"Curiosity is like a hunger"

"Curiosity is like a hunger."

While looking earlier this week for material to post on our Twitter and Facebook accounts - you DO follow us there, right? - that line stopped me dead in my digital tracks. Tweeted by "On Being," Krista Tippett's fantastic radio show, and subsequently posted to the blog of the same name, I've thought quite a lot about it because in a couple respects it goes to the heart of the IdeaFestival.

To be curious is to be open to surprise, to confounded expectation and its subsequent magic. Like the timing behind a favorite joke, or the respiring quiet of Daniel Tammet's voice in 2010, or the sight of floating golden spheres being manipulated by Teller at the 2008 IdeaFestival, the surprise is only the set up. The fact that Teller carefully explaining to a rapt festival audience his variation on a historic trick, his meticulous and hidden execution of an illusion - that was the magic. This magician parted with his secrets.

Surprise, of course, has always had an important connection to survival. We've been wired over time to pick out the anamoly. Is that rustling in the bushes a friend, or is it a lion padding along behind cover, just waiting to jump his next meal?

Today, outliers are critical because given access to so much information, it's the curious whose sensitivity to difference, once developed into an idea and well executed, will bring profit.

The festival is important because your expectations will be overturned, because your subsequent surprise will be contagious, because more and more, your business or organization or church or your plain self-interest depends on an ability to make magic again.

Kodak bet far too long on the future of film. And the change that will sweep your industry is right now just a whisper, a breeze, that disturbing trend line buried in the data, as astrophysicist Mario Livio points in the video above. Miss it because some answers have worked well in past, and it's the future that is jeopardized. "Success," as Jason Pontin, memorably pointed out at last September, "is a terrible mentor."

If "curiosity is like a hunger" still strikes you as a bit dramatic, think about this. The figurative rustling in that suddenly suspicious brush may be neither friend nor foe.

It might be food.

Wayne

Positive thinking, gah!

Listed by Farnam Street as one of its top psychology publications of 2012, a book about the positive power of negative thinking wouldn't seem like a natural pick-me-up. My thought? Finally! Here's a book I can relate to.

I'm just kidding.

I think. But what if positive thinking were a problem, a roadblock in the way of innovation? Oliver Burkeman:

Ancient philosophers and spiritual teachers understood the need to balance the positive with the negative, optimism with pessimism, a striving for success and security with an openness to failure and uncertainty. The Stoics recommended 'the premeditation of evils,' or deliberately visualizing the worst-case scenario. This tends to reduce anxiety about the future: when you soberly picture how badly things could go in reality, you usually conclude that you could cope. Besides, they noted, imagining that you might lose the relationships and possessions you currently enjoy increases your gratitude for having them now. Positive thinking, by contrast, always leans into the future, ignoring present pleasures.

Mentioning Tony Robbins, who famously urges his seminar attendees to visualize success, Burkeman points out that one fire-walker at a Robbins' event manages, despite the participant's cheery affirmations, to get burned.

Mr. Robbins reportedly encourages firewalkers to think of the hot coals as 'cool moss.' Here’s a better idea: think of them as hot coals. And as a San Jose fire captain, himself a wise philosopher, told The Mercury News: 'We discourage people from walking over hot coals."

Imagine that.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by richard winchell

Climbing beyond

Are there limits to knowledge?

In a piece linked by Maria Popova, "transcendence" is described as real and unquantifiable. You recognize that feeling from watching the sun set, or, if you're anything like me, watching the sun set on Mars. You recognize that intense otherness if you've ever watched the birth of your children, or witnessed an act of self-sacrifice or valor. You know transcendence as that sensation of somehow being simultaneously united and scattered. And taking issue with Oliver Sacks, Richard Gunderman suggests you know something neuroscience doesn't.

Gunderman:

When I listen to music, or at least certain kinds of music, I feel transported to another place, my mood is elevated, I feel a new sense of harmony, and I am able to focus more clearly on what seems to matter most. A physicist might come along and say that what I call music is merely the scraping of horse's hairs across cat gut, a mechanical vibration in a particular frequency range. A neurologist might come along and explain that I am merely experiencing the transduction of kinetic energy into electrical energy as processed by neurons in the auditory and higher associative cortices of the brain. And yet, there is something about the music that is hard to reckon in such terms. It would be like saying that a passionate embrace is merely the pressing of flesh on flesh....

Of course, not every composer is a Mahler, nor every painter a Van Gogh, every poet a Yeats, or every scientist an Einstein. Great music is real, but so is bad music, and the same can be said regarding art, poetry, and science. Sometimes people simply get it wrong. But getting it wrong, no less than getting it right, is associated with certain neurochemical changes in the brain. In other words, the mere fact that neurochemical changes are taking place does nothing to help us distinguish between good and bad, the great and the merely insipid. The truth or falsehood of such expressions is not simply a matter of correspondence with some verifiable material state. It is also a matter of elegance, rhythm, balance, and above all, beauty, qualities that are to some degree transcendent.

Essentially making the knowledge argument, Gunderman faults material-only explanations for experiences of wonder and awe, not because biology isn't foundational - it clearly is - but because there are limits to what our bodies, as marvelous as they are, can deduce. In the words of philosopher of mind David Chalmers, "there is something that it is to be like you," the person reason this blog post, that is different from every other person on the planet. Similarly, the best that neuroscience can do at the moment is to point to our brains during moments of transcendence and say, "see there!" And there! And over there! But the snap crackle and pop of our brains at work is correlative, not causative. Transcendence, like the first-person experience, adds "something that it is like" to "climb beyond" that simply can't be quantified.

It can only be experienced.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by h.koppdelaney

The problem with self-help: "selves"

The problem with most self-help literature is that there is no widely accepted understanding of what the self is, which can be a bit of a problem if the goal is to develop new and better you.

"The Self in Self-Help" says it better.

If, like me, you have read your way through sober Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People) and godly Norman Vincent Peale (The Power of Positive Thinking), through exuberant Tony Robbins (Unleash the Power Within) and ridiculous Rhonda Byrne (The Secret), through John Gray who Is From Mars and Timothy Ferriss who has a four-hour everything and Deepak Chopra who at this point really is one with the universe (65 books and counting)—anyway, if you, too, have reckoned with the size and scope of the self-help movement, you probably share my initial intuition about what it has to say about the self: lots. It turns out, though, that all that surface noise is deceptive. Underneath what appears to be umptebajillion ideas about who we are and how we work, the self-help movement has a startling paucity of theories about the self. To be precise: It has one.

Let us call it the master theory of self-help. It goes like this: Somewhere below or above or beyond the part of you that is struggling with weight loss or procrastination or whatever your particular problem might be, there is another part of you that is immune to that problem and capable of solving it for the rest of you....

But, in the spirit of being a better person, I should not be so hard on self-help. The fact is, selves are profoundly difficult to understand. 'There is nothing that we know more intimately than conscious experience,' the contemporary philosopher David Chalmers observes, 'but there is nothing that is harder to explain.'

It's remarkable to me that the experience of self is at once the most intimate one we'll ever have, and yet simultaneously almost impossibly opaque.

The rest of the piece is well worth a read if you have time.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by dbrekke

Video: The Pickpocket a Salsa

With illusionists such as Teller and Philippe Petit, neuromarketer Patrick Renvoisé and psychologist of perception Daniel Simons to reinforce the idea, I've come to appreciate over the course of many festivals just how malleable human attention is.

In recent New Yorker article, master pickpocket Apollo Robbins described his method for shaping perception as "surfing attention." The range of disciplines he has studied such as ballroom dancing was truly impressive - as was his method of getting physically close to his mark during a performance.

Both are described here. Enjoy:

In pursuit of his craft, Robbins has ended up incorporating principles from such disparate fields as aikido, sales, and Latin ballroom dancing. He is a devotee of books like Robert B. Cialdini’s “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion,” and has also immersed himself in the literature of criminal lore....

'When I shake someone’s hand, I apply the lightest pressure on their wrist with my index and middle fingers and lead them across my body to my left,' he said, showing me. 'The cross-body lead is actually a move from salsa dancing. I’m finding out what kind of a partner they’re going to be, and I know that if they follow my lead I can do whatever I want with them.'

Robbins needs to get close to his victims without setting off alarm bells. 'If I come at you head-on, like this,' he said, stepping forward, 'I’m going to run into that bubble of your personal space very quickly, and that’s going to make you uncomfortable.' He took a step back. 'So, what I do is I give you a point of focus, say a coin. Then I break eye contact by looking down, and I pivot around the point of focus, stepping forward in an arc, or a semicircle, till I’m in your space.' He demonstrated, winding up shoulder to shoulder with me, looking up at me sideways, his head cocked, all innocence. 'See how I was able to close the gap?' he said. "I flew in under your radar and I have access to all your pockets.'

Learning how magic tricks are done is often disappointing, because it’s not really magic. With Robbins, though, effect and method are one and the same, and seeing how he accomplishes his thefts is just as impressive as witnessing, or failing to witness, the acts themselves.

As a necessary precursor to creativity and innovation, it's the cross boundary, discipline-spanning connections the festival strives to make. I hope you'll plan now to attend this year's festival, September 24 - 27.

Stay curious!

Wayne