He talked and he talked and

"If you talk all the time about something, you stop knowing anything about it" - the poet Kazim Ali, in February's Poetry magazine.

I loved the counter-intuitive nature of this quote. When people complain about not having enough time, or of being overwhelmed by one email after another, they're having a perfectly rational response to an always-on world that more than ever seems to demand a performance. What they're saying is that they can't feel. The irony is that science is rapidly converging on the idea that what we feel is supremely important to intelligence, or at least the kind of creative far-sightedness that is so valuable today to art and business alike.

Very early in an otherwise forgettable book, The Social Animal, David Brooks writes:

The research being done today reminds us of the relative importance of emotion over pure reason, social connections over individual choice, character over IQ, emergent, organic systems over linear, mechanistic ones, and the idea that we have multiple selves over the idea that we have a single self. If you want to put the philosophic implications in simple terms, the French Enlightenment, which emphasized reason, loses; the British Enlightenment, which emphasized sentiments, wins.

Sentiment doesn't subvert reason. Sentiment makes human reason possible - the kind of reason able to hold out possible worlds for examination, to think deeply about the next move in a competitive market or a game of chess, to extend mercy when none may be merited.

I don't think it's a coincidence that The Onion, Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart offer more grown up insight than some putative news sources. Like Ali, they intuitively know that given a way to communicate with everyone on the planet and unable to stop talking, the joke, sadly, is on us. There is value in being able to stop long enough to know what we're saying, to feel something toward the object of our thinking.

Wayne

Flying humans buzz New York City

Colossal points out that the marketing team for the upcoming movie Chronicle has ditched the movie trailer for something bit more theatrical. Watch.

Wayne

What are you doing with the facts?

It's surprising, according to The Creativity Post, how little effort is given to the how of thinking. Creativity is about thought-in-action - far less about the facts than how those facts are combined:

We go to school and learn about Albert Einstein and his theories about the universe and we say he was creative. We are not taught how he thought. We're taught he was simply more intelligent than other scientists. We're taught nothing about his mental process of 'combinatory play' of visual images or the irrationality of his way of speculative thinking about 'damn fool ideas,' or the many dead ends and failures he experienced. We're presented with his idea as a product of superior intellect and knowledge. Analogically, as if we are taught how to measure daily rainfall by the rise of water in a pail without ever realizing that the rain arrives in individual drops.

But how much more difficult it is to think of creativity as a phenomena that results from a certain combination of relationships. This combination includes the principles of intention, belief, attitude, behavior, language, knowing how to change the way you look at things, knowing how to think in different ways and learning how to think inclusively without the prejudices of logic. We've been schooled to think of them all as separate and distinct entities so they can be described and explained. Despite the apparent separateness of these at this level, they are all a seamless extension of each other and ultimately blend into each other.

Like nature, the contents of creative genius aren't contained anywhere but also are revealed by the dynamics. (emphasis supplied)

Every speaker that appears at the IdeaFestival invariably shares stories from his or her experience. And in almost every case, they've changed how they looked at a problem or thought differently or "lived in the question" long enough to arrive at a solution that they might have prematurely excluded if "just the facts" were brought to bear.

I hope to see you in September.

Stay curious.

Wayne

The New Big Blue Marble

It's a massive and richly detailed update on an icon taken by the crew of Apollo 17 at a distance of about 28,000 miles. (For comparion's sake, the ISS orbits at an altitude of less than 280 miles.)

The full sized retake, taken by the Earth observation satellite Suomi NPP, is enormous but well worth the time to download. It's simply gorgeous.

Wayne

Some rights reserved by NASA Goddard Photo and Video

You don't like regression analysis! Are you well?

Written in the context of a discussion on the cultural development of the "extrovert ideal" in Susan Cain's excellent book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking," the following quote ends with some gentle sarcasm. Cain carefully distinguishes "shy" from "introverted" - one fears social judgement, the other doesn't - and points out that the presumption about what the shy and introverted should like doesn't go in the other direction.

The pressure to entertain, to sell ourselves, and never to be visibly anxious keeps ratcheting up. The number of Americans who considered themselves shy increased from 40 percent in the 1970s to 50 percent in the 1990s, probably because we measured ourselves against ever higher standards of fearless self-presentation. 'Social anxiety disorder' — which essentially means pathological shyness — is now thought to afflict nearly one in five of us. The most recent version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-IV), the psychiatrist’s bible of mental disorders, considers the fear of public speaking to be a pathology — not an annoyance, not a disadvantage, but a disease — if it interferes with the sufferer’s job performance. 'It’s not enough,' one senior manager at Eastman Kodak told the author Daniel Goleman, 'to be able to sit at your computer excited about a fantastic regression analysis if you’re squeamish about presenting those results to an executive group.' (Apparently it’s OK to be squeamish about doing a regression analysis if you’re excited about giving speeches.)

And the nerds rejoiced. We need every kind of mind.

Wayne