mind-blown, mindful, or just thinkin' bout stuff. Some links

As I troll through some stuff for that Black Triangles follow-up post on managing innovators, the saved links are like a tsunami. Let us unspool some and maybe a pony or moonshot might pop out.

[Update: down-post, we reference the multi-tasking hydra in 2 links from the NYT and The Atlantic. Slackermanager.com has posted something cool on taming the beast: Multi-tasking Must Die: 5 Ways to Single Task

Here's something on how emotion and its cascade of neuro-chemicals is like a nail-gun for those post-it notes we call memories--Via mnemosyne:

Describing the brain as a big circuit board in which each new experience creates a new circuit, Hopkins neuroscience professor Richard Huganir, Ph.D. says that he and his team found that during emotional peaks, the hormone norepinephrine dramatically sensitizes synapses – the site where nerve cells make an electro-chemical connection – to enhance the sculpting of a memory into the big board.

Norepinephrine, more widely known as a "fight or flight" hormone, energizes the process by adding phosphate molecules to a nerve cell receptor called GluR1. The phosphates help guide the receptors to insert themselves adjacent to a synapse. "Now when the brain needs to form a memory, the nerves have plenty of available receptors to quickly adjust the strength of the connection and lock that memory into place," Huganir says.

Via Seed Magazine, about how we arrange what we know and perceive (what we've noted, experienced, and remember) affects what we can imagine: The Future of Science is... Art?

...[Niels] Bohr had spent time analyzing the radiation emitted by electrons, and he realized that science needed a new metaphor. The behavior of electrons seemed to defy every conventional explanation. As Bohr said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry." Ordinary words couldn't capture the data.

Bohr had long been fascinated by cubist paintings. As the intellectual historian Arthur Miller notes, he later filled his study with abstract still lifes and enjoyed explaining his interpretation of the art to visitors. For Bohr, the allure of cubism was that it shattered the certainty of the object. The art revealed the fissures in everything, turning the solidity of matter into a surreal blur.

Bohr's discerning conviction was that the invisible world of the electron was essentially a cubist world. By 1923, de Broglie had already determined that electrons could exist as either particles or waves. What Bohr maintained was that the form they took depended on how you looked at them. Their very nature was a consequence of our observation. This meant that electrons weren't like little planets at all. Instead, they were like one of Picasso's deconstructed guitars, a blur of brushstrokes that only made sense once you stared at it. The art that looked so strange was actually telling the truth.

That's from Jonah Lehrer of Frontal Cortex blog. Leonard Shlain's book, Art and Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time, and Light predates it and covers lots more. Basically, how art, artists and imagery makers work in precognitive realms, paving the way for scientists to cognitively grasp, accept and explain previously abstract concepts like black holes or even fluid dynamics. In a way, it's the Overton Window at work -- an idea is "foolish" and "impossible" until someone finds a way to make it graspable and therefore viable. Applies to 30-minute pizza delivery guarantees or to Quantum Mechanics.

For more fearless scouts, IBM has a long but intriguing Dave Snowden/Cynthia Kurtz paper on The New Dynamics of Strategy: Sense-making in a complex and complicated world. A snip...

The Cynefin framework

The name Cynefin is a Welsh word whose literal translation into English as habitat or place fails to do it justice. It is more properly understood as the place of our multiple affiliations, the sense that we all, individually and collectively, have many roots, cultural, religious, geographic, tribal, and so forth. We can never be fully aware of the nature of those affiliations, but they profoundly influence what we are. The name seeks to remind us that all human interactions are strongly influenced and frequently determined by the patterns of our multiple experiences, both through the direct influence of personal experience and through collective experience expressed as stories...

We consider Cynefin a sense-making framework, which means that its value is not so much in logical arguments or empirical verifications as in its effect on the sense-making and decision-making capabilities of those who use it. We have found that it gives decision makers powerful new constructs that they can use to make sense of a wide range of unspecified problems. It also helps people to break out of old ways of thinking and to consider intractable problems in new ways. The framework is particularly useful in collective sense-making, in that it is designed to allow shared understandings to emerge through the multiple discourses of the decision-making group.

Economic Stimulus idea: Brake the constant chase to multi-channel stimulation when possible. Memo to me: Stop pretending you can track, kill, skin and cook the bear. And the rabbit. And the deer. All at once. And well. First, The New York Times:

But the paper also found that “beyond an optimum, more multitasking is associated with declining project completion rates and revenue generation.”

For the executive recruiters, the optimum workload was four to six projects, taking two to five months each.

The productivity lost by overtaxed multitaskers cannot be measured precisely, but it is probably a lot. Jonathan B. Spira, chief analyst at Basex, a business-research firm, estimates the cost of interruptions to the American economy at nearly $650 billion a year.

That's a short sober piece on the modern illusion of busy-ness as good for business. Next, The Atlantic has a longer, more entertaining and personal view: Walter Kirn's odyssey through the nightmare of infinite connectivity begins when his girlfriend sends him a nude cellphone pic and he send his car through a fence while enjoying the, uh, stimulating composition.

...Much of the problem is the metaphor. Or perhaps it’s our need for metaphors in general, particularly when the subject is our minds and the comparison seems based on science. In the days of rudimentary chemistry, the mind was thought to be a beaker of swirling volatile essences. Then came classical physical mechanics, and the mind was regarded as a clocklike thing, with springs and wheels. Then it was steam-driven, maybe. A combustion chamber. Then came electricity and Freud, and it was a dynamo of polarized energies—the id charged one way, the superego the other.

Now, in the heyday of the microchip, the brain is a computer. A CPU.

Except that it’s not a CPU. It’s whatever that thing is that’s driven to misconstrue itself—over and over, century after century—as a prototype, rendered in all-too- vulnerable tissue, of our latest marvel of technology. And before the age of modern technology, theology. Further back than that, it’s hard to voyage, since there was a period, common sense suggests, when we didn’t even know we had brains. Or minds. Or spirits. Humans just sort of did stuff. And what they did was not influenced by metaphors about what they ought to be capable of doing but very well might not be equipped for (assuming you wanted to do it in the first place), like editing a playlist to e-mail to the lover whose husband you’re interviewing on the phone about the movie he made that you’re discussing in the blog entry you’re posting tomorrow morning and are one-quarter watching certain parts of as you eat salad and carry on the call.

Geez. After all that, the band's gonna take a break. Listen to Tom Chapin sing "Not on the test" to mellow us down a bit

Are you Right or Left Brain dominant? A Test

Quick, which direction is she twirling?



If you say clockwise, you may be Right- brain dominant. Counter- clockwise means Left- brain preference.

I'm not sure this is exactly super scientific but one thing is fascinating. I saw clockwise first. (No surprise for those who know me.) But, then my eye scanned elsewhere on the page, and when I returned my eyes directly to her she'd flipped directions - I was perceiving counter-clockwise.

I was actually kinda freaked. I looked at her some more trying to "see" clockwise turning. Nothing, still anti-clockwise.

Then I started reading the list of attributes below and halfway down one stack of words there was perceptible shift in the corner of my eye. Damn! She'd reverted back to clockwise as I was assimilating the bullet points. Below is the list of attributes. Try it and see how it works for you.

LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses logic detail oriented facts rule words and language present and past math and science can comprehend knowing acknowledges order/pattern perception knows object name reality based forms strategies practical safe

RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS uses feeling "big picture" oriented imagination rules symbols and images present and future philosophy & religion can "get it" (i.e. meaning) believes appreciates spatial perception knows object function fantasy based presents possibilities impetuous risk taking

=====

In a way, she really is a like a tachometer for our brains. As I was perceiving her in right-brain mode (home to instantaneous image perception and other sensory gestalt), perhaps my left hemisphere, home to theories and chunks of knowledge (words, words, words!) began to kick in to attempt an answer to "what's going on here?" That flip of focus seems to carry with it a different set of "eyes." What's it mean? I'll save what I think for the book (OK, for a taste click on Brain, Metaphor Archetype, Brand at right). But here's something: Beware Power Pointers and Bullet Listers: Halfway through the list of bullets is where I, at least, flipped onto Right-Brain again without consciously deciding to do so.

Maybe my sensation-seeking brain took over and wanted not lists or packeted discipline, but instead, all-at-once imagery--"big picture" or, perhaps, just the stimulation and simplicity of plain old pictures, moving or not. In other words, in order to keep my attention on that list of points, after about 3 seconds the words would have needed to start doing something with each other or doing something to the cones and rods collecting light in my eyeballs. Your mileage may vary. Whadaya think?

Link

UPDATE: I've gone ahead and broken the GIF down into frames (34) here. Nope, it's not a cheap reverse-direction thing. Click the link for some thoughts on how our brains' might infer different directions for her.

and we see some possible reason

UPDATED UPDATE: We've had many many many hits since hitting send on this "throwaway post" so I thought I should correct some--but by no means all of--the sloppy inferences and grammar in the above text.

In addition, one thing I overlooked (ha!) is that there seem to be parallels to the practical experience of presenters and Powerpoint™ cowboys: Don't say what you are showing on screen; mix your images to stimulate attention in your audience. People bore when both hemispheres are experiencing comparable concepts ("Seen it, done it, got the free t-shirt.") So. don't "say [read] what they're seeing" but, instead, find imagery that challenges your audiences' assumptions. Why "challenge" them? Important point. Assumption, or bias, a harsher word than Assumption, is latent in everyone. And, people's bias is your persuasion target, not the people themselves. If you attempt to persuade, you will lose. But, if you engage their mental library of metaphors and images in service of your (seemingly) counter-argument, then you will have them working to make your "adjustment" cohere with their already established belief. Think about it.