TWO BY TWO BY TWO

No surprise -- our world comes in twos. Male/female. Head/heart. Democrat/Republican. Cubs/Sox. But sometimes you wonder if two shouldn't be one....?

Take the facts from two examples here. Keeping in mind Mark Twain's good advice: "Get your facts first, then you can distort them later."

First, there's the two statisticians from the University of Vermont who are pioneering a new but complex way of scanning the Internet to determine the mood of the nation. They have downloaded 230,000 song lyrics from Hotlyrics.net to calculate what mood of songs were popular at what points in the nation's time. They sorted through 2.4 million lyrics for key words like "love," "sad," and "prisoner."

The research concluded that the national mood is generally up during holidays and vacation times, sharply down during tragic events like 9/11, The statisticians plan to focus their research on tweets next. As one of them put it: "This is going to change the social sciences!"

Maybe. But then maybe most of us could have already told them what their conclusions would be. Investigation is good, but sometimes intuition is simpler. The question before the jury is why can't these two function together...? In other words, how about we investigate our intuition....?

A second example is the recent research at the pretigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Here they used monkeys to test the old intuition "We learn more from ours failures than our successes." According to the way their test monkeys responded to rewards, MIT concluded, "The neurons learn better when the animal has had a recent success."

Now I'm not a monkey, but speaking for my own species, I intuit from the lives I've known that hard failure indeed teaches us more about ourselves than easy gratification. Understand, I'm not speaking for my neurons, just my experience.

Again, the question occurs: Do we really need monkey trials to test the wisdom of the literature and philosophy of the ages? I think not. What I think is thius: two-should-become-one. That is to say, research and reality belong together. We are a species of both head and heart. Investigation but also intuition.

John Paul II wrote eloquently, "To reach the summit of truth, the dove of inquiry needs both wings. Reason and faith together." To put it more mundanely, any baseball manager will tell you the team needs both lefties and righties. Come on folks, can't we just agree on this and work from there...?