Idea Pod

Reclaim the Wonder of Childhood

2010-01-16T09:33:00.000-08:00

We dull our lives by the way we conceive them.

-James Hillman (1965) American Psychologist

Resa Steindel Brown in The Call To Brilliance argues that education can be empowering to children and adults in ways that conventional school systems cannot dare to even hope for. Current schools are fashioned to give children the knowledge they need to get a job when they are grown. But there is so much more to human potential that is completely untapped or even squelched by schooling. Wonder, imagination and self-determination are the first casualties of public schooling. Steindel Brown believes a passion oriented, individualized education can revive the most beautiful attributes of the human spirit, with children leading adults back to a place where possibilities are endless.

The child can lead us back to our innate brilliance with authenticity, integrity and passion, if we allow it. But we forget. We forget our own childhoods when all things were possible.

Marc Brown is taking these passion oriented educational ideas and organizing Passion Oriented Education (TM) which should be launching this month. Groups of parents get together every two weeks to plan and discuss the education of their children and brainstorm together to improve their children's opportunities to follow their passions. Each group has a leader and the children meet once a week for projects and friendship. This model seems ideal for use along with Gifted Education programs.

Are Runners Dopamine Machines?

2010-01-13T12:33:00.000-08:00

We've all heard how exercise can prevent heart disease and maintain brain plasticity. More good news regarding the positive effect of exercise, this time running, was presented recently at the Society for Neuroscience's 2009 meeting. Neuroscientist
Judy Cameron of the University of Pittsburgh showed exercise may have a protective effect against Parkinson's disease.

Cameron's study was conducted on rhesus monkeys. A group of monkeys were divided to follow three different exercise plans for three months. The first group really just sat around and watched others exercise. The second group jogged for thirty minutes daily and the third group ran, on a treadmill, at a speed that brought heart rates up to 80% capacity. After the 3 months,MPTP, a neurotoxin that inhibits dopamine production, was injected into the brains of all monkeys. This neurotoxin is the same one present in the brains of humans suffering Parkinson's disease.

The results were astounding. The monkeys that ran suffered no ill effects from the injected neurotoxin, while the sedentary monkeys lost motor function of their left arms. The jogging monkeys did better than the sitting ones, but by far, the runners remained the healthiest.

My questions are:
1. Will Cameron be able to rehabilitate the sedentary rhesus monkeys by putting them on a strict running program or is their motor function impaired permanently?
2. Would persons experiencing the early symptoms of Parkinson's benefit from joining a local running club and a training for a marathon? Or at what point is exercise no longer helpful?

Worship the Young and Venerate the Old?

2010-01-12T10:07:00.000-08:00

This is a youth-oriented society, and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover.

-Annonymous

American culture idolizes youth. Youth represents strength, both physical and mental, beauty and plasticity. The United States is a young country after all, not just because of its demographics but also historically and architecturally.

An old building in Boston can be no more than 300 years old, compared to Istanbul's Hagia Sophia, China's Qin Dynasty tombs or India's Virupaksha Temple; architecturally we are babies. No ancient structures dominate our landscapes. Los Angeles may have its share of crumbling buildings not because any building has weathered more than 200 August heat waves, but because cheap materials with no staying power were used in construction.

So, part of why we venerate youth may be a form of collective self-esteem. As a culture, as a nation we are young, and so we love youth. To be young and beautiful means higher paying jobs and social opportunities. To be young and bright means hard work and a little luck may land you on NASA's newest mission to Mars or in the Oval Office, regardless of where your parents came from. Youth are not held back by heavy familial traditions or responsibilities.Old age is perceived as defeat. People fight it. Americans want to stay young and any benefits middle-age or beyond may bring are lost to us.

In France, although the beauty of youth is celebrated, age is respected. The old are seen as not only wise, but deserving of attentions small and large. Ecuadorians honor their elders by giving people of "the third age" steep, sometimes more than 50% discounts, on airplane and theater tickets and there is no set retirement age. Healthy octogenarians work alongside younger people and are consulted and prized as workers for their experience. In fact, in the small Andean city of Vilcabamba, older people tend to exaggerate their ages, they want to seem older than their true chronological age. The young are seen as inexperienced and look for guidance from the older members of society.

The benefits of providing myriad opportunities for the young in the United States are clear. Americans believe in possibilities and that is most clear in the iconoclasm surrounding youth. But much is lost with the vilification of old age and with classic American images of the sunset years as disease-ridden and characterized by mental decline and irrelevance. These perceptions bode well for no one, not even the very young. What is there to look forward to if your life opportunities and relevance peak within the first three decades of life? This is simply culturally unhealthy and even pathologically ignorant.

A Faustian Bargain

2010-01-05T10:59:00.000-08:00

All civilization comes through literature now, especially in our country. A Greek got his civilization by talking and looking, and in some measure a Parisian may still do it. But we, who live remote from history and monuments, we must read or we must barbarise.

- William D. Howells (1913), American Writer and Critic

A literature-based education is the exact opposite to Standards-Based schooling, the public school reform movement that has defined the first decade of the 21st century. Schools today work to collectively raise the standards, or scores, of American students. The key word here is collectively. The final end of American public education today is to raise collective scores. This is what administrators focus on and look to inspire teachers to accomplish: higher standardized test scores. To what end exactly? According to educational consultant Ruby Payne , raising the real estate values of communities, is an important reason children should go to school and do well on standardized exams.

Are we deliberately training a generation of under-educated, apathetic and literary ignorant people; that is, classic barbarians, so our homes will retain or increase in value?

That seems like a terrible trade, like nothing short of a Faustian bargain.

The American Way: Plan Before the Plan

2009-12-17T15:38:00.000-08:00

...I had a sudden realization: I was in danger of wasting my life..."What do I want from life, anyway?" I asked myself...

-Gretchen Rubin (2009), American Author

When you want a killer backhand in tennis, you watch a good instructional video, hire a coach or take tips from your tennis-playing best friend. When you want to join the community symphony with your cello, you dust off the old sheet music you haven't looked at since college and practice everyday for two months. And, if you decide to tackle one 500 page history book each week next month, well, start practicing your reading.

New Year's resolutions are on the horizon just waiting, poised, ready to defeat the poor mortals who create them. The thing is most of us make these well-intentioned resolutions with no concrete practice plan. There must be a plan, before the plan. So, if you're going to tackle the New York Times crossword puzzles each week in January, start practicing now. Get ready to make the real resolution stick.

If you have a whole list of resolutions, then you need to be even more organized. Greatchen Rubin's new book The Happiness Project is a fun read about the year she decided to be happier and how she made it work. If you visit her blog The Happiness Project you can even find tools to follow in her organized footsteps to move towards the good life.

The whole idea of resolutions and self-improvement is distinctly American and began with Benjamin Franklin, whom some historians have called "The First American". He constantly sought to improve himself, his community and the world. He details his self-improvement project in his Autobiography.
What a great person to represent Americans.

No Easy Acess for Us

2009-12-14T15:51:00.000-08:00

Google Books will not digitize French literature, french president Nicolas Sarkozy announced today.

"We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage to the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” Sarkozy said.

So France will fund and thus control its cultural digitization project.
This refusal to let french literary treasures swim amongst Google's classic books with no obvious distinction; naked for the entire world to judge impartially, seems arrogant and cowardly. The idea that French literature should only be doled out, beautifully packaged, by the French government seems limiting and could prevent future digitized generations from accessing some of humanity's greatest works as easily as I can today by visiting my local library.
In today's physical libraries, Victor Hugo and Pieter Hugo may stand side by side. Most libraries don't have a room dedicated to french literature and so french greats may be stumbled upon by innocent seekers. If French works are absent from the world's largest and possibly most efficient digital library, would not that be a loss for the French and the rest of us, in the end?
I love the aesthetic considerations that are a French obsession and surely play a role in this decision to keep digitized literature in French hands.
But, would it not be better if Sarkozy's government funded a French-controlled cultural collection and at the same time turned a blind public eye to whatever Google is doing and future plebeians across the globe might still stumble upon French literally grandeur?

Open Education: The Newest Tool for Dialectics?

2009-12-09T10:47:00.000-08:00

The birth of what was to become the Western world's first university, occurred under the breezy shade of an olive grove dedicated to the goddess Athena. Thirty-year old Plato, the first professor, lectured sparsely, but posed humanity's greatest questions before his students for discussion. The teacher served as a discussion guide, a moderator. The brilliant students, hand picked by Plato, sought to discover truths as a collaborative community. Eventually this method of intellectual growth came to be called dialectic.

Fast-forward 2,300 years and this original method of academic discussion, at least in the United States, which boasts more than 5,000 universities, is reserved for only the creme-de-la-creme. The brightest students at the most elite universities seek to discover truths through collaboration with teachers, advisers and each other. Those whose paths have lead them to more mediocre centers of learning, though nor necessarily less expensive, sit and listen. And sit and listen some more. And after some more sitting and listening regurgitate facts on tests and quizzes and sometimes in shallow essays. No one expects these students to solve humanity's greatest questions.

This linking of passive acquisition of information to a University education is oppressive and demeaning to students, many of whom could be capable of tackling humanity's greatest questions, if given a proper university experience that includes dialectic.

The grassroots Open Education Movement (OEM), pioneered by Richard Baraniuk of Rice University, may be the impetus to never-seen-before human intellectual progress, and a very modern form of dialectics. The OEM aims to open up education in the tradition of the open-source software movement, such as Linux.
Using 21st century tools, this OEM collaboration on speed will grow exponentially as students from around the world gain access to real-time tackling of humanity's questions, from the most basic processes we still don't fully comprehend to universe-sized cosmological ideas.

Open educational materials include text, images, audio, video, interactive simulations, and games that are free to be used and also re-used in new ways by anyone around the world. Participants in open-education are working toward a broad set of goals, that democratize education and include intellectuals of all ages, disciplines and nations, reduce the cost of teaching materials (throw out those $120.00 textbooks), reduce the time lag between the production of course materials so they remain crisp and relevant in our fast-paced world.

Imagine the dialectical possibilities when ordinary university students are equipped with an entire collaborative intellectual universe.

The One Human Freedom

2009-06-01T12:00:00.000-07:00

I get up every morning determined both to change the world and to have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day difficult.
-E.B. White, American author

The world is divided into people who believe they can change the world and people who don't. The meanings of "world" and "change" are relative. A 1-year-old smiles sweetly at her daddy pointing at the gummy bear jar on top of the fridge trying to effect change with charm. A teacher sees great potential in a wayward student and tells the parents hoping to make a difference with authority. A chemist works in the lab four hours past quitting time knowing her work could be the difference in eradicating swine flu.
The power to change the world is wrought with peril. Mistakes will be made, people will disappoint or be disappointed and too many days may end with exhaustion and defeat. But such is life. The power to change life is the stuff of hope. Without hope, there is depression.
In 1964, psychologist Martin Seligman coined the term "learned helplessness" to describe a loss of will he observed in lab dogs. The dogs were inadvertently taught that their actions had no correlations to outcomes. These dogs shrank physically and mentally. They became sluggish and the eagerness dogs are known for left. But 1/3 of the dogs kept trying to effect change; they did not learn this helplessness. These are the dogs Seligman continued to study.
Eventually Seligman studied similar characteristics in humans and found that some people refuse to become helpless in even the most adverse life circumstances. These positive people believe negative circumstances are temporary and that they have some control, even if the only control they really have is that of thoughts.
Viktor Frankl, Nazi concentration camp survivor and author of Man's Search for Meaning says

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread. They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

What Frankl labels "last of the human freedoms" is also the first and possibly the only. In the end, we are either directors or prisoners of our thoughts and what we choose to think, makes all the difference in the world.

What Are Your Invariant Representations?

2009-04-29T08:17:00.000-07:00

Genes dictate the overall architecture of the [brain's] cortex, including the specifics of what regions are connected together, but within that structure the system is highly flexible.

-Jeff Hawkins (2004), Neuroscience Researcher

Scientists often refer to the human brain as "wired". This term is misleading because it calls to mind an incorrect image of brain physiology. Substances, such as blood and hormones, and impulses, move through the brain in patterns that are often started and set by individual experience. A live brain is soft and pliable and truly, there are no wires involved. A more appropriate term, though clunky, is Jeff Hawkins's Invariant Representation.

An invariant representation is simply a neuronal pattern with enough connections to other patterns to make a human memory. The more complex a web of patterns is, the more actual brain space (mental space) it takes up. That is why, the brain of a violist practicing 6 hours a day, for the last five years, will be different then your brain, if you're spending 6 hrs/ day playing Wii Tennis.

Actress Jennifer Lopez said,

Until you`re twenty, you have the face you are born with, and after that you have the face you deserve.

The same thing applies to your brain. Your genes determine what you start with. Eventually, depending on how you have spent your time, you will have the brain you deserve.

How Much Space Do You Need?

2009-04-06T10:38:00.000-07:00

It is a disaster to have a man fall in love with me. They aren't content to take what I can give, they want everything from me.
- Katherine Anne Porter (1960), American Journalist

Feeling lonely even when involved in a close, romantic relationship, is not all that uncommon. This odd sort of loneliness stems from unmet expectations. In order to relieve "in-relationship" loneliness one of two things needs to occur. Either the expectations of the lonely person need to be adjusted or even replaced by ones that work for the relationship or an emotional break from the other person must be made. The expectation that is most relevant to happiness in romantic relationships is related to freedom versus connectedness.

A friend, Paloma, recently moved to Manhattan to dance, write and try to make ends meet on student loans and side jobs. She rented a one-room "hole-in-the wall", registered for classes at NYU and chatted with anyone willing. Two weeks into her new life the loneliness set in and flooded any spare moment. Although she spoke to friends and family in Ohio by telephone and e-mail, she felt utterly socially disconnected in her new life. One day, her sister mentioned that Paloma's old boyfriend, George, had also moved to New York recently. "Why don't you look him up?" she said. Paloma did not really want to date George again, but she did need a friend.

George, moved to New York City, rented a flat, and started exploring his new neighborhood, Chinatown. The intoxicating smells of fresh meat and fried delicacies, mandarin folk opera music mingled with curt yelling and the shear mass of humanity kept this Midwesterner enthralled. On his walks to and from his new job he had time to think and marvel. He felt very happy.

Two weeks into his new life, he received a call from Paloma. She was in town, working as a waitress by day and taking evening classes to complete her MFA. "Let's get together!" she said. They met for lunch. They kept in touch and eventually resumed dating. Soon free evenings and weekends were spent in each others company. Paloma was happy. Everything in her life seemed in place now that she had George to share her life. But George began to feel an unease growing inside. Paloma needed more of George. More time. More affection, love and assurance. More impromptu talks, more hugs. George needed time alone. So their conflicts began. Neither of them were quite in love and so, the relationship ended. George went back to marveling at the wonders around him, alone. Paloma began looking for her soul mate.

University of Chicago professor, John T. Cacioppo, author of Loneliness, believes it's a subjective sense of loneliness--not lack of objective social support--that uniquely predicts whether a person's psychological state negatively affects her physiological health. People who feel they are lonely exhibit depressive symptoms, chronic health conditions , and elevated blood pressure.

Each person has a unique need for connectedness and each person's expectations fall in line with that level of need. The needed level of need can not be wrong. Each is just different and this difference can cause relationships with great potential to sour. To remain happy in a relationship with a person whose connectedness needs differ from yours, your expectations must be adjusted to better fit that relationship. Negotiations must begin and a place where each person feels loved and connected needs to be found. That is why Love Is Work.

Love has to be work, because each person's need for connection is unique. Soul mates exist, but someone exactly like you, does not and never, ever will.

Music On My Mind

2009-03-12T13:24:00.000-07:00

Are you good at tuning into the smallest nuances of human speech and its emotional variations? It could be because you started piano lessons at age seven. Neuroscientist Nina Kraus believes musical experience not only sharpens your hearing for music but also alerts you to emotions expressed in speech, such as anger or sadness. The more time (both daily and across the years) a musician has practiced the more obvious the effect. This has hopeful implications for the treatment of mental disorders related to decreased emotional connectivity, such as autism. Maybe we will soon see music lessons especially tailored for autistic children.
In Venezuela, musician Jose Abreu tailors music education to improve the lives of 300,000 poor children, one lesson at a time. Children admitted to his program sign up to practice an orchestral instrument every day they eat, for many hours. They learn classical music from expert musicians and each other. Eventually they join the Venezuelan Youth Orchestra, travel the world and gain a discipline that will forever lift them from poverty. The current conductor of the
Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, is a graduate of Abreu's program.
You don't have to be mentally disabled or living in the poorest neighborhood of Caracas to benefit from the practice of music. Yet it is rare for non-musically trained adults to seriously take up the discipline of music. We somehow find time to hit the gym and even finish a New York Times crossword puzzle now and then.
Could it be our society is so focused on expertise and competence, that it is difficult for adults to start something, they will be terrible at for a few years, from scratch?

More Knowledge Please

2009-03-06T09:19:00.000-08:00

There is probably no limit to what science can do in the way of increasing positive excellence.
So far, it has been physical science that has had the most effect upon our lives, but in the future physiology and psychology are likely to be far more potent.
-Bertrand Russell (1960), British Philosopher

The most difficult human endeavor is self-control.
As a conscious being, you are aware of your body, but the organ in which consciousness occurs, the brain, is not aware of itself. That is why neuroscientists study the brain at work, psychologists experiment to understand behavior and analysts dissect motives. We so want to understand ourselves because deep down we know, with understanding comes freedom and with freedom, the possibilities are infinite.

3 Inspiring New Books

2009-03-05T07:35:00.000-08:00

Continuous effort--not strength or intelligence--is the key to unlocking our potential.
-Winston Churchill (1950), British Prime Minister

Superstar journalist Malcolm Gladwell tackles the topic of success in his new book Outliers. You must be good enough to enter a field, Gladwell says, but once you're in, who you know, how hard you work and how lucky you get, make all the difference in the world.
Fortune magazine's senior editor, Geoff Colvin, also just published his take on the same topic, success in Talent Is Overrated. Hard work is not enough, Colvin says, its the right kind of deliberate practice that boosts a person's chances of achieving greatness.
A third journalist, David Shenk is currently writing The Genius in All of Us, also about genius and success. Why all the books on success? Why are we enamoured with stars? Americans, are probably culturally predisposed to look up to successful people. We hold in our heart, and our founding documents, that each one is special with great potential to be someone and achieve great happiness. It is good to be reminded how to reach that wondrous potential.

What Scientists Want

2009-03-02T10:25:00.000-08:00

Currently in India, the average age of laboratory scientists is close to 50. Bright university students aren't drawn to scientific careers with little pay and little glory. They either defect to the West or choose more lucrative work at home. But India's prime minister, Manmohan Singh, is making sure this trend is reversed within the next decade. Last December, the journal Nature reports, Singh launched a five-year, 21 billion-rupee (US $427-million) scholarship programme for a million 10-15 year-olds, whose funding can continue through graduate school if they stay in science. Singh's plan also guarantees research positions for new science PhDs. These changes will be a boon for older scientists as well. So many new science teachers will be needed that the retirement age for science professors will be changed from 60 to 65, and foreign professors will be recruited as needed. India is going scientific. But will the coming new batches of scientists stay in India? They will if the following three life qualities also improve in India:

Scientific freedom and plenty of funding

Great places to live long term and raise families

India's own heroes of science: people the young will want to emulate

For India to go scientific long term, it must also embrace a culture in which it is O.K. to, in the immortal words of Ms. Frizzle:

take chances, make mistakes, and get messy, because the best science swims in such an attitude.

The Human Animal

2009-02-28T13:39:00.000-08:00

Being able to self-regulate our emotions and our behaviors is a large part of what makes us human.
-John Cacioppo (2008), Social Neuroscientist

In the early 1960's part being human meant, among other things, being able to use tools. That theory, debunked by etymologist Jane Goodall's observations of wild chimpanzees, is no longer part of the "what makes us human" list. Today's list is focused on two main, apparently only human, attributes: Our extremely complex social systems and our ability to regulate our emotions. Yet, this new short list also begs editing.
Yes, we are socially complex, you may say. But aren't bees and ants extremely socially organized as well? They are. But they exhibit no where near our level of social interconnectedness. So, I guess, our humanness requires a certain of degree of complexity, a certain societal tipping point that occurred long ago and eventually led to the formation of the modern human brain.
But how about the emotion control point? You probably know at least one person who is frequently "out of control" emotionally. Are the emotionally volatile less human? Of course not. So, can you really make a list to define humanness? I think so, but not quite yet. Neuroscience is still in its infancy as a science and the human brain is not yet fully understood. One thing is clear, humans have huge brains and therein lie the differences between us and them.

Teach According To Your Ideals

2009-02-27T19:19:00.000-08:00

"Hey love, share your truck with the nice little boy."

Every day, some version of this phrase is uttered by smiling parents in playgrounds across America. There is something very plastic about a parent encouraging her child to do something adults don't do; that is, share a prized possession with a total stranger. Yet, even though hypocritical threads run through many American child rearing practices, I am grateful to live in a society that attempts to teach its children the highest humanistic ideals.
Thomas Jefferson asserted "all men are created equal"; yet he kept slaves whom were not treated with equality. If Jefferson had limited himself to writing only principles that matched his life instead of his ideals we would have a lesser, even inconsequential, declaration of independence buried within old history books.
A nation's ideals determine it's future.

The indoctrination for toddlers in Palestine is devoid of our middle-class American niceties. Hate and warfare are ideals promoted to Palestinian children. Such ideals predict suffering and devastation not only for Palestinian children, but also for anyone affected by such a society.
So, go ahead, tell your child to share, even if you don't. Teach your child to get along, even if you yell at your neighbor over the fence. Maybe, because of your ideals, your child will be a bigger person than you.

New Track Homes?

2009-02-26T11:11:00.000-08:00

Dongtan, located on an island off of Shanghai, China, is one of the world's
first truly green cities. It's still in early development but the bridge and
tunnel link to the mainland is now being built. This planned, zero-waste, energy-efficient community is to reach 500,000 residents by 2050, all the while maintaining much of the natural wetlands that provide one of the few remaining refuges for birds in a constantly developing country. The city will be powered mainly by sea breezes and only clean-running vehicles will be permitted.
It is so good to see a new brand of planned community.

Inner City Centers of Hope

2009-02-25T11:36:00.001-08:00

We greet all students with the same basic recipe for success: high standards, stiff challenges, a chance to develop unexplored talents, and a message that many of them haven’t heard before–that no matter how difficult the circumstances of their lives may be, no matter how many bad assumptions they’ve made about their chances in life, no matter how well they’ve been taught to rein in their dreams and narrow their aspirations, they have the right, and the potential, to expect to live rich and satisfying lives.
-Bill Strickland (2009), Social Entrepreneur

At 16, Bill Strickland, now sixty, had an epiphany. The sun shone through a large window at his Pittsburgh inner city high school on a man in flow, sculpting a clump of clay. Strickland had never seen someone so engrossed in life and was drawn towards the light. He introduced himself to that sculptor and gained a mentor for life. With his mentor's guidance, the young Strickland gained a new, positive view of life and saw the world open before him. Four decades later, Strickland is deeply engaged in changing lives, opening up the world for other inner-city people, through social entrepreneurship. He runs the Manchester Bidwell Corporation and the Manchester Craftsman's Guild, both educational facilities based in Pittsburgh to serve mainly minority, poverty-ridden, youths and adults. These facilities are truly inspiring. They are well designed, both architecturally and educationally, to fill each student with hope and provide them the opportunity to work hard and learn much. Students may enroll in art and music classes taught by world class visiting artists. They may learn gourmet cooking skills or agricultural techniques. The list of offerings is impressive, but I think my favorite ideal of Strickland's schools is the life-changing personal attention and respect each student receives. The young people of Pittsburgh are extremely fortunate to have such an educational center only a free bus-ride away.
Bill Strickland's big idea is to expand his model to over 200 cities around the world. This is an exciting idea worth supporting.
To watch Bill Strickland's big idea TED Conference presentation, click on Bill Strickland's big idea . Enjoy and be inspired.

Keep Courage

2009-02-24T12:22:00.000-08:00

Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.
-Albert Einstein

The current economic crisis will influence today's children to become risk averse. This fear of making mistakes and trying the new may seep into the mindset of an entire generation. Such a fearful mindset shared by millions of Americans will reduce the rate and scope of creativity and innovation of the entire country.
So, how to avert this tragic effect? Is there a way to shield our children, to keep children innocent, from the negative effects of financial mistakes gone haywire? Yes, there is. Each adult being watched by a child must herself act with courage, every day, in the big and the small stuff of life.
And how does one do this? By surrounding oneself with positive, courageous people and deciding to be a big person, worthy of emulation.

Make mistakes.
Keep courage.
Try new things.

Even if this isn't who you really are, fake it, till you make it. Because now, more than ever, the courage exhibited by individual adults will make a positive difference in the future lives of today's children.

Be Good Company

2009-02-24T10:39:00.000-08:00

You learn from the company you keep.
- Frank Smith, American philosopher and educator

What does one teach a child?
She obviously needs certain basic human skills. She must get along with people (including herself, of course) of all ages, shapes, sizes, colors and beliefs (E.Q.). She must internalize the intricacies and nuances of reciprocal communication (speaking, writing). She should be able to google stuff and understand game instructions or soup recipes (reading, tech stuff). A little grocery store math would be good too (arithmetic). She must develop an intuitive balance between healthy food and treats so she feels strong, and must find a way to move that gives her joy (health) and learn what to do with her free time (music, art, business).
But how is this teaching best done? Some say that there is no such thing as teaching, that really there is only learning. When a child opens his attention to you it has little to do with what you are trying to teach, but a lot to do with his emotional state and connection to you. This view is best explained by Frank Smith in The Book of Learning and Forgetting, in which he differentiates "The Classic View "of learning from coercive teaching. Historically the learned have always known the following three truths:

We learn from those around us with whom we identify.

Learning is growth.

We learn continuously and with out noticeable effort

So, how do we teach our children the basics? We connect emotionally with them and somehow get them to identify with us and want to be like us and listen to what we have to say (teach). The educator and philosopher, John Holt (1980) said:

I think children need much more than they have of opportunities to come into contact with adults who are seriously doing their adult thing, not just hanging around entertaining or instructing or being nice to children.

Children need real mentors. Real mentors worthy of emulation. One teaches a child with one's life.

Sure, a child may learn how to decode words (read?) and put down words on paper in the most beautiful handwriting (write?) and calculate the square root of 100 in 2 seconds flat (math?). It is possible to coerce a child to "overlearn" almost any skill, but at a price any thinking person would not be willing to pay; a diminishment of that child's humanity.

Take Care of Your Hippocampus

2009-02-22T19:09:00.000-08:00

The Hippocampus is the brain structure responsible for our ability to store short memories and is key in learning. This structure shrinks as we age. The more one uses its functions by constantly being exposed to novelty and new learning the less age-related atrophy will occur. But people of all ages can have premature hippocampal damage. Robert Sapolsky, Stanford University neurobiologist, is a researcher with a message for us all. "Long term stress is bad for the brain," Sapolsky says, because it produces, possibly permanent, hypocampal atrophy. The stress Sapolsky refers to is severe enough to create the life-wilting twins, "learned helplessness" and depression. The longer a person is depressed the faster her hippo campus shrinks, inhibiting future short term memory capabilities and learning. "Keep your life in perspective!" Sapolsky says. Unfortunately the people most likely to need his advice are the least likely to be able to process it. Depression is a shirking of perspective, a possibly destructive honing in on the self. Depression kicks in when sadness over life's bad turns does not resolve. Everyone experiences moments of great sadness, the people that best protect their hippo campus from long-term damage are those who have a growth mindset to begin with. People with a growth mindset expect to grow somehow through their deepest valleys of despair. They know they will come out a different person, a wiser person. Psychologist Carol Dweck believes "People can choose which world they want to inhabit." And that choice makes all the difference.

Robert Sapolsky on You Tube

Interview with Carol Dweck

Musical Scientists

2009-02-19T19:19:00.000-08:00

Alexander Graham Bell took breaks from inventing the first telephone by playing piano. Einstein played the violin to let his mind work subconsciously when stumped. Neil Armstrong played the baritone horn in between space simulator sessions. All three played in private, but times have changed. Scientists today want to rock in public. A band of scientists, Rock-It-Science, plans to play in NYC on March 3rd.
Cool? Sure.
The real question is whether this change in instrument choices will change parents' instrument recommendations for their children. Will parents still push their kids to play that violin for an extra 15 mins.? In the 1990's Don Campbell popularized The Mozart Effect, he even wrote a book by that title, convincing millions of parents that early music education (classical music) would improve children's mental prowess. Will 2009 parents of small children soon hear of
The "All American Rejects Effect"?
Scientists beware of the trends you start!

Up Your Nose Treatments?

2009-02-18T11:06:00.000-08:00

The 5 February 2009 issue of the journal Nature reports on cerebral immune cells, microglia, as they may be implicated in many neurodegenerative diseases such as memory loss and dementia; as well as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and Narcolepsy. Hyperactivity of these cells may literally eat up synaptic connections. Scientists are still researching and disagree whether the microglia are helpful or harmful in these conditions. Although there are many medical treatments available to aid in easing symptoms of neurodegenerative diseases, no cure is yet available. The key to a cure may be figuring out exactly what microglia are doing at degenerating synaptic connections and figuring out how to stop them.
Futurist, Ray Kurzweil, is very positive about possible cures for these diseases in the near future. If neurodegenerative diseases are caused by inappropriately hyper microglia, the cure is soon to be provided by the insertion of microchips (in truly nano size) into the affected areas of the brain. These microchips would reprogram the cells to act as truly needed for healthy neuronal function. Medical trials are already underway with Parkinson's patients.
I'm hoping by the time I reach the age of common senility scientists will have all this figured out and I can drop by the microchip section of Target to pick up a short-term memory-restoring microchip I insert through my nose.

Ordinary Inventing

2009-02-12T14:02:00.000-08:00

Rather than advanced technological development and education being elite activities bounded by scarce space in the classrooms and labs, they can become much more widely accessible and locally integrated, limited only by the most renewable of raw materials: ideas.
- Neil Gershenfeld (2009), Professor MIT.

On a cold February morning, ten years from today, you may be able to program your car via e-mail, to turn on and begin defrosting and heating at exactly 7:55 a.m. (five minutes should be enough to get you out the door for work on time). Your coat could be warming in the heating closet you also programmed with the click of a single button. And your children could have already been fed warm oatmeal and a cup of blueberries by a robotic breakfast-maker. This Jetsons-like existence really is about to become ubiquitous. And inventing is about to become part of ordinary life.
The Fab Lab, originally from MIT, now has locations around the planet where ordinary people have access to technology specifically designed to make ideas and inventions a reality. Neil Gershenfeld, overall director of these Fab Labs, believes personal Fab Labs will be available so every household can make it's own inventions on site within the next twenty years.

Below are my top three questions about how Fab Labs will change our future:

How would you change your physical world, if you could make almost anything you think up by using a personal Fab Lab?
How will commerce change if you can design a dress at home and have it made within an hour by your personal Fab Lab?
How will education change, if larger Fab Labs become centers for learning and innovating?

Hmm...the possibilities.

New Urban Centers Coming

2009-02-10T07:29:00.000-08:00

We are unable to live without each other. Even on a practical level, it is probably a million years since any human being was entirely and convincingly self-sufficient: able to survive without trading his skills for those of his fellow humans.
- Matt Ridley (1998), Zoologist & Science Writer

Babies instinctively know what is most important to human survival: connection. The little ones unable to connect emotionally with a caretaker fail to thrive. But emotional connectivity skills need constant maintenance throughout life and different skills are needed throughout different life stages. A baby's sustained gaze with eyes, bright like little lights hooks you in. Eye contact is the base of all in-vivo human connection. But a ten year old that hooks you with his eyes needs to do more to maintain the connection.
Human connections, of course, go way beyond person to person emotional communicating. We are the most complex social beings on the planet. Our web of connectedness is vast, intricate and so tied to our humanity that a person not securely connected experiences the negative physical systems of extreme loneliness. Today, humans are forging more and more virtual connections that are productive and time consuming. But real life connections seem to be decreasing. This trend cannot be blamed on technology. But may be, at least partly, linked to the way our living spaces have been structured.
Since the 1950's, when William Levitt and his brother Alfred, designed the first American suburb, Levittown, with long term mortgages and community pools, live connections in the United States have become increasingly trite. As people moved from urban centers, day to day contact with others decreased substantially, especially for women.

With increased physical distance other forms of human connection decrease. Now with the Internet, where you live matters less in so many ways, but connections based solely on technology do not meet a person's human emotional needs. As we become more connected through technology, people with means will choose to live physically closer to other humans, not only to meet their emotional needs for human contact but to increase the capacity of their creative pursuits. Sprawling suburbs, and especially the more recent McMansions, are on their way out of popularity. People want to see each other face to face, more often, and for longer periods of time. Cities are back.

Bad Teachers Teach Unintended Lessons

2009-02-06T14:48:00.000-08:00

The only rational way of educating is to be an example--if one can't help it, a warning example.

-Albert Einstein (1934)

Teachers of all kinds; school teachers, parents, preachers and mentors, are generally unaware of what they really teach. Humans learn through patterns. A lecture may fit into a student's worldview in a way which most likely is unknown by the teacher. The student makes her own emotional connections, which are affected by her relationship with the teacher, her current life path, past experiences, distant memories, her biological make-up and even the day's weather. The teacher most likely to affect his student in line with his intentions is acutely aware of his mood, genuine level of enthusiasm and self-interest. The worst teacher still teaches what she knows best, but it may not be what she intends her student to learn.

Beautiful Brainbows

2009-02-05T08:59:00.000-08:00

It is intolerable that we do not have [a connection map of] the human brain. Without it there is little hope of understanding how our brains work except in the crudest way.
-Francis Crick (1993), Nobel Laureate Biologist

The January 29,2009 issue of the Journal Nature highlights the work of Harvard biologist Jeff Lichtman. Lichtman's team of researchers are busy meticulously dissecting a mouse's brain, slicing it into single strips of tissue and fixing that tissue onto plastic film for study. But mouse brains are only the sideshow in Lichtman's lab. Intra-neuronal connections and neuron-muscular connections in humans are the main topic of study. Lichtman is using color to map every connection in the human brain. The development of green fluorescent protein in the 1990's, gave Lichtman his first tool. He has been developing more colors to differentiate neural connections for almost ten years now and has named his technique colouring the Brainbow.
The brainbow, Lichtman says, allows you to watch competition [between neurons] in real time. And," he adds, the brainbow shows that the brain is not a mass of discrete anatomical areas, or a collection of chemical ingredients, but a vast loom of connected cells.
This is what we are, lots and lots of connections.
Although the 1990's were labeled "The Decade of the Brain" may be the real decade of the brain still lies in the future. A map of the brain is forthcoming, with that map knowledge of how the human mind actually works will truly begin.

"O.K. Johnny, Explain Your Idea."

2009-02-04T07:42:00.000-08:00

The Punahou School, set on 76-acres of hearty tropical grass with lush bushes highlighting startling flowers and huge banyan trees, is a truly beautiful school. The K-12 school, founded in 1841, feels more like a college campus and has an exotic mix of the scholarly and a laid-back Hawaiian-style. Barack Obama is the first U.S. President to come from Punahou, Hawaii's top independent school.
I recently sauntered through the Punahou campus and noted how fortunate students attending there are. Fresh fruits and vegetables are standard fare for lunch; windows are huge and most teachers leave their doors wide open. Elementary classrooms have their own little backyard for children to move in and out of; junior high students may choose to study Spanish, Latin, Mandarin Chinese or Japanese. But really, what makes these students extra "lucky" to be at Punahou is that each student is seen as her own person, full of potential, abilities and gifts to share with the world. Students at Punahou are there to gain skills to fulfill a bigger purpose, bigger than receiving a world class education. They are there to learn what they need to, to contribute to society and make their mark on the world. Their parents have big dreams. Their teachers have big jobs. The children know the school will serve them well.

President Obama experienced a quality education. Like many other U.S. Presidents of the past, he aims to improve American public education while in office. The job is huge. Some argue it isn't even possible at this point. Former public school teacher turned education activist, John Taylor Gatto says:

We must wake up to what our [public] schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants.

Children at Punahou are expected to lead someday. Children in the typical public school may have different expectations. To begin real positive change in public schooling, the grand picture of its actual function must be created, written and burned into the memory of every citizen. The basis for this change lies in what is best in American culture. The United States arguably houses the most innovation friendly culture the earth has ever seen.

Could public schools channel the beauty of American flexibility and openness of mind to improve the individual lives of its citizens and even the entire world?

Could the function of American education be to provide humanity with hordes of great contributors?

Must American education differentiate itself from that of other nations?

Yes. Yes. And yes.

Barack Obama has said a lot about American public education. But the key, the gleam of hope in his ideas on education lies in his comments on assessment. Obama says:

I will provide funds for states to implement a broader range of assessments that can evaluate higher-order skills, including students’ abilities to use technology, conduct research, engage in scientific investigation, solve problems, present and defend their ideas.

Obama hopes American students will soon be taught and tested to present and defend their ideas. That is a different and truly American idea in education. Americans serve, not by being "good listeners" but through contribution.

More power to you and good luck, Mr. President.

Girlish Glee in London

2009-02-03T03:49:00.000-08:00

And the school children, those alleged dysfunctional products of our greed-obsessed, low-serotonin, broken-homed, intolerably lardy, TV-ruined society, were in a snowy wonderland where there was no school, no rules and nothing to worry about. I've never seen London secondary school kids look filled to the brim with such girlish glee.

-Stuart Jeffries (2009), British Journalist

My skin still glows from the mild humidity of Hawaii's version of winter. Post vacation and back home now, I am somewhat grateful to live in a mild climate. Somewhat, I write, because I am an adult with things to do and responsibilities to execute, but still hold memories of pre-dawn February mornings on Long Island, huddled with siblings, kneeling by the stereo, hoping, waiting, almost like a second Christmas, for a general announcement of cancelled schools. Cancelled schools meant closed roads. By 10:00 a.m. neighborhoods across the island rang to the brim with childish glee.

So today, I happily imagine the children of London, who don't often experience Snow Days, and today complain to no one of their numb butts and faces, wet clothes and stiff knees. Cheers to snowy London!

Opening Up Creativity

2009-01-25T09:43:00.001-08:00

The time seems ripe to explore the potential of open education to transform the economics and ecology of education.
-Toru Iiyoshi, Director of the Knowledge Media Lab, Carnegie Foundation.

A friend of mine once called me "the creative type." I took the comment as a compliment but I know she meant it more as a descriptor with little judgement attached. I do wear more flowey skirts and dangly earrings than she does, but am I really "the creative type"? Not necessarily.
Creativity is a hot topic of study in various fields of behavioral science and now neuroscience. What constitutes creativity is still being defined by these fields. In general, creativity is a human trait we long to posses and hope our children exhibit a healthy dose as they grow. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has put together a list of characteristics exhibited by creative people throughout history. Creative people are:

1. Curious
2. Tolerant of ambiguity: Creative people are comfortable not having the answer all the time
3. Intuitive but logical, too. Creativity calls for moving easily back and forth between these two broad ways of thinking and processing information.
4. Open to emotions
5. Sense of humor: There appears to be a strong connection between humor or playfulness and creativity
6. Risk taker
7. Persistent
8. Self-disciplined: The perception that creative people are flighty, dis-organized, absent-minded is simply not true. Some are, many are not, just like any segment of the population.
9. Internal motivation as opposed to being motivated by external factors, like, say, money.
10. Wide ranging interests

Rex Jung, Ph.D., Founder of the new field of Positive Neuroscience has posed the following list of questions for science to address regarding creativity:

• Why do people with low IQs and autism produce beautiful art?
• Does creativity and/or intelligence require written language? e.g. Native Americans; preliterate societies (ancient – Ache)
• Can we really define creativity or intelligence?
• Is creativity constant over the lifespan?
• Is creativity just a social construct – a fad of a certain era?
• Should we study creative individuals as opposed to measures of creativity?
• How is creativity manifest in the brain?
• Are we all creative or only a special few?
• How can individual creative capacity be encouraged and developed?
• Are creativity and intelligence linked in any meaningful way?

The fields engaged in studying creativity are just beginning to scratch the surface of human potential. But it all seems to be leading to practical applications for human learning and education. Formal education is at a tipping point, about to change, to open-up, to better fit the functions of the human brain, including the fostering of creativity. More resources than ever are available to learners. The time really does seem ripe for human learning about creativity to change education for the better.

"Keep Moving Forward"

2009-01-23T08:58:00.000-08:00

How well children learn to deal with reality, and huge numbers learn to do it poorly, has a lot to do with whether they are happy or miserable for the rest of their lives.
- William Glasser (1998), Physician

My favorite animated Disney movie is Meet the Robinsons. It is a science wiz's fairy tale. The orphan Lewis Robinson decides to use his passion for inventing to locate his biological mother so they can be a family "again". The crux of the movie is when he realizes he already has a family and begins to use his brains to improve the world through technology. He sheds his obsession with the past and adopts a new motto "Keep Moving Forward." Lewis' childhood roommate, Grube, adopts a more negative view of life. The crux in Grube's life is when he decides to blame someone else (Lewis) for all his problems. His mindset becomes fixed, he chooses unhappiness and focuses his life on revenge. In the end, there is no end of possibilities for Lewis (renamed Cornelius by the end of the movie). He keeps inventing...

I used to enjoy other Disney animated movies more before I had a daughter who adores the Disney princesses. The Disney princesses (except may be Mulan) do not have a growth mindset. In the end of each princess movie, there really is an end. Each princess got what she wanted and that is that. No possible future stories.

The question is, how do I wean my four-year old off the princess ideal? The music, colors and beautiful characters put out by Disney leave a mark on an eager learner's brain. But may be I shouldn't worry at all, because when my little girl dresses the princess' part, she exudes power. And a sense of power is a mighty emotion to try on at her age. It is a feeling she'll want again in the future. It is then up to me to guide her to true power; power over one's mindset and life direction. So, I'll let her wear gaudy yellow dresses and aluminum high-heeled slippers, while I hold her and chat with her and show her how to harness and direct her power for growth. Because real-life and everyday conversations are the most enduring tools of all.

Take Note

2009-01-22T11:04:00.000-08:00

It takes longer to study a life than to live it, longer to interpret a work than to create it, longer to understand an event than it took to happen.
-Robert Davidoff (2006), American Historian

Each moment of President Obama's inauguration seemed to stand still in time. Like a tennis ball at the height of a service toss or one's gaze while holding a brand new infant, time stood, as if blinking wild with lights saying "I will remember this forever." The journalists, pencils in hand, are ready. The historians take notes too. This is a first that will be studied and analyzed and recorded. Our young daughters will remember Obama's daughters and our grandchildren will write reports on his ideas. Maybe they will ask us "How old were you when Obama became president?" just to frame whatever else we have to say about this moment in American History.
I will tell my grandchildren how new time seemed at the moment Obama said "I, Barack Hussein Obama..." I will tell them how proud I felt because he represents a new and better world; a world in which ideas drive actions and words are chosen one at a time to inspire an entire planet. I will tell them my ninety-year-old grandmother called from South America to congratulate me on America's bright future. She also could tell the world was new once more. I will tell them of hope and how powerful a human emotion it is, if only for today.

Heavy Days

2009-01-20T09:00:00.000-08:00

Begin at once to live, and count each separate day as a separate life.

-Seneca

Albert Einstein, Time magazine's Most Influential Person of the Century, changed the way we perceive time. It's relative; just like everything else in life. Each day is really a new start only if one sees it that way.

Our brand new president, Barack Obama must surely feel each day weighs heavily. Each moment in his life is large. And even though a country's plans must be relatively long term, the day is what matters in the end. Each day eventually ends and is stacked up in the pile of past history, a path leading somewhere.

Each day viewed as a separate life leaves room for a change of direction, as needed, as the relativity of human existence requires. This may be the most positive way to view one's time on earth.

Sullenberger's 10,000 Hours

2009-01-17T08:00:00.000-08:00

The pilot Chesley Sullenberger was "the right guy at the right time at the right moment" to guide a powerless jet safely onto the surface of the Hudson River only 40 hrs. ago. Calm and mindful as pilot and leader his behavior was "flawless." All people aboard his airplane are alive today because Sullenberger put in 10,000 hours into becoming an exceptional pilot. Sullenberger is a classic "Outlier" as described by writer Malcolm Gladwell in his new book Outliers. Sullenberger has even put in time studying the psychology of how people behave in crises'. He knew exactly what to do, he saw the big picture and mapped out a plan of action in a minute. He took care of everything and everyone. His calm direction allowed his crew to perform impeccably. He overlearned what to do in an emergency and had no problem executing. His feat saved the lives of more than one hundred humans and gave America a new kind of hero, a hard-working one. Cheers to Sullenberger for putting in the time.

Examine Your Life, but Not Too Much

2009-01-14T07:41:00.000-08:00

It is easy to slip into self-absorption and it is equally fatal.
-Eleanor Roosevelt (1960)

Unrelenting inner turmoil about one's needs and/or negative feelings often means one is stuck in a depressive mental pattern. The way to get mentally "unstuck" is to force an outward focus. Empathizing with and meeting the needs of someone else may be the ticket to thwart negative self-absorption. Engaging in an activity that demands extreme focus and a merging of action with awareness of that action, also helps. They key, really, is to become absorbed with the outer world.
But to be able to achieve this focus in a way that is meaningful in the long-run, one must take the time to quietly examine one's life. For, as Plato wrote

The unexamined life is not worth living.

A sort of balance between outward focus and inner examination towards intent is fodder for a meaning-filled life.
The popular life coach, Cheryl Richarson trumpets what she calls Extreme Self-Care. The name she has given her philosophy of thoughtful living is misleading and reactionary. She calls on people whom have spent entire decades catering to the needs of others, in family and even work life, to begin caring for themselves first so as to live a meaningful life. Richarson's repackaging of the age-old call towards life-examination invites a resolution based on victim hood and seems a bit whiny to me. Life is about choices and the first step towards productive self-reflection is a curt decision to make choices for oneself and evaluate those as one lives them.
My favorite books on the topic of a choice-based life, and notably not in any way espousing "extreme self-care", are both autobiographies intended as guides towards an examined life. They are the two following:

You Learn By Living by Eleanor Roosevelt

The Autobiography Of Benjamin Franklin by B. Franklin

I have read them and will read them again, and hope to pass what they teach on to my children.

Add This to Your To Do List

2009-01-09T08:00:00.000-08:00

All the great graceful-life philosophies and all the great religions counsel people to remember death.
- Jennifer Michael Hecht (2007), Historian

Most of us have not seen a real person die. If we have, our children most likely have not. Death went out of fashion with paid-in-full real estate in the 1950's and has since been relegated to Hollywood for dramatic interpretation. But a good death is part of a good life and all benefit from observing an end to a well lived life. One cannot just show up to watch someone die in peace, of course, one has to have been around all along. If you have watched someone die well consider youself priviledged. If you have not, reconsider the way you spend your time and who you know. No one should have to face his own death ignorant of its awe-inspiring side.

You Must Be Able to Control Your Feelings

2009-01-08T10:42:00.000-08:00

Today's edition of The New York Times reports on the Pentagon's decision to exclude soldiers with Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) from receiving the Purple Heart, the medal given those wounded or killed in combat. The honor, establish by General George Washington, reads

Let it be known that he who wears the military order of the purple heart has given of his blood in the defense of his homeland and shall forever be revered by his fellow countrymen.

Although various explanations are given for the formal denial of this award to mentally ill veterans, no one sites the assumption that those with purple hearts are
forever to be revered by his fellow countrymen.
But really, our society is not yet ready to overlook the heightened state of "fight or flight" experienced by PTSD sufferers. It really would be difficult to revere someone with uncontrolled rage or major depression. Few would look up to someone who cannot control her mental state and the receipt of a Purple Heart might loose its potency for other recipients of the hallowed award.

Tell Me a Story

2009-01-07T14:17:00.000-08:00

Everything in life is a story. An Historian gathers written accounts (stories) and pieces them together contextually. A Biologist observes organisms and writes the account (the story) of what she saw for others to read and study. A cosmologist thinks about the origins of the Universe contextually and weighing available evidence eventually forms a theory (a story) of its beginnings. An IRS agent sifts through piles of receipts and puts together an account (story) of how the government has been cheated by the person whose receipts he’s analyzed. Every human thought and activity is bound to story. It is how we conceptualize and understand life.
When we don’t understand, it is because what we face is not in context; we don’t know the story. Understanding requires a story to serve as backdrop. Jakob Einstein introduced his young nephew Albert to algebra using a story. He described algebra as

a merry science in which we go hunting for a little animal whose name we don’t know. So we call it X. When we bag the game we give it the right name. (Denis Brian, 1998).

I have always admired people who speak to children this way. My good friend Tiffany answered her little boy’s questions, when he was still quite new to the world, with storied explanations on the fly. She’d level with him, and eye to eye, answer with part truths, part theories and a whiff of fairy-tale. I don’t remember exactly what she told him, but time stood still for but a moment and I wanted to believe what she said and run with the possibilities.
This is why we love a good novel. The best stories are part truth, part possibilities. In the end we want to stay in the land of the possible. Many of us outgrow this realm, but imagine if each child had an uncle or two to introduce her to the deeps of knowledge with a merry little story?

A Vision of Correct Proportions

2009-01-05T14:02:00.000-08:00

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.

-Benjamin Franklin

The ancient Roman architect Marcus Vitruvius Pollio (50 B.C.) did both. He designed aqueducts, highways and magnificent buildings that still stand 2,000 years later and he wrote books. He recorded battles and the interactions of principalities. He detailed grand plans for efficient city living; plans which lay buried under rubble in Alexandria but were dug up and hidden for thirteen centuries. In the 15th century, Leonardo Da Vinci read the ancient Vitruvius and incorporated his ideals to compose the Vitruvian Man. In that same century, a future conquistador also picked up Vitruvius and designed the first city with modern proportions, Cuenca in South America. Cuenca, establish in 1533, was the first city to ever be master-planned with a grid layout. It's cobblestone streets are wide enough to allow two lanes of car traffic today. Too bad Vitruvius never got to see his dream city come true.

Asthma and Soy Beans

2009-01-04T03:10:00.001-08:00

A Viceroy Butterfly gently flaps its wings over a Kentucky prairie with no apparent intent to change the world, yet that simple little action changes all life on earth. The phrase "Butterfly Effect" refers to the idea, affiliated with chaos theory, that a butterfly's wings may create tiny atmospheric alterations, eventually affecting a tornado's path, timing and even occurrence. Asthmatics may be the first humans in line to suffer the effects of the little butterfly's whimsical dance. Scientists at the University of Georgia and Emory University discovered hospital emergency room visits, due to asthma attacks, increased significantly after thunderstorms. But down the chaotic butterfly effect line other humans, specifically the soy-bean-eating variety, would also be affected, because Soy beans grown through very wet summers contain smaller amounts of vitamin E.
Every little thing affects everything else on the planet. This is the essence of life.

Gideon

2009-01-03T20:12:00.000-08:00

Pain and death are part of life. To reject them is to reject life itself.

- Havelock Ellis (1928), British Physician

Life and death are part of the same cycle with no proper name in English. Every living form has a birth or debut as such. But the living package is tied with a ribbon we call death. Death marks a point of no return, when an organism morphs to an unrecognizable, new form. But there is no end. Energy continues to clump into matter in an endless pattern of birth and reorganization.

Our family German Shepard of five years is bleeding and breathing too slowly, soon he will never wake again. He fought two large dogs and lost. So his body will become brown earth soon. We will plant flowers where he'll lay and remember him next Spring. We will sober as we pass the site and think of how fragile our own forms are and we'll be grateful for this chance we've been given to live life.

An Idealistic New Year

2009-01-01T10:05:00.000-08:00

The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live.

-Bertrand Russel (1965), philosopher

I do have a list of New Year's resolutions somewhere in my brain, but really, I know the backbone of a life well lived is good philosphy. Basic needs are addressed and pleasures sweeten life, but lacking ideals one only flounders and hope proves elusive. These are the top ten ideals I hope will support my version of 2009:

Life is good.

Choose to enjoy.

My days are what I make them.

Be afraid of fear itself.

Love grows when given.

Seek people with a growth mindset and energy to share.

Share the good stuff.

Love those around me best.

Be satisfied with my past, grateful for my present and excited for my future.

Know this is the one life I have; ask "what shall I do with it?"; begin with this moment...

We Make a Difference

2008-12-31T16:07:00.000-08:00

If enough people were to believe that the future is at least partly in their hands, the prospect of survival would be greatly enhanced...for... a person is unlikely to take risks and work for the common good unless he or she believes that it will make a difference.
-Mihaly Csikszentmihali (1993), philosopher

Some of the very first Europeans to colonize North America, the Calvanist Puritans, believed human destiny, both individual and collective was pre-determined by God. Yet, they functioned day-by-day on principles of personal responsibility. Their responsible behavior, supported by the belief that godly people behaved well, kept neighbors on their toes. All wanted to be judged as good; Puritans rarely misbehaved.
Today many Americans are more likely to believe future possibilities are determined by genes than by pre-historic actions of God. We ponder on which genes will manifest and which will remain genotypal.
Yet, we intuitively know genes cannot hold all secrets. We are just just beginning to scratch the surface of genetic determinism and all else that contributes to human success. The idea that each person can and does make a difference in her life and that of innumerable others, through actions, is still strong today. Humans need to believe they make a difference; humans find meaning in their perceived choices, and meaning after all, is what the good life brims over with.
So we continue to discuss the role of nature versus nature, of genes versus environment, of family background versus serendipidous opportunities. Because what we do everyday, needs to make a dent in our universe. What a beautiful idea to hold and foster at the dawn of a New Year.

Happiness via Good Government?

2008-12-27T09:24:00.000-08:00

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men...
-Thomas Jefferson. Declaration of Independence

The Declaration of Independence, firmly anchored on humanistic ideals, includes the pursuit of happiness as a basic human right to be secured by government. Great thinkers throughout history have discussed happiness ad infinitum, but an empirical perspective to this most human of pursuits is relatively new. The field of Positive Psychology is dedicated to exactly this: the study of the pursuit of happiness. Martin Seligman and Mihaly Csikszentmihaly, founders of the field, believe the behavioral sciences

can articulate a vision of the good life that is empirically sound while being
understandable and attractive. They can show what actions lead to well-being, to positive individuals, and to thriving communities.

Seligman says, We've learned in 10 years that happy people are more productive at work, learn more in school, get promoted more, are more creative and are liked more.

A major role of recent governments has been to monitor economic conditions and promote economic growth. But considering the ideals of America's founders, one realizes that this focus is mioptic. Ideally, governments are instituted to enable, among other things, the pursuit of happiness. I suggest our new president add a cabinet post for the fomentation of this most human of pursuits.
Currently, the only government on the planet, taking on the responsibility of fomenting the happiness of its citizens is the Asian nation of Bhutan. Bhutan's national pursuit of happiness is spiritually-based. Although spirituality, or meaning-making, is an important component of happiness, it is not the only one. The pursuit of happiness is complex and multi-faceted. I believe it is the key to human growth and meaning. It should be the topic of discussion in government, schools and anywhere else humans have enough food in their bellies and a mind with which to think.

Older Brains in Flow

2008-12-21T19:11:00.000-08:00

I have no doubt myself that a man or woman earnestly seeking in grown-up life to be guided to a wide and suggestive knowledge in its largest and most uplifted sphere will make the best of all the pupils in this age of clatter and buzz.
-Winston Churchill (1953)

When speaking of education, one often refers to something gained in youth. A young brain, busy organizing itself, thirsts for content gleaned and processed from experiences. These experiences may be mental or sensual or interpersonal; in any case, they are triggered by input from one's environment. Yet the human brain remains plastic; it retains the ability to reorganize itself, as needed, with new experiences, learning and memorization, throughout the entire lifespan. But lacking new experiences or triggers, brain function does atrophy. As a healing arm under a cast weakens because of lack of use, brain function weakens with decreased use as well. Cognitive abilities remain sharp with appropriate challenge. Psychologists Patricia Reuter-Lorenz and Louise Stanczak believe attention span may actually increase with age as "attentional functions of the corpus callosum may be relatively preserved and assume a more prominent role in the aging brain".
The loss of cognitive function associated with age, may actually be due to lack of educational, or growth opportunities. A stereotypically older person retires into a flurry of novel experiences lasting about a month. Then she settles into a more laid back, restful life pattern. The problem with this more restful life pattern, is that a resting brain is a brain on the path to atrophy. People of every age need to exercise their brains in novel ways every day to remain relevant and lead lives of meaning. Healthy life patterns are not organized around rest, but around vibrant life experiences or "Flow". Positive psychologist Mihaly Csíkszentmihályi identifies the following as accompanying an experience of flow:

Clear goals (expectations and rules are discernible and goals are attainable and align appropriately with one's skill set and abilities).

Concentrating and focusing, a high degree of concentration on a limited field of attention (a person engaged in the activity will have the opportunity to focus and to delve deeply into it).

A loss of the feeling of self-consciousness, the merging of action and awareness.

Distorted sense of time, one's subjective experience of time is altered.

Direct and immediate feedback (successes and failures in the course of the activity are apparent, so that behavior can be adjusted as needed).
Balance between ability level and challenge (the activity is neither too easy nor too difficult).

A sense of personal control over the situation or activity.

The activity is intrinsically rewarding, so there is an effortlessness of action.

People become absorbed in their activity, and focus of awareness is narrowed down to the activity itself, action awareness merging.[2]

Although not all are needed for flow to be experienced, the older members of our current societies may be the hardest pressed to participate in flow inducing activities. If society would redefine loss of cognitive function as unhealthy in old age, maybe eventually our concept of education would grow to include mental growth for people of all ages.

Good Mirror, Bad Mirror

2008-12-17T15:02:00.000-08:00

Be the change you want to see in the world.

-Mahatma Ghandi (1945), Indian Philosopher

Although Ghandi probably had grand social change in mind, his idea is especially helpful in more intimate relationships. Humans mirror each other all the time. Each interaction with a loved one is affected by both parties. Parents affect their children and children's responses affect their parents. The more powerful person in the relationship usually sets the mood. But the ability to block default mirroring patterns, at will, is crutial to one's happiness regardless of her place on the totem pole. A strong parent will sometimes have to ignore the overwhelming negativity his child projects. Healthy humans do this for each other; when we want to see our best friend happy, we act happy and grateful and have a great story to tell. We lift someone else's mood by picking the mood we want for the situation and acting on it. This really works!

Preventive Education

2008-12-10T13:53:00.000-08:00

Too many current schools operate on a disease model of education, which is about
remedying deficits. Such a perspective makes the school environment unhealthy. Focus on compliance to a set of standards that are mostly disconnected from the students future needs and potential, rather than on the nurturing of personal and universal strengths, diminishes what passes as education to reactionary squelching of the human spirit and potential.
Psychologist Martin Seligman's idea that
"the prevention of mental illness comes from recognizing and nurturing a set of strengths, competencies, and virtues in young people--such as future-mindedness, hope, interpersonal skills, courage, the capacity for flow, faith, and work ethic" (Seligman, 2002), may be applied to education. Education is not only a door to opportunity because it gifts students with relevant skills but also leads students through that door to prevent intellectual depression by nurturing the best qualities of individual students and humanity as a whole.

Goals, Smoals?

2008-12-09T16:07:00.000-08:00

The tragedy of life does not lie in not reaching your goals, the tragedy lies in not having goals to reach.

-Benjamin Mays (1960), Former President of Moorhouse College

People disagree on which is the better way to live; a life filled with goals, lists and missions or goal-free . Life may be enjoyable either way, depending on how you function best. With or without clear goals, our activities must have meaning which is felt or achieved in relation to people we identify with and/or love. Lists can help; so can goals. Both are useful tools to find meaning, but certainly not meaning itself.

Language Implications

2008-12-06T08:48:00.000-08:00

Emotions happen, thoughts patterns are chosen and the human mind is organized through language. A person "at a loss for words" is often confused or at least unsure. A right word holds power and when connected to more words creates rich language patterns leading to ever more complex prefrontal cortex pathways. Babies who are spoken to in complete sentences, lovingly and often learn to mentally digest not only a growing number of words but eventually become more capable human beings.

The Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience recently reported yet another study on early childhood brain development, conducted at UC Berkley in which one of the researchers, Professor Thomas Boyce said "Talking more to children could boost prefrontal cortex development". The study used brain scans to analyze the brains of a small sample of low SES children to compare them to high SES kids. Boyce described the findings as a "wake-up call" about the impact of language deprivation, as low SES children hear, on average, 30 million fewer words by the age of four than children of more educated and wealthier parents.

So a child growing in a quiet home will move about the world more confused and with less power than she who grows in a home rich in conversation? That is a conclusion I am not ready to draw. But if you are in contact with a small child, well, make the world a better place and talk to him.

School Filled With Light

2008-12-03T19:40:00.000-08:00

The Sidwell Friends School in Washington D.C. chosen by Michelle and Barack Obama for their daughters, Malia (10) and Sasha (7) was one of The American Institute of Architecture's top ten green projects for 2007. The project included massive additions and some remodeling of historic buildings. The two biggest considerations in the design were the maximization of natural light and ease of ventilation. The changes were funded in part by a grant undertaken by the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies to determine the effect of the school's new green design on the performance and health of students, teachers and staff, whom were asessed pre- and post project.
Nice choice.

Human's Search For Meaning

2008-12-02T10:53:00.000-08:00

Life and history, when reflected on with any sophistication, deny us the security of fixed meaning.
-Kieran Egan, Professor of Education (2008)

The human qualities that differentiate us most vividly from mice and dogs and chimpanzees are wonderment and a constant search for meaning. This search for meaning is a dynamic process.

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
-Victor Frankl, Psychiatrist and Holocoust Survivor (1955)

Once we have the right answer to something, whether it be a question of metaphysical proportions or simply the time of day, the search ends and the answer is now potentially historic. Although a final answer may allow us to move to the next task or subject of attention with a sense of accomplishment, moving on permanently initiates crystalization of thought and terminates our growth in that area. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but the more important the question is to us, the less likely it is we will reach a final answer today, or ever. There is much beauty in the search; revel in its energy and embrace the process.

Technology Is A Lot Like Money

2008-12-02T10:23:00.000-08:00

10 Ways Technology and Money Are Similar

Too little technology know-how and we starve.

The more technology used the more management is required.

It cannot make us happy, but it opens up our world and gives us so many more options and ways to become happy.

We use it to trade goods, ideas and information.

It can increase our efficiency, efficacy and potential, or spoil us for real work depending on how it is used.

It can bring us together or isolate us depending on how it is used.

It separates the new from the historic.

It promotes democracy by leveling the playing field.

It is a tool for achievement.

It is a sign of growing societal complexity.

A Green School

2008-11-29T10:44:00.000-08:00

What do our president-elect Barack Obama, Steve Case (founder of AOL) and Pierre Omidyar (founder of e-Bay) have in common? They all attended high school in Hawaii, at the Panahou School. The school boasts a long list of worthies as former alumni, but that is not the only thing that makes the school newsworthy.

In the fall of 2005, for five balmy Honolulu days, a group of thirty individuals representing students, faculty, staff, administrators, trustees and parents, gathered to talk about improving Hawaii's top private school's physical environment. The Panahou's School ground's were already gorgeous, classrooms full of windows and lit by sunshine and many of the buildings historically significant, but this group gathered to discuss a deeper way to improve the school's environment; they were to define sustainability and come up with suggestions on implementation of a Sustainability Initiative. The group pondered long and came up with the following broad definition of sustainability:

Sustainability is...

A world that continually maintains and improves the human condition, without negatively impacting future generations.

A world populated by people who recognize that there are natural limits to resources, and who are mindful of the interconnectedness of things.

A world that carefully attends to its environmental, social, economic, cultural, and intellectual resources, and that continuously advances learning and ideas.

The 3,7000 student K-12 school is openly centered on the belief that each child can make a difference in the world. And even though this "difference" made by each child is not limited to learning to live sustainably, a solid green-based philosophy makes sense.

In 2006 the Panahou School was rated as the #1 Green School in the United States by National Geographic. This success seems to have only fueled the school's desire to continue with their sustainability plan that extends to 2016. The long term plan includes improvement in student's meals; students are offered locally grown, organic Food, and reduction in paper use to move to more digitized school work.

This school certainly has the financial means to make all these plans a reality. They are a large school, and a model of what many other schools could be doing to improve the environment their students move in.

You'll Get More Hugs If You Smile More

2008-11-27T07:04:00.000-08:00

Emotions happen. But why?
Most of us love to feel joy. Some of us revel in angst. But what is the point?
Humans are social beings and are deeply connected to one another through a complex web of physiological signals and sensations.

The physiological sensations are called emotions, and their role is to maintain the ever stronger bonds that made humans human.

John Cacioppo, Sociopsychologist (2008)

But not all emotions connect us to other humans in the same manner. Emotions, especially negative ones, such as anger, sadness and hopelessness, may connect us to another human only when used infrequently and without guile. The famous Ella Wheeler Wilcox quote:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you; Weep, and you weep alone; For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth, But has trouble enough of its own

is mostly true, especially if the person weeping, weeps often and without undeniable cause. People who constantly swim in their negative emotions eventually find themselves alone. Emotions can be a repellent as well as a connector. Babies know this. They smile and giggle, and stretch their arms wide, hoping to be picked up and loved. They cry, also, hoping to be relieved from their misery. Adults do the same. But the perpetually miserable person eventually is seen as unattractive and pity towards her eventually turns to contempt.

Emotions push us socially towards others, or away from them. And many a human bond is broken because of an emotion.

Learning Pods, Not Schools

2008-11-25T09:29:00.000-08:00

Schools of the future may not recognize their ancestor as the twentieth-century public school. The elementary and high school of the future will be more like an excellent private college with a the heart of a library and the soul of a friendly coffee shop.

"For five centuries or more--and at a much quicker pace during the last five decades--Western societies have demoted human gregariousness from a necessity to incidental."

John Cacioppo, Psychology Professor (2008)

As the twenty-first century progresses the greatest need of humans will be to connect and form meaningful relationships with one another. Africa's extreme poverty may end. Radical religious zealots may all die off, natural disasters may be handled with ease and biological technology may extend human lifespans dramatically, but we will grow increasingly lonely without concrete places to meet, chat and laugh. Children will not need teachers to transmit information or acquire learning tools. But they will want inspiration and guidance from self-chosen mentorships. They will thrive making friends with people of all ages and across interests. The schools of the future will be open-sourced, well-stocked and thoughtfully designed to foster human connection. In fact, they may no longer even be called schools, but something entirely different that would better represent the places children spend their days.

How Was Your Day?

2008-11-24T14:30:00.000-08:00

Self-absorption is the enemy of social interaction. We all tend to take ourselves too seriously at times, but if we make it a trend, eventually we repel those around us.
One way people, unconsciously push others away is simply by framing a day's events in a self-absorbed manner. When someone asks on an average day, "How was your day?" consider who is asking and why. The question is usually a conversation starter. The person asking is wanting to connect with you and how you answer will tell her if you are open to connect, or if you really just want to vent and are ignoring her. Below are some answers I've gotten recently that made me think I should have not started the conversation with "How was your day?".

Top Four Lousy Answers:

4.) "How was your day?"
"Oh, (sigh) it's hard..."
This person is out of touch. Nobody, not even the love of your life or your mother, wants to hear what you say next. They are probably tired of your constant complaining, and maybe even feel sorry for you (who wants to be pitied?).

3.) "How was your day?"
"Hard. I ran into this idiot..." This answer reveals a sense of entitlement. Your day did not go as well as you expected, because of others' failures.

2.) "How was your day?"
(pause) "Hmm. Good..."
You want to complain very badly, but you won't, and you want to make sure your listener knows how saintly you can be.

1.) "How was your day?"
"Never Better!"
Really? You may be coming across disingenious.

Answers that lead to better social connections would sound like the following:

"How was your day"
"Not so great, but I'm so glad to see you. I'll tell you about my day later, how was your day?"
"Good. How was yours?"
"Great! I had a great day, I ran into..."

Of course you may want to adjust your answer depending on whether you want to attract, or repel the person who asked.

On Being Scared of Global Warming

2008-11-19T08:18:00.000-08:00

Campaigners for cutting greenhouse emissions scare us by proclaiming that a warmer world is a worse world. My dangerous idea is that it probably won't be...we will have to adjust, and adjustment is always painful. Poupulations will have to move...and no, it doesn't imply Armageddon.

Paul Davies, Physicist (2007)

Sometimes the best way to appreciate the earth we walk on is to envision it destroyed. We would miss the tall oaks winding along a crunchy streambed. We would miss the movement of the sky; clouds morphing, coming and going. We would miss the croaking frog chorus at the pond in springtime. Then we would stop the missing and take in the scenes anew. We know nothing ever stays the same. Nothing. So we focus on today. We don't drop our empty coffee cup on the dirt road, we don't drive cars that smoke, and we don't dump engine oil in the toilet.

Clean living is good, for now and for the future. In the 1960's Lady Bird Johnson changed Washington D.C.'s parks and greenways and the country's highways by adding beauty. Grass seeds were spread, flowers were planted and foreign countries sent green gifts to beautify the United States. Children were not frightened with promises of mass extinctions. Instead beauty spread because one person wanted to make the world more beautiful.

Sparkling water, healthy trees and dark-brown, rich dirt are beautiful.
We've put in time imagining the world's demise by polution, we know what we would miss. Instead of fretting ourselves to inaction, let's each find ways to beautify our world, for today and our grandchildren. Let's keep our corner of the Universe clean and shiny because we love what is beautiful, not because we are scared of a hot, resource-poor, future.

Good News For The "Artsy"

2008-11-18T11:27:00.000-08:00

There isn't any knowledge stored in literacy, in all our libraries and databases. What we can store are symbols that are a cue to knowledge. People can read the symbols and not understand the knowledge, or partially understand it, or have only a vague sense of what it means.
Kieran Egan, Professor of education (2008)

We are in the Information Age, and many of us are "knowledge workers"; we work with knowledge. Being in the Information Age means there is more knowledge available than in centuries past. An historian in the 1980's spent much time in dusty libraries in far away places, but now that job is often done by a data entry person. Dust is less part of the historian's experience these days, but the process of making sense of history is the same. The historian, still sifts through data, maybe from her desk at home, but she must still

pick, decide what information is worth including in a narrative and what is useless data. The great historian will construct a beautiful, compelling narrative. That is something a data entry person may not be able to do. Art, in all disciplines, whether history, medicine, cosmology or biology will flourish and push humanity toward greater introspection. Probably the key function of artists in this century will be the ability to choose well; to judge in time, what is important, from the absolutely best word to describe a smell from long ago to what physical structure accounts for dark matter in the Universe. So:
Information + Judgement = Art
and: Art is the gold of the twenty-first century.

What's Your Path?

2008-11-18T10:58:00.000-08:00

The time to start exercising, stop nagging, and work on photo albums, I decided, is when everything was going smoothly; I didn’t want to wait for a crisis to re-make my life.

Gretchen Rubin, Writer (2008)

Falling into a crisis is like stepping on the gas pedal of one's life. One falls much faster, but ends up in the same place. The time to find a map, pack and read up on desired destinations is often spent feeling stressed, unappreciated or out of control. If one has time to feel negative, one has time to get onto a different path, because when a true crisis hits time is not experienced as fluid. In crisis, time is more like a natural disaster; a fire, flood or tsunami. If one is happy, the path must be right; crisis may knock one down, but the path is still the same.

Foggy Roads

2008-11-17T20:03:00.000-08:00

People can choose which world they want to inhabit.

-Carol Dweck, professor of Psychology (2006)

On good days, it's easy to spot the choices available. On bad days, roads get foggy to the point of invisibility. On bad days choices are what one doesn't seem to have. Yet one almost always has at least one choice, that of perspective. One can choose which angle to view life from. That, is what makes all the difference in the world.

Literacy and Socialization

2008-11-17T14:46:00.000-08:00

If socialization is really successful, the result is someone who is indoctrinated.

-Kieran Egan, Professor of Education (2008)

Should socialization be part of education? Is a well-educated person, also a well-socialized person?

In early Massachusetts, the Puritan's pooled their resources and opened the first school for young children in North America. Once a child could read Foxe's Book of Martyrs without help, their public education was terminated. Socialization was not part of education then and only became an important part of the school experience in the early twentieth century when progressives sought to assimilate immigrant children into American culture. Today, socialization is a murky term used to describe a combination of "people skills," emotional intelligence, civic-mindedness, respect of authority, tolerance, etc. This important aspect of today's school experience is not tested and there are no standards to judge whether school socialization is effective or even justifiable. Not that we want standards for socialization. But we do want an education worthy of this new millennium. Could the first step to improving public education for our children be the divorce of literacy from socialization? The literacy rate of Puritan children in Seventeenth-Century Massachusetts was close to one hundred percent. Maybe the way to a more literate future is found in our past, when literacy was the number one priority at the school house.

New Evidence

2008-11-13T09:39:00.000-08:00

It is good genes that make success, and nothing an individual does during his lifetime has any effect whatever upon its genes.

Richard Dawkins, Evolutionary Biologist (1995)

We all know that the genes that make up our DNA control many aspects of our lives, like the shape of our eyes, but what controls our genes? Back in 1995, any respectable scientist would have said "nothing." But today we know about epigenes. The cells of your teeth, eyeballs, skin, and liver all have identical DNA, but different epigenes. These epigenes turn on and off certain genes to get the cell to develop correctly. Genes are the hardware; epigenes the software. Or if you like, genes are the factories, and epigenes are the little guys who decide what the factory will produce.

Epigenes change to meet the situation. If that being is creating eggs or sperm (a girl in the womb or a boy in early puberty), the imprint of those epigenes are recorded for the following generation. And here's the exciting part, certain epigenes, like the ones controlling for body weight CAN be affected by environment, so that the corresponding epigene will not "turn on" an undesired gene.

Interesting Jobs For 2020

2008-11-12T14:30:00.000-08:00

The world is a changin' and everyone realizes children may not grow up to have the same careers their parents have today. Technological and social changes create new forms of work. So, what types of jobs are on the horizon for your children?

[This list is borrowed from a posting on Business Briefs: Jobs for 2020]

Social Technologies presents:

10 Careers You May Never Have Thought Of:

1. Realizer—Creates real versions of virtual objects for people, from grog tankards to sports cars.
2. E-scrubber—Works to undo or minimize the indiscretions that people accumulate on the Web.
3. Unrealtor—Creates virtual tourism, adventure, and retail destinations.

4. Nano-decontaminator—Cleans up nanomaterials now being spread through the environment.
5. Deceptionist—Provides tech-enabled deception services for those wishing to disguise their activities.
6. Genetic dietician—Creates diets tailored to people’s individual genetic makeup.
7. Geoscaper—Makes corporate and private properties look attractive in Google Earth-style aerial views.
8. Unplugger—Counselor/ mental health professional who helps wean people from excessive technology use.
9. Eye pilot—Operates small, remotely piloted, camera-equipped aerial vehicles over war zones, disasters, and other locations of interest on behalf of news services, nongovernmental organizations, and private companies.
10. Sexbot controller—Many things can be done remotely. Not for the squeamish.

I am Special

2008-11-12T09:07:00.000-08:00

Although we are made up of the same chemicals, with the same physiological reactions, we are very different from other animals.

-Michael Gazzaniga, Neuroscientist (2008)

That it obvious. I do look a tad different than my dog. I also can do many things he can't. I can think about him and wonder if he thinks about what I think about him. I have a Theory of Mind. Does my dog?

Several scientist/animal relationship stories (non-fiction books) have hit bookstores this year, including Wesley The Owl and Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human. These scientists go into detail to describe the beauty and complexity of the animal mind and may even be arguing that animals do have a Theory of Mind.

So what is it that truly makes us human? Is there more to our differences than meets the eye? This is a hot topic among neuroscientists, but it seems to me a futile fight. Yes, we are different than other animals. We are our own species, after all. I am unlike my dog, like I am unlike a daisy, or an eagle, or an ocean. All life matter contains carbon, so we must have much in common physiologically, even with an amoeba. I may be going a little far there, but I just don't see the point in proving humans are special. We are. But if we are special, so is every other living thing.

How Long Are YOU Going To Live?

2008-11-11T14:28:00.000-08:00

In the course of my observation...disputing, contradicting and confuting people are generally unfortunate in their affairs. They get victory sometimes, but they never get good will, which would be of more use to them.

Benjamin Franklin (1780)

Want to have a long, happy life? Be agreeable. National Geographic Magazine's feature article on longevity (2006) argued, people who live past 100 years, healthy and happy, have agreeable dispositions and are generally enjoyable to be around. The stereotype of the grumpy old man, may be just that, a stereotype. The oldest among us, are the most pleasant.

I have met exactly two beautiful people who are close to a century old; both truly inspiring. One is my grandmother, who is a young ninety-one. She is pleasant, witty, non-confrontational and still gets manicures weekly. I wonder sometimes, how she became who she is today. How is it that she seems to savor the moment with a twinkle in her eye? She keeps so much in her heart, and remembers more good than bad in her life. Was she born this sanguine? Her mother died when she was six years old. Her strict and austere grandparents raised her. She married young and had eight children, the last of which died in her arms as an infant. Did se decide to be happy no matter what? I guess I better ask her next time I see her. I'll keep you posted...

Find Your Own Happy Pace of Life

2008-11-10T13:54:00.000-08:00

Metabolism is the central characteristic of biological life.

Fritjof Capra, Physicist (2008)

What is the difference between a rock and a rose? Metabolism. What is the difference between an obese person and an athlete? Metabolism.

Metabolism is speed. Too little speed, makes a sloth-like existence. Too much speed creates inflammation, and a body's anger response kicks in. Finding one's own happy pace of life is a matter of finding what gives joy and strength, and what leaves a person with enough energy to share and spare.

Does It Look Like a Jail To You?

2008-11-09T10:09:00.000-08:00

The lack of attention to beauty and achitectural ideals in the engineering of public school buildings (especially post 1970's) belies the true educational philosophies at play. If your local high school looks like a jail, smells like a jail and feels like a jail...well then, is it a jail? It's not supposed to be. But what is the real message being sent to all who attend, teach, or even just drive by, such a facility?

An architectural website listing Great Buildings around the world, includes only a handful of schools. Certainly no school, public or private, in my small southern california city would qualify as "great" by any measure. So, we give lip service to lofty educational ideals, but our school buildings tell another story.

When People Really Connect

2008-11-08T16:06:00.000-08:00

Life is no brief candle to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I've got hold of for the moment, and want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

George Bernard Shaw

It is difficult to find mentors sometimes. It seems so many of us move about the earth in a zombie-state, not quite here. But some of us awake from time to time and look for others who are also awake. Those who have been awake longer; those are the mentors. How do you spot a mentor? They radiate energy, like a torch. This energy isn't visible at all times. Mentors aren't perfect humans, but at the point in time when their energy radiates and reaches another, that is a perfect moment for both persons. That is when the torch is lit.

A Symphony of Community

2008-11-06T19:43:00.000-08:00

Once upon a time, in far away Japan, a man had a dream. He dreamed he walked amongst tea trees on a cool Tokyo morning. He came upon a courtyard. Empty and still, it seemed to be waiting. He sat on a honey-hued wood bench, letting the fragrance of quiet peace fill his lungs. Clean air rushed in, his thoughts bright, his eyes now closed. Then he saw children. Walking in pairs. Sitting under trees. Running after one another, one playing Bach on an old cello. The man sat a long time, he saw nothing more, but heard. First the cello, then a warm voice speaking to a small one. "Yes, well, today we will discuss your idea with the others." Another voice, then another came, until the voices fell into each other as if written on a musical staff, ready to become a symphony. The man didn't try to understand the music, he knew what it meant. He knew what to do now. He would make this place happen. He would build a school.

The Eishin school in Japan is architecturally gorgeous. Honey-hued wood, plenty of natural light and meandering garden pathways between buildings placed strategically on its 18 acre campus. The faculty, students and staff all had input in its design and creation. This 1980's school-wide project, designed to build a deeper allegience to humane principles and create a new school culture was the brainchild of the then vice-principal of the school, Mr. Murakoshi. I'm not sure if he came up with the idea in a dream or if it had simmered in his conciousness for many years, but the initial vision was his. He shared his vision with architect Christopher Alexander, and so the Eishin school exists, almost exactly as Mr. Murakoshi envisioned it.

Babies Sculpting Our World

2008-11-05T13:04:00.000-08:00

...a character...She has an air of authority & reflectiveness astonishing in an infant...

Winston Churchill (1928),

referring to then two-year old Elizabeth Alexandra Mary,

years before there was any expectation of her ascending the throne.

Do serious babies become serious adults? Sometimes.

Queen Elizabeth must have been serious enough, as a small child, to impress Churchill and she isn't particularly smiley today. Why was she so serious? Did she have a cold fish nanny? Was her mother too busy to read another round of her Memory Chimes Book? Some would argue it really doesn't matter that she has laughed only five times in her entire life, because she holds a serious post, after all. But unfortunately for the British monarchy, she isn't

as authoritarian as she may have been destined to be. During Elizabeth II's long reign, the monarchy has lost credibility and import internationally and in the U.K. It could be her serious demeanor is rather a sign of lack of flexibility and a rather low E.Q.

Babies show their potential in their eyes; those little pools of light, so full of promise. When a baby holds one's gaze and seems to have no questions, one is left to wonder at her place within humanity. Every baby, though randomly chosen to enter the world, has a unique place in it. Serious babies, smiley babies and colicky ones begin changing the world the second they arrive. The world will never be the same again. Each baby does this. Two-hundred and fifty-five babies are born into the world every minute. Each minute the course of the world shifts ever-so slightly, 255 times. And every little thought each tiny life has will fight for existence. No wonder we all feel a little dizzy at times.

Is Obama like Lincoln?

2008-11-04T08:08:00.000-08:00

Browsing through the magazine section of Barnes & Noble today, I ran across a publication of American History Magazine titled Lincoln: In His Own Words.

At least a million of Abraham Lincoln's words survive, and more are discovered every week.
Harold Holzer, Historian (2008)

During the Lincoln-Douglass debates, for example, Lincoln referred to scraps of paper in which he habitually jotted down his thoughts on the fly. Sometimes these scraps were kept inside his stovepipe hat.
Barack Obama writes his own speeches, although no one has yet spotted scrappy paper or a tall hat, he has been compared to Abraham Lincoln in this electoral campaign. Will he have a chance to live up to that comparison? So far this election day morning, it seems he may. May the best man win, be he Obama or McCain.

To Write or Not To Write

2008-11-03T13:28:00.000-08:00

Writing is the great invention of the world.
Abraham Lincoln (1862)

The nineteenth century is a wonderful period for social historians to research because the act of writing became an acceptable use of leisure time for more women than ever before. Women had diaries and journals and wrote letters. Many were left behind for us to study and sometimes even marvel at today. A similar milieu is simmering today in the blogosphere. More and more plebes (myself included) are actively participating in conversations based on the written word. Our tools are more complex; we don't use quills and china black ink anymore.
With more capable tools, will our written thoughts be more grand? Not necessarily. To write great things, one must think great thoughts, and to think great thoughts, one must have great models to mirror first, then surpass.
We live in a time of great opportunity and more options than ever in history; the challenge lies in choosing well. Whom and what we choose to allow as models will determine what we leave behind for our great-grandchildren to read and consider. Will the early twentieth century be interesting to historians of the future? Or will the written mess we leave behind be dismissed as way too noisy and trite?
I'll take my chances, and participate anyway, just for the joy of being part of it all.

Reconsidering Compulsion

2008-10-29T22:57:00.000-07:00

Voting is compulsory in Belgium, Australia, Ecuador and Lebanon. It is not in the Netherlands, Great Britain and Venezuela. Most Americans would agree, voting is a good thing, a priviledge; but forced voting would be a hard sell here. Most Americans would also agree, schooling is a good thing. But schooling is on a different plane, it isn't just a priviledge in the United States, it is compulsory. What makes schooling so much more important to require, or maybe so much less likely to occur without, compulsion?
If I were planning my own utopian society, I would certainly favor a population with basic education over a highly democratic one. But isn't that freedom Americans have not to vote part of the democratic package? Shouldn't the freedom not to go to school be also? In my Utopian society, no one would have to go to school, but every single person would want to be educated: every single person would prize learning and the community would be resource rich, an eden for the body and mind.
The United States is cram-packed with resources. Many of the brightest, richest, most creative people on the planet reside here. Our material resources, from the Library of Congress to the local bookmobile, are everything our founders would have wanted for us and so much more. So, why do we need to force schooling?
The most amazing education humans have ever had, is literally a finger-tap away. So why compel people to check into a community building that insulates them from the resource-rich world? It is time to re-consider schools for what they are and what they could be, because in the world in which we live, compulsion should be irrelevant.

Famous People Who Liked School

2008-10-29T22:18:00.000-07:00

10. Oprah Winfrey (American Talk Show Host, 2005): “For every one of us that succeeds, it's because there's somebody there to show you the way out. The light doesn't always necessarily have to be in your family; for me it was teachers and school.”

9. Ernest Renan (French Philosopher, 1883): “The simplest schoolboy is now familiar with truths for which Archimedes would have given his life.”

8. Victor Hugo (Poet, Novelist, 1830): “He who opens a school door, closes a prison.”

7. Andrew Wiles (English Mathematician,1993): “I loved doing problems in school.”

6. Luciano Pavarotti (Italian Opera Singer, 1990): “I was an elementary school teacher.”

5. Alphonso Jackson (U.S Secretary of HUD, 2003): "Progress for black Americans depends on good schools because education is the last great equalizer.”

4. Bill Watterson (Author of Calvin & Hobbes, 1987): “At school, new ideas are thrust at you every day. Out in the world, you’ll have to find the inner motivation to search for new ideas on your own.”

3. Jane Addams (Founder of Hull House, Chicago, 1900): “America’s future will be determined by the home and the school.”

2. Bill Dodds (American Novelist, 2007): “Labor Day is a glorious holiday because your child will be going back to school the next day. It would have been called Independence Day, but that name was already taken.”

1. E.C. McKenzie (Author, 2000): "Schoolteachers are not fully appreciated by parents until it rains all day Saturday."

Famous People Who Disliked School

2008-10-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

10. George Bernard Shaw (1925 Nobel Laureate, Literature): "My schooling not only failed to teach me what it professed to be teaching, but prevented me from being educated to an extent which infuriates me when I think of all I might have learned at home by myself."

9. Robert Morley (English Actor, 1985): "Show me the man who has enjoyed his schooldays and I will show you a bully and a bore."

8. Albert Einstein (Physicist, 1950): "It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of education have not yet entirely strangled the curiosity of inquiry."

7. H.L. Mencken (Journalist, 1935): "School days, I believe, are the unhappiest in the whole span of human existence. They are full of dull, unintelligible tasks, new and unpleasant ordinances, and brutal violations of common sense and common decency."

6. Woody Allen (Playwright, 1989): "I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers."

5. Mark Twain (American Author, 1900): "I've never let my school interfere with my education."

4. Margaret Mead (Anthropologist,): "My grandmother wanted me to have an education, so she kept me out of school."

3. Ernest Shakleton (Antartic Explorer,1905): "I do not know what "moss" stands for in the proverb, but if it stood for useful knowledge...I gathered more moss by rolling than I ever did at school."

2. Ivan Illich (Philosopher, 1990): "We have come to realize that for most men the right to learn is curtailed by the obligation to attend school."

1. John Updike (American Author, 1975): "The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called schools, equipped with tortures called education."

What's Your Box?

2008-10-23T14:45:00.000-07:00

There are two ways to live your life - one is as though nothing is a miracle, the other is as though everything is a miracle.

Albert Einstein (1950)

Non-material neuroscientist and author, Mario Beauregard argues for the existence of God based on a negative philosophy; God exists, he posits, because scientists can only

explain the existence of mind as "what the brain does". This explanation

won't do. He accuses such scientists of operating within the box of materialism. His perspective, based on research within religious communities, is much bigger. Since not all scientists agree with his definition of mind, Beauregard believes a"cultural war" within science now exists. My question is: does it matter which box you are operating from? The premise that what cannot be explained must be God, seems pretty boxy to me. "God" can be a beautiful explanation for an infinite number and variety of processi, but may also be limiting as humans push to understand themselves, their minds and their Universe. The actual word "God" is ill-defined by humans. God may be a person, a feeling, an idea, or even a set of mathematical patterns that run existence. The ultimate purpose of science is to define and God is, at this point in human history, still a catch-all concept for what we do not yet understand.

Soul?

2008-10-23T14:11:00.000-07:00

This is the first, the wildest and the wisest thing I know: that the soul exists, and is built entirely out of attentiveness.

Mary Oliver (2006), poet

Awareness happens when the brain defines a thing, an event, a person, individually; like a snapshot. This still focus may last a fraction of a second, but for a moment the brain singles out the experience as important somehow. Awareness differenciates the mundane from a potentially bigger concept. Uninterrupted awareness leads to attentiveness; the link from one's mind to the Universe. What metaphysics defines as soul is really the bridge of attentiveness. The bridge crossing from one's physical person to other living beings, things and ideas. We don't see it, this soul bridge, but it makes up an entire dimension of human existence.

Sarah Palen's New Shoes

2008-10-22T20:21:00.000-07:00

India, today succesfully launched its first unmanned mission to the moon, Chandrayaan-I. Good for India, but I can't help feeling a little jealous. The top story in today's newspapers here are about an uppity hockey mom's expensive wardrobe. What is NASA doing these days anyway? Actually, NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) mission was successfully launched into space to explore the outer reaches of our solar system, just last week. But nobody I talked to today even knows about it. It's hard to compete against sexy shoes for news space.

Cleaning, A Pleasure?

2008-10-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

The best things are nearest:

breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at you feet, duties at your hand, the path of God just before you. Then do not grasp at the stars, but do life's plain, common work as it comes, certain that daily duties and daily bread are the sweetest things of life.

Robert Louis Stevenson (1888), poet

Actually, Mr. Stevenson, life's daily duties can be sweet only if they are loaded with meaning. The meaning may be small, such as a commitment to cleaning out the tiniest speck of dust from the corner bookshelf because one enjoys being attentive to detail, or grander, such as staying up late to edit one more page of a first novel you think will change the world.

No meaning; no sweetness. No meaning; no beauty, or art, or reason for life. So regardless of whether one is cleaning out the bathtub or cutting a documentary film on epidemiological diseases in Africa, one's daily duties will be sweet if they serve a larger purpose. The difficult part is, there is no clear path to meaning. Each person finds it on their own. It is rarely clear or "just before you".

Moonwalk

2008-10-18T01:37:00.000-07:00

It's 1:00a.m. and I'm holding my baby girl. We walk and look at the yellow moon. All is oh so quiet. The air is still but fresh. I'll sleep when I'm old, I think. For now I have her, my baby, to hold and protect from everything bad. From coyotes and loud noises. For now I am here, knowing this time won't last.

The days are long, but the years are short.

Anonymous

Fanaticism and Imagination

2008-10-17T21:54:00.000-07:00

Fanaticism is governed by imagination rather than judgment.
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1866)

Harriet Beecher Stowe, the “little woman who started this war” (as described by Abraham Lincoln), in today’s vernacular would be described as very imaginative. Her Uncle Tom's Cabin is possibly the most influential social justice novel of all time. She wove an imaginary tale that opened a country’s eyes to the true shame of slavery. Today, imagination is not often linked to fanaticism; it is considered a good thing. Everyone wants it. Children have lots of it and the best adults never lose theirs. But if we define fanaticism as extreme single-mindedness, then maybe it could be paired with imagination after all. Some of the greatest thinkers of our time have been extremely single-minded. Einstein put in at least 10,000 hours trying to decipher physical differences of perspective. And his brand of fanaticism was definitely governed by imagination. In fact, he said:

Imagination is more important than knowledge.
Albert Einstein (1950)

Are knowledge and judgment equivalent? They could be. In his new book, Human-The Science of What Makes Us Unique, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga explains

One of the major facts emerging from split-brain research is that the left hemisphere has marked limitations in perceptual functions and the right hemisphere has even more prominent limitations in its cognitive functions.

So, left-brain dominant people may be low on perception. And right-brain dominant people could be low on, ah, cognition. I am going to go ahead and tie this crazy thread of thoughts with a judgmental statement that could be fanatical.

Fanaticism is sometimes required to lead imagination towards good judgment.

A New Creation

2008-10-15T13:40:00.000-07:00

We have it in our power to begin the world again.

Thomas Paine (1776)

Each day is a new beginning for each person in the Universe. No matter how dark life turns, no matter how long the previous night, the day comes eventually. I don't have to wake with a sunny attitude or a plastic smile, I just have to wake up. I may wake in the middle of a nightmare and greet light in confusion. I may come down slowly and rhythmically from fluffy clouds in a blue sky. Either way, each moment I am awake I begin my world one more time.

A Creative Milieu at Oxford U.

2008-10-14T13:12:00.000-07:00

The James Martin 21st Century School at Oxford University is featured in the latest issue of the journal Nature. This school, directed by Ian Goldin, focuses on solving humanity's broadest issues. Each institute within the school is run by teams of scientists and thinkers from a variety of disciplines. The idea is to converge human learning from different angles in an open approach. Several notable institutions of higher learning encourage interdisciplinary studies but this is the most radical format I have read of yet. I expect great new and very relevant ideas from Oxford in the near future. What a great way to foster a creative milieu.

What About Socialization?

2008-10-13T14:33:00.000-07:00

People are social. Everybody knows that. Children are to be socialized. Most people would agree. But what does socialization entail? Does it mean becoming just like others in one's society or becoming useful within that society, regardless of whether that means mirroring others or being different enough to contribute what others cannot?

Super Futures

2008-10-09T16:26:00.000-07:00

Children starting Kindergarten this year will retire in the year 2068. Their teachers are to prepare them for their future without knowing what that future will really be. In the past visionaries, philosophers and futurists have imagined futures that have turned out to be true. I propose we look to modern-day visionaries, philosophers and futurists for a glimpse of the possible futures of those children just entering school this fall.
Smart children have been around since the dawn of history. Yet only certain periods in Earth’s history have produced true geniuses and creators; people whose contributions have benefitted humanity in some way or another adding complexity to our species. Social scientist Howard Gardner delineates the indispensible role of circumstances in the production of the world’s geniuses (Gardner, 1993). Gardner argues creative people possess unusual combinations of intelligence and personality but must be surrounded by informed peers and have the support of caring individuals who believe in their ideas; that is, creative individuals require a supportive milieu to thrive. Such a milieu ignited the fifteenth century Renaissance producing creators such as Galileo Galilei and Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Machiavelli among others. A similar early twentieth-century milieu also ushered in the modern era pushing smart people, like Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T.S. Eliot, Martha Graham and Mahatma Gandhi, towards greater human complexity and humanitarian contribution.
Could we be at the brink of a new Renaissance? Many modern-day visionaries, philosophers and futurists think so. American futurist, Daniel Pink, labels this new age, The Conceptual Age. He sees the rise of “high concept” and “high touch”. According to Pink (2006),

High concept involves the capacity to detect patterns and opportunities, to create artistic and emotional beauty, to craft a satisfying narrative, and to combine seemingly unrelated ideas into something new. High touch involves the ability to empathize with others, to understand the subtleties of human interaction, to find joy in one’s self and to elicit it in others, and to stretch beyond the quotidian in pursuit of purpose and meaning.

Harvard biologist and Pulitzer-prize winning author E.O. Wilson (1999) suggests the way to this new Conceptual Age is through Consilience; or a unification of all the great branches of learning, a kind of hyper-interdisciplinarism that will move humanity exponentially to complexity. Wilson states (1998)

What I've done is simply point out what the trends are in the increasing [blending] of the scientific disciplines. . . . We've seen everything that we conventionally call biology and the natural sciences now linked with a web-work of cause-and-effect explanation running from particle physics all the way to ecosystem studies and the brain sciences. The idea of consilience, then, is simply an observation that this is what is happening, and a projection into the future that this will continue.

This unification of knowledge coupled with breakthroughs in techniques and technology enable people to meet their higher potential. Young people today break records at earlier and earlier ages. Science writer Phillip Ross attributes the proliferation of chess prodigies, for example, to the advent of computer-based training methods "that let children study far more master games and to play far more frequently against master-strength programs than their forerunners could typically manage.” (2006). The potential of today’s smart children is unprecedented in human history.

Just Make Good Choices. OK?

2008-10-08T13:21:00.000-07:00

Although we are alike in so many ways, the small differences between individual humans are often times most relevant in shaping life experiences. A tiny chromosome determines whether we have the capacity to bear children or father them. A mere inch determines whether a child may or may not ride the newest roller coaster at Disneyland. We have little control over such differences. What we can control is how we react to or express our differences. The expression of what cannot be changed can be changed. We cannot change our genes, for example, but we can affect our epigenes, the expressions of our genes, by the choices we make every day. Choices, are what truly differentiate human beings from one another, and in fact, from other animals as well. The biggest differences between human and chimpanzee DNA actually lie within gene activation patterns.

The differences between chimps and humans are not in our proteins, but in how we use them.

Katherine Pollard (2006)

UC Davis Genome Center

The way our bodies use proteins may be based on our choices. Could it be that we are humans today because our ancestors made certain choices? Hmmm....

Will the choices we make today determine the micro-evolution of our species? Probably. Will the choices we make today determine the macro-evolution of humans? Hmmm...I'll have to get back to you on that.

Feeling Tired?

2008-10-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

Fatigue, conflict, and burnout can all result

from being mired in old catagories,

trapped by old mindsets.

Ellen J. Langer (1997),
professor of Psychology

I spoke to my brother as he commuted back home after a long day at work, "I'm tired, he said. Then he added, "I'm tired because work was boring today."

So many times we are tired simply because we are bored, doing

something mindless, feeling stuck and unstimulated. Next time you are tired, try switching activities. Take a brisk walk, or read a good book outloud, or do what my brother did, call someone you love and hope she's been doing something fun.

Child's Work

2008-10-06T14:35:00.000-07:00

With smart children, the traditional basic skills of reading, writing, and arithmetic and a twentieth-century addition, technology, are best taught through play. When the child is coerced in any way, the activity becomes someone else’s work and learning slows way, way down.
Mark Twain said “Work and play are words used to describe the same thing under differing conditions.” Twain explains,

What work I have done I have done because it has been play. If it had been work I shouldn't have done it. Who was it who said, "Blessed is the man who has found his work"? Whoever it was he had the right idea in his mind. Mark you, he says his work--not somebody else's work. The work that is really a man's own work is play and not work at all. Cursed is the man who has found some other man's work and cannot lose it. When we talk about the great workers of the world we really mean the great players of the world. The fellows who groan and sweat under the weary load of toil that they bear never can hope to do anything great. How can they when their souls are in a ferment of revolt against the employment of their hands and brains? The product of slavery, intellectual or physical, can never be great.

Play may be a perfect tool for the customization of education. What may seem like play to an adult may not be play for a child and vice versa. Psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi coined the word “Flow” to describe work that feels like play. Csikszentmihalyi (1991) found this flow experience is characterized by the following:

A sense of that one’s skills are adequate to cope with the challenges at hand in a goal directed, rule bound action system that provides clear clues as to how one is performing.
Concentration is so intense that there is no attention left over to think about anything irrelevant or to worry about problems.
Self-consciousness disappears, and the sense of time becomes distorted.
An activity that produces such experiences is so gratifying that people are willing to do it for its own sake, with little concern for what they will get out of it, even when it is difficult or dangerous.

Smart children who come to school knowing the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic and technology often acquired these through play. Not necessarily using toys, fun curricula or with a highly animated adult, but in an environment where a flow experience could occur; a flow experience that facilitated the acquisition of a basic skill, such as the ability to read. Comparison studies of smart children who entered school already knowing how to read and smart children who did not read yet found mothers of accelerated readers provided a flow inducing environment through interaction, discussion, and word identification. These mothers provided clear goals and gave immediate feedback, intuitively balanced the level of challenge and the child’s skill level and by giving the child a sense of control in the interaction and making the experience self-rewarding, or fun, turned learning to read, into play. These children, having access to books, spend time with them, in a state of flow, challenging themselves to more difficult reading tasks in a self-determined manner with no external pressure. Improving their reading skills is their work, not someone else’s; these children are at play.
A child who enters school already knowing how to read does not need to, and in fact should, not, spend many hours practicing basic reading skills along with the rest of her or his class. That would turn her work/play of reading into simply a “load of toil” as the equilibrium between the level of challenge and personal skill is not there. Many smart children will enter school as non-fluent readers or unable to write simple words or lacking basic number skills. Learning these basic skills can become their work, their play, their flow-experience at school. Most likely the groundwork has been laid at home.

A Poetic Existence

2008-10-03T13:45:00.000-07:00

I try to live what I consider a “poetic existence.” That means I take responsibility for the air I breathe and the space I take up. I try to be immediate, to be totally present for all my work.

Maya Angelou (2001), American Poet

One small action leads to a series of events. One small action determines a future outcome. Like a butterfly fluttering below angry clouds, changing the barometric pressure, tipping the forces of nature to produce a tornado. This is called the butterfly effect. It happens everywhere in the universe and it explains a lot.
Every action, by every human, alters the world. Every thought produces some outcome. Every emotion leads to a different path. Each choice every single human makes affects your future, and the futures of so many others. The image of a flying butterfly altering the earth’s climate explains the power of only a single factor, but every moment in every day is full of factors each with power to move life in a certain direction. The butterfly effect explains a lot, but still too little. The infinite butterfly effects occurring throughout the universe is Chaos. We live in a chaotic universe. We shape it with each choice.

The Real School Crisis

2008-10-02T08:52:00.000-07:00

The main crisis in schools today is irrelevance.

Of all the institutions in America, schools have least adapted themselves to the free agent economy.

Daniel Pink (2001), journalist

I began reading Free Agent Nation by Daniel Pink last night and love his take on the irrelevancy of public education as it stands today. * Public education is ideally based on the fundamental principles of the American democratic ideal (i.e., concern for natural rights of freedom and independence for the individual, as well as responsibility towards society). But today's system really belongs to an era that defined democracy in an oxymoronic way: personal freedom through rule following and sticking to "a plan." Most people agree that some kind of reform in education is in order, but still, millions of American parents trust the school system enough to hand over their kids every day. It's almost as if most people are wearing front blinders, unable to see what lies ahead for themselves and their children.

*To read a review of Free Agent Nation: http://www.sohodojo.com/ribs/free-agent-nation.html

Why Guilt?

2008-09-30T12:05:00.000-07:00

Benjamin Franklin (1736) wrote a small paragraph about the death by smallpox of his son Francis (age 4). He wrote of how guilty he felt for years, because he had not inoculated his little boy. He wrote about how equally guilty parents whose children died despite inoculation must feel. Children could die with or without inoculation, he concluded, and guilt is part of grieving.
Years earlier, inoculation had been a very hot topic in the newspaper run by Franklin’s brother, The New England Courant. The Franklin brothers ridiculed inoculation and defamed its influential proponent, the Rev. Cotton Mather. I’m sure Franklin’s past history against inoculation added an extra emotional burden to his grieving process.

Franklin is right. Guilt is part of the grieving process. The question is: Why is guilt part of the grieving process?

Evolutionary psychologists may argue that loss must become sticky in an organism’s consciousness, so that loss is minimized in the future. Like burning pain prevents a child from touching a hot stove again. So burning emotional pain such as experienced by the loss of a child, should include guilt. Guilt brands culpability onto one’s consciousness and should prevent future loss.
Each child lost takes with her an infinite number of futures. Franklin himself said it best:

For the loss of one in ten
thereby is not merely the loss of
so many persons, but the accumulated loss of all the children
and the children’s children the deceased might have had,
multiplied by successive generations.

Benjamin Franklin (1785)

If an organism’s most important biological purpose is to survive until it reproduces, than guilt has an obvious function.

The pain of guilt is life’s way of saying “Don’t let this happen again.”

Tear It Down Baby

2008-09-28T22:56:00.000-07:00

In today's New York Times, architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff proposed the demolition of the Met Life Building (formerly the Pan Am building) in New York City. These financially difficult times, Ouroussoff argues, are perfect for rethinking human spaces.

Instead of crying over what can't be built, why not refocus our energies on knocking down the structures that not only fail to bring us joy, but actually bring us down?

Nicolai Ouroussoff (2008), journalist

The idea of making the best of difficult times by clearing out the bad is not new. One must make room for beauty by removing clutter. Life becomes difficult, but the recovery is what matters. And the first step towards recovery may be destruction. Moving beyond the helpless stance of indifference, in some cases towards hate, is the first step towards some kind of action. This is what Ouroussoff is proposing: action against urban ugliness as a metaphor for healing from what has brought us down.

Things don't go wrong and break your heart so you can become bitter and give up. They happen to break you down and build you up so you can be all that you were intended to be.

Samuel Johnson (1750), English poet

Maybe now is the perfect time to break down. The sooner the better, so recovery can begin. Maybe ugly human spaces are concrete examples of ugly human activity. As a child, I always loved driving on Park Ave. towards the then Pan Am building. I would actually miss it if it disappeared from that landscape. But I appreciate Ouroussoff's idea that to make room for new beauty, sometimes, a wrecking ball must be used to destroy the ugly. Like a fire destroying an old forest to allow for new, if different life to thrive.

Processi?

2008-09-25T16:00:00.000-07:00

The process of consciousness is a dynamic accomplishment of the distributed activities of populations of neurons in many different areas of the brain.

Gerald M. Edelman, biologist

Consciousness is a process. Some call it “soul,” others call it “spirit.” In any case humans are aware they have “it”. We can feel it but are only beginning to uncover its truth. Consciousness is about speed, like light. It is heightened neuronal activity; like electricity traveling through a cord to a bulb. The light turns on and changes everything. A conscious moment begins and we can see.

We connect to the world and become live. We feel, emote and think. Reducing consciousness to processes can’t be bad. It can only lead to more, well, consciousness.

The Beginning of Consciousness

2008-09-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

My view is compatible with much of the work going on now in neuroscience and psychology, where people are studying the relationship of consciousness to neural and cognitive processes without really trying to reduce it to those processes.

David Chalmers, Philosopher

I had not planned on running down the hill. But the slight change in slope gave my jogger stroller the power to pull me faster and faster, like a reckless one year old Labrador. I held the leash with all my strength, my one connection to my baby girl. My feet brushed the blacktop with force. The cool wind slapped my face, my hair flew back. My lungs grew large with morning air, my brain filled with hot, fast blood. The bottom of the hill came fast enough for me to catch my breath and laugh.
Feelings are like that. A slight change comes, and everything follows. Until one feels it all, the whole result sometimes for just a moment, like a laugh. Feelings are biochemical, just bodily responses to outside stimuli. The heart changes pace, brain pathways slicken. Fluids run wild. A tipping point is reached and a conscious moment begins.