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The Science of Kissing, Selling Your Brain, The Other Wes Moore, Personal Foul, Dying to Do Letterman, The Drunkard's Walk, Live to 250 - beginning on Wednesday at 10a, single event tickets for these and many more IdeaFestival 2011 events will be available!
Wayne
The IdeaFestival was founded on the assumption that most people have little opportunity to get out of their field to learn how to integrate, and apply to their area of interest, important ideas.
The quote above reminded me of a blog post last week at Psychology Today, "How our Senses Influence Creativity," in which the author makes the point that an ability to think broadly, or creatively, depends to an extent on what our senses are telling us.
Such research demonstrates strong links between perception and cognition. For instance, research has found that the concept of power is related to vertical spatial positions: powerful groups and powerful animals were identified more quickly when they were at the top of the screen, whereas there was no effect for powerless groups and animals. Another study found that when participants held a heavy (vs. light) clipboard, they invested more cognitive effort in dealing with abstract issues, such as displaying more elaborate thinking.
One of the real ironies of our hyperconnected age - my view - is that the information we process while compulsively texting, checking email or answering the phone takes far too much time in the march happening in our prefrontal cortex and contributes far too little to the creative process. Fixed on the fleeting detail, we lose the bigger picture. At the moment, we're focused on the vibration in our pockets. At the moment, we're thinking about the call we should make to a business associate. Staring at the drive-through monitor, at the moment we might supersize that lunch.
Stop. Give yourself a chance to incorporate what your eyes and ears are telling you.
The IdeaFestival is the perfect place to put aside the phone for a little cognitive down time "out of your field." You'll be surprised at the unexpected left-field connection that happens.
Wayne
Rhodes Scholar, Army Captain, paratrooper and veteran of Afghanistan, Wes Moore is honored in Time as one of its New Greatest Generation (the story is behind a paywall). Moore has started a mentoring program for first time offenders in his native Baltimore.
Watch this video for more on the Time story, and then read what Moore's web site has to say about "The Other Wes Moore," his book about two people with the same name whose lives went in dramatically different directions:
In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore.
Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen?
Moore will be speaking at IdeaFestival 2011.
Wayne
Narcissists may look like good leaders, but are they? Freakonomics:
Generally speaking, narcissists tend to do well in life. Which is strange, since we usually look down on traits such as arrogance and inflated self-image. And yet, for all the reasons we hate them, society usually rewards narcissists in one crucial category: leadership. For some reason, even though we claim to see through all the trappings of self-love and big egos, we tend to think that narcissists make good leaders, and in group settings, consistently lift them to positions of power.
Confident self-presentation is an important part of believability, yes. But I find it interesting how self-absorbed individuals are seen as good leaders while the creatively-absorbed agonize over their image and work. If you have an opportunity today, do yourself a favor and read Joshua Mehigan's eremitic and lovely meditation on self-expression, mental illness and poetry, "I Thought You Were a Poet" at Longform.org.
All leaders, whether narcissists or not, require our attention. Today, let's practice good followership.
Wayne
In his "neurosphilosophy" column in the Guardian, Mo Constandi writes about IdeaFestival 2011 participant Daniel Simons and the subject of inattentional blindness. Simons makes a number of points - most notably that our auditory sense can similarly be deceived, and that inattentional blindness increases with the demands of a task - but most interesting is the following thought: "the bigger issue is not our failure to notice. The problem is with our mistaken intuitions about what we will notice."
One of things I've learned in the time that I've been writing this blog is just how little of our walking around lives are present to conscious thought and reflection. It's the same phenomenon philosopher of psychology Eric Schwitzgebel writes about at length on his blog, Splintered Mind, the "intelligent mistakes" that precede the fatal calculations of pilots, as described by author Laurence Gonzales, or more happily, the contented lull that great magicians like Teller use to great effect on stage. Teller does one thing. We think another.
Constandi's column is based on this interview posted at his Google+ account, which goes into much more detail. Check it out.
Wayne