The human mind is full of implicit and explicit biases. When it comes to judging someone - and we do judge, whether we want it or not - we cloud our perceptions with lived and anticipated memories. These imaginations and lived experiences influence our words and actions, and they perpetuate the chain of human bias. Each year, I am asked to be a professional judge (for a national children’s book award, for a research prize and for one technology competition), and each year I get acutely aware of my own pre-conceptions. My weak spot is a strong preference for hybrid works: research that is mixed-method and interdisciplinary, works that combine tradition with innovation. I have this preference in poetry too - I love poems that fuse with other arts in filmpoems or dancepoems. Hybrid artists are en vogue, think of Lana Del Rey crossing film noir and music, David Garrett crossing rock and classical style. Hybrid arts can simultaneously open multiple gates, which can be both generous and fulgurous for the audience.

Many people ask me why I don’t hybridise my poetry and scientific work, why I prefer to keep the two identities separate. My friends know me in both contexts, but I work on parallel lines when writing poems or research papers. Maybe one day they will intersect in an obvious carrefour. So far, I have engaged with different communities, with different thinking processes and with different steppingstones to get me where I am in my poetry and in my research. There is a great sense of freedom in not fully committing myself to either of the two worlds and living a life of both - as a hybrid, I guess.

I enjoy engaging in debates open to impersonal criticism and neutral observations. Sure, the human mind is never neutral, but there are some structures to guard from being a subjective judge. In research, the double-blinded peer review process is one such structure. It ensures that neither the researcher nor the reviewer know the author’s identity. The reviewers judge the work, not who made it. The judgment is based on the rigour of the study methods, the validity of the argument, the impact on practice, and other objective criteria. Emotions are minimized and rationality is maximised. In judging literary or artistic awards, it is often the reverse, with political and societal factors taken into account together with personal views.

I am proud of my merits in academia because they are, as much as a human enterprise can be, unclouded by personal prejudices. I am proud of my titles, but I dislike being introduced as a Professor, or winner of that or this award. I suppose it is part of my general reluctance towards outer selves, and towards social labels and the biases that they carry. It took me months to figure out which label to put on my social media profile, and I guess I still most strongly associate with the description of a “cloud watcher”. I love the changeable nature of the sky and its subtle colours that gently take on new shapes.

*“The measure of a man is what he does with power.” Plato*

I was pleased to find Goodreads reviews starting with ‘never judge a book by its cover’ for The Love Virus. The choice of an unassuming cover was quite deliberate. I am suspicious of books with a big sticker “best-selling” on their covers. Why creating expectations before you read the first page? Or in academia, why starting presentations by listing your successes and achievements? Or when meeting someone, why immediately googling them? The wonderful Irish poet David Whyte says that we are ‘constantly naming things too early…In love we name a relationship before it has matured into a joint pilgrimage.’

Next time you meet someone for the first time, do yourself a favour and do not immediately check their social media or ask for half of their CV. Let the words and chemistry do the work. Let their personality unfold in response to yours. Let your unique experiences and imaginations hybridise and create something new. You’ll be amazed how dazzling you, and the other, can become.

How do you speak to yourself? The words you tell yourself when you look at your face in the mirror- would you tell them to your friend? David Whyte also wrote that we constantly name ourselves in ways that are far too small for ourselves….

Per Ars Poetica Ad Cor Vitae