freelance paradigm

Part 1 Part 3 Part 4

In the first part of this series I discussed the noise that is created by the media outlets which clutters and occupies our minds so that we simply cannot think creatively. But there are other problems too. The next in line is:

The Lack of Imagination
Imagination is the core engine of creativity and many people simply lack that. Imagination simply means seeing with your mind's eye what has not been materialized yet. At least not that you know of it. There are IMHO two basic reasons why people don't develop/carry this ability in adult age:

1- they lack proper genes for their brain to be powerful enough (I don't believe this could be true for such a large amount of people),
2- they had it too easy in life.

Since the first reason is completely arbitrary and hard to prove (then again, I am not a geneticist), I shall not discuss it.

But what about the second? Again, I might be speaking from my gut, but I came to believe that imagination develops when there is a certain delay between a wish and its fulfillment. If that time is too long then frustrations and its suppression can occur, but that is an other subject.

Remember your childhood; you want a new toy so badly it almost hurts. But your parents don't buy it right away, so you'll have to wait till Christmas or your birthday. During that time you start imagining how sweet would it be to get that thing and everything you could do with it. You can see yourself playing with it, sharing it with friends, and so on... This is how your imagination was born! If you have parents that fulfilled your wishes instantly, it is very likely you will not develop imaginative powers of the brain. Again, this is from the gut, but in my experience as a mentor, spoiled kids tend to have more difficulty understanding fairytales, poems or even visual art. They also produce less (and lesser quality) of their own works. It is not that they are stupid or unknowledgable, they simply lack imagination. And patience! How could anything be created without patience!? (another product of non-fulfilled wish)

Then you go to school and school fails even harder than some parents at developing children's imagination. Almost every education system in the world is what Lawrence Lessig would call a Read-Only (RO) system. That is a centralized system at which one person broadcasts his knowledge or skills, while a myriad of other are in a role of completely passive receivers, who have to repeat whatever was told or demonstrated. This system has no respect for individual intellect or personal creativity. Most classes are organized in a way that knowledge is brought to you readily on a tray. You don't have to work for it. It is just there for you to consume it. It often feels like the system thinks I am so stupid, that I can't find that knowledge myself. Only the most inspired teachers have the power to overcome this built-in flaw and make their classes a Read-Write (RW) class, at which students equally participate in creation of the lesson, and where their individual contributions (ideas) are crucial for the class. But those are rare exceptions.

Imagine now, if you will, a different kind of class. It is a class at which knowledge is acquired by hands-on experimenting and (field) research. A class where you have to work to get your answers. The knowledge doesn't come right away, you have to wait and search for it, and while you're at it, you imagination is already working out the possible solutions for your problem. It might take a little more time, but the understanding you get is far deeper and the knowledge more real. It is not just words you memorize from a book, it is The Knowledge. This kind of teaching respects learner's intellect. It is as if it's been sublimely said: "I know you are a smart person. I believe you can find answers yourself and you don't need me to bring them to you." It is a lot easier to be motivated after such compliment. And imagine a class at which testing is done in a way that is not humiliating. Questions are completely different. One can get a question like;

"From where does a tree get all the stuff it needs to grow?"

If you want to answer that, you have to know really a lot about trees, but not just that; you must also connect together different domains of knowledge, like biology, chemistry, geology, meteorology, math... Everything has to fall into place for you to answer that the tree is made mostly of carbon and that carbon doesn't come from the ground (like the majority would answer), but from the air with a process called photosynthesis. You didn't see that one coming, did you! Photosynthesis is how a tree makes wood! If it really came from the ground there would be a large hole under every tree. A tree wants to grow up to reach even more sunlight and dominate the space (evolutionary explainable). Oxygen is just a side product. But you didn't learn that in school, because you were too occupied with memorizing the exact word order of the proper definition of photosynthesis, which goes as followed:

"Photosynthesis (from the Greek φώτο- [photo-], "light," and σύνθεσις [synthesis], "putting together", "composition") is a process that converts carbon dioxide into organic compounds, especially sugars, using the energy from sunlight.Photosynthesis occurs in plants, algae, and many species of bacteria, but not in archaea ..." (source)

It is a scientifically correct definition, but it completely blurs the point. It is a wood making process! Of course, memorizing and repeating that dull definition will rob you of the joy that is thinking. I assume you had a great time pondering the question "From where does a tree get all the stuff it needs to grow?" but not such a great time when you had to memorize in school. People simply love to think, they love to use their imagination, but the schools will just not give you enough opportunities to use your brain in a way that it was built for and we are lucky to have that many creative people who retain this capacity into their adult life. For the most people, by the time they finish school, they are just a machine to store and reproduce a few facts and some basic skills (language and some math). If people are creative, they are creative despite of-, not because of the schools.

The schools are tiring and stressful, but that shouldn't be confused with intellectually hard. The schools are far to easy. Thinking is fun, but there is almost no thinking and imagining done in schools.¹ This kind of teaching is actually an insult for one's intelligence. No wonder kids rebel! Again: there is no delay between a wish and its fulfillment that is needed to spur imagination. Hence, for the most of the people, schools are boring and no fun at all! The unnatural way of learning and testing is a cause of a lot of anxiety. There is something very wrong with that. The majority of people doesn't see it that way (they assume this is the nature of things, that it cannot be done any other way...), but I simply find it problematic. Give me one good reason why should the school be stressful! Why in the world should 10-year-olds have cramps in their stomach every morning? Why do we torture our kids like that? Schools could be so much fun, full of adventure and exploration, just like Naional Geographic, but in real life! We just have to shift our logic from RO to RW and develop respect for their young but huge intellects.

In both cases (parenting and teaching) the reasons for not giving a child enough time to develop imagination could be completely benevolent and even noble. Parents want their children to have things they couldn't have had. And many people go into teaching because they want to share knowledge and spare misconceptions they had themselves. They want to give kids the right answers straight away so that they wouldn't waste time on intellectual dead ends. That is a noble cause indeed, but by doing it too much they rob young people of the joy that is exploration (and imagination).

After school, your passive intellectual life, where information is only consumed (not even repeated anymore) continues in front of the TV set and other classic media.² We covered that already. 20th century is perhaps the only century in human history, where the predominant culture was of the RO kind. A big, centralized industry of music, movies, television, radio and publishing was feeding hungry consumers. Why wouldn't they consume; professionals in Hollywood are much better than the local theater. But there is a good news; with the dawn of the internet our creative potential is back at work. Just look at the Vimeo, YouTube, Flickr, blogs and everything that is created. We are back to Read-Write. We all participate in making the cultural landscape. And that fuels my imagination!


Basic references:
Hawkins, J., (2004), On Intelligence, New York, Holt Paperbacks
Robinson, K. et all, (1982), The Arts in Schools, London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Robinson, K., (2001), Out of Our Minds - Learning to be creative, London, Capstone
Robinson, K., (2009), The Element - How finding your passion changes everything, New York, Viking Penguin
Lessig, L., (2004), Free culture - How big media uses technology and the law to lock down culture and control creativity, New York, Penguin (Free PDF)
Lessig, L. (2007): TED Talk
Robinson, K. (2006): TED talk 1
Robinson, K. (2010): TED talk 2
Drori, J., (2007): TED talk

And if you want to so see how a good RW kind of class looks like, see this.

Footnotes:
¹ - We should also note, that the school curriculum is far to narrow to cover all of the interests and talents that children might have. Not just that; it is completely unbalanced. Languages and math are dominant subjects everywhere you go while arts and certain sciences suffer from the lack of attention. As Ken Robinson puts it, a lot of people go trough their lives thinking they don't have any talent at all. They don't enjoy what they do in life, they just do their jobs and wait for the weekend. We are not all born just for math, languages and encyclopedic learning. We are much more than that! I spilled a lot of ink on that subject, I am aware of the problem, but it is an education-specific subject, so I decided not to write about it in this context.

²- One more thing. When you talk about schools and media in this tone, you can quickly pass the line and end up on the side of conspiracy 'theories'. It is a very thin line indeed! The point at which conspiracy simply fails is that it assumes that this system is put up and maintained by intelligent design of the elite. Now this is a kind of a compliment, don't you think? I simply don't believe they are that smart. Nobody is. There is simply too much data and too many arbitrary factors for anyone to manipulate with. Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science will show you that even with the simplest of rules a great randomness can occur. Even supercomputers can't predict weather for more than 3 days ahead, not to mention the whole society. I would also strongly suggest reading some game theory on this subject. It will show how even if every involved member of the society is trying for the best, the whole system can go totally down. Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene will force you to make the same conclusion.

Originally posted by Jeff Hawkins, On Intelligence, page 134:

To the cortex, our bodies are just part of the external world. Remember, the brain is in a quiet and dark box. It knows about the world only via the patterns on the sensory nerve fibers. From the brain's perspective as a pattern device, it doesn't know about your body any differently than it knows about the rest of the world. There isn't a special distinction between where your body ends and the rest of the world begins.

We can now draw at least two conclusions. Firstly, that would explain the dualism in religion about body and soul being separated. But I will not talk about that. Instead I'm interested in an other phenomenon. Perhaps there there is a degree by which you can separate the rest of the world from your body and the level of it depends on psyhological aspects of "skill".
Maybe you are a skilled skier. Do skies feel like an object when you are "in the zone" skiing? I bet not! The same thing happens to me when I'm in the zone with my photo camera (Steve Taylor would say that my ego is in abeyance while by "inner game" model self1 would be in charge) I can no longer separate my camera from the rest of my body. It becomes a part of me. In the same fashion a conductor perceives his baton - just as an other part of his body. The more skilled you are, the more the object feels as a part of you.
So perhaps very good pilots think of their airplanes just as a bigger body inside of which they slip to fly. And we all feel of our cars as a new and bigger body when we drive. If that is true, we can explain a series of things that occour in connection to cars:

- It can explain why people extend their ego to cars. Pimping cars is nothing else than bodybuilding with different means.
- It can explain why it "hurts you" when a rock or something hits the car,
- It can explain why people worry so much about scratches on their cars,
- It can explain why people do all that nasty stuff inside their cars (like picking their nose). They are inside of the body, how could you see them?

Now, isn't that interesting?!?!

Yes! I finally get it what the Star wars saga is all about! It took me a long time, didn't it?
But in the previous years, when episodes I-III were comming out, I didn't have enough patience and knowledge to fully understand, even though I did saw episode I and II at the time. Now, during this hollidays, I saw all six of them in a couple of marathon evenings. I watched it in the same order as they were filmed. You must know it was a powerful and overwhelming experience.

And afterwords it was worth to see Family Guy - Blue harvest and have a really good laugh!!!

One thing that strikes me the most when I read books or listen to humanistic [=understanding human] lectures is how impossible it is for us to see our mind the way it really is. The dilemma is the following: how to adress the problem? Should we study the brain as a piece of hardware or our mind as software. Somehow this reminds me on the nature of the light which could be understood both as a wave or as a partice (when in fact it is none of it, really).

There are many who aproach our brain as hardware and achive amazing results. The other day I was visiting TED Talks and found astonishing Vilayanur Ramachandran's talk. You should see it.
The software paradigm has some benefits of it's own as well. For one it's far simpler methods are useful to deal with patients in mental care therapy. Well, Freud took it (too) seriously and his books often sound like a mathematical argument where everything has it's logical place. In his terms, our mind is a large peice of OS software code, where the larger part is hidden (to us) and performs tasks that peak out only when certain results of previously done processing are important. Perhaps that is an exaggeration, but I see no reason whatsoever to study brain or mind by one method only.

The dilemma actually multiplies itself on a smaller scale. Within the hardware paradigm some explain it as the chemistry in the brain (?!!?), others as the sum of connections between synapses. That can be very accurate in many cases. For example; fading memory can be described by less and less active connections (synapses have less and less neurotransmiters active).
Software apologists have their own crossroads; are we programed by our (supressed) desires and ...aammm... chemistry (?), or do we hold the power of free will (Glasser)?

Somehow there just isn't a theory around to condense it all. It seems like we are programed to see either the lady or the man with the saxophone, but not both at the same time ("or are we?" Glasser might say). You might want to see Jeff Hawkins' video for that matter.
Hopefully we'll manage somehow. Our minds have this limited way of thinking that satisfys humble everyday's experience, but science has a good record of breaking them.

Image source.

I've came to the conclusion that small details of everyday's life situations take a key role in the quality of our lives and success we achive. How is this possible?
For example; we all know how important is the first impression a new guy makes on us when we first meet. Imagine two different situations; in first he's a smiling and open charachter and in second he is a timid and closed person. Maybe the real person behind is the same and he just had an extremly good or a bad day. In first case you might decide to continue a relationship with that person and you shall gain a fantastic new friendship, but in second, you missed that chance. And it is all because that bustard didn't have the guts to gather some strength and simply be nice for a minute.

So I think it is extremely important that we take a conscious part in order to control such details. Smile, when you meet new pepople, think carefuly what to wear not just on important occasions, but all the time, write adress on envelope with special care (you will impress the reciver), look confident when you enter the room... Of course this takes effort (a lot of it, sometimes), but which good thing doesn't!?

I believe your everyday life experience will then be a lot more powerful. You will have more of life and I think this kind of thinking leads to better business as well.

Today I am deeply moved by death of Luciano Pavarotti, one of the greatest tenors of all time. I was privileged to meet him on Histria Festival in Pula, on 3th of July 2004. I was there as a photographer. They took us with a boat from Fažana to Brijuni islands where the press conference was performed. He was a bit late to the event, but about two minutes before he entered the room, there was already an electricity in the air. People had beacome nervous in anticipation and when he finally came, the whole room bursted in a loud and warm applause. He just smiled and waved his hand.
After the brief statement of Bashkim Shehu, the director of festival and a very noble man from Pula, Pavarotti got to speak. He told us that he's very happy to perform in such fabolous city, especially in the Arena, roman theatre in Pula.
Then the members of the press started to ask questions. Let's be honest, a few of them were totally off topic and even stupid (as it is allways like that on such events), but he never lost his nerves and remained a true gentleman in the best possible way. He was just kindly smiling. After 15 or 20 minutes his managers told that it was enough and we should stop. But Pavarotti just couldn't. He was there for us. It was like he was in pain to leave the conference so he managed to negotiate one last question with his staff. And here's where I came into place. I lifted my arm really high and he looked at me so kindly, almost like he was my father, and said something like that (I was too excited at that time to remember the exact words): "Well young boy, what would you like to know." So I asked him about his repertoare for the concert which included a vast part of Puccini's La Bohemme (Che gelida manina, Si, mi chiamano Mimi and O soave fanciulla, performed with Carmella Remigio, Itallian soprano, fabolous voice!). My question was targeting his first performance in early 60', when he debuted with this exact role. Is there any special connection to it? What is his relationship with Rodolfo after many years?
His reaction was exceptionally warm, like he was overwhelmed by the fact that I actually did some homework about his career (well, I was doing it since I was 12... don't ask, I was a strange kid). He explained to me that he was a young passionate boy at that time ("much like you", he said) , trying to make it in the big world. Rodolfo is exactly that kind of role. So everytime he sings Rodolfo, he is reminded on that times, which were hard, but carried all the romantic things of youth. I was moved!
Then it was really time to end. Some of us attempted to get an autograph, but he was tightly surrounded by his mannagers and bodyguards, so it was impossible.

The next day, on my birthday, he performed a marvelous concert. Eventhough his voice wasn't exactly like we remember from his best times (due to age and illness), the charisma was enormous!

There is are reasons why we think of him as the greatest, but most of them go beyond music!

Anyways - today I wanted to share this with you, because the occasion feels right.

This article is a little contribution towards understanding abstract art in general. I was actually thinking to write about cubism and Picasso, but that shuld wait for the next time. I believe this comes first.

People often visit modern galleries and watch modern art with no understanding, because they expect to recognize parts of their physical reality. I think there is much more to human life than that. What about our passion and love, fears and demons, what about our phylosophy? Isn't that worth expressing? And how could you do it if not by complex "rebuses"? How did it come t that?

On the left: Le guitariste by Pablo Picasso (1910)

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I just found out about this, and i was quickly addicted to this small 22-minutes videos of the most remarkable people speaking about future and new ways of thinking. I strongly suggest you see them. This one is just an example:




And there are many more here: http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/

So just as we thaught this the global warming erased winter from our dictionary, this happened. I must say, yesterday evening was nice and romatic, but today it is all very redundant. No matter what season we're in, there shure will be some days that don't fit in at all. That's all we can count on nowadays.