How Collaboration Has Made the Human Brain Bigger

How Collaboration Has Made the Human Brain Bigger

Culture, Featured

In this article “Collaboration Makes Our Brains Bigger,” Gaurav Bhalla references a TED talk by Dan Gilbert to mention how the human brain has grown significantly in size over the last 200,000 years due to its power of imagination. Moreover, the development of the kind of imagination was mentioned as well, i.e. that We moved from imagining, “How big is the universe?” to imagining, “How do we work together to build a spaceship to get to the moon?”   So, collaboration seems to be one of the main reasons we developed imagination. In other words, we became Homo Sapiens because we had a better brain that could imagine how to collaborate, and because we could imagine how to collaborate we became better Homo Sapiens. And the more we learn to collaborate — and that includes the list of things like co-creation, value creation, open innovation, collaborative innovation, collective innovation, and continuous innovation — the more our brains will grow. Image: "Education" by Sean...
What Is Flow Experience? Can We Help Each Other Experience Flow More Often Than What Is Described Here?

What Is Flow Experience? Can We Help Each Other Experience Flow More Often Than What Is Described Here?

Featured, Home, Science

When you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, you do not have enough attention left over to monitor how your body feels, or your problems at home. You cannot feel even that you’re hungry or tired. Your body disappears, your identity disappears from your consciousness, because you don’t have enough attention, like none of us do, to really do well something that requires a lot of concentration, and at the same time to feel that you exist. So existence is temporarily suspended. This automatic, spontaneous process that is being described can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you cannot be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field. Whether it is mathematics or music, it takes that long to be able to begin to change something in a way that it is better than what was there before. Now, when that happens, he says the music just flows out. This is the flow experience, and it happens in different realms. –Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in the TED Talk “Flow, The Secret to Happiness.” All quotes in this post are from this TED talk, which can be viewed also at the bottom of this post.   Flow Experience for a Poet For instance, a poet describes it in this form. This is by a student of mine who interviewed some of the leading writers and poets in the United States. And it describes the same effortless, spontaneous...
Israel & Iran: A Love Story? [TED Talk]

Israel & Iran: A Love Story? [TED Talk]

Culture, Featured

They want to respond. They want to say the same thing. So… now it’s communication. It’s a two-way story. It’s Israelis and Iranians sending the same message, one to each other.” – Ronny Edry, Israeli graphic designer Given the contentious nature of relations that exist between Israel and Iran, it is a wonder that one man, Ronny Edry, could start a whole new dialogue between the peoples, simply by creating one poster on Facebook. That poster [the image above] said: Iranians, we will never bomb your country, We [heart] You.” The following quotes are from Edry’s TED talk. In it he details how that poster led to many more posters, conversations, and the revelation of love between Israelis, Iranians, and many others: On March 14, this year, I posted this poster on Facebook. This is an image of me and my daughter holding the Israeli flag. I will try to explain to you about the context of why and when I posted. A few days ago, I was sitting waiting on the line at the grocery store, and the owner and one of the clients were talking to each other, and the owner was explaining to the client that we’re going to get 10,000 missiles on Israel. And the client was saying, no, it’s 10,000 a day. (“10,000 missiles”) This is the context. This is where we are now in Israel. We have this war with Iran coming for 10 years now, and we have people, you know, afraid. It’s like every year it’s the last minute that we can do something about the war with Iran. It’s like, if...
Connected, But Alone [Ted Talk]

Connected, But Alone [Ted Talk]

Culture, Featured

  “I’m still excited by technology,“ says Sherry Turkle in her TED talk, “but I believe, and I’m here to make the case, that we’re letting it take us places that we don’t want to go.” Turkle is a psychologist and author most recently of the book, Alone Together. Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile communication and I’ve interviewed hundreds and hundreds of people, young and old, about their plugged in lives. And what I’ve found is that our little devices, those little devices in our pockets, are so psychologically powerful that they don’t only change what we do, they change who we are. Some of the things we do now with our devices are things that, only a few years ago, we would have found odd or disturbing, but they’ve quickly come to seem familiar, just how we do things. So just to take some quick examples: People text or do email during corporate board meetings. They text and shop and go on Facebook during classes, during presentations, actually during all meetings. People talk to me about the important new skill of making eye contact while you’re texting… Parents text and do email at breakfast and at dinner while their children complain about not having their parents’ full attention. But then these same children deny each other their full attention.” The Allure Of Connecting When You Want, How You Want, With Whom You Want Why does this matter? It matters to me because I think we’re setting ourselves up for trouble — trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in...
Time To Act: Continued Constant Economic Growth Will Lead To Collapse

Time To Act: Continued Constant Economic Growth Will Lead To Collapse

Economy, Featured

The earth is full. It’s full of us, full of our stuff, full of our waste, full of our demands; yes, we are a brilliant and creative species, but we’ve created a little too much stuff—so much that our economy is now bigger than it’s host, our planet…” – Paul Gilding, independent writer and adviser on sustainability. The above and following quotes are from Gilding’s TED talk on sustainability. A Familiar Message With Little Regard Given To It It is nothing new that advocates and scientists are warning that consumption is out of control on our planet. However, little is done to educate us, the various populaces of the planet, that our current levels of consumption are detrimental to the future survival of our species, other species, and the planet as a whole. As Gilding says, We’re burning through our capital, or, stealing from the future… what this means is our economy is unsustainable … when things aren’t sustainable they stop.” In Love With A Crazy Idea When we think about economic growth stopping we go, ‘that’s not possible,’ because economic growth is so essential to our society that it is really questioned… it is based on a crazy idea, the crazy idea being that we can have infinite growth on a finite planet… I’m here to tell you the Emperor has no clothes, that the crazy idea is just that: It is crazy.” Gilding states a counter argument: But we need growth. We need it to solve poverty. We need it to develop technology. We need it to keep social stability.” His reply: I find this argument fascinating, as...