Curiosity is like a furious knocking

Curiosity (from Latin curiosus "careful, diligent, curious," akin to cura "care") is a quality related to inquisitive thinking such as exploration, investigation, and learning, evident by observation.... The term can also be used to denote the behavior itself being caused by the emotion of curiosity. As this emotion represents a thirst for knowledge, curiosity is a major driving force behind scientific research and other disciplines of human study.

That is the definition of "curiosity" from Wikipedia.

Here's mine. Curiosity expands the boundaries, fences and captured ground on which we live. It is inquisitive because it knows it cannot live on captured ground forever. It is evident because when we explore, investigate and learn, we are moved.

What the brief film "Overview," above, accomplishes is to simultaneously hold out the particular and the general for examination. That's the secret of perspective. It succeeds because when we take leave of ourselves, when, for example, we stand under the tented firmament of the Milky Way staked from one horizon to the next, or face the singular calm of the morning star-rise, or when we extend mercy - even when none is merited - we feel something toward the object of our thinking. We are changed.

Having spent my tween years fitting together newspapered kites and model airplanes and flying (and crashing) them over the clay hills and soybean fields of northern Louisiana, I was moved by people like Edgar Mitchell, who appears in Overview. Because people like Mitchell - people who flew - were my heroes, I would pedal my bicycle in the summer months out to the control tower at the airport in Monroe and knock at the locked door at the bottom until the controllers admitted me. I would wait and wait and wait. Sometimes I would pedal home, disappointed.

As the Apollo 14 Lunar Module Pilot Mitchell and Commander Alan Shepard executed a particular maneuver during the pair's ascent from the lunar surface that brought the Earth, Sun and Moon into view with clock-like regularity, years of investigation, exploration and learning - his waiting - was rewarded by this thought:

The molecules in my body and the molecules in my partner’s body and in the spacecraft had been prototyped in some ancient generation of stars. In other words, it was pretty obvious from [his academic studies] that we are stardust.

As philosopher David Loy says elsewhere in the film, astronauts often experience "something 'other than them.' Mitchell was "at some very deep level, integrating, realizing [his] interconnectedness with that beautiful blue ball."

The irony is that whether for a little while or a long while, curiosity calls us out of ourselves so that we can know what there is in us to know. So when I think of the "emotion of curiosity," I think of a furious knocking.

I think of a sudden seeing.

Wayne

Those rose-colored glasses

So what is happening when we chronically overestimate the odds of success? The Neuroscience of Looking at the Bright Side suggests that in addition to the long known human tendency to discount information that counters a prevailing or optimistic view, we have a lessened future ability to process undesirable information.

How can prediction errors help us to understand optimism? [In one study] participants estimated their likelihood of experiencing 80 negative events including various diseases and criminal acts. They then saw the statistical likelihoods of these events happening to an average person of their age. We then measured how much participants updated their predictions by having them re-estimate their personal likelihoods of experiencing these 80 adverse life events. When given good news -- i.e., a bad outcome is not as likely as you thought -- people responded strongly. But given bad news, they tended to change their prediction only a little bit.  Importantly, distinct brain regions seemed to be related to prediction errors for good and bad news about the future. Interestingly, the more optimistic a participant was the less efficiently one of these regions coded for undesirable information. Thus, the bias in how errors are processed in the brain can account for the tendency to maintain rose-colored views (emphasis supplied).

I wonder if the reverse is true - if over-weighting bad information can leave an individual pre-disposed to pass on opportunity (I would suspect it does) and what longitudinal studies, if any, might say about life satisfaction been those who always look on the bright side and those who do not.

Stay curious!

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by Jayel Aheram

Scott Barry Kaufman: The crooked path straight to discovery

How does the human mind transcend its own limits to create something new or useful?

Asking that question, Scott Barry Kaufman of Creativity Post shares his interest and insight into the psychology of creativity, which he believes is characterized by inspiration, passion and intrinsic motivation.

We don't appreciate inspiration as much as we should because it is inspired people who generate ideas, he says. "Inspired" in this case does not necessarily mean someone convulsed by manic fits or over-the-top enthusiasm, but could describe that poet or theoretical physicist laboring over a quirk in their respective languages, hunting for the right phrasing.

The thought reminded me of the power of awe to lend time to our creative efforts.

The inspired mind, he adds, is characterized by a broad focus, or openness, and considers "lots and lots of possibilities," which more or less describes standard procedure at the IdeaFestival. One never knows when insight or the solution to a vexing problem will suddenly materialize, but it's surprising how often I've head people mention how they were listening to something at the festival completely unrelated to their day to day lives when - BAM! - an idea that had eluded a focused search suddenly appears from nowhere. That's the power of possibility.

This quote on the creative mind also stood out.

Doing everything for external reward takes us further and further away from ourselves.

External motivation, which Kaufman distinguishes from an intrinsic motivation fueled by curiosity, hinders the creative life primarily because the questions that flow under those circumstances are often short-circuited by the first or most available path to the reward. The second question is less likely to be asked.

That's too bad because play and experimentation, and the creativity that flows from it, Kaufman concludes, is a core competency - it really is "what is important in this world." We couldn't agree more.

Posted at the Think Jar Collective, give the short video a watch.

And stay curious.

Wayne

Brian Eno on discovery: Surrender

I just love this little video.

Brian Eno has had a long career in art, and in rock, ambient and, more recently, generative music. If you are involved in any creative work - and you are whether you know it or not - his thoughts on the process of discovery in the video to the right are striking.

Three stood out:

One of the things art offers you is the chance to surrender, the chance to not be in control any longer. If you think about it, in our culture most of the encouragement is to 'take control.....'

Creativity is not so much making something new, but of 'noticing when something is happening.'

and this,

An inequality of opportunity exists, of course. But there is also 'an inequality of readiness.'

For much of our history we humans have intuited the need for periods of quiet, to be alone with ourselves to know what there is to know. No one ever suggests "'go fast' and smell the roses," and in an age of endless demand for speed an "equality of readiness" might mean being a little less quick to jump when the phone rings, or of simply making more time for yourself or close friends, or, in my case, of cutting back on the volume of news I consume. There is only so much attention to go around, and it's squandered all too easily responding to the clamorous pinging of contemporary life.

"Noticing when something is happening" will certainly be a subject discussed by Maria Konnikova, the author of "How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes," when she appears at IdeaFestival 2013 in September. Alert observation is perhaps the oldest tool for discovery in the human toolbox, and one that is all too often neglected in our rush to meet the next deadline or to show up for that client meeting.

And finally, this related thought: the Festival of Faiths, which will take place in advance of the Dalai Lama's appearance in Louisville on May 19, will feature a rich discussion on the practice of silence. Silence has always been important in the lives of many of the faithful in every religious tradition. The great irony is the loss of self while being absorbed in contemplation, in the case of a spiritual practice, or in the "flow," as described by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, is the hallmark of a fecund psychology. It's then, I've found, when we're most available to that something that is happening.

Stay curious.

Wayne

IF Conversation: How the hippies saved physics

Appearing in this IF Conversation, MIT history of science professor David Kaiser explains how a group of physicists, some of whom were trained at the nation's most prestigious institutions, found themselves on the counter-cultural margins of society at a time when our understanding of quantum physics was also undergoing a similarly profound change.

The mix was combustible. And it led to the kinds of questions that have always been characteristic of the success - and the failure, of course - of any number of transformative projects over time.

Kaiser's own field of particle cosmology certainly has no shortage of deep questions, some of which he mentions near the end of the video.

Did the members of the "Fundamental Fysiks Group" save physics? Doubtful. But I'm pretty sure they enjoyed it more.

It's just a guess. 

Wayne