Sometime in the next several days the IdeaFestival will release its 2010 agenda and presenters, and debut an attractive new, and much improved, web site.
The timing got me to thinking.
As an annual post-Derby event, public release of the IdeaFestival agenda could be the second act in a distinctly Louisville two-fer, a cognitive call to the post that follows the horses.
Like the infield goings-on, the mix of ideas and people at the IdeaFestival is a heady experience - it's impossible to know what you'll encounter. You'll leave, however, with a buzz, a new and unexpected thought, a flash of insight. In a world where everything but creativity has become a commodity, that's a payoff that could last a lifetime.
"Push" author Sapphire, co-producer of "Avatar," Jon Landau, and the man who committed the "artistic crime of the century," Philippe Petit, might be among the incredible and talented people who be on hand in Louisville this fall.
But I'm not saying.
Wayne
Futurist and business strategist Peter Schwartz, and mathematician and economist Eric Weinstein pointed out that no forecasts for large scale disruption of air travel because of volcanic ash clouds had been made, and so Eyjafjallajökull was a true Black Swan event.
Emanuel Derman simply said, "more efficient, more vulnerable."
But there was one very human point to be made.
A business school might seem like an unlikely source for this kind of news, but apparently packing up our troubles does help us get past unwelcome events, according to research from the Rotman School of Management.
A new study... suggests you might want to stick something related to your disappointment in a box or envelope if you want to feel better. In four separate experiments researchers found that the physical act of enclosing materials related to an unpleasant experience, such as a written recollection about it, improved people's negative feelings towards the event and created psychological closure. Enclosing materials unrelated to the experience did not work as well....
While the market implications might not be immediately obvious..., the findings point to new angles on such things as fast pick-up courier services and pre-paid mortgage deals that relieve people's sense of debt burden. If people realize that the memory of past events or tasks can be distracting, perhaps there is a market for products and services that can enclose or take away memories of that task.
Wayne
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/biggreymare/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
In the study of time, philosophy has become theory, which has become proof. Moving at widely different speeds, two clocks will document two separate times.
A feature of special relativity, time dilation has been confirmed through experimentation.
But the effect can be observed in people as well. New studies demonstrate that two individuals standing even feet apart can, in fact, experience time very differently.
What's more, writing in the latest issue of PopSci, Steven Kotler suggests that understanding why time dilation occurs in individuals during times of crisis (think flying bullets in The Matrix) might lead to better treatments for mental illnesses. Kotler:In recent years, scientists have learned that the circadian rhythms that control our 24-hour sleep/wake cycle are governed by a cluster of 10,000 brain cells called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. Sorting out what happens moment to moment is the focus of [David] Eagleman [neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine]... [H]is Baylor-based Laboratory for Perception and Action is one of the only facilities dedicated to running experiments that produce hard data on how we perceive time.
Engleman has found that the brain keeps two clocks, one "that feeds you a perception of the now, and another that is constantly at work tidying up that perception." To conserve energy, the portion of the brain "tidying up" will predict events, meaning that the everyday events will flow by relatively unnoticed, while the unexpected events takes longer - or so we think - to pass.
This new understanding might have profound implications for sufferers of mental illness.
Deana Davalos, a psychologist at Colorado State University who works on timing and mental illness, agrees. 'Sensory gating, the process by which the brain filters out repeated stimuli, is a problem with schizophrenia,' she says. 'Most people think it’s a breakdown in their ability to inhibit responses to repeated stimuli, but Eagleman’s work points to a timing malfunction.' To this end, Eagleman, with the help of psychologists, is designing a videogame that would recalibrate the brains of patients. He hopes to begin testing it in the next few years.
It's a fascinating article. Read it for yourself.
Wayne
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/badboy69/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Referencing a Wired UK article on "ultra mapping," Nokia's head of interface design, Adam Greenfield, stakes a claim to some pretty rich epistemological territory. Maps that dynamically pinpoint us render more than another coordinate or elevation. No, they are much more illustrious:
[A]ll those routinely gorgeous renderings of subway ridership or crime or air quality imply something very different when you can either find yourself within their ambit or cannot. At its rawest, the suggestion is this: either these issues affect me, or they do not. And this is true even if what is being mapped is a purely historical event. The implication is there, however faint.
Wayne
Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/collectivenouns/ / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Via Futurismic, "clear goals and fair incremental rewards" are a couple game design techniques that could make the transition from the one playing field to another.
Wayne
With repercussions for academic disciplines new and old, Nobel Laureate and psychologist Daniel Kahneman points out that "we think of the future as anticipated memories." Such anticipation bears on personal satisfaction, particularly if those memories are uncomfortable, but a better understanding of how we think the future also has an important economic dimension that is being explored.
We all exercise choice.
And Kahneman asks, who chooses, our "remembering self" or our "experiencing self?"
Thanks for pointing out the video Alice!
Wayne
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