TED, not always sucky.
That last post was probably unfair to TED, which I think is generally awesome. There are some great talks I’ve looked at recently, and I want to let you know about a few of them here.
The first is by Simon Sinek, who has a really clever concept about how to think about life and meaningfulness in general:
Saul Griffith and his kites:
And Richard Dawkins, always a favorite to listen to amongst men of the book:
See! Not so bad…
Predicting visual stimuli on the basis of activity in auditory cortices: Not Quite…
In May 2010’s Nature Neuroscience, Meyer et al. claim that watching videos that imply sound (e.g., coins being dropped in a vase) but are actually silent activates the auditory cortex.
The problem with this study, as I see it, is that we might be looking at a suggestion effect. Simply, watching a car accident without sound, for instance, suggests crashing and gnashing sounds which might lead to an auditory illusion. What you would have to do to preclude this, then, is show silent videos of things which imply sound but you might not know what those sounds are — e.g., someone using a dead snake as a baseball bat.
Intriguing to me is that this might also point to some kind of ‘readiness potential’ in conscious processing, meaning you are prepared to hear the sound ahead of time so your brain doesn’t have to do so much computing when creating a seamless conscious experience.
NOTE: our brains break down incoming data then put it all back together again into a seamless experience involving vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell. How it does this, we don’t know, but this points to a possible clue.
Using your hands makes you smarter
Abstract thinking is facilitated with kinesthetic action, the NY Times reports:
As they thought about years gone by, participants leaned slightly backward, while in fantasizing about the future, they listed to the fore. The deviations were not exactly Tower of Pisa leanings, amounting to some two or three millimeters’ shift one way or the other. Nevertheless, the directionality was clear and consistent.
“When we talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors like ‘I’m looking forward to seeing you’ or ‘I’m reflecting back on the past,’ ” said Lynden K. Miles, who conducted the study with his colleagues Louise K. Nind and C. Neil Macrae. “It was pleasing to us that we could take an abstract concept such as time and show that it was manifested in body movements.”
Cesar Millan makes some noise
Cesar Millan, better known as The Dog Whisperer, is the subject of a NY Times business feature.
(Notice how his relationship with Jada Pinkett Smith — via geographically-influenced serendipity — just about made him. Lots of people are immensely talented, but few know what to do with it.)
The Red Book
Carl Jung’s Red Book is finally being published. In the movie Seven (starring Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman and Kevin Spacey, oh my), Brad and Morgan break into Spacey’s apartment to find thousands of notebooks filled with non-sensical musings. The Red Book reminds me of that scene — a brilliant effort of impenetrable worth.
(But the story behind Sonu Shamdasani’s editing of the Red Book is mindbending. That’s a life’s work right there.)
This is frame control.
At the Sasquatch 2009 music festival, this guy brought the party (this is the essence of frame control):
The Best Test
I, along with many others, have been called “the best hypnotist in the world.” I cared little for the title, not only because hypnosis is easy and the judges were too old and misinformed to know better, but because the title does not represent any real talent; indeed, how do you measure a skill that is largely a function of another’s ability to respond?
Hypnosis, in this way, is a lot like cup stacking: so easy a kid can do it — yet amazing to watch and difficult to perceive. What we need now, then, is some kind of world championship…
Growing Up Goldman
I just came back from an event at Goldman Sachs’ London office, and boy do I feel itchy. The Harvard Club of London, together with Goldman, hosted a talk by Jack Meyer, former caretaker of Harvard’s endowment. While I was intrigued by his perspective on risk management, which took up the first 20 minutes of the talk, Meyer spent the rest of the time trying to sell a really bad idea.
Briefly, Meyer’s involved with the Asian University for Women, and tonight’s talk was really an AUW fund-raiser. I’m fine with that — I’ve been to Tupperware parties before — but I was disappointed by the lack of foresight on this project. Specifically, Meyer is talking about setting up a world-class university in Bangladesh to serve the needs of women (presumably) from disadvantaged Asian communities. Here are the problems:
1. Why a university? If you have to go through the trouble of recruiting applicants throughout Asia, why not just institute a scholarship program that utilizes existing resources? Just develop a course curriculum at an American university and send your selected scholars there.
2. AUW states that the minimum criteria for acceptance, for their undergraduate program, are:
- Age: 17-26 years
- Education: 10+2, a total of 12 years’ education
- 65% or above marks in Secondary School Certificate (SSC)/10th Grade/equivalent and Higher Secondary Certificate (HSC)/12th Grade/equivalent result
- 70% marks in English of HSC/Year 12/equivalent (If your medium of instruction was NOT English)
- Experience and aspiration to lead and contribute for own country and society
The problem with these criteria is that they select for females who have access to 12 years of education — something extraordinarily difficult to come by and NOT A FUNCTION OF MERIT. Being able to access education in developing countries is largely a function of money: you have money, you go to school; you don’t have money, you go to work. Worse still is that (presumably) you’re asked to get first-class marks in English IN COUNTRIES WHERE ENGLISH IS POORLY TAUGHT.
3. Why put the university in Chittagong, Bangladesh?
I understand the desire to locate the institution in a hotspot, but doing so unfairly disadvantages the students. Being in Chitta-middle-of-nowhere means that you make it unnecessarily difficult to retain talented faculty, unreasonably cumbersome to maintain world-class facilities, and, hell, do you even have consistent electricity in Bangladesh?
I think it’s another irrational idea being sold by otherwise rational people. (Jesus! Why is it so difficult to find financing for good ideas? Like building a waste-management infrastructure that generates almost no waste and employs hundreds of disadvantaged people? Ahem.)
As an aside, I wasn’t surprised by how many douche-bags showed up at the event. I think the guy from one of the earlier (season 2?) Apprentice shows was there too. What really gets me is how some of these people never learned social-savvy. For instance, one of the women there approached me at the elevator and tried to start a conversation by asking if I thought the room was too hot. I replied with the obvious: “oh, that’s just me. I have that effect on people.” Which subsequently paralyzed her with nervous giddiness — the same feeling you get when a crush calls you out for dropping a pen to look up her dress. And that’s when it hit me: these may be the Masters of the Universe, but, in a way, they’re still just kids.
UPDATE (April 24th): O.K. I concede. It’s frame control, actually.
Attitude
The essence of manhood, really: Malcolm X, 1964.
If I were 10 years older…
I might have studied with Milton Erikson and been better prepared to ride the dot-com boom and its subsequent real-estate bubble. At the very least, I would have been able to travel to see Peter Reveen perform — a man who I believe was the best hypnotist of his time. (Yes, better than Ormond.)
A montage video – with rare interview footage — offers some insight about how he presented himself onstage (which is pretty much the show itself: a good show is never about the performance; it’s about the performer):
Storytelling
Everyone has a story. Your life, I believe, tells that story through the wake it creates: real estate developers leave buildings, scientists leave papers, writers leave books. Sad is the life that leaves no story.
I was happy to see, then, that the NY Times featured a piece about Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s new autobiography, A Drifting Life. (An 855-page monster!) I never quite understood why people, in general, can’t see the empty narcissism involved when non-writers attempt to write an autobiography. A painter can tell his story, for instance, with a body of work, perhaps even a self-portrait. But why attempt to write about your life if writing is not your strongest skill? It’s as if to say “I will settle for an inferior representation of myself” — the antithesis to a meaningful life’s work. I think Tatsumi understands that: his life’s work was manga; hence, he tells his best through his manga.
A book like “A Drifting Life” is fairly easy to pick apart on a drawing-by-drawing or line-by-line basis. Don’t make that mistake. Its pleasures are cumulative; the book has a rolling, rumbling grandeur. It’s as if someone had taken a Haruki Marakumi novel and drawn, beautifully and comprehensively, in its margins.
Remembering Ormond
Ormond McGill was the nicest old man I’d ever met. He was, essentially, a gentleman. Being one of the giants of hypnotism, he always seemed to have lots of people sucking up to him. Tom Silver, the moderately-talented man he is, was one of them, and, it must be said, was rewarded for all his time with some revealing Ormond footage (this one on inductions):
Ormond recalling his days as Dr. Zomb:
If you didn’t have the pleasure of watching Ormond perform, this is pretty much what he looked like in his twilight:
(Tom Silver is so obviously a tool . . .)
And, finally, some more footage (on pre-talk):
Just a few short years ago, this footage would have been extremely difficult to find, probably costing upwards of $200 on eBay. YouTube, then, truly has changed the game for hypnotists.
Robbins Conquers
Being an NLP trainer (under Richard Bandler) means I have to hear lots of crap about Tony Robbins. I disagree with most of it, not because I like Tony’s work (not my thing, really), but because I think he does his work extraordinarily well, and I have a fetish for things done extraordinarily well.
Proof: below is a talk Tony did at TED, where he is in front of a room of people that are better-educated and (probably) more accomplished than he will ever be. And he kills. Mercilessly.
(Note to NLPers: notice the self-reference when he says “resourcefulness.” Also, pay attention to how Robbins asserts his dominance over the room by calling Al Gore a son of a bitch. Lastly, listen to the change in energy during his compliance testing — that’s a master at work, folks.)
The Greatest Zucchini
In the movie Catch Me If You Can, Frank Abagnale Sr. tells his son that the Yankees win because everyone’s too busy looking at their pinstripes. The insight, within the body of the story, became more than the obvious “people believe what you tell them” by suggesting something deeper: to know someone, agitation is essential.
Recently, I read a wonderful, wonderful story on The Great Zucchini (Eric Knaus) in the Washington Post. It wasn’t just a good piece of human-interest journalism, it was also didactic and revealing and insightful — in a good way. You see, Eric Knaus’ life is a bit messy — and people don’t lead messy lives on purpose. There’s something lurking the background, and just a little bit of fishing usually gets you a glimpse:
Jane said she has no doubts that Eric’s mistreatment at the hands of his father influenced his life, though she isn’t sure exactly how. She knows he’s never fully accepted adulthood, growing up both guileless and naive — still in many ways a child, for better or worse
Fritz Perls, it was said, could peer into you and see these very things, the secrets you hide in plain sight, and unzip your skin such that your tortured soul would fall to the floor, chilled, writhing in its nakedness. I always thought this was much cooler than, say, juggling. Hence, I spent much of my adolescence perfecting this skill. Admittedly, some say it’s one of my few true talents.
It’s beautiful to see how someone like Knaus expresses himself. He is entirely uncommon and thus worthy of study. Specifically, Knaus is tragically unorganized, and in that chaos are glimmers of brilliance:
The Great Zucchini’s tattered loose-leaf appointment book is filled with the names and dates of his scheduled parties, months and months into the future. He keeps no backup — no other notes, nothing on a computer disk, nothing anywhere. If he were to lose that book, he’d have no idea where he was supposed to be, or when. For months of weekends, preschool children would be waiting expectantly in homes across greater Washington, and the Great Zucchini would simply never show.
Eric understands the importance of that book. Without it, the Great Zucchini would cease to exist, and all that would be left would be Eric Knaus. And so he carries it with him everywhere. He won’t leave it in a car, in case the car is stolen. When he goes out of his house, if he absolutely must leave the book behind, he hides it in a special place no burglar would think to look.
This is so obviously the story of a risk-taker, someone oblivious to fear, someone driven by more than the quotidian emptiness of Facebook status updates. And there is, indeed, beauty here; a raw innocence juxtaposed against the realities of adulthood: money, bills, sex, despair.
He’s stopped parents in the street to inform them that, at 3, a child is too old for a pacifier. Once, when a 4-year-old at a party seemed painfully timid, Eric told the mom to stop letting the child sleep in her bed. “How did you know he does that?” the mother asked. Eric just knew.
This “just knowing” is indicative of preternatural empathy, an uncanny ability to know and speak as if social boundaries didn’t exist, as if a single consciousness could be shared among two people, if only for a moment, and a real honesty achieved. And honesty is that too-rare commodity everyone thinks they have too much of when, in fact, they are dealing in counterfeit goods.
Not everyone is special. It’s a mathematical fact. But I venture to say The Great Zucchini just might be.
Fermat, and the evolution of Endgame
Sometime around 2006 I used my diplomatic pouch privileges to send some magazines to Uganda. One of those happened to be Psychology Today, and in it was an article about grit, which talked a bit about Andrew Wiles and Fermat’s Last Theorem. I’d been interested in the story since.
So, after staying up all night, tired and uncoordinated, I decided to go see a talk by Simon Singh, who not only wrote a book on the Wiles-Fermat story, but also made this here fine documentary:
The thing that got me about Singh’s talk, however, was that it was passionless. Singh talked a bit about how he got into writing, how it was just something he thought of as an alternative to him being “not a good physicist.” That kills me. It rubs me raw because the Wiles story is one that’s full of passion and heart — and I don’t think Singh sold it as well as he could have. It’s as if he’s saying he got lucky: the Wiles-Fermat story is so compelling that any good writer could have made a bestseller out of it. (Ugh… a tool.) Norman Mailer used to say that journalists have the easiest time because they are given the story — they don’t have to come up with it — and that was the worst because it doesn’t build you into anything. If he were alive, I’d tell him he was wrong: the worst is having a passionless journalist tell you his story via powerpoint.
The real problem, however, is this: it’s so clear in the documentary that it’s a story about passion and dedication and heart (i.e., Endgame). I mean, the basic story is that here’s a guy, Wiles, who takes seven years to solve a math problem. Granted, Wiles is a supremely talented mathematician and scholar, and the problem in question happens to be one of the hardest mathematics problems ever; however, don’t miss the point here: WHO DO YOU KNOW HAS THE GRIT TO WORK SEVEN YEARS ON ANY ONE THING? And that’s not the whole story. You have to appreciate that Wiles is a professor at Princeton and needed to publish things during that time (he published old work); moreover, he couldn’t really talk about what he was doing with anyone (god forbid someone usurp his work). Most importantly, Wiles had no idea it would take seven years; in fact, it could have taken 10 or 20 or 50 years to complete, if at all. Still, he had faith and hope and steadiness.
The Wiles-Fermat story, then, is not about math or genius or fame. It’s about love.
It’s a love story.
In search of sorcery
Pope Benedict traveled to Angola recently to tell them they’re heathens. I figure he thought it best for Angola, since he just happens to be a white man in a white robe, wearing a white hat, in a country full of black people. But hey, people make mistakes (love these super-clear police affidavits) - I mean, I once remember, as a freshman in high school, running towards a girl I liked, then slipping and falling on some black ice, and her running over to see if I was O.K. (The mistake wasn’t the slipping, which cut my head open, it was not pursuing that girl; she was classy - she could have laughed, after all. Damned if I ain’t screwed: I have to slip and fall in front of every girl I date now to see if she’s up to snuff.)
The problem here is not just that you have an influential figure working to stamp out the remnants of an ancient culture, but the fact that there is so little being done to preserve or study or record it. Once these traditions are gone, they are likely gone forever (which would suit the Pope, and probably Rush Limbaugh, and maybe some other people who wear white robes and hats, just fine).
The problem I have with it is that cultural traditions preserve evolutionary features. Andean peoples, for instance, have developed, over centuries, physiological responses (e.g., larger lung capacity) as well as cultural traditions (e.g., chewing coca) to cope with high altitudes. In the context of hypnosis, if we are to believe it actually exists, then we must first define its role in human evolution; then, if that role is reasonable, we should subsequently be able to see hypnosis in varying forms in other cultures beyond our own. I believe these rituals Benedict is talking about extinguishing are where we can uncover these varying forms.
So what am I going to do about it? Well damn, that’s not on me: NBC didn’t like Tour Dementia and I have a pharmacology paper to write. I tried…
Chimpanzees are (probably) smarter than you.
It’s long been a notion of mine that people are unreasonably stupid. My logic is simple: most people live their lives as emotional blobs–nothing more than hormone factories that eat, sleep, fuck, and shit (O.K. Sometimes they watch Gossip Girl while working the fryer at Burger King). In a very significant way, then, the average person can be related to a chimpanzee–because chimps also spend their lives eating and sleeping and fucking and shitting (O.K. Sometimes they end up as washed up TV actors who engage in domestic violence). And therein lies an existential quandary: what is it about humans that make us human? Animals have been known to show compassion and love and reason, as well as murder and even make war. One notion I read some time ago was that humans may differ from animals in our ability to plan for the future (I want to say I read that in a Dan Gilbert book, but hey, someone find me a reference…). Now, a Swedish psychologist suggests chimps have autonoetic consciousness and plan for the future. Damn.
And this is the allure of hypnosis, to me: it underscores the uniqueness of being human. I believe it is where we diverged from the ape, when we descended from trees and needed to develop intelligence so we could pick up stones and throw them at predators. (Indeed, this stone-throwing is unique because it requires massive intelligence. Elephants, for instance, can throw things, but they do not have the potential to pick up a stone–the size of a baseball–and hurl it at a precise target, say, the size of a strike zone, at 90mph–that requires more intelligence than they can muster.) Hypnosis, I believe, developed from a common need for an authority figure (the alpha male) to compel his tribe to ignore their impulses to flee (when attacked, for instance, by a sabre-toothed tiger), and commit all resources–most likely relating to intellect, our one true advantage–to fighting under his direction. One stone hurts. Many stones kill.
One man makes a fire. Many men burn down a forest and build condos. And such is the way of modern Man: we utilize intelligence to force Nature into submission.
You’ve read me right: Mother Nature is our bitch. We do not adapt; instead, we force the environment to adapt to us. This is also where I believe we differ from animals. This, and the fact that you’ll never see a monkey helping another monkey quit smoking through hypnosis. (Or maybe you will. I could be wrong… I am, after all, only human.)