By Pauline W. Chen ’82

Editor’s note: Loomis Chaffee invited physician and author Pauline W. Chen ’82 to speak at a convocation this fall on the subject of this year’s school question, “What does it mean to be human?” The text of Pauline’s thought-provoking talk, edited for print, follows.

I have spent a good chunk of my post-Loomis Chaffee life doctoring. I care for other human beings, who are sometimes well, but often in the throes of a debilitating symptom and occasionally on the cusp between life and death. 

Another large chunk of my life has been devoted to thinking and writing about what I see, trying to make sense of the very moving human dramas that play out in my work life. 

I suppose it would seem that I might have a bit of a leg up when it comes to this year’s school theme, “What Is Human?”

Nonetheless, in the months since [Head of School Jody Reilly Soja’s] invitation to speak, I have been at an utter loss. When it comes to existential and metaphysical questions, “What is human?” is right up there with “What is the meaning of life?”

I have turned to essays, books, and academic journals. I have made it a point to query my friends and colleagues. 

“Tell me,” I ask them. “What is human?” 

Their responses after I explain why I am asking? “Ha! Good luck!”

So, a couple of weeks ago, with my back to the metaphorical and, I suppose, metaphysical, wall, I finally resorted to something that I suspect many of us who are feeling anxious and pressured to produce have done.

I turned to A.I.

First, figuring this question might fall appropriately into the medical research and scientific realms, I went to Open Evidence, an A.I. platform that synthesizes peer-reviewed medical literature and clinical guidelines.

I typed in, “What is human?”

Open Evidence’s answer? “This question is outside the scope of Open Evidence.”

I was surprised, but I admired that A.I.-flavored sense of humility.

I then turned to ChatGPT. Maybe the answer required a generalist intelligence. Again, I typed in, “What is human?”

Well, there was no humility here. In seconds, ChatGPT spit out an entire outline that it summarized at the end in two sentences:

“A human is a thinking, feeling, social being — capable of both great kindness and cruelty, creativity and destruction. Being human means not just existing, but being aware that we exist — and constantly trying to make sense of that fact.”

Pretty impressive, especially that last sentence. So we humans are human because we are constantly trying to make sense of the fact that we exist.

Indulge me for a few minutes as I tell you a little story about how I’ve been trying to make sense of one fact of my existence.

It’s 1922 in the southwestern countryside of France. The Great War, World War I, is over, and the Great Influenza Pandemic of 1918 has finished taking its horrific and deadly toll. 

Things are finally beginning to look up for the farmers in Cabreret, a tiny village whose name is derived from the local dialect’s word for “goat.” 

“Goat” is an apt moniker, given that the village sits on and is surrounded by enormous limestone rocks and cliffs that only a goat could scale. The limestone rock is white, with sharp ledges and planes and visible cracks, even at the ground level.

Andre David is 16 years old, and he has spent his entire life on the family farm in Cabreret. A few months before Andre’s birth, his father is caught in a huge and violent rainstorm while working in the fields. He takes refuge in one of those cracks in the limestone earth and is soon joined by a neighboring farmer who is also caught out in the storm. 

But it’s a cramped space for two big men and the storm is not letting up, so they begin removing rocks from the little limestone pit to make more room for themselves. By the end of the storm, the men have uncovered a hole. When they throw a pebble into the hole, it seems to roll for maybe 50 feet before stopping, sending off echoes that seem to go to the very bowels of the earth.

Over the next few years, Andre David’s father and a few interested grown-ups in and around the village attempt to widen the hole and even descend into it; but they get only so far. They lose their nerve when they slip along the wet tunnels and hear rumblings — maybe even growls — coming from the darkest reaches. 

By the time Andre David is 8 years old, his father has forbidden any further exploration of the mysterious hole.

Of course, you can imagine that the ban on exploring makes young Andre even more drawn to going there. Imagine, growing up with this mysterious hole in your back yard, one that might even go to the other end of the earth! Andre begs his parents over and over again to let him explore, but the answer always is a hard and unwavering no.

But the year he turns 16, Andre convinces his best friend, 15-year-old Henri, and his 13-year-old sister Marthe to descend down the hole with him. The trio quickly aborts the first attempt because their candles are snuffed out by the wetness in the cave. Andre wants to persist, but Henri tells him that if they don’t leave right away and are trapped, he will have no reservations about eating Andre and Marthe to stay alive. 

The three teenagers continue in their attempts, eventually devising a system where one end of a rope is secured around the waist of the person who descends while the other end is secured to a person standing above ground.

Finally, in October of 1922, Andre is able to go farther than he ever has, and he finds himself in an enormous cave with dozens of gargantuan stalactites and stalagmites. With candle in hand, he begins exploring the cave, stepping carefully along the moist limestone path and feeling his way around with hands pressed against the cave’s cool walls. 

Suddenly before his eyes, he sees a series of drawings on the walls, stunning renditions of mammoths, reindeer, and spotted horse-like creatures that, when viewed against his flickering candlelight, appear to be alive, galloping across the cave.  

He is completely overcome. “We felt that we had entered another world,” he would later write. The caves were “decorated with numerous drawings of animals and markings that allowed me to penetrate the metaphysical mystery of prehistoric man.”

So moved is Andre David, that the caves, the Pech Merle Caves, became his life’s obsession; and he devoted his life to their exploration and preservation. Up until his death in 1970, Andre David would continue to descend down to the grottoes, those riveting prehistoric works of art mesmerizing him, entrancing him, and drawing him in again and again and again.

In the years since Andre David’s discovery, other caves with prehistoric drawings have been discovered, especially in the area of southwestern France where limestone abounds. In the late 1940s, scientists were able to apply the newly discovered technique of Carbon-14 dating to many of these cave drawings. Using this technique on samples of the charcoal of the Pech Merle drawings, scientists were able to estimate that they had been created 29,000 years ago. 

This means that the artists who made those fantastic tableaus lived in the late Pleistocene age — the very moment in history when the first humans, the earliest homo sapiens, emerged from Africa and began roaming the earth.

The first time I visited the caves of Pech Merle, I was 17 years old. I was spending my senior year in France on the School Year Abroad program; and that spring, in addition to museums and cathedrals, we visited the caves. I don’t remember the details of the visit, only that the images of those paintings lingered for so long in my mind that I sometimes thought of them as more of a dream than a memory.  

Until I revisited the caves this summer. 

There is a museum now above the caves. And to descend down, you have to walk through a heavy wooden door at the back of the gift shop and descend some 50 feet. Except for sounds of other tourists jostling about to get a closer look, it is silent down there, a series of enormous caves created over the millions of years by acidic ground water slowly dissolving the rocks.

Interspersed throughout these underground chambers are those fantastic tableaus. Those works of art, created by the earliest humans, the earliest homo sapiens, feel as vivid and as moving today as they did to me 40 years earlier, to Andre David more than 100 years ago, and, I suspect, to the humans who saw them 29,000 years ago.

I understand why Andre David kept going back. I understand the desire to immerse oneself in the otherworldliness of these caves. I understand the profound pull of these drawings and the sense of wonder and astonishment that they elicit. 

These cave drawings have such a hold on us because, I suspect, we know, without question, that they are undeniably human.

There’s a new field of scientific inquiry, social neuroscience, that has emerged over the last two decades or so. It’s a fascinating multi-disciplinary field, one that examines how the brain mediates social interactions. 

In one particular branch of this discipline, scientists look at how neurotransmitters affect human behavior, or, you might say, make us human. 

Neurotransmitters are chemicals produced by the brain that allow neurons to communicate. Oxytocin and dopamine are two such chemicals. Dopamine is linked to rewarding behavior and typically results in pleasure, motivation, and alertness. Oxytocin, like dopamine, is related to reward and pleasure but can also be calming and relaxing. It appears to promote bonding and socialization and is famously associated with parenting, being released during breastfeeding and early skin-to-skin contact. 

While still relatively new, the field of social neuroscience has come up with some very intriguing findings that offer potential biologic underpinnings of what is human. One of these is the idea that human evolution — becoming human, if you will — was predicated in part on an increase in the production of neurotransmitters like oxytocin and dopamine. 

These neurotransmitters made the earliest humans more social, more goal-directed, more trusting, and more empathic. And more successful than their hominid counterparts when it came to the game of survival.  

Neurotransmitters like oxytocin and dopamine amplify social cues and inclinations that favor survival, like staying with others to promote reproduction, caring in teams to ensure the survival of the next generation, and communicating to others about places of danger or fields of bounty. 

According to these social neuroscience theories, oxytocin and dopamine were the oxygen that fueled the other fire that humans were discovering, that is the use of stories or narratives.

Interpreted through this neurotransmitter theory, the remarkable drawings of Pech Merle become the concrete manifestation of a new rush of signaling in the brain, a tapping into and an outpouring of neurotransmitters. 

With dopamine and oxytocin surging, the prehistoric artists told the stories of the creatures they had seen. They drew the herds of dappled horses that grazed nearby. They etched the playful faces of horses that they had seen. They recounted violent encounters between those horses and giant woolly mammoths. And they recalled hunters or enemies who had been felled by arrows.

Behind all of this, behind every brush stroke and every line, were the hands of artists who were beginning to define what is human. 

The ability to tell stories, to create narratives with pictures, writing, movement, speech, or song, is a defining characteristic of being human. Powered by our brain’s increase in self-produced chemical messengers, storytelling emerged among our prehistoric ancestors in highly elaborate forms across all cultures. It was as if storytelling was, as evolutionary psychologists write, “an ancient and central part of human life.”  

The impulse to tell and listen to stories is as natural as the impulse to learn to walk. The ability to tell stories has been shown to be present in children as young as 2 1/2 years old. And children who are barely 2 years old can already sense, through language, when someone is about to tell them a story.

So it’s not surprising that we modern-day human beings can sense when one of our earliest ancestors is trying to tell a story.

The stories woven and painted by the artists of Pech Merle are particularly moving because despite the intervening 29,000 years, they seem so human. The drawings and paintings and etchings feel like attempts to capture a moment in time, to convey a cautionary message or shout-out, to elicit feelings and reactions in the viewers. 

They reflect incredibly poignant human impulses that are not so far from the ones that compel some of us to create reels on social media.

Modern psychology researchers have termed this kind of storytelling the creation of a “narrative identity.” Weaving together the details of particular parts of our lives, we human beings construct a story and internalize that story. For example, part of my narrative identity is composed of the stories from my four years at Loomis Chaffee, as a day student from Windsor, as a member of the Orchestra, as a part of The LOG.

These stories that each of us possesses, these “narrative identities,” are how humans understand and “convey to themselves and to others who they are now, how they came to be and where they think their lives may be going in the future.”

I began this talk with the story of Andre David. I wasn’t sharing his story because he is an amazing example of what is human — although he is also that. 

And I wasn’t sharing his story because he devoted his life to exploring and protecting the Caves of Pech Merle, which in turn allowed others to catch a glimpse of the magnificence of prehistoric people — which he absolutely did.

I began with Andre David’s story because of this: In an essay he wrote much later in life recounting his first visit to the cave, Andre David describes one particular drawing that caught his attention, the ghostly negative hand prints and thumb prints that adorn the animal paintings. 

These prints were created by blowing pigment over a hand or thumb held against the cave walls. They are placed very precisely, symmetrically often, and they pop out, like some prehistoric shout-out to future observers that “We are here!”

They seem to be the artist’s urgent insistence of their presence in their tableau of life, a direct call to their viewers then — and now.

I suspect that these negative handprints haunted Andre David from the moment he saw them until his last days. I suspect that those visual declarations of humanity drew him back again and again to the caves and that they lingered so deeply in his mind that he couldn’t be sure if they were real or a dream, until he saw them again.

I suspect all of this because it was those negative handprints that stayed in my own mind for more than 40 years and drew me back to Pech Merle. 

Andre David’s story shows us that no matter how human, how miraculous, our impulse is to tell a story, what ultimately gives that story true meaning and power is the listener, the audience, the person who takes it all in, even if it is just the author alone or a 17-year-old some 29,000 years later. 

A story is not a story unless it has a listener.

What is human is the singular ability to listen, to watch, to pay attention, to fully empathize with the storyteller. What is human is the ability to offer attention.

And, as it turns out, at the same time early humans developed the ability to tell stories, they also developed the ability to offer their attention because attention relies on precisely the same cocktail of neurotransmitters that good storytelling requires. 

Twenty-nine thousand years ago, in a cool cave in southwestern France, prehistoric humans began to experience something entirely new. They found that by focusing on these groupings of scratches and lines and dots on the walls, these representations of great and frightening creatures, they would feel a rush of suspense and anticipation (mediated by dopamine). By leaning in closer to see more clearly, one body touching another, they could immerse themselves in another world and feel a sense of connection and empathy with others (triggered by the release of oxytocin). 

They were becoming human.

Listeners matter, and the ability to listen, or to bear witness — to be open, to empathize, to fully immerse oneself in the story of another, to offer our attention — is, I believe, what is human.

So when I finally finished drafting this talk, I gave it to my twin daughters, Natalie ’20 and Isabelle ’20. They have become my best first readers, which is, I know, because of their education, not in college, but here at Loomis Chaffee. 

Natalie asked if I happened to have any photos of myself at Pech Merle. Sadly, I answered, I didn’t. I explained that Pech Merle is one of the last caves with prehistoric drawings where the public is allowed to see the actual drawings, not replicas, and that flash photos are strictly forbidden because it can degrade the paint.

“Ah,” Natalie said. “So you have to listen to the past, you have to pay attention. Not try to capture it.”

“Attention is,” the brilliant and unparalleled French philosopher Simone Veil said, “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

And it is, I would posit, the most precious of gifts. 

So as you engage in this great, wondrous exploration of what it is to be your best self, to work for the common good, and to be human, I hope you will remember my take on that ultimate existential and metaphysical question.  

Remember, always, the very human gift that each of you possesses. Use it wisely, but also generously.  

Fire up those neurotransmitters by telling your stories to your peers, your teachers, the staff, the administrators, and your family. But really show them your humanity by listening, observing, immersing yourself in their stories, and offering them your attention.