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Archive for the ‘from the reading room’ Category

theWarofArt

Posted in books, creativity, from the reading room, writing, tagged on September 12, 2008| 3 Comments »

On the plane from Edinburgh to Tokyo I read theWarofArt by Steven Pressfield (ISBN 9 780446 691437). It’s subtitled “Break through the blocks and win your inner creative battles” and has a brilliant little Foreword by Robert McKee which really captures the essence and the scope of the book. It’s one of those books about creativity in general and writing in particular. There are no breakthrough insights here but it is a highly readable and very inspirational little book which is structured around three sections. The first is all about what stops us from actually creating – Resistance. This is a brilliant section. He describes Resistance as a force. A pretty malevolent force and one that can feel highly personal, but which, in fact, is an impersonal natural phenomenon. It’s what stops us from starting, what stops us from carrying on and what stops us from finishing. As he says right at the beginning –

It’s not the writing part that’s hard. What’s hard is sitting down to write.

Now there’s something you’ve heard before – that to write you need to turn up at the writing table, you need to sit down, stop sharpening the pencils, tidying the notebooks and post-its, stop browsing the web, and WRITE. It’s the getting started that’s hard.

Most of us have two lives. The life we live, and the unlived life within us. Between the two stands Resistance.

Isn’t that so true? There’s the things we want to do, the things we feel we should do, the things we feel we were even born to do, and then there’s what we actually do. And as we all know……..it’s what we actually do that matters. The commonest form of Resistance, of course, is procrastination, and he nicely captures its power –

The most pernicious aspect of procrastination is that it can become a habit. We don’t just put off our lives today; we put them off till our deathbed.

He reminds of the common stories of people who have been told they have cancer or some other serious disease and who change their lives from that day on; change their priorities; channel their energies somewhere else. And he reminds us how often these very same people end up surprising the doctors and everyone else by seriously overshooting their death sentence. Why, he asks, do we need to wait till Resistance faces us with disease and death before we pay attention and start to live the life we were born to live?

He’s great about the passive aggressiveness of victimhood. By victimhood he means that use of exterior loci of control so clearly described by William Glasser.

Casting yourself as a victim is the antithesis of doing your work. Don’t do it. If you’re doing it, stop.

There’s really a lot of refined gold in this tight publication. Let me finish telling you about the first section with a reference to his comments about criticism. I often think there are two common attitudes amongst people – the commonest one is to criticise and complain. On any train, in any cafe, in every work place, every day you’ll hear people expressing righteous indignation. It never makes life feel richer and it never seems to solve anything either. The less common attitude is DO, to be creative, to solve or to heal.

Individuals who are realised in their own lives almost never criticise others. If they speak at all, it is to offer encouragement. Watch yourself. Of all the manifestations of Resistance, most only harm ourselves. Criticism and cruelty harm others as well.

The second section of the book is entitled “Combating Resistance. Turning pro”. This contains his advice for beating the phenomenon of Resistance and here’s the secret – it’s to “turn pro”. By this he means living your vocation.

The professional loves it so much he dedicates his life to it. He commits full-time.

He cleverly takes everyday jobs as a model for becoming creatively professional. Here are ten characteristics or principles we can take from doing and everyday job and apply to the work of being creative –

  1. Show up every day
  2. Show up no matter what
  3. Stay on the job all day
  4. Commit over the long haul
  5. The stakes are high and real (it’s about survival, feeding our families, educating our children)
  6. Accept remuneration for your labour
  7. Don’t overidentify with your job
  8. Master the technique of your job
  9. Have a sense of humour about your job
  10. Receive praise or blame in the real world.

You’ll need to get the book to read the detail on those! But I’m sure you’ll agree they make sense.

The third and final section of the book is the one Robert McKee takes some issue with in the Foreword. It’s entitled “Beyond Resistance. Higher Realm” and in it Steven writes about Muses – the spiritual forces which bring us inspiration and which work with our genius. He describes them as Angelic forces but is very clear that you don’t have to believe in Angels to benefit from the work of the Muses. He makes the point that just as we can think of Resistance as an impersonal force, so can we think of the Muse as an opposite impersonal force and he describes how he begins every writing session with a prayer to the Muses. I liked this section at least as much as the rest of the book. However you want to conceive of the Muses, I think he is completely right about them.

Let me finish this little review with one of Goethe’s couplets which he quotes –

Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, magic, and power in it. Begin it now.

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Storytelling and the science of the mind

Posted in from the reading room, life, narrative, neuroscience, psychology, tagged on August 11, 2008| 3 Comments »

Because I deal with stories every day, I decided to learn more about the place of narrative in human experience, but coming from a medical perspective I couldn’t find much about narrative, even though there are emerging disciplines of “narrative-based medicine” and “narrative-based research”. Instead, I found the best thinking on storytelling lay in the world of the Humanities. In fact, Richard Kearney’s “On Stories” gave me more insights than any other single work.

It was interesting, therefore, to read this perspective, from Scientific American, which describes how researchers are beginning to study the use of narrative in order to gain insights into the workings of the mind. “Why does our brain seem to be wired to enjoy stories? And how do the emotional and cognitive effects of a narrative influence our beliefs and real-world decisions?”

The first problem scientists face, however, is defining a story! What exactly constitutes a story?

Exposition contrasts with narrative by being a simple, straightforward explanation, such as a list of facts or an encyclopedia entry. Another standard approach defines narrative as a series of causally linked events that unfold over time. A third definition hinges on the typical narrative’s subject matter: the interactions of intentional agents—characters with minds—who possess various motivations.

I loved the conclusion they reached –

However narrative is defined, people know it when they feel it. Whether fiction or nonfiction, a narrative engages its audience through psychological realism—recognizable emotions and believable interactions among characters. “Everyone has a natural detector for psychological realism,” says Raymond A. Mar, assistant professor of psychology at York University in Toronto. “We can tell when something rings false.”

In other words……you just know! How often this applies in life! How do you know when you are well? How do you know when your energy levels are good? Guess it’s the same when it comes to recognising a story. It’s a function of human intuition.

Do you become immersed in stories? Completely absorbed by them? Well, it turns out that if you have prior experience which is similar to that of the characters in the stories then you are more likely to become immersed in those stories. This is kind of obvious. It means that you are more likely to become absorbed by a story if you identify with the characters. One step beyond this conclusion is interesting though…..those who become more easily immersed in a wider range of stories have been shown to be those who have the greatest capacity to empathise. Interestingly, this can work the other way too…….you can increase somebody’s ability to empathise by teaching them literature! The ability to empathise is the ability to imagine what’s going on in someone else’s mind – scientists call this “theory of mind”. Theory of mind develops in children around the age of 5 and is a key part of the human ability to live in communities. So, storytelling also has the possibility of improving our skills in living together.

Other scientists have studied stories to see what they reveal about human motivations and goals –

As many as two thirds of the most respected stories in narrative traditions seem to be variations on three narrative patterns, or prototypes, according to Hogan. The two more common prototypes are romantic and heroic scenarios—the former focuses on the trials and travails of love, whereas the latter deals with power struggles. The third prototype, dubbed “sacrificial” by Hogan, focuses on agrarian plenty versus famine as well as on societal redemption. These themes appear over and over again as humans create narrative records of their most basic needs: food, reproduction and social status.

Are these the basic, common themes we find in stories? Do you agree that stories reveal the common human patterns of motivation and desire?

Let me finish this post with the final point made in this interesting article – the power of stories to influence us. This is well understood by advertisers and PR companies, but this point really struck me –

…..labeling information as “fact” increased critical analysis, whereas labeling information as “fiction” had the opposite effect. Studies such as these suggest people accept ideas more readily when their minds are in story mode as opposed to when they are in an analytical mind-set.

Now isn’t that interesting! Stories are more likely to convince people than “facts”!

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Inside the mind of Juliette Binoche

Posted in from the reading room, life, personal growth, psychology on August 6, 2008| 2 Comments »

Juliette Binoche is one of my favourite actresses so I was delighted to read a short interview with her in “Psychologies” magazine this month. The article referred to her creative range – as an actress, a painter and, now in London, a dancer. Even if you just check out her filmography, it’s clear this is someone who likes to push against her boundaries. In the interview she reveals a number of her key beliefs –

  1. Risk taking. “It’s when you are taking risks that you know what you’re capable of. You discover your strengths, and your self. So that’s why sometimes you have to push yourself a little bit in order to surpass your expectations.”
  2. Non-attachment. “I like to leave habits behind. They scare me. Life isn’t about hanging on to things”
  3. Learning. She’s a great example of what Carol Dweck calls “the growth mindset“. Asked about her parents divorce when she was young and being sent away to school, she responded “I took it as a learning process”
  4. Living in the present. “It’s important to me to make the present as beautiful as I can”
  5. Potential. Asked if creativity can be learned she said “We all have potential. We just need to stop being afraid of exploring something new, something daring. Someone said “We’re more scared of our lights, of our possibilities, than of our darkness” Why are we so scared of new beginnings?
  6. Internal locus of power. Like William Glass she clearly believes in Choice Theory. “We always think the solution is external, not internal. But real change comes from an internal shift”
  7. Importance of human connections. “I cannot work and not feel connected. It would make no sense to me. I need the human connection, the complicity…..”
  8. No regrets. Asked “Do you ever regret your choices?”, she responds “No. This is my life. When you have dark moments, desire does return. Life surprises you all the time. I just wish for the best, open my arms and go for it.”

I recently read an interesting post about life lessons from Bon Jovi…….well, this makes a nice collection of life lessons from Juliette Binoche.

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Two mindsets – fixed and growth

Posted in books, education, from the reading room, life, psychology on August 4, 2008| 8 Comments »

Stanford university psychologist, Carol Dweck has published a book entitled “Mindset. The New Psychology of Success” (ISBN 978-0-345-47232-8). Guy Kawasaki posted about it, and wrote a commendation which is printed on the front page. And Stanford Magazine did an article about it last year.

She’s identified two “mindsets” in relation to how people approach challenges and effort.

When you enter a mindset, you enter a new world. In one world – the world of fixed traits – success is about proving you’re smart or talented. Validating yourself. In the other – the world of changing qualities – it’s about stretching yourself to learn something new. Developing yourself.

One point she made which struck me as surprising at first was that people with a fixed mindset often have had lots of praise. She makes the point that just telling your child they are clever, or wonderful, or whatever, sets up a belief system in them which can become fixed and she recommends instead praising children for their effort, for what they’ve learned. This is her key point really – that when you have a mindset about loving learning you can grow, but when you have a mindset where you think talents are fixed then you get stuck.

The fixed mindset limits achievement. It fills people’s minds with interfering thoughts, it makes effort disagreeable, and it leads to inferior learning strategies. What’s more, it makes other people into judges instead of allies. Whether we’re talking about Darwin or college students, important achievements require a clear focus, all-out effort, and a bottomless trunk full of strategies. Plus allies in learning. This is what the growth mindset gives people, and that’s why it helps their abilities grow and bear fruit.

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Complexity, science and genes

Posted in from the reading room, philosophy on July 26, 2008| 1 Comment »

There’s a good piece in the New York Times today by David Brooks. He’s discussing the issue of genetics and pointing out very clearly and sensibly that the early claims about the possibilities which genetic discoveries might bring to understanding human behaviour were way off. As he says, first of all, we’ve seen there is no simple single mapping of particular genes to particular behaviours. There is no aggression gene for example. Instead behaviours seem to be related to multiples of genes, with there being literally trillions of possible combinations of interaction between the genes within the gene sets. Secondly, he points out that it’s now clear that genes only express their potential in the presence of particular environmental factors. And thirdly there is a total lack of clarity about the terms we use to describe our inner experiences. How do you know that what you can anxiety is what I’d call anxiety?

In conclusion, I think that what he highlights is that reality is messy and complex and those who are still enmeshed in the old logical positivist scientism just haven’t caught up!

Our lives are not determined by uniform processes. Instead, human behavior is complex, nonlinear and unpredictable. The Brave New World is far away. Novels and history can still produce insights into human behavior that science can’t match.

We can strive to eliminate that multivariate thing we call poverty. We can take people out of environments that (somehow) produce bad outcomes and try to immerse them into environments that (somehow) produce better ones. But we’re not close to understanding how A leads to B, and probably never will be.

This age of tremendous scientific achievement has underlined an ancient philosophic truth — that there are severe limits to what we know and can know

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Seasonal reading

Posted in from the reading room, life on July 22, 2008| 2 Comments »

book poster

I saw this photo on a bus stop shelter the other day. It’s promoting books to read during the summer. The headline says “This summer. I read”

Is your reading seasonal? If it is, are there particular kinds of books you prefer to read in certain seasons? Specifically, are there books you consider as “summer books”?

Did you ever read “The Summer Book” by Tove Jansson? It’s the story of a child who goes to spend the summer holidays each year with her great grand-mother on a remote, barely inhabited Finnish island. It’s a lovely book for the summer.

Mostly, however, I’m just a reader. An addict really. Got a never decreasing pile of books beside my bed (the size of the pile doesn’t change, just its content! I can’t say I’m aware of selecting particular books for the summer though.

Oh, on that advert at the bus stop, one of the book titles really amused me – “La Joueuese d’echecs” – which translates as “The Joy of Checks”.  🙂

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Time passes….just at different rates

Posted in from the reading room, life, philosophy on July 21, 2008| Leave a Comment »

When in France I enjoy picking up a magazine or two in the local newsagents. You just get a different kind of magazine in France from what is available in Scotland. One I like is “Philosophie”
philosophie
You’ll see I read it with my huge Francais-Anglais Dictionnaire to hand!
This issue has an interesting lead feature about the passage of time. Referring to philosophers past and present they consider time from three “dimensions” (with the seasonal focus being on how we experience the passage of time while we are on holiday).
They discuss “le temps de la nature”, “le temps de la conscience” and “le temps collectif”.
The first is Nature’s time dimension, which is, of course, immense compared to the short period of time experienced in a single human life. They point out that we “temporalise” Nature’s time by our use of clocks, watches and other “timepieces” to “measure” time, but this, actually, is just a human invention. Time is not measurable. Our particular units of measurement are culturally determined. They are what they are just because we’ve agreed to use them. Nature knows nothing of minutes and hours. Holidays allow us to step out of these culturally determined rhythms – the nine to five of working life for example – and get in touch with a different experience of the passage of time, related to the weather, to the cycles of the moon, the growth, blossoming and seeding of the plants around us, to the presence of certain birdsongs as migrating birds move through the part of the world where we are.
The second is time as we experience it subjectively, with our eyes closed. As we drift on the pool, or under the bright sun, the past, the present and the future all intermingle in our consciousness. It’s in our own heads where we can experience time not as a simple line passing before us in single file. We can hold the past and the future together in our minds in the same instant as the present. Contemplative practice allows us to disengage from the world for a while and step out of the constant flow of time to see things from quite other perspectives.
The third dimension to consider is shared time, social, societal time. In this issue, the authors consider this from the perspective of collective rituals, festivals, celebrations and routines. In France, for example, the first weekend of August is known as “Le Grand Depart” – the great departure – because most people start their holidays that weekend. In Scotland the cities have their own version of that. Today, in fact, is the start of the “Glasgow Fair”, otherwise known as “Fair Fortnight”, when, traditionally, all the industries would close down for two weeks and the workers would have their annual holiday. Despite de-industrialisation, the “Glasgow Fair” continues. Today is a Glasgow Public Holiday. Last monday was “Bastille Day” in France and there was a Public Holiday, dances, parties and fireworks. (here’s the mobile phone video I took of the fireworks at Carcassonne Castle last year!) These societal and communal rituals and celebrations mark the passage of time in a uniquely shared way.

So, there you have it. Three ways to think about the passage of time. Think I’ll go and have a lie down!

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The Petabyte Age – pattern discovery sheds a light on everything

Posted in from the reading room, life, philosophy, science on July 12, 2008| Leave a Comment »

Chris Anderson of Wired magazine has published an interesting and provocative article about how “more is different”. It’s difficult to even visualise huge amounts of data, let alone analyze enormous data sets, but emerging technologies are giving us the tools to be able to interact with bigger and bigger datasets. A petabyte is 2 to the power of 50 (ie 1,125,899,906,842,624). This can be approximated to 10 to the power of 15 (1,000,000,000,000,000). Whilst this is truly a mind-bogglingly large number, Google servers process this much information every 72 minutes! But wait, it gets even more amazing! There are bigger numbers. An “exabyte” for example is 1,024 petabytes, and a “zetabyte” is 1,024 exabytes. Let’s not even go there yet! We can process such vast amounts of information by using large networks of computers and algorithms which handle the datasets as “clouds”. I like the “cloud” idea. You might already be familiar with it through the tool known as “tag clouds“. However, let’s get back to Chris Anderson’s article.

Anderson says that science has proceeded until now by making models then testing to see how well the models fit the data -“hypothesize, model, test”. This enables scientists to uncover the links between events which show us how those events come about (causation) and then make predictions about the future. This is a powerful method and has greatly increased human understanding. However,

There is now a better way. Petabytes allow us to say: “Correlation is enough.” We can stop looking for models. We can analyze the data without hypotheses about what it might show. We can throw the numbers into the biggest computing clusters the world has ever seen and let statistical algorithms find patterns where science cannot.

In other words, the ability to handle such vast amounts of information directly, allows us to uncover the correlations which exist and thereby to see patterns emerge right out of the data without pre-selecting the data with a hypothesis and a model.

Anderson has pushed this idea provocatively to claim this means the end of science as we know it and a lot of commentators have reacted to this with strong disagreement. The points made both by Anderson in his original article and by the commentators are stimulating and thought provoking.

George Dyson says

The massively-distributed collective associative memory that constitutes the “Overmind” (or Kevin’s OneComputer) is already forming associations, recognizing patterns, and making predictions—though this does not mean thinking the way we do, or on any scale that we can comprehend. The sudden flood of large data sets and the opening of entirely new scientific territory promises a return to the excitement at the birth of (modern) Science in the 17th century, when, as Newton, Boyle, Hooke, Petty, and the rest of them saw it, it was “the Business of Natural Philosophy” to find things out. What Chris Anderson is hinting at is that Science will increasingly belong to a new generation of Natural Philosophers who are not only reading Nature directly, but are beginning to read the Overmind.

This feels right to me. These new methods are not the death of science but are the beginning of scientific methods which will change the way we understand the world. Kevin Kelly says more along this line of thought

My guess is that this emerging method will be one additional tool in the evolution of the scientific method. It will not replace any current methods (sorry, no end of science!) but will compliment established theory-driven science. Let’s call this data intensive approach to problem solving Correlative Analytics. I think Chris squander a unique opportunity by titling his thesis “The End of Theory” because this is a negation, the absence of something. Rather it is the beginning of something, and this is when you have a chance to accelerate that birth by giving it a positive name. A non-negative name will also help clarify the thesis. I am suggesting Correlative Analytics rather than No Theory because I am not entirely sure that these correlative systems are model-free. I think there is an emergent, unconscious, implicit model embedded in the system that generates answers.

Maybe the contribution I’ve enjoyed most, however, is that made by Bruce Sterling, which begins this way –

I’m as impressed by the prefixes “peta” and “exa” as the next guy. I’m also inclined to think that search engines are a bigger, better deal that Artificial Intelligence (even if Artificial Intelligence had ever managed to exist outside science fiction). I also love the idea of large, cloudy, yet deep relationships between seemingly unrelated phenomena—in literature, we call those gizmos “metaphors. ” They’re great!

As is so often the case, Bruce Sterling puts his finger right on what’s interesting. He highlights the relationship between this way of viewing data sets and the way we use language. Metaphors are incredibly powerful tools. They can feel like a kind of magic, producing sudden, potentially profound insights, literally in moments. It’s exciting to think that the “petabyte age” will bring us similar tools to engage with a wide range of phenomena.

Finally, Oliver Norton brilliantly manages to make these mind-bogglingly large computations suddenly seem not so overwhelming at all by saying –

And I guess my other point is “petabytes—phwaah”. Sure, a petabyte is a big thing—but the number of ways one can ask questions far bigger. I’m no mathematician, and will happily take correction on this, but as I see it one way of understanding a kilobit is as a resource that can be exhausted—or maybe a space that can be collapsed—with 10 yes or no questions: that’s what 2 [10] is. For a kilobyte raise the number to 13. For a petabyte raise it to 53. Now in many cases 53 is a lot of questions. But in networks of thousands of genes, really not so much.

The complexities of life can seem overwhelming but I feel pretty excited by our human capacity to perceive patterns using all kinds of tools from “clouds” to “metaphors”. The drive to make sense of life, to find meaning and purpose, is a core human quality. Science, its new methods and its old ones, is one way of responding to this drive.

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Johnny Bunko

Posted in books, from the reading room, life, personal growth on July 7, 2008| 1 Comment »

Daniel H Pink, who wrote “A Whole New Mind“, has written what he calls “America’s first business book in the Japanese comic format”. Now, I don’t know how you feel about comics, graphic novels and so on, but I know my mum really didn’t like them! She was never keen on the comics I used to look forward to every week, rather disdaining them as something inferior to “proper” books. But I liked them. And I still do. The graphic novel is whole art form in its own right and in France the “bandes dessinees” (sorry, don’t know how to get an “e acute”!) section of the bookshop is always VERY busy. I’ve picked up some utterly beautiful examples over the years. The graphic novel has developed in a very distinct way in Japan. They call it Manga. It’s this latter style which Daniel Pink has chosen for his latest book. You can actually read it online. Don’t be put off by its pitch as a business book. It’s a simple, easy to read, fun, but thought provoking self-development book.

He makes just six points, each of which is delivered to Johnny Bunko, an accountant who is bored with his job, by Diana, a sprite who appears when he breaks magical chopsticks (I know, I know, stay with me here, you have to take the genre as it is!). Here they are –

1. There is no plan (“It’s nice to believe that you can map out every step ahead of time and end up where you want. But that’s a fantasy. The world changes“)

2. Think strengths, not weaknesses (you know this one – it’s the positive psychology message)

3. It’s not about you (“the most successful people improve their own lives by improving others‘ lives”)

4. Persistence trumps talent (“practice and practice and practice some more”)

5. Make excellent mistakes (that’s a well-rehearsed one. One of the key messages of “Feel the Fear“)

6. Leave an imprint (“use your limited time here to do something that matters“)

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Laughter and loving

Posted in from the reading room, life, perception on July 3, 2008| 1 Comment »

I came across this quote from the poet, W.H Auden…..

Among those whom I like or admire, I can find no common denominator, but among those whom I love, I can: all of them make me laugh.

It’s one of those quotations which instantly resonates as a truth, isn’t it? I think it’s true, but I’m not so sure about the other way round…….do I love those who make me laugh? Well, I’m certainly better disposed towards them, certainly LIKE them, but I can’t say I feel love towards all who make me laugh. I can’t think of anyone who I do love, who doesn’t make me laugh however. There’s something very bonding about sharing laughter with those we love.

Here’s the strange thing though, when I first read that quote, I read it quickly and I thought, yes, that’s true, all those whom I love, can make me laugh, and, yes, there’s no common denominator amongst those who I don’t like. But, hey, wait a moment! I just re-read the quote to post about it and it doesn’t say that! It says there’s no common denominator amongst those I “like or admire”. Goodness! How could I have mis-read that so significantly! Well, I did. I’d understand it if I had mis-read it, reading a “truth” instead of a phrase which didn’t ring true for me, but that’s not the explanation. I actually agree with the whole quote. Guess I focused in on the phrase which really resonated most strongly – the bit about all those I love being able to make me laugh, and then read the first part of the quote, seeing the opposite there – those I don’t love, in fact, those I don’t even like. Well, well. Just goes to show, we don’t always read a sentence in a straight linear manner and it’s not difficult to see what we preconceive, instead of what we perceive.

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