Want more time? Experience more awe

Want more time? Experience more awe.

In this fascinating video from the Stanford Business School, PhD candidate Melanie Rudd does a tremendous job of unpacking the experience of awe, pointing out its relationship "to a boost in life satisfaction," and that it "alters decision making" in ways that promote cohesion, empathy, warmth and solicitude.

But it's the why that interests me.

She suggests "perceptual vastness" as one of the key drivers of awe. That vastness could be physical - think of watching the sun set, or of lingering beneath a dark night sky pricked by thousands of nearby suns. Or it could be abstract. I've often wondered what it must feel like to read a page of equations and realize that the math describes a particular topology, or suggests vanishingly small folds in the time and space we know so well. The fact that mere symbols accurately describe celestial mechanics, or might portend discoveries yet to be made, should startle anyone paying attention.

Even more importantly, those awe-inspiring realizations, as Rudd points out, create "a need for accommodation," the desire to understand, to interpret and to incorporate the knowledge that awe heralds. We want more.

That means that awe is fleeting. If the knowledge gained hardens into a legalism unable to incorporate new revelation, the rights inherited sui juris no longer illuminate - they appeal to rules alone, not to the beating heart the rules represent. In unique ways, the existentialism of Sartre, the phenomenology of Husserl and the mysticism of Sufis and Pentecostals alike, prioritize experience over rule following.

There is a biological advantage to being awestruck.

Many of us can also relate to being so absorbed by a particular activity that we've lost track of time. Musicians and puzzle solvers can routinely recall moments of particular clarity that emerge from this immersion in the moment. That feeling of "flow," described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is especially conducive to creativity, and is being explored by any number of people and organizations, including, of course, one doctoral candidate at the Stanford Business School.

"Experience more awe" is easier said than done, yes. But a good place to start might be with the following: When was the last time you were completely absorbed by an activity?

Go from there.

Wayne

Jonathan Fields: For creative outcomes, "reframe" fear

If you're an entrepreneur or creative, watch this video from the author of "The Uncertainty Book," Jonathan Fields, who addresses the fallout from fearful takes on change.

What if we fail? How do we overcome the primary culprit that keeps many of us from "going out into the world and doing the things we're here to do?"

In clear and straightforward language, Fields describes how to "reframe" situations that have caused fear in the past by altering the stories we tell ourselves about those situations - stories that too often "paralyze" instead of "mobilize" us. "Disruption," he says, "never comes without opportunity." Getting past disrupting or of isolating events of all kinds, whether they be in an entrepreneurial or family setting, is to account for the fear of acting, to acknowledge it, but to add an equally forceful accounting of a better future.

What, in other words, if we succeed? What does that story look like?

Wayne

IdeaFestival Conversation: Lisa Randall on the Physics "Mess"

In this IdeaFestival Conversation, one of four newly released videos from IdeaFestival 2012, Harvard theoretical physicist Lisa Randall describes her interest in talking about physics as one, "the physics itself," and two, how science in general gets done.

On the highly energetic and vanishingly small physics she studies, Randall believes that "in some sense" theorized extra dimensions might "come to us" if particles with certain kinds of characteristics are observed in the fallout from the collisions generated by the Large Hadron Collider. While one cannot see the extra dimensions directly, one can find conforming evidence.

On the latter she says science, as a practice, "is much messier because you're trying to figure out things you don't know." That sounds like any genuine search. Go into it with an idea about what one will find.

Be honest about the evidence against that idea.

All four IdeaFestival Conversations can be found on the festival YouTube channel, IFTV.

Wayne

Voyager Ex Voto

Reawakened periodically 35 years into a sluicing and eternal languor, the twin Voyager spacecraft still send carefully coded and modulated letters from the void. Their beglamored creators, in contrast, ask only questions in return.

Where are you? Where are you? What do you see? Such is the lot of a species able to ask more of itself than either its circumstances or technology can deliver.

In a particularly inspired piece of prose comparing the craft to the Easter Island monoliths, Matthew Battles had this to say last week about Voyager 1, which will finally sail beyond the solar wind in the next year and so become the first object formed by human hands to enter the interstellar medium.

With the Voyager probes, our exoarchaeological traces now exceed the solar system’s footprint. Indeed, an archaeologist might properly interpret Voyager as a votive offering: the token of a wish to find ourselves companioned in the cosmos, offered to the void ex voto without expectation of return....

This prompts a question: what story will future xenoarchaeologists glean from our spacefaring artifacts? In the space age, we thought them the foundation stones of our future spacefaring civilization; increasingly, they seem like the moai of Easter Island—votive offerings, erected in desperate hope on the only shores we will ever know.

"Those shores," our shores, will eventually disappear too, of course. Although it may have long ceased working, in this animated video, linked by Battles, a silent and orphaned Voyager 1 watches a star (ours?) go nova. 

Others put aside existential questions, comforted by the nature of these explorers' missions. Some time ago New York Times science journalist Dennis Overbye reviewed the book, "Flyby," a history of the two craft and their Golden Records by Stephen Pyne. Pyne, as Overbye writes, clearly differentiates this exploration from others in a way that I find moving. I hope you do as well:

This book blooms with such glorious rushes of exalted prose that I was dog-earing almost every page until I gave up.... Pyne writes that Voyager was 'a modernist machine loosed onto the cosmos. The Voyagers would not be blinded by gold or the mirage of fame. They would not abandon wife or child, or enslave unwary indigenes. They could not despair, could not be crippled by loneliness, could not fight for the cross or suffer for science, would not know epiphanies or endure tropical fevers. They would lay no claims, issue no proclamations of sovereignty, raise no toasts to king or republic, sign no treaties of trade or military alliance, nor send out reconnaissance parties to lay out routes for folk migration. The Voyagers confronted no Other, or even life.'

On the issue of exploration in general, one of my absolute favorite videos is of the planetary scientist Nathalie Cabrol, who, when interviewed about her choice to study other worlds, links exploration to our very survival in the following bracing sentences.

Stying put means death! It is true physically, it is true spiritually and it is true intellectually.

Watch the video. I dare you not to applaud at the end.

As for the twin craft themselves, when they are no longer able to communicate using their radios, they will record 62,500 kilobytes of date for transmission "at another time" before taking our questions with them into the endless quiet.

Wayne

Improv on a Grand Central Scale

"For me, the word 'jazz' means, 'I dare you.'" - Jazz legend Wayne Shorter, via NPR

With music, lights and a filmed vantage point faintly reminiscent of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, this improvisation must have caught the passers by at New York City's Grand Central Station off guard. Judging by the looks of many of them, it was an enjoyable experience. 

So how would this possibly relate to the IdeaFestival?

Not knowing what to expect is half the fun, isn't it? And learning to improvise - that's a life long pursuit.

Wayne