Pick Your Path

The journey of a thousand whatevers doesn’t start with a single step, it starts with a decision.

Decisions are powerful things, but we have to get them out of the way if we are to move forward. Perpetually keeping your options open leaves you with nothing but options. If you’ve ever known anyone who truly lives in the moment, nothing matters except that moment. Things only have value over time, and that value starts with choosing one thing over another.

In an excerpt from his AMA, writer and producer Dan Harmon tackles writer’s block, saying, “[T]he reason you’re having a hard time writing is because of a conflict between the goal of writing well and the fear of writing badly.” The act of writing kills the fear of writing. Making the decision to just get down to it dispels the crippling fear of doing it.

From the page I feel a lot of pressure
I treat it like it’s too precious
Like there’s an audience saying, ‘Impress us!’
But it’s just my impression
— Roy Christopher, June 19, 2007

That same conflict is evident in other processes besides writing, and it often builds into a wall that stops us from doing the things we want to do. Novelist Emma Campion (2016) puts it this way:

All this fear and doubt was simply a surge of energy that needed release, and it was my choice whether I used it to destroy or create. I played with this and noticed that when I used it to destroy, the energy didn’t release but grew in intensity; but when I used it to tell a story I could feel the relaxation as the pressure eased (p. 12).

That energy just builds until you either decide to use it, or it uses you. Think about how big a deal finding a meal can be: It’s really not that crucial of a choice, it just has to be done — repeatedly. That’s why many overly productive people eat the same few meals over and over again to avoid this unnecessary deadlock. Campion concludes, “All the edgy feelings want is for me to surrender to the story. All I need to do is get out of my own way” (p. 12). You are most often the thing that is holding you back.

I love the way Charlie Skinner (played by Sam Waterston) expresses the power of making decisions in the beginning of this clip from The Newsroom (2012): “We just decided to.” Sometimes that’s all it takes.

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Remember: There is nothing so liberating as making a decision.

References:

Campion, Emma. (2016). Turning Fear into Excitement. In Signature’s Ultimate Guide to Writing Advice (p. 12). New York: Penguin Random House.

Gooden, Casey. (Writer & Director). (2015). We’ll Find Something. New York: We’ll Find Something.

Sorkin, Aaron (Writer), & Mottola, Greg (Director). (2012). We Just Decided To [Televison series episode]. In A. Sorkin & S. Rudin (Producers), The Newsroom. New York: Home Box Office.

Wright, Megh. (2016, November 4). Read Dan Harmon’s Excellent Advice for Overcoming Writer’s BlockSplitsider.com.

How Soon is Now? The Perpetual Present

When I was growing up, the year 2000 was the temporal touchstone everyone used to mark the advances of modern life. Oh, by then we’d be doing so many technologically enabled things: Cars would fly and run on garbage, computers would run everything, school wouldn’t exist. We were all looking forward, and Y2K gave us a point on the horizon to measure it all by. When it came and went without incident, we were left with what we had in the present. In Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now (Current, 2013), Douglas Rushkoff argues that the flipping of the calendar to the new millennium turned our focus from the future to the never-ending now. “We spent the latter part of the 20th Century leaning towards the year 2000, almost obsessed with the future, the dot-com boom, the long boom, and all that,” he tells David Pescovitz, “It was a century of movements with grand goals, wars to end wars, and relentless expansionism. Then we arrived at the 21st, and it was as if we had arrived.”

“We spent centuries thinking of hours and seconds as portions of the day,” he continues, “But a digital second is less a part of greater minute, and more an absolute duration, hanging there like the number flap on an old digital clock.” A digital clock is good at accurately displaying the time right now, but an analog clock is better at showing you how long it’s been since you last looked. Needing, wanting, or having only the former is what present shock is all about. It’s what Ruskoff calls elsewhere “a diminishment of everything that isn’t happening right now — and the onslaught of everything that supposedly is.” As the song goes, when you say it’s gonna happen “now,” well, when exactly do you mean?

Michael Leyton (1992) calls us all “prisoners of the present” ( p. 1), like runners on a temporal treadmill. He argues that “all cognitive activity proceeds via the recovery of the past through objects in the present” (p. 2), and those objects often linger longer than they once did thanks to recording technologies. In 1986 Iain Chambers described the persistence of the present through such media, writing,

With electronic reproduction offering the spectacle of gestures, images, styles, and cultures in a perpetual collage of disintegration and reintegration, the ‘new’ disappears into a permanent present. And with the end of the ‘new’ – a concept connected to linearity, to the serial prospects of ‘progress’, to ‘modernism’ – we move into a perpetual recycling of quotations, styles, and fashions: an uninterrupted montage of the ‘now’ (p. 190).

Present ShockNeedless to say that the situation has only been exacerbated by the onset of the digital. In one form or another, Rushkoff has been working on Present Shock his whole career. In it he continues the critical approach he’s sharpened over his last several books. Where Life, Inc. (Random House, 2009) tackled the corporate takeover of culture and Program or Be Programmed (OR Books, 2010) took on technology head-on, Present Shock deals with the digital demands of the now. A lot of the dilemma is due to the update culture of social media. No one reads two-week old Tweets or month-old blog posts. If it wasn’t posted today, in the last few hours, it disappears into irrelevance. And if it’s too long, it doesn’t get read at all. These are not rivers or streams, they’re puddles. All comments, references, and messages, and no story. The personal narrative is lost. It’s the age of “tl; dr.” The 24-hour news, a present made up of the past, and advertising interrupting everything are also all about right now, but our senses of self maybe the biggest victims.

“Even though we may be able to be in only one place at a time,” Rushkoff writes, “our digital selves are distributed across every device, platform, and network onto which we have cloned our virtual identities” (p. 72). Our online profiles give us an atemporal agency whereon we are there but not actually present. On the other side, our technologies mediate our identities by anticipating or projecting a user. As Brian Rotman (2008) writes, “This projected virtual user is a ghost effect: and abstract agency distinct from any particular embodied user, a variable capable of accommodating any particular user within the medium” (p. xiii). Truncated and clipped, we shrink to fit the roles the media allow.

Mindfulness is an important idea cum buzzword in the midst of all this digital doom. Distraction may be just attention to something else, but what if we’re stuck in permanently distracted present with no sense of the past and no time for the future? If you’ve ever known anyone who truly lives in the moment, nothing matters except that moment. It’s the opposite of The Long Now, what Rushkoff calls the “Short Forever.” Things only have value over time. Citing the time binding of Alfred Korzybski, the father of general semantics, Rushkoff illustrates how we bind the histories of past generations into words and symbols. The beauty is that we can leverage the knowledge of that history without going through it again. The problem is that without a clear picture of the labor involved, we risk mistaking the map for the territory.

James Gleick summed it up nicely when he told me in 1999,”We know we’re surrounding ourselves with time-saving technologies and strategies, and we don’t quite understand how it is that we feel so rushed. We worry that we gain speed and sacrifice depth and quality. We worry that our time horizons are foreshortened — our sense of the past, our sense of the future, our ability to plan, our ability to remember.” Well, here we are. What now?

The existence of this book proves we can still choose. In the last chapter of Present Shock, Rushkoff writes,

…taking the time to write or read a whole book on the phenomenon does draw a line in the sand. It means we can stop the onslaught of demands on our attention; we can create a safe space for uninterrupted contemplation; we can give each moment the value it deserves and no more; we can tolerate uncertainty and resist the temptation to draw connections and conclusions before we are ready; and we can slow or even ignore the seemingly inexorable pull from the strange attractor at the end of human history (p. 265-266).

We don’t have to stop or run, we can pause and slow down. Instant access to every little thing doesn’t mean we have to forsake attended access to a few big things. Take some time, read this book.

References:

Chambers, Iain. (1986). Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience. New York: Routledge.

Leyton, Michael. (1992). Symmetry, Causality, Mind. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Morrissey, Steven & Marr, Johnny (1984). How Soon is Now? [Recorded by The Smiths]. On Hatful of Hollow [LP]. London: Rough Trade.

Rotman, Brian. (2008). Becoming Beside Ourselves: The Alphabet, Ghosts, and Distributed Human Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Rushkoff, Douglas. (2013). Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Current.

It’s All in the Risk: The Creative Edge

There are plenty of people trying to get at the heart of creativity, where it comes from, and how to get there. All of us at some point need that creative spark, and sometimes it can be so elusive it’s difficult to imagine it happening at all. Knowing more about the cognition of creativity is like knowing how a car engine works: It doesn’t make you a better driver. Finding the creative Edge is a far more personal quest.

The Edge, he said, have to find that Edge. He made you hear the capital E. The Edge was Fox’s grail, that essential fraction of sheer human talent, nontransferable, locked in the skulls of the world’s hottest research scientists. — William Gibson, “New Rose Hotel”

Part of conjuring that Edge is making space for it to happen. Finding the space rarely works, so you have to tip it in some way. Just going for it is one way. Setting aside all of your fears of failure, self-editing, and just getting out of your own way. Ice-T puts it bluntly and succinctly [runtime: 1:37]:

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Playing it safe isn’t interesting. — Ryan Kidwell

As Ice-T mentions, Edge gets you right in the middle of that creative process.* you have to step outside of your comfort zone and find that space where it happens. Like the dreamers in Inception (2010), creating and experiencing the world simultaneously.

If you’ve ever seen anyone rap off the top of their head or improvisation well done, you know what getting in the middle of that process looks like. When someone is truly, spontaneously in the present moment. You can do it with any creative endeavor. Writing and riding are the two activities where I most find I need the Edge, and sometimes lightning does strike, but it’s all too rare.

Alex Burns described that zone to me as “hot space,” the place where creativity is happening in your head right then. After bouts with creative blocks, it’s namesake, Queens 1982 record Hot Space, was recorded in short bursts of studio time. Here’s a clip of them recording “Under Pressure” with David Bowie [the first half of the clip or so; runtime: 7:02]:

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Each of us have different limits, but we all have to venture outside of them once in a while. If you never cross the line, you’ll never know where those limits are, and you may never find the Edge you need to get past your obstacles. Push Your Self.

————

*This isn’t the first time the worlds of William Gibson and Ice-T have collided. The Iceberg was the leader of the Lo-Teks, “J-Bone,” in the Gibson-penned, 1995 movie, Johnny Mnemonic.

Expanding Minds: Books on Hacking Your Head

Thinking about our own minds often seems so pataphysically impossible as to be useless and silly, but, to paraphrase Steven Johnson (again), trying to understand the brain is trying to understand ourselves. By contrast, trying to expand and enhance it seems much easier. You can expand your mind without really understanding how it happens. There are many ways to make your brain feel bigger, and these three new books provide many steps in that direction.

Upgrade your grey matter because one day it may matter.
— Deltron 3030

Mindhacker: 60 Tips, Tricks, and Games to Take Your Mind to the Next Level by Ron Hale-Evans and Marty Hale-Evans (Wiley, 2011), the “unofficial sequel” to Ron’s previous book, Mind Performance Hacks: Tips & Tools for Overclocking Your Brain (O’Reilly, 2006; which I mentioned previously). From the sublime to the silly, extensive lists of mental activities, experiments, and games comprise these books, and they’re as fun as they are fertile.

Many of the hacks here take advantage of the fact that the way you see your mind and your world are often radically related, if not often the same thing. What I mean is that a lot of these are not just mental exercises, but tricks for productivity, ways to communicate better, hacks for breaking bad habits, tips for time management, and creative ways to be more creative. It’s not just about the hacks though. Mindhacker is also stocked with other (re)sources: Relevant URLs, books, and articles are listed on every page, along with the stories of the hacks’ origins, and the book’s website has even more, including pieces of code as well as complete programs.

Speaking of programs, Andy Hunt’s Pragmatic Thinking and Learning (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2008) tackles maximizing the mind from a programmer’s point of view, and it overlaps and complement’s the books mentioned above nicely. Maps, models, recipes, and other scripts and schedules are a part of Hunt’s push, but you don’t have to be code nerd to get plenty out of this book. It has helpful tips for everyone. Chapter four, “Get in Your Right Mind,” even suggests rock climbing, which I regularly use to clear my mind’s cache.

From the grounded to the grandiose, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension by Andy Clark (Oxford University Press, 2011) stretches the mind in multiple manners, also blurring the line between the brain and the world. Clark’s extended mind thesis posits the mind beyond the body… Sometimes. That is, sometimes we perform a Dawkinsian flip, seeing the biosphere as an endless network of DNA regardless of organismal boundaries; sometimes our brains and the brains of others are emphatically embodied. It’s a simple but sizable distinction. Where we draw those lines changes everything about how we see the mind and the world.

Other than a few minor missteps (e.g., In his conclusion, Clark unfortunately defines the mind as a “mashup,” when really he just means that it’s extremely diverse, infinitely adaptable, and ultimately mysterious), Supersizing the Mind is one of the better books I’ve seen in the neurosciences in a while.

If you want a brain book that’s handy and fun, I definitely recommend Mindhacker and Pragmatic Thinking and Learning. Those two, along with Dan Pink‘s book, A Whole New Mind (Riverhead, 2006), will get you a long way toward optimizing your cognitive output. If you want something a bit more theoretical, check out Supersizing the Mind. Either way, get to mining and minding your mind. It is still legal.

Obscured by Crowds: Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus

In The Young & The Digital (Beacon, 2009), Craig Watkins points out an overlooked irony in our switch from television screens to computer screens: We gather together around the former to watch passively, while we individually engage with the latter to actively connect with each other. This insight forms the core of Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (Penguin, 2010). Shirky argues that the web has finally joined us in a prodigious version of McLuhan’s “global village” or Teilhard de Chardin’s “Noosphere,” wherein everyone online merges into one productive, creative, cooperative, collective consciousness. If that seems a little extreme, so are many of Shirky’s claims. The “cognitive surplus” marks the end of the individual literary mind and the emergence of the Borg-like clouds and crowds of Web 2.0.

Okay, not exactly, but he does argue for the potential of the cognitive collective. So, Wot’s… Uh, the deal?

Is Clay Shirky the new Seth Godin? I’d yet to read anything written by him that didn’t echo things I’d read David Weinberger or Howard Rheingold (or Marshall McLuhan, of course), and I hoped Cognitive Surplus would finally break the streak. Well, it does, and it doesn’t. As Shirky put it in his previous book, Here Comes Everybody (Penguin, 2008), “society doesn’t change when people adopt new tools; it changes when people adopt new behaviors.” This time around he argues that we adopt new behaviors when provided with new opportunities, which, by my estimate, are provided by new tools — especially online.

Steve Jobs once said that the computer and the television would never converge because we choose one when we want to engage and the other when we want to turn off. The problem with Shirky’s claims is that he never mentions this disparity of desire. A large percentage of people, given the opportunity or not, do not want to post things online, create a Facebook profile, or any of a number of other web-enabled sharing activities. For example, I do not like baseball. I don’t like watching it, much less playing it. If all of the sudden baseballs, gloves, and bats were free, and every home were equipped with a baseball diamond, my desire to play baseball would not increase. Most people do not want to comment on blog posts, video clips, or news stories, much less create their own, regardless of the tools or opportunities made available to them. Cognitive surplus or not, its potential is just that without the collective desire to put it into action.

Shirky’s incessant lolcat bashing and his insistence that we care more about “public and civic value” instead comes off as “net” elitism at its worse. The wisdom of crowds, in James Surowieki’s phrase, doesn’t necessarily lead to the greater good, whatever that is. You can’t argue for bringing brains together and then expect them to “do right.” Are lolcats stupid? Probably, but they’re certainly not ushering in the end of Western civilization. It’s still less popular to be smart than it is to be a smartass, but that’s not the end of the world, online or off-. The crowd is as wise as the crowd does. Glorifying it as such, as Jaron Lanier points out in You Are Not a Gadget (Knopf, 2010), is just plain wrong-headed.

The last chapter, “Looking for the Mouse,” is where Shirky shines though. [Although its namesake echoes a story by Jaron Lanier from a 1998 Wired article about children being smarter and expecting more from technology. Lanier wrote, “My favorite anecdote concerns a three-year-old girl who complained that the TV was broken because all she could do was change channels.” Shirky’s version involves a four-year-old girl digging in the cables behind a TV, “looking for the mouse.”] His ability to condense vast swaths of knowledge into a set of tactics for new media development in this last chapter is stunning compared to the previous 180 pages. Perhaps he is the new Seth Godin afterall.

References:

Lanier, J. (1998, January). “Taking Stock.” Wired, 6.01.

Lanier, J. (2010). You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. New York: Knopf.

Shirky, C. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age. New York: Penguin.

Surowieki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Anchor.

Watkins, S. C. (2009). The Young & The Digital. New York: Beacon.

Dreaming Out Loud: Transubstantiation

Dreaming Out LoudIn 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl (Tarcher/Penguin, 2006),* Daniel Pinchbeck extends Heisenberg’s idea that observation influences the observed into a Hegelian wordview that consciousness constitutes the core of reality, as if the physical world and our perception of it are merely two sides of the same phenomenon. Taken wholesale, it’s not quite solipsism, but it’s close. Either way, the veneer between the two is definitely permeable, but one needn’t believe in magic to see how.

The world is inseparable from the observing subject and is accordingly not objectifiable.
— Arthur March

I’ve written before about the Burkian designation of literature as “equipment for living.” As Richard Rorty puts it, “the point of reading a great many books is to become aware of a great number of alternative purposes, and the point of that is to become an autonomous self.” Virtual reality started with the first story told. Literature is a workout for your mind.

The prosifications of the greats are no more use than dumb bells under the bed if you don’t pump them. — Eddie Coffin in Tibor Fischer’s ‘The Thought Gang’

When different situations exist in your world, your brain is different. New knowledge and new stuff physically and chemically changes the make up of what’s in your head. Howard Bloom uses the example of bags used to carry things. In his “Jack the Pelican presents” lecture from 2003, he explains transubstantiation (i.e., things moving between the spiritual realm and the material world) by saying that our brains are different when different inventions exist. That is, we have different thoughts and dreams after certain ideas and innovations exist in our world (the material to the spiritual). Before bags were invented, one could only carry what would fit in one’s hands. After bags, well, it depends on the bag and one’s fortitude for carrying.

Looking down on empty streets, all she can see
Are the dreams all made solid
Are the dreams all made real

All of the buildings, all of the cars
Were once just a dream
In somebody’s head
— Peter Gabriel, “Mercy Street”

Howard also explains a dream invention that he’s had since he was a boy and how a computer company set out to make it, saying that one of his lifelong dreams will be a reality (the spiritual to the material). It’s not What the Bleep Do We Know? or The Secret, but it can be powerful — if not magical — stuff.

My first memory of something passing through the spirit/world barrier was one of my moms’ friends telling me she had a dream about a balloon tree. She managed to remember the idea and executed a version of it for her daughter’s birthday party to great effect. The next time I paid attention to the idea was when I first met Paul Barman.

Paul takes his dreams very seriously. “I always try to make my dreams come true,” he told me. “When I dream about something, if I can possibly make it happen… I mean, what better instructions could you be given?”

References:

Fischer, T. (1997). The Thought Gang. New York: Scribner.

Gabriel, P. (1986). So. Geffen Records.

Kain, P. J. (2005). Hegel and the Other: A Study of the Phenomenology of Spirit. New York: SUNY Press.

Pinchbeck, D. (2006). 2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.

Rorty, R. (November 2, 2000). “The Decline of Redemptive Truth and the Rise of a Literary Culture.” Retrieved from Richard Rorty’s Homepage.

* I’m finished reading it, so this is the last post about this book, I promise. Also, his is sort of a companion piece to the last post, Pumping Irony: Technology and Disconnectivity, albeit from the opposite extreme.

[“Ballon Tree” drawing by Roy Christopher]

Mirroring Minds

In researching technological mediation (which many of you know has been my most intense intellectual jones over the past few years), I started looking internally a year and a half or so ago. Internally meaning cognitively, thinking that quite a lot of the process I’m trying to figure out is going on inside our heads. I first read about mirror neurons when David Byrne and Daniel Levitin were in Seed Magazine‘s “The Seed Salon,” and I immediately knew I’d stumbled across something I couldn’t ignore. Continue reading “Mirroring Minds”

Mind Wide Shut: Recent Books on Mind and Metaphor

Scientists have used metaphors to conceptualize and understand phenomena since early Greek philosophy. Aristotle used many anthropomorphic ideas to describe natural occurrences, but the technology of the time, needing constant human intervention, offered little in the way of metaphors for the mind. Since then, theorists have compared the human mind to the clock, the steam engine, the radio, the radar, and the computer, all of increasing complexity. Continue reading “Mind Wide Shut: Recent Books on Mind and Metaphor”

Jonah Lehrer: The Fourth Culture

Jonah Lehrer In 1959, C. P. Snow lamented a chasm between what he called the Two Cultures: artsy types on one side and stuffy science folks on the other. Well, Jonah Lehrer has been trying to bring them back together. His book Proust was a Neuroscientist (Houghton Mifflin, 2007) makes large strides toward their collusion by showing how the insights of several artists, musicians, writers, and one chef were a step ahead of the science of their time. In spite of Sir Karl Popper’s insistence that “real” science be falsifiable (though even he respected the authority of the artist), art often tells us more about ourselves.

Noam Chomsky once said, “It is possible — overwhelmingly probable, one might guess — that we will always learn more about human life and personality from novels than from scientific psychology.” Examples of the overlap between art and science are not difficult to unearth. World-renowned physicist Richard Feynman was known to draw, Philip K. Dick‘s A Scanner Darkly (for one example from Dick’s vast canon) explores possible effects of a corpus callosotomy, and Lehrer himself reveals many more in his article “The Future of Science is Art” from Seed Magazine, where he is Editor at Large.

Up against Lehrer, with his post at Seed, his oft-updated blog (The Frontal Cortex), and his well-written, well intriguing book, the rift between the two cultures doesn’t stand a chance.

Roy Christopher: How did the people in Proust was a Neuroscientist come together? Was James Joyce too easy an example? How about Philip K. Dick?

Buy This Book from Powell'sJonah Lehrer: I’m always a little embarrassed to admit just how idiosyncratic my selection process was for the eight artists in the book. Once I had this idea about artists anticipating the discoveries of modern neuroscience –- and I got that idea when I started reading Proust in a lab — I began to see connections everywhere. I’d mutter about the visual cortex while looking at a Cezanne painting, or think about the somatosensory areas while reading Whitman on the “body electric.” Needless to say, my labmates mocked me mercilessly. But, in general, my selection process could be boiled down to this: I began with my favorite artists and tried to see what they had to say about the mind. The first thing that surprised me was just how much they had to say. Virginia Woolf, for instance, is always going on and on about her brain. “Nerves” has to be one of her favorite words.

Joyce makes a few appearances in the book, but so much ink has already been spilt on Joyce and “consciousness” that I wanted to find something a little more surprising. And Philip K. Dick will definitely appear in the sequel, when I get around to writing it.

RC: In light of all of the parallels between the Two Cultures that you’ve documented, do you think that C. P. Snow’s insight was a fallacy?

SEED Magazine: The Future of Science is ArtJL: Of course, there are real differences between our Two Cultures. Artists speak with metaphors, brushstrokes and plot, while scientists rely on acronyms, experiments and control variables. Sometimes, the languages of art and science can be so different that it’s hard to imagine a consilience ever taking place. But I think that cheap and easy binary distinction is also a little misleading. For starters, artists often rely on experimentation while making art -– they’ll try out different approaches and see what “works” –- while scientists often depend on their imagination.

Finally, I’d add that you don’t have to go very back in time before this cultural distinction disappears. George Eliot, for instance, famously described her novels as a “a set of experiments in life.” Virginia Woolf, before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, said that in her new novel the “psychology should be done very realistically.” Or look at Coleridge. When the poet was asked why he attended so many lectures on chemistry, he gave a great answer: “To improve my stock of metaphors.” In other words, the poet didn’t believe that art and science needed to be separated.

RC: Snow’s Third Culture has given way to John Brockman’s Third Culture. Do you think the latter will inspire a proper version of the former?

JL: They’re fundamentally different enterprises. I believe that a third culture should ultimately be about re-creating a dialogue between our two cultures, which is what C. P. Snow was referring to. John Brockman, on the other hand, believes that the job of a third culture is to translate science for the masses. (As he puts it, “Science is the only news”.) That’s certainly a worthy endeavor — educating the public about science is really, really important — but it’s not a Third Culture.

RC: Is there a cultural divide between East and West? I ask because it seems to me that Eastern cultures — specifically Japan — are more open to what we would consider noise. Your chapter on Stravinsky got me thinking about this.

JL: That’s an interesting idea. I’m not aware of any research on that subject, but it’s certainly a testable hypothesis. I’d only add that I think neuroscience is really beginning to discover the importance of culture. We’re slowly beginning to learn all of the different ways the inputs of the arts — from “American Idol” to Wagner — can literally shape the brain. In other words, ideas are powerful things.

RC: What are you working on next?

JL: I’m currently hard at work on a book that should be published next year. (I just knocked on wood, in case you couldn’t tell.) The book is still coming together, but it won’t involve Proust, unfortunately.

Car-Race Meat Spiral Chief Restaurant Snail Button

No, it’s not some new awesome, all-purpose web widget. That was the subject line of an email I just received. The next one read “Butterfly Drink Book Army Data Base Aeroplane Space Shuttle,” and “Worm Data Base Rainbow Jet fighter Compass Pocket Telescope” was after that. They were spam of course, and, as much as it still frustrates me that there’s an entire industry dedicated to intruding my inbox (and phone line, and hard drive), I’m trying to see the positive.

Mind Performance HacksThe subject lines above are perfect fodder for Mind Hack #19 [Seed Your Mental Random-Number Generator] from O’Reilly’s Mind Performance Hacks (edited by Ron Hale-Evans). I mean, you can make that stuff up, but randomness is easier if it just arrives via email.

Another one I use a lot is Hack #27 [Play Mind Music]. Though I still often play Hip-hop when I work, I’ve been listening to more and more instrumental music. Here’s a sample of my recent playlist of “mind music”:

  • Explosions in the Sky All of a Sudden I miss Everyone, The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place, Friday Night Lights OST
  • Cliff Martinez Solaris OST, Wicker Park OST
  • Pelican City of Echoes, The Fire in Our Throats Will Beckon the Thaw
  • Red Sparowes At the Soundless Dawn, Every Red Heart Shines Toward the Red Sun
  • Main Hz, Motion Pool
  • Mogwai Zidane OST, Mr. Beast, Happy Music for Happy People
  • Peter Gabriel Long Walk Home (Rabbit-Proof Fence OST), Passion (The Last Temptation of Christ OST), Birdy OST
  • Brian Eno Eno Box I: Instrumentals, Music for Airports, Apollo, Discreet Music, etc.

(Brian Eno might be the best creative catalyst available, what with his cannon of ambient music and his co-creating the Oblique Strategies [Hack #23]). Mind Performance Hacks has nearly a hundred tricks and exercises to rattle your brain out of its usual patterns.

A Whole New MindI also just read The 4-Hour Workweek (Crown) by Tim Ferriss and am in the middle of Daniel Pink‘s A Whole New Mind(Riverhead), both of which have exercises that will make you think differently. The former has more for achieving personal goals, delegating responsibility, and getting free of your work, while the latter has more regarding cognitive and creative concerns. Pink contends that the next revolution will come not from left-brained engineers and accountants but from right-brained creative types like designers, teachers, and storytellers (good news for artists that want to be formerly known as “starving” — thank you, Govone), and his book is rife with exercises for your right hemisphere.

Anyway, I’m now thankful for weird subject lines in spam messages. Anything that makes me think about things in a different way is welcome.

What tricks do you have for tackling problems creatively?