IBRAIN

June 24th, 2018

Much of advertising is designed to appeal to the quick-solution-seeking, lazy parts of ourselves. 

 

How successful would an advertising campaign be if the product proudly claimed that one had to work consistently every day for the benefits of the product to be realized.  Advertising does the opposite, claiming that the product will make this hard work disappear, that the benefits will come effortlessly.

 

 

 

The truth is somewhere on the spectrum between these two extremes.

Technologies can drastically reduce effort and maximize benefit. 

 

 

 

 

The design of the medieval plow underwent a huge change in Eastern Asia, giving birth to the modern shape of a plow and the use of the old design for centuries is claimed to be the single largest waste of human energy ever, due to the inefficiencies of the original plow shape.

But technologies do not always improve so straightforwardly. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Smartphones are undeniably more versatile but their effectiveness might be called into question if we are spending countless hours scrolling Facebook or Reddit. Just 20 minutes of this a day, say, in bed before falling asleep, adds up to more than 5 full days a year.  Perhaps that doesn't seem like much.  But how nice would it be to get 5 full days of sleep? 

 

How long does 5 days feel if we couldn't eat for that long?  

What if that 5 days was used to meditate?  Instead of an endless stream of mostly forgotten information, we would have a calmer life, clearer thinking, more appreciation, gratitude and self control.  How might this affect the other 1,420 minutes of each day?

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recently I saw this tagline: "the 57 must-have apps for entrepreneurs". 

No entrepreneur has time for 57 apps, especially if they are trying to start a business.

 

 

 

 

Might the number of apps we have and the time we waste using some of them be a good metric for the good or bad state of our brains? 

We have spring cleaning for the house and we take out the trash daily. Might the same be applied to our phones? Our brains?

Versatile technology means we are given a choice about how to use it.  Will we use the technology to help us be better people or just placate the lazier parts of who we are?

 

 

 

 

Very few people are actually laughing out loud, certainly not as much as is claimed.

 

But those consistently using a meditation app to help them build a good habit are actively using technology to build better brains.

 

TWO EYES

June 23rd, 2018

Watching a 3D movie is interesting for about 7 minutes. After that, it’s easy to forget you’re watching a 3D movie. Perhaps that’s because we are so used to 3D . . . i.e. normal life away from a screen.

Close one eye and try and go about your day though, and quickly it’s apparent that something important is missing. You can make sense of everything alright, but it’s flat as hell and distances feel less intuitive.

 

 

 

 

 

Any given subject, no matter how we are looking at it, always benefits from a shift in perspective. Like flipping a card to see who won the poker round. It can seem like the card has changed, but of course it hasn’t. Our perspective of that card has changed. It no longer holds possible promise or defeat, it reveals certainty. Or rather, our perspective reveals that defeat or victory. Our understanding of the card has deepened because of the shift in perspective.

Think of a child with a new toy, turning it over and over, inspecting every facet of it. learning. This is the joy of the 3D world, experiencing in such a visceral way that everything has many sides to it depending on how we look at it.

Our language hijacks the visual experience as a metaphor. Do you ‘see’ a solution? Can you ‘see’ the point she’s trying to make? For good reason too. The more sides of a given topic that someone can ‘see’ the greater variety of useful and possible interpretations are available…

Looking at a coffee mug with one eye is only one interpretation of that coffee mug, like a face-down card. Open the other eye and it pops. Suddenly you have a lot more information.

We need multiple perspectives on the same thing to understand it. And the more perspectives we do the hard work to ‘see’, to learn and understand, the more well-rounded we may be said to be.

Perhaps this is why life has evolved just about all seeing-creatures with two or more eyes.

From birth we learn constantly through two simultaneous perspectives.

How might we take a cue from evolutionary biology?

Who is better suited? The stubborn one banging against the wall? Or the determined one who looks at the whole wall and notices a door in it? Both are trying to achieve the same thing: getting to the other side. But only one is willing to entertain multiple perspectives of the problem.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Of course it’s no surprise that one-eyed monsters are considered so… one-track-minded….and, well. dumb.

Maybe a good question to ask is:

Are their any topics that you’re being a real dick about?

 

 

 

(P.S. There is a one-eyed animal, it’s called a copepod. It’s really really small, too small to notice. Which is… perhaps appropriate)

TO UNDERSCORE OR ERASE?

June 22nd, 2018

Our brains have a finicky relationship with facts.

 

Logically, rationally, it would make sense to gobble up as many facts as we can.  Each new fact increases the accuracy of our mental model of the world.  And a more accurate map means you can travel around the real terrain with far more ease.

 

This is not what we do though.

 

If we come across a new fact.  Particularly one that is especially at odds with the way we look at any particular subject.  What do we usually do?

 

We stick to what we know, what we believe, and everything we’ve been doing based on that set of thinking.

 

 

One of the reasons that beliefs are so sticky, is that usually when we come across information that contradicts what we think we know.  Usually it’s false. (like what the crazy person on the street corner says)

 

But not always.  

 

And there’s the catch.  We ignore almost all information that contradicts our ideas.  This means we are also missing out on small bits of important information that could aide us.  We miss out because the habit of ignoring contradicting information is predominately an emotional reaction.

 

How do beliefs change?

  

Beliefs change due to emotional reactions.  It’s the emotional experiences that easily influence how we think, believe and act in the future.

 

Back in the days of the saber tooth tiger, this was bloody useful.

 

Those days are long gone though.

 

The best way to learn is not through our emotional experience of the world.  That mechanism is still useful, but it can also be very misleading.  Calmly, quietly and thoughtfully considering facts gets us to where we’re hoping to go much faster.  Much MUCH faster than simply reacting to what’s going on.

 

Research shows that information contrary to our opinions and beliefs even hardens those preexisting beliefs.  Even if that new information is widely replicated as fact.  The polarization over Climate Change is a prime example.

 

What is the antidote?

 

It’s not easy:

 

It requires slowing down and being skeptical about our own beliefs.  It requires entertaining the idea that our beliefs might be wrong, that our beliefs might even be damaging. 

 

It requires thoughtfully considering.

 

Taking the spotlight off of the quick emotional reaction.

 

Practicing humility.  Remembering:

 

We know far less than we feel we do.

 

There’s a whole lot of world out there.

 

We only have two eyeballs worth of it.  When those two, limited, windows through which we experience the vast universe come across something new.  Maybe different.  Potentially threatening to some entrenched believing system we have.  How do we react?

 

Do you underscore?

 

Or are you willing to erase?

 

And

 

Write something new.

 

Something better.

SLIDING UP

June 21st, 2018

This episode references episode 33 entitled Rose-Colored Cuffs. If you'd like to fully understand the reference, it's suggested that you check out that post first.

We do not install slides where we have staircases for obvious reasons. Slides are fantastic. . .

But only in one direction. 

Every person past playground-age has experienced the difficult results of testing the hypothesis of whether it is possible to go UP a slide. Just like this kid.

Often our success is dependent on a good pair of sneakers and a strong grip. 

Inevitably the stairs prove to be far more convenient.

These structures, and the images evoked by the way we interact with them – or rather the way we try to interact with them can provide some kinder understanding to some of our thoughtfully bad habits:

Our love of conclusions.

Our subsequent tendency to pigeonhole people. . .

Our discomfort with uncertainty.

Our fear of the unknown, the untried & the untested.

On a large enough scale, progress looks much like a staircase. Take this staircase for example.

This staircase, much like the playground staircase, is a ripe analogy.

Each plateau is a rest, a pause between efforts.

And effort here is defined as an interaction with that uncertain space. The space between each stair, between each little plateau. It is the space where failure might creep in. Where we might take a wrong turn. A space that takes energy to interact with in order to make something happen.

Indeed, even when trying to go UP a slide, we invoke the same strategy. With each teetering step, the child tries to grip the slide like a stair. We pause to take a breath, regain balance, and continue.

Each step is like a current conclusion. The last idea we had that panned out. And now we are in a different place, a better place, a higher place with a better perspective, a bigger context. The pattern of the staircase illuminates the solution for getting stuck.

This is often what happens though. We reach a conclusion and we stay there. We get stuck. We get lazy, and we forget what we probably look like from higher up on the staircase.

We form a specific idea about someone, and having reached that conclusion, our ideas about that person stay there, right on that stair and we may be guilty of shackling them with ROSE-COLORED-CUFFS. Totally ignorant of a better perspective, a bigger, more generous context.

Sometimes a person may surprise us. And we are vaulted up a few stairs. 

Somehow, we always seem to forget the surprise and apply it to the future.

We forget that there are more stairs.

In every single aspect of our lives we are climbing a staircase, or usually, just standing in the middle of a staircase, our eyes trained down, locked on the current context. Too lazy to look up and continue the hard work.

Learning something new is climbing a staircase. And each little ‘ah ha!’ moment is the triumph over that uncertain space, when our new footing – a higher footing – is found.

Sometimes the next step is high above, and it’s as if we need to climb a slide to get up there.

Often times this is what we see, looking up at a slide from the bottom. We think, “well that’s not meant to go up.” So we stop. We stay where we are. We climb other stairs. Stairs that still look like stairs. The easy stuff. The low-hanging fruit.

Often times we’d benefit from a little more of that rebellious spirit we all had as kids, when we were willing to entertain ridiculous hypothesizes, testing them, just for the fuck of it, to test our own ability, to test our own ridiculousness.

But then again, if human progress is shaped like that sloping staircase, it shows that walking up the stairs quickly fails as a strategy. The same way low-hanging fruit is easy, but runs out quickly.

To get to the next step, it’s more like climbing a slide.

Enduring the uncertainty for longer.

Entertaining the untried, the untested, and gripping the way up any which way we can, inventing new strategies as we go, and doing our absolute best to do the impossible,

to slide up.

P.S. With practice, with the right idea, the right strategy, or the right technology, getting up that slide can be exhilharating, fast and mindblowing. Like this.

RATE OF CHANGE: NOT IN MY LIFETIME!

June 20th, 2018

It is worth noting that in 1901, Wilbur Wright said to his brother. . .

 

 

 “Man will not fly for 50 years.”

 

 

 

This was not a dejected, negative reaction to one of their failures.  This was an honest prediction.*

 

*I think it’s fair to surmise this because of two auxiliary points:  Once after a failed flight attempt when Wilbur really was feeling down, he said that man won’t fly for a thousand years.  This has the proper hyperbole of a person feeling like a failure.  The other point is that the 50 year prediction is part of a larger quote that assures Wilbur’s attempt to make an accurate prediction. It also encapsulates the main point of this post:

 

“I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years… .  Ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions” – Wilbur Wright, in a speech to the Aero Club of France, 5 November 1908

 

 

 

Wilbur Wright was one half of the Wright Brothers, who invented the first airplane.  They accomplished this two years after Wilbur made the above prediction.

 

Two years.

 

Here was a man who was about as close to the invention of flying as you could get at the time.  Someone who thought about the subject deeply – who sought to make progress.  We could say that Wilbur, at the time, was one of only two world-class experts in aviation.

 

And yet, his estimation for how long it would take was 25 times more than what actually happened.

 

2 years later they had figured it out. 

 

We expect our experts to be a bit more accurate.

 

 

 

That Wilbur’s dreams were realized in only 2 years is not the most important part of this story.  What happened 67 years later says far more about Wilbur’s poor ability to predict than his dream being realized in 2 years.  What happened 67 years later?

 

 

We put a man on the moon.**

 

 

 

 

From no flight to moon landings.  In a breathtakingly short amount of time. 

 

A little more than a hundred years before Orville and Wilbur cracked the mystery of the bird, the first steam locomotive was invented.    And before that was thousands and thousands of years of walking or trusting an animal to do your walking for you. 

 

Progress follows a very counter-intuitive trend.  While it can crash, stagnate and plateau for long periods of time… when progress is occurring, it does not look like a steady even climb.  It’s more like SLIDING UP by driving a motorcycle at full speed up a slide.

 

 

 

 

Computers used to be giant, slow monsters that cost millions of dollars.  Today they fit in our pockets and not only are they 1,000’s of times cheaper.  They are millions of times more powerful. 

 

When people talk about nanobots, and AI, our default reaction is disbelief fueling doubt.  But if we look on a large enough time line, we can see just how little time is needed for huge changes.

 

It might be worth pausing to think more carefully the next time we hear something and feel the urge to say….

 

 

Not in my lifetime!

 

 

 

 

 

 

**It’s also important to note that Wilbur’s ’50 year’ prediction overshoots the breaking of the sound barrier in 1947.  While the moon landing is more iconic and therefore more useful in this post.  Breaking the sound barrier deserves special merit, simply because it probably wasn’t imaginable.  Going to the moon was imaginable (though not believable) because it was clearly a place, and we are familiar with going from one place to another.  But we were not so familiar with special events that occur at obscure thresholds – like the sound barrier.  Wilbur could have looked at the moon and imagined himself up there looking back.  It’s doubtful that he could have imagined a sonic boom.

 

 

 

 

What unpredictable sonic booms might lie in the future?