day 2 has been interesting! wasn't exactly my choice of topic, but it definitely hit home (the TED speech, obviously). it's something that's brewing like stew in the back of my mind - thinking about people, events, memories - but i don't bother writing about it anymore. listening to this speech (especially the excerpts i've included below) - helped me understand the way our brain works a little more, and how we fail to somehow address the important things in life. it also cemented my belief that i'm one of those people that can, for good or bad, read someone really well, and also mimic their feelings and emotions simply based on an excerpt of their life they have provided me. our belief that reason is the most important tool in our lives may have helped us, but i strongly belief that it has hindered us from feeling - a lesson i learned in ssy - sometimes we need to stop thinking to feel. shravan panyam once taught me to focus on my strengths instead of weaknesses - and brooks focuses on that in his talk...you are who you are, make yourself better where you believe you can but never deviate from the idea that you must read yourself before attempting to do so with anyone else. learn your weaknesses and strengths, learn how much YOU can handle. otherwise you're asking for trouble. anyway :) that is all from me. enjoy the excerpt below. and learn about the birdie from wiki. something fun i decided to do. just learn something new everyday :) its never too late to do that
day 2: TED talk - (the social animal by david brooks)
http://www.ted.com/talks/david_brooks_the_social_animal.html#
“we're really good at talking about material things,but we're really bad at talking about emotions.we're really good at talking about skills and safety and health, we're really bad at talking about character.
the first insight is that while the conscious mind writes the autobiography of our species, the unconscious mind does most of the work. and so one way to formulate that, the human mind can take in millions of pieces of information a minute, of which it can be consciously aware of about 40. and this leads to oddities. another finding is that the unconscious, far from being dumb and sexualized,is actually quite smart.
the second insight is that emotions are at the center of our thinking. people with strokes and lesions in the emotion-processing parts of the brainare not super smart, they're actually sometimes quite helpless. emotions are not separate from reason, but they are the foundation of reasonbecause they tell us what to value. and so reading and educating your emotions is one of the central activities of wisdom.
and the third insight is that we're not primarily self-contained individuals. we're social animals, not rational animals. we emerge out of relationships,and we are deeply interpenetrated, one with another. and so when we see another person, we reenact in our own minds what we see in their minds.
we believe that reason is the highest of the faculties. but i think this research shows that the british enlightenment, or the scottish enlightenment, with david hume, adam smith,actually had a better handle on who we are -- that reason is often weak, our sentiments are strong,and our sentiments are often trustworthy. and this work corrects that bias in our culture, that deep humanizing bias. it gives us a deeper sense of what it actually takes for us to thrive in this life.when we think about human capital we think about the things we can measure easily -- things like grades, sat's, degrees, the number of years in schooling. what it really takes to do well, to lead a meaningful life are things that are deeper, things we don't really even have words for.
the first gift, or talent, is mindsight -- the ability to enter into other people's minds and learn what they have to offer. scientists at the university of minnesota did a study in which they could predictwith 77 percent accuracy, at age 18 months, who was going to graduate from high school, based on who had good attachment with mom. 20 percent of kids do not have those relationships. they are what we call avoidantly attached. they have trouble relating to other people. they go through life like sailboats tacking into the wind -- wanting to get close to people, but not really having the models of how to do that. and so this is one skill of how to hoover up knowledge, one from another.
a second skill is equal poise. the ability to have the serenity to read the biases and failures in your own mind. men drown at twice the rate of women, because men think they can swim across that lake. but some people have the ability and awareness of their own biases, their own overconfidence. they have epistemological modesty. they are open-minded in the face of ambiguity. they are able to adjust strength of the conclusions to the strength of their evidence. they are curious. and these traits are often unrelated and uncorrelated with iq.
the third trait is medes, what we might call street smarts -- it's a greek word. it's a sensitivity to the physical environment, the ability to pick out patterns in an environment -- derive a gist. the third is what you might call sympathy,the ability to work within groups. and that comes in tremendously handy, because groups are smarter than individuals -- and face-to-face groups are much smarter than groups that communicate electronically, because 90 percent of our communication is non-verbal. and the effectiveness of a group is not determined by the iq of the group,it's determined by how well they communicate, how often they take turns in conversation.
and here's what he wrote: "i looked at her face, and i looked so deeply that i felt i was behind her eyes.and all at once i found myself saying as tears flowed, 'that's me. that's me.' and those simple words brought back many thoughts that i had had before, about the fusion of our souls into one higher level entity, about the fact that at the core of both our souls lay our identical hopes and dreams for our children, about the notion that those hopeswere not separate or distinct hopes, but were just one hope, one clear thing that defined us both, that welded us into a unit -- the kind of unit i had but dimly imagined before being married and having children. i realized that, though carol had died, that core piece of her had not died at all, but had lived on very determinedly in my brain."
the greeks say we suffer our way to wisdom.through his suffering, hofstadter understood how deeply interpenetrated we are. through the policy failures of the last 30 years, we have come to acknowledge, i think, how shallow our view of human nature has been. and now as we confront that shallowness and the failures that derive from our inability to get the depths of who we are, comes this revolution in consciousness -- these people in so many fields exploring the depth of our natureand coming away with this enchanted, this new humanism. and when freud discovered his sense of the unconscious, it had a vast effect on the climate of the times. now we are discovering a more accurate vision of the unconscious -- of who we are deep inside. and it's going to have a wonderful and profound and humanizing effect on our culture.”
day 2: Wikipedia article - (pied currawong)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pied_Currawong
the pied currawong (strepera graculina) is a medium-sized black passerine bird native to eastern australia and lord howe island. one of three currawong species in the genus strepera, it is closely related to the butcherbirds and australian magpie of the family artamidae. six subspecies are recognised. it is a robust crowlike bird averaging around 48 cm (19 in) in length, black or sooty grey-black in plumage with white undertail and wing patches, yellow irises, and a heavy bill. the male and female are similar in appearance. known for its melodious calls, the species' name currawong is of indigenous origin.
within its range, the pied currawong is generally sedentary, although populations at higher altitudes relocate to lower areas during the cooler months. it is omnivorous, with a diet that includes a wide variety of berries and seeds, invertebrates, bird eggs and juvenile birds. it is a predator which has adapted well to urbanization and can be found in parks and gardens as well as rural woodland. the habitat includes all kinds of forested areas, although mature forests are preferred for breeding. roosting, nesting and the bulk of foraging take place in trees, in contrast with the ground foraging behaviour of its relative the australian magpie.
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