The IdeaFestival's one and only rule

I love meeting people who discover the festival and decide then and there that they just HAVE to be a part of it.

I was once that guy.

Yesterday, I took part in a couple of IdeaFestival meetings with various organizers and interested people. Following the second get together late in the afternoon, I was approached by someone who was new to the whole idea and wanted to know more. Over the years, I've learned that the most common question we get when meeting with people about the festival is this one.

What is it?

Here's my answer to that question. The IdeaFestival is a celebration of the central fact of early 21st century life, which, paraphrasing Daniel Pink, is that it's become a whole-brain world. Reason and logic will take you a long way, but whether you're an artist, businesswoman or scientist, an ability to envision an alternate path, to imagine, to connect the factual dots as it were, will get you where you want to be. In this world, the meaning makers win.

The biggest struggle most of us have in our day to day lives is the struggle to refocus, to escape the routine and the rote answers the routine brings. It's work to just look up from whatever and whoever might be on our minds at the moment.

With lives emulsified with more and more data, with demands on our attention and with old businesses being replaced with the new - anyone remember Kodak? - being curious is the difference between the ordinary and extraordinary. For people like me the frontiers are internal. The hard problem of consciousness, for example, is endlessly interesting. For others they frontiers are external. True, a restless mind guarantees nothing. But without a desire to walk toward the unknown and a certain tolerance for uncertainty, nothing of value ever happens.

To be an expert one must take risks.

The terrible business truth today is that doing the same old thing may get you the same old result. It could also drive your business or organization into extinction. Apple is the most capitalized company on the planet because it created whole new markets. It broke the rules. And now it gets to make the rules. I've since forgotten the statistic, but more than - probably much more than - half of its revenue is derived from products that didn't even exist as recently as 2007.

Every IdeaFestival fan or organization that makes its way to Louisville for one week in September makes a faith statement. As Kris Kimel explained to the afternoon audience yesterday, we don't do tracks. There is no business track. There is no arts' track. There is no day set aside just for physicians, accountants or marketing professionals. One presentation on mindfulness will follow another on what nature can teach us about complex systems will follow another on what magic says about belief and everyday life.

No person who goes to the festival knows what she will find. The measurables, the metrics and measurements (gah!), have almost nothing to do any answers supplied by the incredible people who show up year after year to speak. The only measurable is the electrifying connection you will make, let's say three hours and fifteen minutes into the second day of the nerdocalypse when you realize that what speaker A and speaker B were saying has a lot to do with your situation C.

That flash of insight is all yours. But you must do one thing and one thing only to have that moment.

Stay curious.

I hope to see you in September.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by eflon

Mice and men and memory

NPR Cosmos and Culture reports that false memories have been successfully implanted in mice by observing the memory-forming areas of their brains. So why is this interesting?

Two reasons stand out.

Working together, the brain and body inhabit a world that continually imparts jolts and jabs. The whole embodied enterprise, for us, is a cooperative effort to make sense of day-to-day life. So I'm wondering to what extent any false memory will last once the mouse's brain and body once again begin to correspond without the experimenter's electric mat tazing the poor creature's feet.

Nonetheless, the writer, Barbara King, suggests that the sufferers of post-traumatic stress syndrome may one day benefit from this research insight. Let's hope so.

She also raises this unexpected point:

Scientists have known for a long time that human memory is both unreliable and reconstructive, that is, we modify our memories heavily as we revisit them. But why would evolution have allowed the brain to be built in such a way? What's the benefit?

Speaking to the The New York Times, study scientist Susumu Tonegawa speculated that the benefit may have to do with the creativity that underlies human artistic and scientific endeavors, which depends on thinking freely about both real and imagined events. This thought makes sense to a biological anthropologist like me.

I too find a bit of worldly solace in the idea that an unreliable memory might also let us think freely about "real and imagined events," or that this imperfection makes room for the creative spark.

IdeaFestival 2013 speaker Oliver Burkeman, in fact, expands on that thought when he talks about the undesirability of pushing aside all bad memories or unpleasantness in a (futile) quest to be happy. Getting outside our comfort zones expands our creative horizons. We grow. For a tease on this and other themes on which he will no doubt expand in September, I encourage you to watch his video.

Stay curious!

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by kjarrett

We know what we are, but not what we may be

Lord, we know what we are, but know not what we may be.

Hamlet, Act 4, Scene 5

Beginning at the 15:45 mark in this video at RSA, Sir Ken Robinson discusses the generative dynamic of learning, comparing it one point to the exchange between actor and theater-goer.

I like that.

Jane McGonigal, who spoke at IdeaFestival 2008, has written extensively about play and alternate reality gaming as a performance of belief, and I think the festival is theatrical in a particular way.

It is to understand that when John Barker said "what is, is possible" last year, he was making not just a comment on the regenerative potential of human biology, his research interest, but saying something about the staggering ability of the human mind to hold out other worlds for examination.

It is to understand that when serial entrepreneur Peter Sims said that "success is a terrible mentor," he was making a comment on the choice to believe in only what we can see or feel at the moment. On this account, failure, likewise, has far less to do with what has happened. It has a much more to do with what we are thinking now.

Even though the festival has featured many incredible people talking about many amazing things, it is really about no-thing at all - that missing limbs are not disqualifying, that that last failure is not defining, and that when it comes to what is, the human mind deals in mere fractions. Battered as it may sometimes be, it is the belief that there is more than this.

"What we are" is worlds away from "what we may be." Harnessed to a worthy goal, make-believe has the generative potential to become belief-made.

Festival Passes for IdeaFestival 2013 are now on sale. But don't wait too long! We're expecting to sell out again.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image of the Globe Theater: Some rights reserved by Arbron

There is a danger to search

If you've been following the latest Five Questions interview series - and if you haven't watched them, do so right after reading this post - you may have heard IdeaFestival 2013 speaker and Technology Review editor Jason Pontin reference the digital critic Nicholas Carr.

Here's a January entry by Carr at American Public Media's Marketplace on how "search" means something much different than it once did.

When we talk about 'searching' these days, we're almost always talking about using Google to find something online.

That’s a big change for a word that long carried existential connotations -- a word that had been bound up in our sense of what it meant to be human. We didn’t just search for car keys or missing socks. We searched for truth, for meaning, for transcendence. Searching was an act of exploration that took us out into the world, beyond ourselves, in order to know the world, and ourselves, more fully.

On his blog he writes that "a true search is as essential as it is dangerous."

I love that idea.

The searches at the IdeaFestival are as much about meaning as they are answers, and the danger, such as it is, is strictly personal. That's good. Because while the questions at the festival are often thought provoking, difficult, even, the rewards are worth the effort: the answers your find will always be yours.

Stay curious.

Wayne

Image: Some rights reserved by ºNit Soto

Awe, "opensure" and happiness: Five Questions with Oliver Burkeman

If someone handed you a piece of paper tomorrow that told you exactly how the rest of your live would unfold in every detail, you would hate it, even if what was on that sheet of paper was all good.

Covering a rather large plot of psychological terrain, journalist and author of "The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking," Oliver Burkeman talks with the IdeaFestival for our Five Questions series. Similar interviews have been done in the past three weeks with Maria Konnikova, Jason Pontin and Ariel Waldman.

Each of these terrific people will speak at IdeaFestival 2013.

Calling awe a mixture of wonder and fear, and the most "undervalued emotion," Burkeman describes the sensation as "not entirely pleasant." He offers attending the birth of a child as one example.

Burkeman also uses a term new to me, "opensure," or a fundamental openness toward the unknown, which contrasts neatly with what I judged in my question to him to be a widespread longing for certainty. And: "an ability to rest in mystery is a crucial 'negative' skill."

As for creativity and innovation in the business world, Burkeman argues that systems designed to avoid failure will inevitably fail. And breakthroughs that find cultural homes or financial success, are, like our happiness seeker, governed by paradox: it is often when "you are not focused on one specific endpoint, of knowing that things have to turn out one specific way, that you can hear opportunity knocking from other directions." 

Perfect.

Don't miss Oliver at IdeaFestival 2013! In the meantime, please enjoy an all-too-brief encounter in the video here. Have a great, great weekend.

Stay curious.

Wayne

1. Let's start with the obvious question: why would positive thinking be counterproductive?
2. The prolific blogger Andrew Sullivan often writes about the subject of doubt, comparing its virtues favorably to a cultural moment that would appear to crave certainty. Is doubt a "negative" power? 1:06
3. Buddhism and the monotheistic traditions have a long tradition of apophatic thinking, of triangulating, rather than directly appropriating, a big idea. Insofar as the experience of a becalmed and starry night, for example, is such a happy one, it would seem that people value awe roughly as much as knowledge. Why does "not knowing," as it were, produce this feeling? 2:58
4. You've written a couple of times at the Guardian about how a new purpose for an old object emerges once we overcome a predisposition toward functional fixedness. The process sounds like it may be useful to our happiness seeker. Perhaps once he or she stops thinking about what happiness should mean and pays attention to what, for them, it does mean, they're miles ahead. Would you agree or disagree? 4:30
5. What questions will IF fans have after your talk? 5:56
6. Do you have a favorite unanswered question? 7:25