Ice and frightening.

Skip maybe just to the second half if you're impatient.

Creativity, a baby's world, and happiness.

Occasionally I get behind in my blog reading, and sometimes this creates fortunate coincidences. Like, now.

First, an article in Scientific American about how babies see the world. (both SciAm and the Shambala Sun articles are off Integral Options Cafe.)

"As adults when we attend to something in the world we are vividly conscious of that particular thing, and we shut out the surrounding world. The classic metaphor is that attention is like a spotlight, illuminating one part of the world and leaving the rest in darkness. In fact, attending carefully to one event may actually make us less conscious of the rest of the world. We even know something about how the brain does this: connections from the prefrontal part of the brain both enhance our perception of the attended event and inhibit our perception of other events. And there is a chemical basis for this, too. When we pay attention to an event certain brain chemicals called cholinergic transmitters make a small part of the brain more flexible and “plastic”, better at learning, and simultaneously other inhibitory transmitters actually make irrelevant parts of the brain less flexible.

If you look at baby’s attention you see a related but very different picture. Babies and young children are much worse at intentionally focusing their attention than adults. Instead, they seem to pay attention to anything that’s unexpected or interesting – anything they can learn from. We say that children are bad at paying attention but we really mean that they’re bad at not paying attention – they easily get distracted by anything interesting. And young brains are much more generally “plastic”, more flexible and better at learning than adult brains. Young brains are bathed in the cholinergic transmitters that enhance attention in adults, but the inhibitory transmitters that damp consciousness down haven’t yet come on line. If you put all that together it suggests that babies consciousness is more like a lantern than a spotlight – that it illumines the entire world around them.

Finally, you can think about what adult experience is like when we put ourselves in the same position as babies. When we travel for instance, we are suddenly surrounded by an unexpected new world and, instead of just focusing on the important things, we take in lots of information at once. That actually makes us more vividly conscious of our surroundings, not less. I think that for babies, every day is like first love in Paris."

Also, on play and pretending:

"...they seem to use their imagination the way that creative scientists do. One of the big new ideas about how babies learn is that they use what computer scientists call “Bayesian inference”. That means that you imagine lots of different possibilities and test how likely each possibility is.

When we have a theory of the world, we can not only say what the world is like now, we can also explore what would happen if the world was different. We can ask what would happen, for instance, if there was a rocket that traveled close to the speed of light. In fact, the ability to imagine these possibilities is one of the biggest advantages of understanding how the world works. Because we imagine, we can have invention and technology. Its actually play, not necessity, that is the mother of invention."

In a second article from Scientific American, researchers look at a way to increase creativity, and find that making something psychologically distant from oneself (anything not happening here, now, and to oneself is psychologically distant) increases creativity around the problem, which makes sense. How playful would you feel if you were trapped in a room slowly filling up with water? You'd probably be freaking out.

It also accords with the candle study, explained in the video below from TED talks:

Basically, people have to figure a simple task out. There are two groups, one given money if they complete it quickly and one not given any money. Classically, you'd expect the group given money as a reward to do better, but they do worse. See, the task they have to do involves some creativity. Giving people money apparently takes away some of their playfulness. (The talk is actually on motivation and the twenty-first century work place. I might talk about it in a later post, it's good.)

One more from TED: something I've put up before:

Finally, an article from the Shambhala Sun on happiness.

Now we can get to the point. It seems to me that the mode of consciousness described in the first article is not unique to babies, we're just educated out of it, at least when we're facing concrete and tangible problems, but we have access to it at anytime, and can certainly train to enhance it (the guys on "Who's Line is it Anyway"come to mind). Of course, the restricted, focused consciousness is just as important, we'd never become adult without it, but we're losing something when we ignore it, something that (as the first video explains) is increasingly needed in our world, and which might be linked to happiness. Or perhaps over-reliance on the focused method of consciousness, the "get-the-loot" consciousness, as the article puts it, causes us to ignore those million little things that are uplifting in the day.

Indeed, though the article in the SS doesn't present it in this light, we need both of these kinds of consciousness to be successful, and in meditation are training both: a simultaneous rigid focus on an open and innocent ("virgin", the article says,) state-of-mind. This could be why both the first and the last article are concerned with paying attention. Children are paying attention to everything, and if you're unhappy, maybe you're just not paying attention.

But children are not enlightened, nor are they all-in-all more conscious than adults (well, healthy adults.) The combination of the two is something attained through growth. As the SS article says, the "get-the-loot" mindset is always looking for something exterior, an experience or thing, while happiness comes from the inside. Babies don't have this, they aren't differentiated from their environment yet.

Remove the pillars of your belief in this world and look around a little bit, at least every once in a while, I guess is the take-home message.

Trust in Play.

I seem to be on an education/creativity kick recently. Here's another TED talk about creativity and productivity, quick on the heels of this one, itself following this post about schooling vs. education.



The most interesting thing of this all, I think, is near the end, when he says that an environment of trust is necessary for play, which I can't agree with more. I would link this idea to the fact that as one becomes more and more centered and identified with their consciousness, their attitude often becomes much more playful. Ken Wilber has used the analogy of a dream. When one is in a dream, one's attitude towards the surroundings is often anything but trusting, quite the opposite. When one becomes lucid in a dream (an experience I think most people have had at least a few times) one is given the freedom to play. You know it's a dream, so there's the trust that nothing can go wrong, and it becomes seriously fun. When one realizes enlightenment or has a satori, the world is seen for what it is, and life is free to be fun.

This also speaks to why children with supportive parents can grow up to be emotionally successful people. They trust their parents (and with good reason) and so are able to experiment and play around with who they are and what they can do so that when they are adults it is easier to face any sort of circumstance.

What's the shift when large groups of people across the planet start to experience the universe as being fundamentally benign? We're beginning to see, in fits and starts.

Trust in play. Trust in Creation.

Fully interactive data world.

This is way too cool.

I don't usually put something up here unless I have something to say about it, but this is just too cool. Imagine, instead of having to go to a computer, that computers, the internet, etc, were simply transposed over the world we live in, like living simultaneously in a computer and in the real world.

Dope.

Do Schools Kill Creativity?

Close on the on the heels of a post about schooling vs. education, a wonderful and funny talk from Sir Ken Robinson on TED about the same issue.



Advocating an open-ended approach to education that fosters creativity as being just as important as literacy for a world which fundamentally changes every five years or so, Sir Robinson talks about many things I've noticed here in China, specifically, that children aren't afraid of being wrong, that is, they'll have a go at it, whereas by the time kids are adults, they're terrified of giving the wrong answer. Even young children here won't take a stab at something if I haven't already told them the answer, something that frustrates me to no end. I'm not just saying wild stabs in the dark, but also having all the tools to put the answer together but without the answer itself, kids are extremely reluctant to try and figure out what the answer might be, especially in my first few classes with them.

"We are now running national educational systems where mistakes are the worst things you can make, and the result is that we are teaching people out of their creative capacity."

This is a feature of bureaucracism, subject of another recent video on TED, from Barry Schwartz, which hits many of the same notes, but from a moralistic standpoint. When people are not allowed to be individuals making decisions, but are handed lists to teach/ do in a rote manner, society, in the long run, is much worse off. "Three Strikes You're Out," is such an example, but so is much of what Robinson is talking about with "No Child Left Behind." You prevent disasters, perhaps. But you also prevent any real sort of progress and personal energy, which I can attest to firsthand, living and teaching in the birthplace of bureaucracy.

Thanks to Cyriac for the heads-up.

The Coming Great Reboot

This talk, from Juan Rodriguez via TED Talks, is pretty fascinating, as a rational account of the coming crash and post-crash, which he calls a re-boot.

It is interesting to compare and contrast different versions of the coming reboot, to see how it's interpreted in different metaphors, especially considering none of them are going to be a hundred percent right. (That is, the future will lie somewhere between all of them.)

His idiom is fairly close to what I'm fairly sure is going to happen: in the short term, we're going to have a huge SNAFU. But we will emerge an entirely different animal, in a very different world. I do not share Juan Rodriguez's marriage to the objective sciences, however, and so I put the emphasis on a leap in consciousness, which you can find evidence for all over the web (click on this Peter Russell talk to see an example of what I'm talking about- it's quite clear and talks science, so don't be afraid.) Science is, of course, part of the future. It's just not the whole story.

People in enough numbers are starting to directly experience adual reality, that is, they are coming into direct contact with the ground of being, that pretty soon there should be a tipping point.

Bioengineering, coupled with robotics, has become sophisticated enough that we are coming to a tipping point.

The similarity in these two, the thread that ties them together, is that we're entering an age of conscious control of our reality. Now, control is a sticky word, and I don't mean by it what a ten-year old would, it is a much more detached control, one that requires a relinquishment of the smaller and petty identification of self that we usually think of as being "controlling." In any case, hold onto your butts. Things are already starting to get interesting. Aren't they?