The initial visit to a foreign country understandably presents generous opportunity for neurogenesis, as the visitor is potentially confronted with an abundance of new circumstances that their existing neural network is ill-equipped to process.

So it was for me during my initial trip to Russia, which represented the first time I was immersed in an overwhelmingly white population that was nonetheless ethnically diverse in a more apparent way than I was accustomed to in the US. In a crowd of white faces, skin color could no longer serve as a lazy crutch to aid in segregation; the task required perception of more nuanced features, even to the point of being so nuanced as to defy attempts to articulate quite what they were.

This begs the question of whether one can reliably apply to their observations a means of discernment whose principles they’re unable to explain to another. If you can’t explain to others why you’ve concluded what you have about what you’ve observed, how can you be assured of your conclusion? And yet, decisions based on inexplicable intuition continue unabated. The gap implied by inexplicable intuition is fertile ground for neural growth, which seeks to bridge it.

Thus, I could not initially understand the rationale for classifying faces as I did, but with time, and concomitant exposure to more faces on which to refine the skill, a path to articulation began to form, involving the shapes of facial features and their relative position, an increasing sensitivity to the breadth of skin tones encompassed by the term white. Improvement in the ability to group members of the local population was evinced by how trivial became the comparatively coarser task of distinguishing a white tourist from a local, even if their accoutrements were comparable.

Still, the formation of an explanation doesn’t equate to objective truth; just because a bridge has formed doesn’t mean it’s one that can carry any weight.