Interesting things come from people interested in things

Lightly edited and re-posted, this blog entry and video are great reminders that IdeaFestival 2013 is fast approaching! Festival passes may be purchased here, but don't wait too long. Sales are well ahead of last year's pace.

Stay curious!

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The most interesting things come from people interested in things - artist Hasan Elahi

Here are some of the reasons why I think curiosity is important.

Genuinely curious questions open us to new information. And a comfort with novel information and new experiences in general are traits all creative people share.

There are strong links between curiosity and personal satisfaction, curiosity and good health, and curiosity and successful business. About the latter: studying a field other than your own is linked to insight, problem solving and, if the new understanding is skillfully brought to market, to profit. So yes, interesting things come from people interested in things.

When questions and a desire for novelty are preferred over answers and rigid certainty, hope and optimism grow. Fear diminishes.

We know from a number of studies that curiosity is a predictor of intelligence.

Curiosity is a social skill. It tends to diminish over time. But it's a skill that can be learned. One of the founders of modern dance, Isadora Duncan, is quoted as saying, “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it.” Experience creates meaning. Curiosity informed by experience shows us the difference that can make a difference.

And as individuals, curiosity clarifies. Given permission to explore the world around us, the world around us will eventually tell us who we really are. 

Wayne

Being the Octopus

Grabbing my attention because of an audio interview I did years ago with University of Louisville professor and evolutionary biologist Dr. Lee Dugatkin on Octopus cognition and perspective-taking (wait for the slider to load), the following paragraph describes why an understanding of the first-person experience is so easy to have and difficult to pin down.

On Being an Octopus

How do we approach questions about 'what it’s like' to be something or someone? One way of asking these questions makes them impossible to answer regardless of what minds might be made of. In this interpretation, to ask what it’s like to be a bat or an octopus is to ask for a description, given from a third-person point of view, that encapsulates the animal’s experience itself. But having an experience will always be different from having a description of it. This will be true if we are biochemical machines and true also if there is a soul-like extra ingredient in the world. A gap between a first-person and a third-person point of view arises either way.

Descriptions are not completely powerless, though, in helping us get a grip on what the experience of another might be like....

Getting a sense of what it feels like to be another animal—bat, octopus, or next-door neighbor—must involve the use of memory and imagination to produce what we think might be faint analogues of that other animal’s experiences.

What is being described is the "hard problem" of concioussness. It may be answerable to science, or it may not. But as I read the piece it occurred to me that the first-person experience, followed by a theory of mind - or the belief that other creatures like you are similarly endowed - would not only have required the imagination, but in some ancient and distant past virtually discovered it.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by maureen lunn

Postponing the verdict on life

Two quotes struck a chord with me yesterday while scanning material to post to Twitter and Facebook - you do follow us there, right? - because they go to the heart of the IdeaFestival.

"The Essayification of Everything:"

What is behind our attraction to it? Is it the essay’s therapeutic properties? Because it brings miniature joys to its writer and its reader? Because it is small enough to fit in our pocket, portable like our own experiences? I believe that the essay owes its longevity today mainly to this fact: the genre and its spirit provide an alternative to the dogmatic thinking that dominates much of social and political life in contemporary America. In fact, I would advocate a conscious and more reflective deployment of the essay’s spirit in all aspects of life as a resistance against the zealous closed-endedness of the rigid mind. I’ll call this deployment 'the essayification of everything.'

'The essay, like this one, is a form for trying out the heretofore untried. Its spirit resists closed-ended, hierarchical thinking and encourages both writer and reader to postpone their verdict on life. It is an invitation to maintain the elasticity of mind and to get comfortable with the world’s inherent ambivalence. And, most importantly, it is an imaginative rehearsal of what isn’t but could be.'

The other is this quote from a brief question and answer exchange between science journalist and author Jennifer Ouelette and astrophysicist Mario Livio posted at Scientific American. Livio, on risk taking and thinking outside-the-box as a critical component of progress:

There are many modern discoveries that were at some level the consequence of serendipity, or initial blunders. Some of the better known examples are penicillin, and post-it notes. In general, a large fraction of the discoveries of new medications is the result of serendipity or, to some extent, 'brilliant' blunders.

One can easily image a public official today outraged over the funding of mold studies. And sadly, "knowing" has always been far darker and more harmful in the hands of the sure. Thank goodness we don't know because change, as it were, is not only ever present but if this research is correct, our willingness to explore and its concomitant call to embrace doubt and uncertainty plays an enormous role in our sense of ourselves. Channeled through exploratory science and intrepid art, through business risk and honest personal reflection, change might just be the key variable in full lives.

So postpone the verdict on life.

Posted recently by Maria Popova, Joss Whedon's recent commencement address at Wesleyan University is chock full of insight into the human condition, including the advice to embrace our contradictions - the urge to love and despise, to embrace and condemn, to make both trouble and meaning. But the observation that "you do not pass through this life, it passes through you" is especially poignant to me. There are as you read this uncounted particles issued from ancient furnaces hot and bright passing through the Earth and your body toward futures and destinations that you and I cannot comprehend. The stuff of life does pass through all of us, and fittingly it's the stuff we can't see. An "elasticity of mind" does not mean minimizing what is known, but acknowledging and becoming comfortable with the thought that what can be known is more than we can imagine, if we first start humbled.

For a few hours and days in September, the festival brings that dazzling variety of life to bear. It is humbling. It is about this too. Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by ferax

Overlooking the nail in your head

Always displayed on Andrew Sullivan's web site, Orwell's "to see what's in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle" is advice any creative, entrepreneur or scientist will find valuable. There are of course things that confound simple observation - the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and the many cognitive biases to which each of us are prone come to mind - but having a good look around may be humanity's oldest discovery technique.

That's especially true when it comes to personal discovery. Facilitator, business coach and improv aficionado Johnnie Moore uses this very funny video as a reminder "not to fall in love with your schtick," to be open, in other words, to further personal growth or to consider the idea that a nail in your head might just be a nail in your head.

So stay curious! And don't forget to buy your festival pass for IdeaFestival 2013.

Good grief, it hurts just looking at that video.

Wayne

Liz Cohen - Wrench, worth, bodywork

Over the course of eight years, Liz Cohen took two cars, an East German Trabant and a Chevy El Camino, and created something new. As the daughter of immigrant parents she learned that custom cars, like identity, are always "in a state of approach."

Creative Capital:

As Liz explains in the video, Bodywork is essentially a project about transformation and hybrid identities. She says, 'Cars can have so much to do with people’s identities, and national identity. For example, the Trabant and the El Camino both embody the values of the two countries that they come from. I thought that was a nice foil for what could happen to a person who is going from one country to another, or from one job to another job, or is marginalized in any way from the mainstream.'

Cohen spoke at IdeaFestival 2012 as part of a group of Creative Capital artists that included Sam Van Aken, Hasan Elahi and Tahir Hemphill. We're delighted that Creative Capital will once again bring a diverse group of artists and fresh perspectives to Louisville in 2013.

Cohen's video is part of the "IF Conversations" series. Have a look at the most recent releases, as well as a few of the more popular videos.

And don't miss IdeaFestival 2013!

Wayne