Once again, far too long has gone by without me writing to you, mikeschramm.com readers. I thought about writing something describing what I’ve learned since I’ve moved to Los Angeles so far, but then I figured that’d be harping on the point — it’s been a month since I moved out here now and I’ve probably tweeted about nothing more exciting since. Instead, I’ll just riff on a few things I’ve been thinking about lately. LA and my experiences here will likely come in the mix — sorry about that.

So I’ve been reading this book called A General Theory of Love lately (recommended to me by that psychologist I interviewed for WoW.com about game addiction), and last night I read about something called the visual cliff. I’ve actually heard about it before, as it’s a pretty famous psychological experiment, and it has a few connotations for how our minds develop in early life. But it’s super interesting, and in the context of what I’ve been thinking about lately, it has more meaning than ever.

The idea is that you have a “cliff” (a shelf of sorts) with the far side covered in clear plexiglass so that if you walked out off the cliff, instead of falling to your doom, you’d be standing on the plexiglass. The experiment is designed to test depth perception in different beings that we can’t just talk to — animals, babies, and so on. So they did this test with babies — made the babies climb out to the edge of the “cliff,” and of course the babies don’t know what plexiglass is, so they reach the cliff, look over it, and aren’t sure whether to step onward (into what might be empty space) or not.

How do they figure it out? They look to their parents. If they can find their mom’s face, they study it. And here’s where it gets weird: if mom is calm, the babies laugh and head right out on to the cliff, no problem. If mom is worried or frightened, the babies stop and cry and won’t climb out onto the glass.

There’s a lot happening there that makes psychologists stay up late at night. First is that the babies are actually using their emotional equipment to determine reality in the physical world — they’re not studying the cliff to determine whether it’s safe or not, they’re actually studying what mom thinks about the cliff and the situation. And second, and probably more amazing but less obvious, is that babies can realize what mom is thinking at all. Even without the development of language or the ability to walk, they know how to tune in on extremely subtle details in her expression and then deduce serious meaning from them. From a scrunched up brow and a bit lip on mom’s face, they are determining whether or not the ground they’re standing on is safe. As the book says, by merely looking at mom’s expression and then determining serious conclusions about what her inner state is like, they’re more or less reading minds. Even before they can read books, they’re reading emotions, and they trust that reading so much that they trust their life to it. It’s a kind of telepathy, a broadcasting of a wordless message, between two human beings.

The whole book is filled with that kind of stuff, stories about humans using subtle emotional cues to connect. And that’s been on my mind lately a lot — connecting with humans and how we do it, both in terms of intimate, relational connection and just in terms of general, human connection. I find myself in the weird situation of trying to connect with an entire city here — when I moved away from Chicago, I figured that I’d changed a lot in the past six years. It wouldn’t take long for me to settle back down, put some roots in just as I had in the other big city I moved to, and figure things out pretty quickly. But while yes, the mechanical parts of the move were actually much easier (I knew how to set up utilities and who to see about fixing up the paperwork and dotting Ts and crossing Is; wait…), it turns out, a month later, that the mental settling down takes time. More time than I expected. Whenever I stay inside for a long time (in my apartment, or at the gym or a movie theater, though I haven’t seen as many movies as I hope I would when I moved out yet), I tend to forget I’m actually in LA. I find myself feeling like I’m back in Chicago, and that walking outside will send me into a chilly, windy fall, not the sunny afternoons and cool evenings they have out here. It’s taking me a little while longer than I actually expected to make this place feel like it’s somewhere I belong.

And then there is, of course, the people. I’ve never been someone who’s good at making friends in the first place, but moving 2000 miles from anyone I know well has put the procedure of emotion and friend-making at the fore of my mind. I’m not desperate or lonely or anything — well, ok, maybe I am a little lonely, but it’s my own fault for completely uprooting myself, and fortunately I’m also the kind of person who knows how to entertain himself with computers and TV and video games, so it hasn’t been too bad. And I’m not sitting back and doing nothing — I’ve joined a bowling league, and checked out a church, and joined a new gym. But it has been quite a learning experience, reading about how our minds connect with each other in strange, unpredictable ways while at the same time experiencing the making of connections with the people I’m meeting for the first few times out here.

We are wacky creatures, human beings, and a person could study the human mind his or her whole life and still be mystified by some aspects of human behavior (I’ve been studying the people around me for all of my life, and I am continually mystified, in both good ways and bad, daily). And as globally connected as the world is lately, there are fascinating differences even from region to region that can separate us across gaps we didn’t even know existed.

Consider, finally, the first time it rained since I’d moved out here. I’d never actually seen rain in LA before — I didn’t know it existed out here, and as far as I know, it still doesn’t up in the hills. I lived out here for a few months during college and in that entire time, I saw a light misting that lasted about 15 minutes in the morning, and never saw a drop of anything fall from the sky again. But it does rain here, occasionally, for about one or two days out of the year. And I happened to be here for the first time on one of those days a few weeks ago.

Conan joked that it was chaos, but his jokes were actually founded in truth: the local blogs reported that during the first morning of rain, car accidents in the city rose by a measure of hundreds of percentage points. People stayed home from work. It wasn’t panic in that there was widespread looting and chaos, but people did freak out a little bit — people who live here are so accustomed to not dealing with weather of any kind that when they do, everyone kind of forgets all the other rules about how to live.

And here’s the really crazy thing: as you know from my last post, I’m from the midwest. I’ve lived through winters full of freezing temperatures and feet of snow and wind that threatened to pull your skin off. But because everyone around me was panicking — all of the Twitter folks were talking about it, it was all over the TV, and everyone had to deal with the rain in some way — I panicked a little too. I thought about driving to run some errands, and then decided that I should probably wait a day to go out on the road. I considered not going for a walk, not even thinking that I had an umbrella stored in the closet (and this was the kind of rain where I wouldn’t even bother with an umbrella had I seen it in Chicago).

I was being the baby. Well yeah, I was panicking over a few drops of water, a very babylike thing to do, but I mean I was being the visual cliff baby. Placed in a new environment, I was looking at the people around me to determine my reaction. And against all logic, I was seeing panic on the faces of others, and so I too, for no discernible reason, felt a little bit of panic. Some weird connection had developed between me and the people around me — not telepathy as such, but the common experience of being in the same place, and sharing the same reaction to something, of reading each other, and echoing that emotion. Like the little kid on the visual cliff, I saw rain falling, looked at the reactions of those around me, and without willing it so, recreated the same reaction in myself.

So that’s what I’m thinking about lately. Hope things are well with you, readers — thanks for all the good feedback on the Moto post a while back. I’ve been looking for good restaurants out here (in fact, I’ve been overwhelmed by looking for them — there’s so many to try I have no idea where to start). When I find something cool to write about for you, I will do so. Talk to you soon.