Pheromones

Have you ever wondered about why ants usually march in a single-file line? When an ant walks somewhere, if you look closely you can see their tail ends continually touching down to the ground in periodic, structured motions. As they do this, they emit a pheromone, which causes a chemical reaction within the colony. The chemical that they lay down sends of a different signal, similar to a prairie dog bark, signifying danger, food, pleasure, etc. One ant travels off into the great unknown, laying down those pheromones and before you know it the rest of the colony is following along because they know what the signal means. It’s almost like a default—they follow without knowing what’s out there, but also without questioning what is or even searching for their own territory. They blindly trust a chemical to dictate where they will be traveling.

Think about the whole canvas of earth ants have to travel on. It seems large to humans, but imagine being their size and how much more immense it is for them! Maybe that’s how it is with us—we are walking around on a huge canvas, but there’s something or someone (depending on what you think) even bigger that watches us from a different vantage point. I think a big difference between ants and us however is that we don’t follow each other by default though I do think humans have many other defaults, particularly emotional defaults.

It seems as though we program ourselves to react to certain situations in specific ways. When we receive a bouquet of flowers, we’re happy. When we burn our tongue on a hot drink, we’re upset. When we get cut off in traffic, we’re infuriated. Barry and I were talking about this during my exit interview (which was much more of a philosophy discussion, which is often the case whenever the two of us get together to talk), and he started talking about how he cut someone off on the way to work that morning. The other driver surprised him by smiling and waving rather than honking the horn or giving the finger that is the predictable response.

That got us thinking about what Barry calls the “CYE” or “Choose Your Emotion” theory. Imagine a giant layer of buttons above you with different emotions labeled on them. Rather than acting blindly like the ant following a chemical trail, when something happens to you, you can take the time and look up, choose your reaction, and hit the button.

I related the default emotions to a default font on a word document. Just because the documents are set up with Times New Roman, size 12 fonts doesn’t mean they can’t be changed. Think about all the possibilities just within the font type, not to mention size, italics, bold, underline, etc. A default is simply a preselected option adopted when the user or programmer specifies no alternative. Luckily, we are given the choice to choose and use that alternative option. We just need to be able to take the time to look up and select, instead of reacting by default.