Do stay in touch

We're so happy you read the IdeaFestival blog! You've no doubt heard by now that Google Reader will be discontinued on July 1, so if you'd like to continue taking the blog's syndicated feed, you will need to move it and any other feeds you may have to another service by the end of the month.

I've found Feedly to be an exceptional replacement, and the service, which appears to be the destination of choice for former users of Google Reader, has said that it will provide the cloud backend to quite a few desktop and mobile RSS clients, including Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader. Feedly also has iOS and Android clients for those news junkies who take their feeds on mobile devices.

Feedly's plug-ins for Chrome, Safari and Firefox web browsers are a terrific way to add feeds to your collection as you browse the web.

The IdeaFestival syndicated feed isn't of course the only way to stay in touch with us! Why not consider taking the IdeaFestival newsletter, which provides subscribers with festival speaker and agenda updates, ticketing information, select blog posts and generally talks about all things IdeaFestival. See the lower right side of our home page to subscribe with your email address.

The festival is also quite active on Twitter (@ideafestival) and Facebook, where you will find assorted and eclectic linkage, comment and general nerdery all day long. Our Twitter following is growing especially fast. If you haven't tried Twitter, or if you're an old hand and don't follow us already, please do so.

Finally, video interviews with Maria Konnikova and Jason Pontin have also been scheduled and will be recorded soon for posting to the IdeaFestival blog. The festival is also working with several other people, including Ariel Waldman, to schedule similar efforts. Many of these individuals will be speaking at IdeaFestival 2013 as well. So stick around to see what they have to say about their upcoming appearance!

Stay curious.

Wayne

Peter Sims image: Geoff Oliver Bugbee

Rafe Sagarin - The writer, philosopher and marine biologist

Taking his cue from the biological systems he studies, Rafe Sagarin, who will speak at IdeaFestival 2013, describes how nature differs from individual expertise when it comes to problem solving.

Step one: don't be so sure that you understand the problem.

That more perspectives you can bring in, which could be represented in nature as multiple... ways to solve an unknown problem, the more likely you are to be able to deal with whatever it turns out that problem [is].

Oriented toward survival in the singular and perpetuation on the whole, nature is marvelously resilient because it is adaptable. In human affairs that means the help you seek just might enter through the side door. Yes, of course! Expertise and accomplishment should be applauded, but it can often benefit from a perspective other than its own.

So don't be the hedgehog.

In a sad parenthetical, Sagarin also describes how the trained volunteers on hand to attend to the exhausted runners in the Boston Marathon supplied the necessary expertise to deal with an entirely unforeseen event.

Wayne

Don't be the Hedgehog

Has 90 percent of all the world's data really been created in just the past two years? Referring to IBM research, Nate Silver throws out that statistic in the RSA video embedded here.

Silver, author of "The Signal and the Noise," talks about big data and hedgehog thinking, or a predisposition, in the case of the latter term, toward One Big Theory to explain a collection of unrelated information. The problem for the would be theorist is not that she might be right, but that she might be right in an unproductive way. Her result does not arrive with the potential for a deeper understanding of the questions being asked. And when wrong - and perhaps this is particularly true in a world now emulsified with more and more data - she is surprisingly or alarmingly wrong.

"We are our own constraint," Silver says, as explains why the process of inductive reasoning is so productive and the advice of experts, especially media-driven personalities, has a no better than random chance of being right.

Following up his initial observation, he concludes that "the obvious problem here is that 90 percent of the useful knowledge has not been created in the past two years."

Watch the video. And stay curious.

Wayne

The Signal and the Noise from The RSA on Vimeo.

Curioustimized

Can forgetting help you learn? Of course! Imagine trying to rummage through all the possibilities, ever, for where you left your keys yesterday morning when you were running late for work. Having lived in one place for the past several years, you discount, without thinking, every possible answer that includes prior residences.

The flexible brain has not evolved for perfect recall, but for recalling relevant information. Moreover, we don't strictly remember facts of the matter, but the meaning derived from those facts - especially, and sadly, if the facts of the matter are associated with a bad experience.

Dwelling excessively on past failure is a learning inhibitor, and it has often been said that elite athletes must have a short memory. Perhaps one factor in athletic achievement is a capacity for learning from, and then forgetting, the failure itself.

Perhaps the same is true of innovators. Because our metaphorical minds relate everything in a terms of another thing, forgetting can open us to new ideas, experiences or emotions.

In his latest Guardian column, Oliver Burkeman, who will speak at IdeaFestival 2013, links to a new tongue-in-cheek dictionary, the "Emotionary," that seeks to assign words to unnamed emotions. Naming these emotions may seem like a fun if pointless exercise, but as Burkeman suggests the process of naming serves an important and practical purpose in psychiatry since it may determine whether a patient's sad experiences are part living, or if they stray into rather more serious territory and medication is recommended.

The sheer variety of emotion is staggering.

Having been involved for several years now in the growth of the IdeaFestival, I'm quite familiar with the feeling of minding my own business, contentedly listening to a speaker discuss her experiences or breakthrough when BAM!, a new thought leaps into my head because I was unknowingly relating the discussion to that vague notion orbiting recently on the periphery of my own thinking. I've been curioustimized, or experienced the state of having had my curiosity optimized by forgetting for a few moments what it is I thought I knew.

Give thanks that our recall isn't perfect.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by gagilas

Wired for Laughter

If we are wired for laughter, why?

Reading Laughter and the Brain this morning brought to mind autistic savant Daniel Tammet's observation at IdeaFestival 2010 that he learned the art of social navigation by watching his classmates on the playground and making predictions against which he would compare results.

So it is with laughter. Humor offers unique insight into the working of the human mind because, in part, we are all little scientists constantly comparing the world to scripts unfolding in our heads. And as with magic and illusion, comedy exposes the unconscious assumptions we make as we compress an external and largely unknown reality into lived experience.

Laughter and the Brain:

Recently, scientists have begun conducting research into the neurological processes underpinning mirth and laughter. I would not suggest that neuroscience can 'explain' humor or provide the reason why we laugh at certain jokes or cartoons and not at others. Trying to parse humor, in any case, can be a self-defeating exercise. As E. B. White once wrote, 'Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.' Still, neuroscience can provide some useful insights into what happens when we find a joke or cartoon funny. Ultimately, it isn’t just humor that we seek to better understand, but rather, that most complex and elusive of organs: the human brain.

Humor's power is associative. It depends on shrewd observation. Done skillfully, the well time joke or aside can take on subjects that are much too sensitive to be discussed otherwise. Former IdeaFestival attendee and speaker Baratunde Thurston's satirical self-help book, How to Be Black, effectively raises issues about race in America in a way that a purely historic or straightforward examination never could. In laughter, understanding.

And profit. Thurston's company, Cultivated Wit, will be glad to consult with you on your latest product or company strategy.

Joke telling can also be compared neurologically to the creative act because for both inhibition must be lowered. It is a kind of high wire walk because there is danger.

Indeed, when a comedian bombs on stage, it can take a personal toll on his or her mental health. In an interview with fellow comedian David Steinberg on Showtime’s Inside Comedy, Steven Wright described comedic performance as 'very dangerous, like walking a tightrope, or like running across a lake of ice where the ice is breaking behind you and it is going to take an hour to get to the other side.' Steve Martin told [comedian David] Steinberg of the comedian’s need to steel himself against the pain aroused when no one laughs at a joke or, worse yet, when you get booed off the stage. 'Stand-up comedy is the ego’s last stand,' according to Martin. This proved true for the late Jonathan Winters, who suffered a serious nervous breakdown during a performance in San Francisco in 1959. After spending time in a psychiatric hospital, Winters returned to stand-up only to suffer another nervous collapse two years later, after which he quit nightclub performances altogether and turned his attention to making records.

There really is no "humor center" in our wetware, just a collaborative effort between brain and body, between sense and sense making, to bring order to experience. If there is a deep association in the mind between logic and laugher, perhaps the "why" of humor is to demonstrate just how much there is left to know of the world.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by f_mafra