greater emotional granularity. They're making finer distinctions among their experiences.

But Barrett means something more interesting than simply having a large emotional vocabulary. Her theory is that our brains construct our emotions. We don't merely detect and label preexisting emotions. Instead, we actively construct emotional experiences by integrating bodily sensations, past experiences, learned concepts, and the present situation.

The more flexibly and precisely we can construct categories, the better we can make sense of our circumstances. It's not necessarily about making more distinctions, but rather the ability to construct emotions that matter in the present moment, rather than simply experiencing every unpleasant sensation as a kind of generic distress.

Both Barrett and Rovelli challenge the idea that reality is best understood as a collection of independently existing, fixed things.

Barrett argues that an emotion like anger isn't one universal biological object that occurs identically in every person and situation. It's something constructed through relationships among the brain, body, experience, and environment.

Rovelli's relational interpretation of quantum mechanics similarly challenges the notion that physical properties can always be understood independently of interactions: the properties of a physical system are only meaningful in relation to other systems.

Both invite us to replace our static picture of the world with a dynamic one. For Barrett, an emotion is something that happens. For Rovelli, the physical universe is understood through interactions. In other words, relationships stand at the center of everything we try to understand.

As preschool teachers, we are present with young children as they are just beginning to construct emotions. Many of us have been taught that part of our job is to support children in this process by helping them name their emotions. We might say to a child, "You look mad" with the spirit of helping them "name" what they are feeling, giving them an important piece of emotional vocabulary.

We might even take it a step farther, by connecting their feeling to a cause: "You're angry because she took your toy."

But what if the emotion the child is constructing isn't simply anger? I mean, "mad" or "angry" are not particularly granular. They are terms like forest or beach that cause us to miss the trees or sand. What they are experiencing is an unfamiliar combination of disappointment, betrayal, surprise, uncertainty, and who knows what other categories that they have not yet fully constructed for themselves.

Barrett might argue that the child's brain is actively working to make sense of what is happening and that when we step in with our too-broad labels, we perhaps risk showing them a forest when what's really needed are trees.

More productive, perhaps, would be for the adult to participate in a conversation that helps the child develop more precise and flexible ways of understanding their experience.

A school-ish mindset often drives us to offer broad categories and simplistic answers. Even the way we structure our subjects -- science, math, literacy, art, physical education -- may be useful to us, but have little relationship to how any individual child will experience an activity.  Likewise, we categorize children according to grades or behaviors, when granularity would suggest we would better serve them by looking more closely and individually.

What if one of the great benefits of self-directed play is that children get to practice constructing their own categories rather than always having to use ours? Not just about what and how they learn, but also what and how they feel?

Barrett says, "Most psychologists and neuroscientists practice traditional realism, rife with typological thinking and essentialism, when the neuroscience evidence actually supports relational realism, which is more dynamic and contextual."

Anger is an event that emerges from relationships among a particular brain, body, personal history, and situation.

What we call a 'forest' is more than trees. It is an event that emerges from a vast, complex, and ever-changing system of relationships among things that are themselves continually becoming through their interactions with the world.

We tend to think of children as independent entities with identifiable characteristics: shy, aggressive, cooperative, intelligent, challenging.  

But what happens when we begin thinking relationally?

The "shy child" might be shy in one setting, exuberant in another, quiet with adults, and commanding among friends.

Which is the real child?

All of them.

Indeed, the child isn't merely displaying different aspects of some underlying, unchanging personality. The child's behavior and developing identity are partly constituted through relationships with other people and environments.

That doesn't mean children have no enduring characteristics. It means those characteristics aren't sufficient to explain who they are or what they do. They emerge from their relationships.

And suddenly the question changes.

Instead of asking, "What's wrong with this child?" we might ask, "What's happening between this child and the world?"

Then, perhaps, we will begin to see the trees (and the fungi, and the soil . . .) instead of just a green smudge we call a forest.

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