‘I warn you not to be ordinary
I warn you not to be young
I warn you not to fall ill
I warn you not to get old.’
Neil Kinnock, in a speech at Bridgend, Glamorgan, on 7 June 1983.
‘I warn you not to be ordinary
I warn you not to be young
I warn you not to fall ill
I warn you not to get old.’
Neil Kinnock, in a speech at Bridgend, Glamorgan, on 7 June 1983.
I don’t think, as a matter of fact, that I’m going to benefit from anything on this earth. It’s more like that, I mean, if you have love on the earth, that seems to be number one. There’s food, water, air and love, right? And love is just basically heartbreak. Human’s can’t live in the present as animals do; they just live in the present. But human’s are always thinking about the future or the past. So, it’s a veil of tears, man. And I don’t know anything that’s going to benefit me except more love. I just need an overwhelming amount of love. And a nap. Mostly a nap
On Wednesday the 2nd of September I will be speaking at York Cafe Scientifique about ‘The Learning Brain’. This is what I promised to talk about:
Your brain is not fixed clockwork, but an ever changing economy of abilities, habits and desires. Everthing we do, every thought and experience, changes the brain and how we think and feel in the future.
Dr Stafford will talk about the discoveries psychologists and neuroscientists have made that reveal just how changeable the brain is, the astonishing ability it has to learn and cope with astounding injuries. Using examples taken from everyday life, he will evidence how the brain’s capacity to learn has a surprising influence on our behaviour. Why do people insist that coffee tastes better from their favourite cup? Why do people compulsively check their email? How do your reduce prejudice? These and other questions will be considered from the perspective of The Learning Brain.
Venue: City Screen Picturehouse, Basement Bar, York
Time:7.30 – 9.00
Details: here
The lesson I draw … is that a uniform ‘scientific view of the world’ may be useful for people doing science – it gives them motivation without tying them down. It is like a flag. Though presenting a single pattern it makes people do many different things. However, it is a disaster for outsiders (philosophers, fly-by-night mystics, prophets of a New Age, the “educated public”). It suggests to them the most narrowminded religious commitment and encourages a similar narrowmindedness on their part
Paul Feyerabend, in ‘Against Method’ (third edition, chapter 19). ‘the “educated public” is included in the list in his ‘Conquest of Abundance‘, in which this section is repeated with a few changes.
La cucina di un popolo è la sola, esatta testimonianza della sua civiltà!
“The cuisine of a country is the only exact attestation of its civilization.”
Traditional Italian saying, apparently
Desire to know why, and how, Curiosity; such as is in no living creature but Man: so that man is distinguished, not only by his Reason, but also by this singular Passion from other Animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of Sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a Lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of Knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure.
Thomas Hobbes, in Leviathan, part I, chapter 6
I seem to be, to my surprise, a member of a large profession. There are some 20,000 psychologists in this country alone, nearly all of whom have become so in my adult lifetime. They are all prosperous. Most of them seem to be busily applying psychology to problems of life and personality. They seem to feel, many of them, that all we need to do is to consolidate our scientific gains. Their self-confidence astonishes me. For these gains seem to me puny, and scientific psychology seems to me ill-founded. At any time the whole psychological applecart might be upset. Let them beware
J.J. Gibson. (1967) Autobiography. In: Reed, E.& Jones, R. (Eds.) Reasons for Realism (p. 21)
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help from pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
From ‘On Dover Beach’ by Matthew Arnold, 1851
You’ve probably had the experience of not writing back to someone because you want to write properly and don’t have time. So you put off writing. And put it off. And put it off. And never write back because you wanted to do it properly.
I think twitter is a wonderful facilitator of social interaction. Because each tweet or message is limited to 140 characters it is impossible to write ‘properly’ (i.e. in any depth), so you are free to nudge, bother, flirt with, joke with or otherwise contact all those people who you would like to be in touch with but have been putting off contacting because they deserve more than 140 characters.
Now, in honour of twitter I will attempt to rehash this thought in less than 140 characters:
Twitter facilitates social contact because msgs are limited to 140 chars. Can’t write properly, so easier to write at all!
(122 characters)
@tomstafford, by the way
Rob Redmond is possibly the only person I have ever read on the internet who writes anything worth reading about martial arts: 24fightingchickens.com. Today I particularly like ‘The most effective martial art on earth’
“The secret is out. You know what sex means to most people? […] Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it’s the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that’s equal to others or better, even, that you don’t have to go to college six years to get. And it’s not religion and it’s not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself”
Donna, in Don Delillo’s Underworld (1997, p301)
…unless you saddle yourself with all the problems of making a concrete agent take care of itself in the real world, you will tend to overlook, underestimate, or misconstrue the deepest problems of design
Dan Dennett on the unreliability of simulations and imagination, and hence the need for (a theory-motivated?) robotics (via Tom Walton)
People don’t change, but – if they’re lucky – they get better at being themselves.
Yes my little snail climb
up the fujiyama
but slowly slowly
Haiku by Kobayashi Issa, trans. R.H.Blyth and freely retranslated by M.K. (and I put in the line breaks)
For what it is worth twitter.com/tomstafford
I’m still trying to work out what it is good for
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Samuel Beckett, in Worstward Ho
An action slip is when, due to a failure of attention, you accidentally perform an action out of context or out of sequence. For example, you pour milk on your toast or you forget to add the tea bag when making a cup of tea. Making action slips is common. Lately I have realised that I also make ‘second order’ action slips. These are where I perform the correct action, or the correct sequence of actions, but in the state of absent-mindedness whereby I might be more likely to make an action slip. I catch myself in the middle of some mundane and appropriate behaviour and with a start think to myself “Oh no what have I done!”. Usually this is during sudden, irreversable actions which would be bad if done out of context, such as urinating on things (ok for toilets, bad for most other things), getting into the shower and turning it on full (ok if clothes off, bad otherwise), pouring boiling water on things (ok for making hot drinks, bad for most foods, pets and family members). Of course with this kind of action I have, so far, always managed to do the right thing, but something about the consequences, and my lack of attention, causes a brief moment of panic. A chasm of intentional vertigo opens up as I ask myself exactly what I’m doing and how I know it is the right thing to do.
File under ‘perils of metacognition’?
I’m going to San Francisco on Monday. I’ll be in Berkeley and then San Francisco for the Annual Convention of the APS. After that I’m flying to Rome, then by ferry and train to Thessaloniki, then train back through eastern europe to home, via Zurich, Brussels and London. If you’re in any of these places, or you have recommendations for people to see and things to do, let me know…
A call for imaginative writing from “outside the city limits”:
As a society, we no longer acknowledge the role of stories in shaping what is real to us – and so our storytellers become entertainers, our poets harmless eccentrics, our artists cynical manipulators of the market, all taboos busted and everything for sale.
The Emotional Cartography book launch was on friday and went off a treat. Since I had, unusually for me, planned my talk by writing it out in full I have reproduced it below. This is more-or-less what I said:
There is a saying that those who want to enjoy laws and sausages should not find out how they are made. I think the same is true about facts. Or rather I think that anyone who wants to believe in simple honest facts, objective lumps of knowledge which are true and eternal, ought to stay away from the places where facts are produced. When you see how facts are made you ought to gain, I believe, a healthy scepticism about how they are used.
I am a scientist — an experimental psychologist — and I work in a University. In the University, in the Faculty of Science, we like to think we are the factory of facts. Yet, it still surprises me that some of my colleagues still believe in simple honest facts, even after years in the workrooms squeezing the meat of messy reality into the offal tubes of truth. Many times I’ve been faced down by these colleagues who refuse to believe that some complex social or political dilemma is really problematic. “Just find out the facts” they say. “When we know the facts, what do — about schools, israel-palestine, whatever — will become obvious”
Curious that anyone who has seen facts being made can still believe that on their own they’ll help!
I’m reminded of another quote, this one by Matt Cartmill – Professor of Biology, at Duke University. He said,
“As an adolescent I aspired to lasting fame, I craved factual certainty, and I thirsted for a meaningful vision of human life – so I became a scientist. This is like becoming an archbishop so that you can meet girls.”
Now don’t get me wrong, facts do exist. We look to the stars and ask if things can be known — can things be known? And things can be known. There is right and wrong, true and untrue. Facts, in this sense, do exist. But they aren’t enough for a balanced intellectual diet.
I think facts are seductive because they take a lot of technical skill to produce. If you want to make even a basic truth which will hang together long enough to survive being passed around, you need a lot of disciplinary training. You need expensive and complex measuring equipment, you need esoteric statistical techniques and you need to make the right comparisons. All this takes time and money and a lot of discipline specific experience. No wonder scientists are proud of their facts, and the facts themselves invoke some envy and respect.
The problem is that facts always — always! — come with a set of presumptions, they always come along with a view of the world that they promote.
If you’ve read Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’, his sprawling riotous novel of wartime paranoia you might know one of his Proverbs for Paranoids: “If you can get them asking the wrong questions, you don’t have to worry about the answers”
To stop this getting too abstract, and to bring it back to the book that we’re gathered here to launch, let’s talk about maps.
Everyone interested in maps should read Dennis Wood’s “The Power of Maps”. I believe this so strongly I have forced myself to only say this once, so that was it.
I read this book while I was working on a thing called the Sheffield Greenmap. Greenmaps are community mapping projects designed to mark environmental and community sites in a local area. Dennis Wood talks about the selective accuracy of maps, how they show one part of the world, and can seduce you into thinking (because of the professionalism of their accuracy) that their representation is the way to view the world. But, he said, “Accuracy is not the issue. Selectivity is the issue”. Perhaps because I was involved with the Sheffield Greenmap project these words of his resonated with me very strongly. Maps are choices about how to view the world. When I looked at maps of my hometown, maps which I would happily point to and say “this is Sheffield”, I saw the one way roads marked, the petrol stations. The base I used for the greenmap of the area around the University was based on the University’s own map. Running up the hill from the University in Sheffield is a road with parks either side of it. When I came to look at the University map, I noticed, for the first time, that only one of the parks was marked. The road, you see, was also a socio-demographic division between the leafy suburb of the university and the estates next door. For the University, the park next to the estates didn’t exist (or at least not as a place for students and University visitors to go).
The greenmap project made me look at the maps of Sheffield and ask why what was on them was on them. Why the roads and the petrol stations, why not the scenic routes through park, the community cafes and the places you could lock your bike up?
Accuracy wasn’t the issue. Selectivity was.
Wood discusses the ‘general purpose’ map as a particularly insidious example of interests using maps to mask their interests. The generality, the lack of explicit purpose, in a map disguises that it represents the end of a careful and directed process of selection. Like the scientific facts, the beauty of the technical process can blind you to the bias inherent in the construction.
I was invited to contribute to the Emotional Cartography because of Mind Hacks, a book I wrote with Matt Webb and a few valiant contributors in 2004. Mind Hacks is a collection of 100 do it yourself experiments that you can try at home and which reveal something about the moment-to-moment workings of your mind and brain. Our ambition with the book was to perform a smash and grab on the goodies of cognitive neuroscience, to open source some of the fascinating science that has been done, turning it into demonstrations which anyone could try. We wanted to make some of what was known about the mind available to be re-purposed by other people. So designers, artists, educators and whoever could notice and reuse various principles of how our minds make sense of the world.
Lately I’ve come to think — and this was inspired by writing the chapter in Emotional Cartography — that the view of the mind we took in Mind Hacks was limited. And this limitation reflects that of academic psychology as a whole. We focussed on the perceptions, thoughts and feelings of isolated individuals, rather than of people in their full social context, in interaction with others.
This is why I’m excited about Emotional cartography. It takes the idea of open-sourcing the production and consumption of facts to the social level.
First, emotional cartography. We’re a visuo-spatial species. We love sights, spaces, exploring with our eyes. We reify this prioritisation into maps, which are themselves inherently visuo-spatial. If you believe that maps are a kind of technology for thinking with, which I do (my chapter in the book is about this), then this is turn makes it easier to think about the kinds of things which are easiest to show on a map. The maps of physical space then make this selection bias invisible, by pretending to be natural.
Emotional Cartography makes another kind of information mappable, and this opens up the space to think with and debate about what that mapping makes explicit. For example: why are people anxious or excited in this place? Is that something we should do something about?
The other reason I’m excited about emotional cartography is because, truly, it opens up a space for emotional cartographies — a refocussing on the process of mapping and remapping. By open-sourcing mapping it allows mapping to be a processes rather than a product and this powerfully opens up space for people to take part in the negotiation of the representation of their own geographical spaces. Rather than one true map of a locale, there are many maps, and these maps can be a medium for the mappers to meet and discuss their feelings, the places where they live, and the interrelation of these two things.
So let me finish by congratulating Christian on his idea and all his hard work which resulted in this book, let me congratulate the other authors for their contributions and let me commend to you the practice of emotional cartography because, as should be obvious by now, in all areas of life, including map making, I believe it is far more satisfying to be a participant than a mere consumer.