Amazing pic: "Space jump" practice

Courage is the power to let go of the familiar. - Raymond Lindquist

Felix Baumgarnter stepped out of this capsule at 71,000 ft. yesterday in a practice jump for a record setting attempt from 120,000 ft. later this year.

After reaching that height beneath a balloon, the Austrian skydiving veteran ran through a lengthy checklist, depressurized the capsule and then stepped outside in a custom suit designed for the plunge. At this altitude a exposed human would quickly die from the near total lack of atmospheric pressure, having bodily fluids literally boil away.

Later this Baumgartner, will attempt to break the record leap of 101,000 feet set in the early years of the U.S. space program by Col. Joe Kittenger, who tested the fabric and technology that would later be worn by U.S. astronauts in orbit. Organizers believe Baumgartner may break the speed of sound in a five and half minute free fall.

Wayne

CREDIT: Jay Nemeth/Red Bull Content Pool

The dark side of teams

Scanning the morning feeds, I ran across a couple of articles that bear on creative judgements and teams. One has to do with the famously closed Apple design process, which its chief designer, Jonathan Ive, says "doesn't do focus groups." Wired expands: "The irony, of course, is that in avoiding focus groups altogether, Apple has managed to make the most commercially successful phones and tablets on the planet."

Also showing up this morning was some business management research from The Wharton School, which suggest that collaborative judgement-making too often rejects outside information. And that leads to diminished performance.

The corporate formula for innovation often focuses on creating a team of experts to cook up the next big thing. Groups of managers -- typically composed of individuals from a variety of fields, including engineering, marketing and operations -- band together to develop new products or services that can create top-line growth. In a recent paper, Wharton management professor Jennifer Mueller and Wharton lecturer Julia Minson looked at the dark side of teamwork -- the tendency of those groups to become insular and less efficient as they grow in complexity.

In "The Cost of Collaboration: Why Joint Decision-making Exacerbates Rejection of Outside Information," Minson and Mueller found that people working in pairs were more likely to dismiss outside input than individuals working alone.

Innovation-by-committee isn't an optimum strategy. That finding won't surprise anybody. I just found it interesting that the variable in both cases here is a willingness to consider outside information. The solo creative, or at least one who can see to it that her vision prevails in a corporate setting, is demonstrably more open to experience, which will include alternate takes on the problem at hand. The result may be spectacularly bad, or in the case of Jonathan Ive, just spectacular.  

Wayne

Jason Silva: "engineering inspiration" means new eyes

There are a couple of interesting ideas in the announcement that filmmaker and futurist Jason Silva will be speaking at PSFK Conference NYC. One is that "biology is now an information technology subject to the same radical progress of Moore’s law," which means that biology might be digitized and accessed just like any other realm of knowledge. He compares the revolution to "software that writes its own hardware."

The other? I liked Silva's take on creativity, which reminds me a lot of the effect the IdeaFestival has over the course of four days.

Tom Robbins says you can’t manufacture creativity or wonderment, but you can pull yourself out of context so dramatically that you gawk in amazement at the ubiquitous everyday wonders you’re culturally conditioned to ignore. I think this is key: To get new ideas we need to see the world with new eyes–we need to evoke a novel way of seeing things.

Stay curious.

Wayne

What can novelists learn from neuroscience?

Language continually expresses one thing in terms of another. What's more, science can demonstrate that far from mere expression, language and metaphor color our physical experience of the world. Remorse, for example, affects how individuals judge the relative light inside a room.

The evolutionary biologist Robert Sapolsky makes that point in a piece from 2010, "This is Your Brain on Metaphors," putting it this way:

In a remarkable study, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help (that the experimenters had set up) that came shortly afterward. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren’t the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands.

Authors of course have been using this knowledge for centuries, skillfully connecting with readers through the use and arrangement of symbols on a page to produce various emotional states. And in a wider sense, the arts draw on the psychic, emotional and material to make subjective statements about the human condition, deducing what it can from incomplete information.

At the Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer turns the tables, interviewing novelist and psychologist Charles Fernyhough, author of Box of Birds, on the use of neruoscience in his work. It's a deeply informed back and forth about a growing and fruitful exchange between the arts and science, as well as its limits. Check it out. What can novelists learn from neuroscience?

Wayne

The Love Competition

Watch several people in the Love Competition think as hard as possible about love while having their brains imaged. It will move you. Keep the tissues handy.

Wayne

The Love Competition from Brent Hoff on Vimeo, discovered via Maria Popova.