Memory, Like All Information, Needs Filters

I didn't review it here, just had a couple of quick references, but I thought it was very interesting to run across a very similar statement in the book from yesterday's post to one in The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. The comparison is interesting because The Information includes an exploration into the development of writing and recording information as absolutely important to the way we think and how we understand the world today. It's one long progress of improving evolution. Moonwalking with Einstein, on the other hand, explores the history of books and recorded information as an erosion of memory and a detriment to our ability to think.

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First, a section from Moonwalking with Einstein:

One might assume that S's vacuum-cleaner memory would have made him a formidable journalist. I imagined if I could only take notes without taking notes and have at my fingertips every fact I'd ever digested, I'd be immensely better at my job. I'd be better at everything.

But professionally S was a failure. His newspaper gig didn't last long, and he was never able to hold down a steady job. He was, in Luria's estimation, "a somewhat anchorless person, living with the expectation that at any moment something particularly fine was to come his way." Ultimately, his condition made him unemployable as anything but a stage performer, a theatrical curio like the mnemonist of Alfred Hitchcock's The 39 Steps. The man with the best memory in the world simply remembered too much.

In his short story "Funes the Memorious," Jorge Luis Borges describes a fictional version of S, a man with an infallible memory who is crippled by an inability to forget. He can't distinguish between the trivial and the important. Borges's character Funes can't prioritize, can't generalize. He is "virtually incapable of general, platonic ideas." Like S, his memory was too good. Perhaps, as Borges concludes in his story, it is forgetting, not remembering, that is the essence of what makes us human. To make sense of the world, we must filter it. "To think," Borges writes, "is to forget."

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Next, a section from my review of The Information:

This is a quote I found interesting from the last chapter, 15, “New News Every Day,” in reference to the idea of information overload: Having to think of information as a burden is confusing, as Charles Bennett says. "We pay to have newspapers delivered, not taken away.” But the thermodynamics of computation shows that yesterday’s newspaper takes up space that Maxwell’s demon needs for today’s work, and modern experience teaches the same. Forgetting used to be a failing, a waste, a sign of senility. Now it takes effort. It may be as important as remembering.

We have a greater understanding of what he means because of what has come before. Maxwell’s demon is first briefly mentioned in chapter 8, “The Informational Turn.”

Then it’s fully explained in chapter 9, “Entropy and Its Demons,” leading into: But information is physical. Maxwell’s demon makes the link. The demon performs a conversion between information and energy, one particle at a time. Szilard--who did not yet use the word information--found that, if he accounted exactly for each measurement and memory, then the conversion could be computed exactly. So he computed it. He calculated that each unit of information brings a corresponding increase in entropy--specifically, by k log 2 units. Every time the demon makes a choice between one particle and another, it costs one bit of information. The payback comes at the end of the cycle, when it has to clear its memory (Szilard did not specify this last detail in words, but in mathematics). Accounting for this properly is the only way to eliminate the paradox of perpetual motion, to bring the universe back into harmony to “restore concordance with the Second Law.”

This idea is expanded in chapter 13, “Information Is Physical”: The younger man pursued Landauer’s principle by analyzing every kind of computer he could imagine, real and abstract, from Turing machines and messenger RNA to “ballistic” computers, carrying signals via something like billiard balls. He confirmed that a great deal of computation can be done with no energy cost at all. In every case, Bennett found, heat dissipation occurs only when information is erased. Erasure is the irreversible logical operation. When the head on a Turing machine erases one square of the tape, or when an electronic computer clears a capacitor, a bit is lost, and then heat must be dissipated. In Szilard’s thought experiment, the demon does not incur an entropy cost when it observes or chooses a molecule. The payback comes at the moment of clearing the record, when the demon erases one observation to make room for the next.

Forgetting takes work.

Which leads to a thought in the Epilogue, one that particularly speaks to a librarian like myself, because in this age of information overload it takes experts who dwell in the information to filter it and make it usable; librarians, in other words, become more essential than ever: No deus ex machina waits in the wings; no man behind the curtain. We have no Maxwell’s demon to help us filter and search. “We want the Demon, you see,” wrote Stanislaw Lem, “to extract from the dance of atoms only information that is genuine, like mathematical theorems, fashion magazines, blueprints, historical chronicles, or a recipe for ion crumpets, or how to clean and iron a suit of asbestos, and poetry too, and scientific advice, and almanacs, and calendars, and secret documents, and everything that ever appeared in any newspaper in the Universe, and telephone books of the future.” As ever, it is the choice that informs us (in the original sense of that word). Selecting the genuine takes work; then forgetting takes even more work. This is the curse of omniscience: the answer to any question may arrive at the fingertips--via Google or Wikipedia or IMDb or YouTube or Epicurious or the National DNA Database or any of their natural heirs and successors--and still we wonder what we know.

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On a related note, another section from Moonwalking with Einstein. I've often said in response to what is assumed to be my vast knowledge of information because of my profession, "Librarians don't know everything; we know how to find everything."

Indexes were a major advance because they allowed books to be accessed in the nonlinear way we access our internal memories. They helped turn the book into something like a modern CD, where you can skip directly to the track you want, as compared to unindexed books, which, like cassette tapes, force you to troll laboriously through large swaths of material in order to find the bit you're looking for. Along with page numbers and tables of contents, the index changed what a book was, and what it could do for scholars. The historian Ivan Illich has argued that this represented an invention of such magnitude that "it seems reasonable to speak of the pre- and post-index Middle Ages." As books became easier and easier to consult, the imperative to hold their contents in memory became less and less relevant, and the very notion of what it meant to be erudite began to evolve from possessing information internally to knowing where to find information in the labyrinthine world of external memory.

To our memory-bound predecessors, the goal of training one's memory was not to become a "living book," but rather a "living concordance," a walking index of everything one had read, and all the information one had acquired. It was about more than merely possessing an internal library of facts, quotes, and ideas; it was about building an organizational scheme for accessing them.

Of the Importance of Practice

Second-to-last (planned) post about the "memory book" I recently finished, Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer. This one offers a bit of insight into how people become experts.

The OK Plateau, and how and why experts avoid it:

In the 1960s, the psychologists Paul Fitts and Michael Posner attempted to answer this question by describing the three stages that anyone goes through when acquiring a new skill. During the first phase, known as the "cognitive stage," you're intellectualizing the task and discovering new strategies to accomplish it more proficiently. During the second "associative stage," you're concentrating less, making fewer major errors, and generally becoming more efficient. Finally you reach what Fitts called the "autonomous stage," when you figure that you've gotten as good as you need to get at the task and you're basically running on autopilot. During that autonomous stage, you lose conscious control over what you're doing. Most of the time that's a good thing. Your mind has one less thing to worry about. In fact, the autonomous stage seems to be one of those handy features that evolution worked out for our benefit. The less you have to focus on the repetitive tasks of everyday life, the more you can concentrate on the stuff that really matters, the stuff that you haven't seen before. And so, once we're just good enough at typing, we move it to the back of our mind's filing cabinet and stop paying it any attention. You can actually see this shift take place in fMRI scans of people learning new skills. As a task becomes automated, the parts of the brain involved in conscious reasoning become less active and other parts of the brain take over. You could call it the "OK plateau," the point at which you decide you're OK with how good you are at something, turn on autopilot, and stop improving. . . .

What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled "deliberative practice." Having studied the best of the best in many different fields, he has found that top achievers tend to follow the same general pattern of development. They develop strategies for consciously keeping out of the autonomous stage while they practice by doing three things: focusing on their technique, staying goal-oriented, and getting constant and immediate feedback on their performance. In other words, they force themselves to stay in the "cognitive phase." . . .

When you want to get good at something, how you spend your time practicing is far more important than the amount of time you spend. In fact, in every domain of expertise that's been rigorously examined, from chess to violin to basketball, studies have found that the number of years one has been doing something correlates only weakly to level of performance. My dad may consider putting into a tin cup in his basement a good form of practice, but unless he's consciously challenging himself and monitoring his performance--reviewing, responding, rethinking, rejiggering--it's never going to make him appreciably better. Regular practice simply isn't enough. To improve, we must watch ourselves fail, and learn from our mistakes.

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How vast experience creates a well-spring of memories that lead to intuitive expertise:

What makes chicken sexing such a captivating subject . . . is that even the best professional sexers can't describe how they determine gender in the toughest, most ambiguous cases. Their art is inexplicable. They say that within three seconds they just "know" whether a bird is a boy or girl, but they can't say how they know. Even when carefully cross-examined by researchers, they can't give reasons why one bird is a male and another is female. What they have, they say, is intuition. In some fundamental sense, the expert chicken sexer perceives the world--at least the world of chicken privates--in a way that is completely different from you or me. . . .

This, of course, is what all experts do: They use their memories to see the world differently. Over many years, they build up a bank of experience that shapes how they perceive new information. . . .

It is said that a student of sexing must work through at least 250,000 chicks before attaining any degree of proficiency. Even if the sexer calls it "intuition," it's been shaped by years of experience. It is the vast memory bank of chick bottoms that allows him or her to recognize patterns in the vents glanced at so quickly. in most cases, the skill is not the result of conscious reasoning, but pattern recognition. It is a feat of perception and memory, not analysis. . . .

For the most part, the chess experts didn't look more moves ahead, at least not at first. They didn't even consider more possible moves. Rather, they behaved in a manner surprisingly similar to the chicken sexers: They tended to see the right moves, and they tended to see them almost right away.

It was as if the chess experts weren't thinking so much as reacting. . . . They weren't seeing the board as thirty-two pieces. They were seeing it as chunks of pieces, and systems of tension.

Grand masters literally see the board differently. Studies of their eye movements have found that they look at the edges of squares more than inexperienced players, suggesting that they're absorbing information from multiple squares at once. Their eyes also dart across greater distances, and linger for less time at any one place. They focus on fewer different spots on the board, and those spots are more likely to be relevant to figuring out the right move. . . .

Chess masters use the vast library of chess patterns that they've cached away in long-term memory to chunk the board. At the root of the chess master's skill is that he or she simply has a richer vocabulary of chunks to recognize. Which is why it is so rare for anyone to achieve world-class status in chess--or any other field--without years of experience. Even Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess prodigy of all time, had been playing intensely for nine years before he was recognized as a grand master at age fifteen.

Contrary to all the old wisdom that chess is an intellectual activity based on analysis, many of the chess master's important decisions about which moves to make happen in the immediate act of perceiving the board. Like the chicken sexer who looks at the chick and simply sees its gender or the SWAT officer who immediately notices the bomb, the chess master looks at the board and simply sees the most promising move. The process usually happens within five seconds, and you can actually see it transpiring in the brain. Using magnetoencephalography, a technique that measures the weak magnetic fields given off by a thinking brain, researchers have found that higher-rated chess players are more likely to engage the frontal and parietal cortices of the brain when they look at the board, which suggests that they are recalling information from long-term memory. Lower-ranked players are more likely to engage the medial temporal lobes, which suggests that they are encoding new information. the experts are interpreting the present board in term of their massive knowledge of past ones. The lower-ranked players see the board as something new. . . .

Expertise in "the field of shoemaking, painting, building, [or] confectionary" is the result of the same accumulation of "experiential linkings." According to Ericsson, what we call expertise is really just "vast amounts of knowledge, pattern-based retrieval, and planning mechanisms acquired over many years of experience in the associated domain." In other words, a great memory isn't just a by-product of expertise; it is the essence of expertise.

Are Knowledge and Imagination Dichotomous?

On the wall next to my bed hangs an Einstein quote: Imagination is more important than knowledge. (Follow the link for an interesting article, by the way.) I obviously like it. But that doesn't mean I discount knowledge, because without it all we have is truthiness. I think both are important and work together. Endorsing the quote, however, implicitly endorses the idea that imagination and knowledge are at odds with each other. The memory advocates at the heart of Moonwalking with Einstein would deny that dichotomy, though, and say they are more closely linked than we normally assume:

"In our gross misunderstanding of the function of memory, we thought that memory was operated primarily by rote. In other words, you rammed it in until your head was stuffed with facts. What was not realized is that memory is primarily an imaginative process. In fact, learning, memory, and creativity are the same fundamental process directed with a different focus," says Buzan. "The art and science of memory is about developing the capacity to quickly create images that link disparate ideas. Creativity is the ability to form similar connections between disparate images and to create something new and hurl it into the future so it becomes a poem, or a building, or a dance, or a novel. Creativity is, in a sense, future memory." If the essence of creativity is linking disparate facts and ideas, then the more facility you have making associations, and the more facts and ideas you have at your disposal, the better you'll be at coming up with new ideas. As Buzan likes to point out, Mnemosyne, the goddess of memory, was the mother of the Muses.

The notion that memory and creativity are two sides of the same coin sounds counterintuitive. Remembering and creativity seem like opposite, not complementary, processes. But the idea that they are one and the same is actually quite old, and was once even taken for granted. The Latin root inventio is the basis of two words in our modern English vocabulary: inventory and invention. And to a mind trained in the art of memory, those two ideas were closely linked. Invention was a product of inventorying. Where do new ideas come from if not some alchemical blending of old ideas? In order to invent, one first needed a proper inventory, a bank of existing ideas to draw on. Not just an inventory, but an indexed inventory. One needed a way of finding just the right piece of information at just the right moment.

That is what the art of memory was ultimately most useful for. It was not merely a tool for recording but also a tool of invention and composition. "The realization that composing depended on a well-furnished and securely available memory formed the basis of rhetorical education in antiquity," writes Mary Carruthers. Brains were as organized as modern filing cabinets, with important facts, quotations, and ideas stuffed into neat mnemonic cubbyholes, where they would never go missing, and where they could be recombined and strung together on the fly. The goal of training one's memory was to develop the capacity to leap from topic to topic and make new connections between old ideas. "As an art, memory was most importantly associated in the Middle Ages with composition, not simply with retention," argues Carruthers. "Those who practiced the crafts of memory used them--as all crafts are used--to make new things: prayers, meditations, sermons, pictures, hymns, stories, and poems."

Keep Your Head Up

And take time to marvel and wonder.

I got quite a few accolades on Facebook for this picture after I shared it there.



I was very grateful for the praise, but don't know that I did much to deserve it. I was barely outside the day I took it because I was spending the day shepherding someone at the hospital. I just happened to be running a quick errand to the car in the parking garage, and when I walked out I saw this really cool sky and took a picture. It seems due to luck and happenstance more than anything.

Yet as I think about it, I didn't see anyone else stop to pull out a camera and capture it. I didn't see anyone else even seem to notice it, in fact. Everyone was busy going about their business, with their heads down and their attention elsewhere. So maybe if I'm to get credit for anything, it's for not being so absorbed by life that I can't take the time to notice my surroundings.

One thing I've noticed at the library is that kids are much more observant than their parents, and much more likely to be delighted and wonderstruck. I like to make the spaces interesting, with decorations, posters, and other things to discover all over. Adults rarely notice these kinds of things, and when they do they only see the ones at eye level. It's always the kids who point out the things hanging from the ceiling or low to the ground. I was also struck by a section in the book Moonwalking with Einstein on time and memory. Time drags when you're young and flies when you're old, in general. The theory in the book is that time is slower when you're younger because you're busy constantly discovering new things and making new memories. When you get older you've seen and done it all already, so the world is less notable and you pay less attention, thus making fewer memories because you're on autopilot and it all becomes one big blur of quickly passing time.

The picture above isn't the only one of mine that people have praised. Many seem to. I don't consider myself a photographic artist, I just like trying to capture things I enjoy looking at. But the fact that I do so seems to stand out. And it's one of the ways I make myself happy. Instead of keeping my head down and rushing through life, I do my best to pay attention to my surroundings and find things to marvel at, because that makes life more wondrous.

A Few Thoughts on Memory

Recently I was showing a friend a walking trail at a park I hadn't visited for at least 4-5 years, and in the middle of our walk I blurted out, "I listened to football here." I couldn't remember the exact details--probably, I believe, because it had happened multiple times and I was remembering more than one thing--but I knew without a doubt I'd had sports radio playing on my headphones while doing the same thing in the past. It was such a vivid sensation, I had to share. That wasn't the first time it's happened. I make a habit of listening to audiobooks on long walks, hikes, and runs. Later, whether it's the very next time I use that same section of trail or road or months or even years later, I'll suddenly have a vivid memory of a scene or section from a book I was listening to when at that spot previously. The physical location is somehow linked to the listening experience and the activity.

Those events seem to be spontaneous triggers for specific memories. The same can happen with particular smells, songs, and other sensory associations. More often, I'll be trying to remember something and coming up blank at first, yet I'll know the memory or information is rattling around in my brain somewhere. If another person is involved, I'll ask them to keep describing the situation in different ways, until they say the one thing that clicks and suddenly I'll have access to the memory. It indeed was in there, I just had to figure out how to find it. As a librarian, I think of it as needing to find the right keyword for my search to bring up the results I want. I know the the information exists, I just have to figure out how it was classified, labeled, and stored so I can find it, and sometimes I have to try multiple searches before I can figure it out.

I'm not crazy, because that's the way memory works. And once you know that's how memory works, there are tricks you can teach yourself to make it work better. The sensory associations are key, particularly images. When I remember the football and audiobooks on my walks, I'm not remembering the words I was hearing, but the images I created in my head when I heard them. Those images are linked to the images of my physical surroundings when they played through my head, so when I revisit the places the other images come with them. The human brain's ability to recall images is much more vast than most people realize, so if you want to remember something they key is to associate it to an image.

Joshua Foer describes his experience of learning just that in Moonwalking with Einstein. While observing the event for a journalistic article, he became so intrigued by the U.S.A. Memory Championships that he decided to enter the competitive memory world and a year later won the title. He found that memory masters don't necessarily have superior intelligence or innate talent, they just practice hard using the classic mnemonic device of memory palaces--remembered or imagined physical spaces in which you mentally place images of what you want to remember, so that by "walking" through the palaces later you encounter the images and remember what they represent. As I read, I couldn't help but be reminded of Christopher McDougall's Born to Run, because the two books are written with similar structures. Like McDougall, Foer describes how went from becoming aware of an elite group who compete in an unusual task to becoming one of them. Along the way he sought out experts and learned everything he could about the topic. Interwoven with his personal experience is stories about the unusual personalities and characters he met who compete in the field, an exploration into the history of the field, and an investigation into the science of the field, the human potential and limitations. I'm pretty sure I won't be building any memory palaces of my own, but I learned a lot of interesting things and had fun doing so.

After having learned how to memorize poetry and numbers, cards and biographies, I'm convinced that remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice. . . .

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged. That's what Ed had been trying to impart to me from the beginning: that memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

Lance Armstrong: Cyborg of the Future?

Now this is definitely a different take than most I've read.  Greg LeMond, cycling world champion and winner of the Tour de France in 1986, '89, and '90 and famous accuser of Lance Armstrong, talks about how he continued to improve his strength and fitness after 1990, but gradually became unable to keep up with the other riders as the sport was overrun with doping.  He--and others--point to wattage output data of the riders and a host of scientific indicators to make their case that the cycling feats the past 20 years just aren't humanly possible.  Maybe they aren't:

Making Peace With Our Cyborg Nature

 . . . Whether we think of knowledge, or communication, or perception, or medicine, or commerce, or the arts, we live in a vast web of organized human exchanges and shared practices. We are technologists by nature. Or to use philosopher Andy Clark's apt phrase: We are natural-born cyborgs. 

The point is not just that we couldn't do what we do without tools. The point is that we couldn't think what we think or see what we see without tools. We wouldn't be what we are without tools. Making tools, changing tools, is a way of making new ways of being. Technologies are evolving patterns of human organization. . . . 

So let us turn now to the case of Lance Armstrong. He is a trailblazer. One of the greats. He didn't win races on his own. No, like each of us in our social embeddings, he created an organization, one drawing on other people, and the creative and effective use of technology, the mastery of biochemistry, to go places and do things that most of us never will, and that no one ever had, before him.

That we now attack him, and tear him down, and try to minimize his achievements ... what does this tell us about ourselves?

It tickles a vague memory I have of having read something similar, that idea that we are our tools and our tools are us.  I think it's this section from that book on memory (Ha!) I've referenced a number of times: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer.  He describes a scientist who has created machines that record--visual and audio--his every experience from his perspective along with a record of all documents he reads and more, an "external memory," if you will, so he can go back and find his every experience, no matter how banal and mundane and unremarked by his "internal memory."

With his custom search engine, he can, in an instant, figure out where he was and whom he ws with at any moment in time, and then, in theory, check to see what that person said.  And because he's got a photographic record of everywhere he's ever been and everything he's ever seen, he has no excuse for ever losing anything.  His digital memory never forgets. . . . 

For now, Bell's internal and external memories don't mesh seamlessly.  In order for him to access one of his stored external memories, he still has to find it on his computer and "re-input" it into his brain through his eyes and ears.  His lifelog may be an extension of him, but it's not yet a part of him.  But is it so far-fetched to believe that at some point in the not-too-distant future the chasm between what Bell's computer knows and what his mind knows may disappear entirely?  Eventually, our brains may be connected directly and seamlessly to our lifelogs, so that our external memories will function and feel as if they are entirely internal.  And of course, they will also be connected to the greatest external memory repository of all, the Internet.  A surrogate memory that recalls everything and can be accessed as naturally as the memories stored in our neurons: It would be the decisive weapon in the war against forgetting.

This may sound like science fiction, but already cochlear implants can convert sound waves directly into electrical impulses and channel them into the brain stem, allowing previously deaf people to hear.  In fact, they've already been installed in more than 200,000 human heads.  And primitive cognitive implants that create a direct interface between the brain and computers have already allowed paraplegics and patients with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) to control a computer cursor, a prosthetic limb, even a digital voice simply through the force of thought.  These neuroprosthetics, which are still highly experimental and have been implanted in only a handful of patients, essentially wiretap the brain, and allow direct communication between man and machine.  The next step is a brain-computer interface that lets the mind exchange data directly with a digital memory bank, a project that a few cutting-edge researchers are already working on, and which is bound to become a major area of research in the decades ahead. . . . 

Perhaps instead of thinking of these memories as externalized or off-loaded--as categorically different from memories that reside in the brain--we should view them as extensions of our internal memories. . . . 

We Westerners tend to think of the "self," the elusive essence of who we are, as if it were some starkly delimited entity.  Even if modern cognitive neuroscience has rejected the old Cartesian idea of a homuncular soul that resides in the pineal gland and controls the human body, most of us still believe there is a distinct "me" somewhere up there driving the bus.  In fact, what we think of as "me" is almost certainly something far more diffuse and hazier than it's comfortable to contemplate.  At the least, most people assume that their sef could not possibly extend beyond the boundaries of their epidermis into books, computers, a lifelog.  But why should that be the case?  Our memories, the essence of our selfhood, are actually bound up in a whole lot more than the neurons in our brain.  At least as far back as Socrates's diatribe against writing, our memories have always extended beyond our brains and into other storage containers.  Bell's lifelogging project simply brings that truth into focus.

So just what defines us as selves, as natural, as "organic?"  I'm sure there are many writing about these exact questions.  I'm thinking about it today because of a book review I just read, one from the Unshelved Book Club.  Here is what they have to say about Amped, by Daniel H. Wilson:

The world has been transformed by the amp, a tiny device implanted in the skull that regulates and enhances brain activity. The injured become whole, and the healthy become smarter, faster, and stronger. Increasingly, those without amps cannot compete in school or the workplace. Things come to a head when the Supreme Court rules that the amped, having elected to make themselves more than human, are not entitled to basic civil rights.

Owen Grey doesn't consider himself particularly advantaged by his amp. His father, one of the early developers of the technology, implanted it to keep Owen's epilepsy under control. But it doesn't matter -- soon he is out of a job, out of an apartment, and then just trying to stay alive.

As the social rift becomes violent, Owen discovers that his amp has some undocumented features.

Why I picked it up: Nancy Pearl gushed about Wilson's Robopocalypse.

Why I finished it: This novel races along so fast I hardly felt I had the choice to stop. Owen joins the amp subculture, meets its superpowered leaders, and discovers a dark conspiracy. But the nerdy truth is that I was most intrigued by the issues of constitutional law Wilson raises.

I'd give it to: My son Theo, who will see the parallels between the amped and the super soldier threads that run through Marvel's comic book universe(s).

Is Lance Armstrong still human, or has he been rightfully disqualified because he has found a way to use tools and technology to make himself something else?  And if he is now a mild form of cyborg, should he be disqualified for that or celebrated for his pioneering work in biological enhancement?

Of eBooks, Memory, and the Power of Tactility

Fascinating. I've long objected to ebooks for personal use because I like to be able to rapidly flip around pages, go back and reread sections, find out how far I am from the next section break, etc. It's really interesting to see that put in a psychological perspective.

That was said by a colleague and friend, and it articulates excellently why I still prefer physical books. I'm obviously online a lot and do much reading on screens, but not yet books. They're a different beast than posts and articles because of their length (although, truth be told, I prefer even those in print form). Books are better because of their physicality, in my mind, partly because I do like to flip around to reread and etc., and partly because things I read in books stick better in my mind than what I read on screens. There's a reason for this.

My friend was responding to the blog post, This is Your Brain on eBooks. In it, the author shares some research he's done for a presentation. He shares lengthy quotes from a couple of sources about spatial context and memory that explain why a physical environment is important for recall. A few excerpts:

And up until the rise of the web, the mechanisms for information storage were largely spatial and could be navigated, thereby tapping into our innate navigation capabilities. Our libraries and books — the real ones, not today’s electronic variety — were supremely navigable. . . .

The web and e-books have upsides physical libraries do not, of course, but they are deeply lacking in spatial navigability, and so they don’t yet serve the brain-extension role that is within their potential. . . .

And:

Spatial context may be particularly important because evolution may have shaped the mind to easily recall location cues so we can find our way around. . . .

E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print . . . Printed books on the other hand, give us a physical reference point, and part of our recall includes how far along in the book we are, something that’s more challenging to assess on an e-book.

He connects it to the TED talk Neil Burgess: How your brain tells you where you are. I connect it to a couple of other things. The first is my recent reading and blogging about Joshua Foer's book on the competitive memory circuit, Moonwalking with Einstein. Specifically, what I wrote in A Few Thoughts on Memory:

Later, whether it's the very next time I use that same section of trail or road or months or even years later, I'll suddenly have a vivid memory of a scene or section from a book I was listening to when at that spot previously. The physical location is somehow linked to the listening experience and the activity. . . .

I'm not crazy, because that's the way memory works. And once you know that's how memory works, there are tricks you can teach yourself to make it work better. The sensory associations are key, particularly images. . . .

Memory masters don't necessarily have superior intelligence or innate talent, they just practice hard using the classic mnemonic device of memory palaces--remembered or imagined physical spaces in which you mentally place images of what you want to remember, so that by "walking" through the palaces later you encounter the images and remember what they represent.

The other connection I made was to an article I flagged just yesterday to read and consider blogging, but the connection is more than just timeliness: 5 Seemingly Random Factors That Control Your Memory. The first factor: Walking Through Doorways.

Your brain uses a very similar directory system to that of your computer. Only instead of neat folders labeled "Work," "Documents" and "TOTALLY NOT PORN," your brain tends to compartmentalize by physical location. This means that the information readily accessible to you in one room ("I must get a glass of milk to wash down all this delicious fudge") suddenly becomes a lot harder to access when you go to another one ("Why am I in the kitchen? I know it had something to do with the toaster ..."). The moment you cross a doorway, you're essentially sending a signal to your brain that you're in a new environment now and that nothing that happened in that previous one matters, so just flush it.

It seems that memory has a very definite spatial, physical component. So do paper books, in a way that's lacking in eBooks. That doesn't mean that reading from a screen is a worthless activity, but this factor is definitely something to consider. Maybe there's a reason so many of us instinctively rebel against eBooks and prefer the tactility of traditional ones, even if we can't quite name why.

-----

I wanted to mention a couple of the last article's other four memory factors. The first: Ridiculous Fonts. I share this because I am a Comic Sans apologist and I make frequent use of it, despite the widespread disdain for it. It just seems to have a special something I've never quite been able to name. Maybe that something is recall:

Researchers at Princeton and Indiana University proved this by having one group of people read stories in 16-point Arial and others in the much more difficult to process 12-point Comic Sans MA and 12-point Bodoni MT. Quite simply, they found that the people given the shitty font retained the information better. This was confirmed by a longer 200-person trial where the lucky kids who got their textbooks replaced with doppelgangers with funky fonts retained the material better and got higher test grades. The effect was most noticeable in physics, which is strange, as a physics book written in Comic Sans would be quite close to our definition of hell.

Another factor that impacts memory: Looking at the Floor. It's not the floor that matters so much as looking away from faces: The reason appears to be that, as social animals, human faces are mentally captivating to us, and thus suck up quite a lot of our concentration. If you want to devote more mental horsepower to solving a problem, you need to look away. I've always been very self-conscious in conversation with others since I realized--a long time ago--that I lower my eyes frequently when I have something I want to pause to consider. Self-conscious because it's no issue when talking to men to drop eye contact to gaze at their chests, but with women . . . it's not the best habit; even if your eyes will unfocus as you turn your gaze inward, they probably won't catch on to that fact. I've had to train myself to look over shoulders and in other directions instead.

So Tired of Being Called "Negative"

Because it's not everyone who calls me negative, only a certain type who I find empty-headed and Pollyanna in their positivity, who believe the answer to everything is a simple optimistic attitude that all will be good if we are just excited enough about it.  I've said over and over that I ask questions, play devil's advocate, and consider things from all angles because I want to make things work, and part of making things work is knowing what the issues are going to be so we are ready to address them.

It seems I'm not crazy for feeling this way, but supported by years of scientific study.  This article describes exactly that process, that in order to achieve goals it is essential to first understand the obstacles and plan for how to overcome them.  Follow the link for the process; I'm sharing first a bit I want to emphasize then a bit more for context from the introductory and concluding thoughts.

Relentless pie-in-the-sky optimism detached from reality . . . desiccates motivation and implies that having a less sunny view of events is a sign of defective thinking and a deformed attitude. “It’s a load on people who doubt and question things, and who see things in a more differentiated way.”

Why Understanding Obstacles is Essential to Achieving Goals

While inspiring words might provide a moment of motivation, it turns out they can have an adverse effect on achieving those goals. According to the latest research, the positive attitudes meant to provide inspiration may be the ones that get in the way of accomplishing those dreams.

For 20 years, psychology professor Gabriele Oettingen of New York University and the University of Hamburg has been examining positive thinking and her conclusion is clear. All that positive thinking can trick the dreamer into believing she’s already done the work to get to the desired goal, squelching the motivation to actually go after it. “Positive thinking alone is not enough,” Oettingen says. Indeed, fantasizing about success without an anchor in reality can actually diminish the likelihood of a better outcome. . . .

Oettingen is careful to point out that hope is a vital and necessary part of achievement, but that relentless pie-in-the-sky optimism detached from reality just hurts children. It desiccates motivation and implies that having a less sunny view of events is a sign of defective thinking and a deformed attitude. “It’s a load on people who doubt and question things, and who see things in a more differentiated way,” she says. “Positive dreams are not enough to actually achieve them.”

This is far from the first evidence of this sort I've come across.  Having someone take the contrarian role is often essential for a successful enterprise.  People like me serve a very important purpose, and beating us down with feedback that we are negative simply serves to create hostile dynamics instead of appreciative ones, because we are here to help, in our own, "realistic" ways.

For another example, consider my review of Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work, by Chip & Dan Heath (particularly notice some of the points of the WRAP process, such as "Reality-Test Your Assumptions"):

"I know one thing: that I know nothing."
- Socrates

For the past few years I've had a fascinating and fun journey working my way through a good collection of titles about how thinking works; more specifically, about how thinking doesn't work the way we think it works. That we are constantly lying to, misleading, and deluding ourselves. That our knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, memories, and actions aren't nearly as rational and reasonable as we like to think. That many of our decisions, both the little, daily ones and the big, life-changing ones aren't as sound and carefully reasoned as we believe. Titles on my shelves I'd include in this category:

- Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, by Dan Ariely
- Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior, by Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman
- You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself, by David McRaney
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, by Daniel Pink
- True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, by Farhad Manjoo
- Practical Wisdom: The Right Way To Do the Right Thing, by Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe
- Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything, by Joshua Foer
- The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement, by David Brooks
- Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler
- Thinking, Fast and Slow , by Daniel Kahneman*

While there have been times the reading has left me feeling cynical and dispirited--that there is no point trying to communicate or connect with others since their assumptions and biases will confound my efforts anyway--for the most part it has been a helpful, healthy process of improving my self-awareness and interpersonal/emotional intelligence. They've made me a better listener, less sure of my own strident opinions in discussions and more likely to assume a generous "AND" stance instead of a combative "EITHER-OR" one.

Something they all have in common, for the most part, is that they spend the bulk of their time sharing the findings of recent research and studies in order to dispel our common-sense assumptions, and only after that leave a bit of space for talking about what to do with the new information. Decisive, on the other hand, starts with the new perspectives, explains them a little, then spends the bulk of its time sharing ways we can make better decisions in light of that information. It's less theoretical and idea-based, much more practical and applied.

And here's where I regret "reading" this book as an audio, because now that I've finished it I want to go back and revisit many parts to study them and consolidate my learning. Unfortunately, there is a long waiting list for our copies of the print book, so I won't be doing that in time to include specific thoughts in this review. In brief, the authors describe a process to follow when making decisions that will help counteract many of the tendencies that steer us wrong. It's not necessarily a step-by-step formula since each decision is unique and every context requires something different, but it provides guidance and a series of checks and balances to make sure we are properly considering the issue from a variety of helpful facets.

They abbreviate the process WRAP, which breaks down--with subcategories--as:

Widen Your Options
- Avoid a narrow frame
- Multitrack
- Find someone who's solved your problems
Reality-Test Your Assumptions
- Consider the opposite
- Zoom out, zoom in
- Ooch
Attain Distance Before Deciding
- Overcome short-term emotion
- Honor your core priorities
Prepare to Be Wrong
- Bookend the Future
- Set a Tripwire

Each point requires the explanations from the book to understand the authors' perspective (especially "ooch"; definition 2 here is vaguely in line with their meaning)--particularly since so much of it is about overcoming commonly accepted truths and operational habits that we unconsciously accept as acceptable--but I think it will be a very helpful process to get in the habit of following, with guidance from the material once it's in my hands.

If I have one complaint about the book, it's that the Heaths spend a little too much time describing the fine details of the real-world examples they use to illustrate all of their points and not enough dwelling in the world of ideas that I love so much. I would have been happier had they tipped the balance of information to case studies and exemplification in the other direction. But, then, this is a book for practitioners.

-----

*Okay, I haven't finished the last one yet; I had both it and Decisive checked out and was considering which to make my next listen, and fairly randomly went with Decisive. I immediately regretted it when, in the introduction, the Heaths mentioned Thinking, Fast and Slow and Predictably Irrational as the two most important titles to read for background information on the studies and theories they worked from in writing this book. I'm now a few discs into it.

Sacred Is Nothing Special

Sacred is nothing special. It's just life, revealing its true nature. Life's true nature is wholeness, Indra's net embracing every living thing, able to contain all unique expressions. In a sacred moment, I experience that wholeness. I know I belong here. I don't think about it, I simply feel it. Without any work on my part, my heart opens and my sense of "me" expands. I'm no longer locked inside a small self. I don't feel alone or isolated. I feel here. I feel welcomed.

That's from Turning to One Another: Simple Conversations to Restore Hope to the Future by Margaret J. Wheatley. It's not a new book (2002), but I only became aware of it recently when someone shared it with me. I'm glad I did. Here's what I wrote for my review:

My only complaint about this book is that there's not more of it. I love everything about it except its short length. I could read more of these thoughts and themes all day. If we want things (anything) to be better, we need to talk to each other more--with honesty, openness, kindness, and listening. This book provides a philosophy, guide, and prompts for doing so.

Here's a big more from Wheatley (ellipses not included to create better flow):

I've noticed that many of us harbor negative beliefs about each other. Or we believe that there's nothing we can do to make a difference. Or that things are so crazy that we have to look out only for ourselves. With these beliefs, we cannot turn to one another. We won't engage together for the work that needs to be done.

I believe we can change the world if we start listening to one another again. Simple, honest, human conversation. Not meditation, negotiation, problem-solving, debate, or public meetings. Simple, truthful conversation where we each have a chance to speak, we each feel heard, and we each listen well. 

We each experience life differently. It's impossible for any two people to ever see things exactly the same.

To be curious about how someone else interprets things, we have to be willing to admit that we're not capable of figuring things out alone.

When we listen with less judgment, we always develop better relationships with each other. It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do. Curiosity and good listening bring us back together.

We can't be creative if we refuse to be confused. Change always starts with confusion.

As the world grows more strange and puzzling and difficult, I don't believe most of us want to keep struggling through it alone. I can't know what to do from my own narrow perspective. I know I need a better understanding of what's going on. I want to sit down with you and talk about all the frightening and hopeful things I observe, and listen to what frightens you and gives you hope. I need new ideas and solutions for the problems I care about. I know I need to talk to you to discover those. I need to learn to value your perspective, and I want you to value mine. I expect to be disturbed by what I hear from you. I know we don't have to agree with each other in order to think well together. There is no need for us to be joined at the head. We are joined by our human hearts.

Simple, truthful conversation where we each have a chance to speak, we each feel heard, and we each listen well. 

We each experience life differently. It's impossible for any two people to ever see things exactly the same.

To be curious about how someone else interprets things, we have to be willing to admit that we're not capable of figuring things out alone.

It's not differences that divide us. It's our judgments about each other that do. Curiosity and good listening bring us back together.

It's excellent. I have more to share below.

(And I'll note, in contrast to my normal practice, that when quoting this book I've left out ellipsis to represent the absence of a few words, sentences, or paragraphs for better reading flow, since I did it so often.)

A strongly related idea:

The instinct to judge other people's behavior as stupid, irrational, or crazy is very common, and it's also a sign that there's something you're missing. This is a point that top negotiators all emphasize: don't write off the other side as crazy. When their behavior confuses you, lean in to that confusion. Treat it as a clue. You'll often find that it leads you to the information you need to resolve the negotiation. . . . 

Leaning in to confusion is about inverting the way you're used to seeing the world. Instead of dismissing observations that contradict your theories, get curious about them. Instead of writing people off as irrational when they don't behave the way you think they should, ask yourself why their behavior might be rational. Instead of trying to fit confusing observations into your preexisting theories, treat them as clues to a new theory.

Scouts view anomalies as puzzle pieces to collect as you go through the world. You probably won't know what to do with them at first. But if you hang on to them, you may find that they add up to a richer picture of the world than you had before.

That's from an excellent companion book, a newish one: The Scout Mindset: Why Some People See Things Clearly and Others Don't by Julia Galef. Turning to One Another proposes making the world better by being open to each other; The Scout Mindset proposes making ourselves better by being open to each other. Both motivations lead to the same conclusion.

Here's my review for The Scout Mindset:

Many people aspire to be "open-minded." Most of us probably think we are. Because our evolutionary and instinctive programming fights that goal, though, we all have room to improve. This is a book for doing so, for working on becoming more open-minded.

Galef defines open-mindedness as having a "scout mindset."

Scout Mindset: the motivation to see things as they are, not as you wish they were.

Scout mindset is what allows you to recognize when you are wrong, to seek out your blind spots, to test your assumptions and change course. It's what prompts you to honestly ask yourself questions like "Was I at fault in that argument?" or "Is this risk worth it?" or "How would I react if someone from the other political party did the same thing?"

In this book, she clearly and effectively describes what it is to have a scout mindset, considers its opposite and the obstacles that prevent it, and provides a variety of tools for more effectively achieving one. Many books detail our human flaws to clear thinking; this one spells out what to do about them. It's highly valuable.

I'll have more from this in a bit.

I want to share something from comic/graphic artist Jessica Hagy, who writes Indexed. This is from the Indexed Facebook page:

Sonder: to realize that everybody on Earth is living a life as complicated, intense, and vibrantly unique as your own. It’s that feeling you get when you realize that you’re not IN traffic—you ARE traffic.

Visually, that word is is an iceberg: with what we see about other people above the waterline, while what’s really happening is submerged below.

Like so:

I believe that Sonder was first defined by The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:

n. the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

Sonder.

Back to today's featured books:

I alone can't ask to be seen fully for who I am and my unique value. If I want you to acknowledge my gifts, I have to be curious about yours. I have a responsibility to look for and honor yours. We create enough space for our own self-expression only by inviting everybody else's uniqueness.

 ~ Turning to One Another

Our judgment isn't limited by knowledge nearly as much as it's limited by attitude.

 ~ The Scout Mindset

It's reciprocal and mutual. If I want others to see and appreciate me, I must always work to see and appreciate them.

Here's an abridged version of the guidance Wheatley provides in Turning to One Another for how to be in conversation with each other:

For conversation to take us into this deeper realm, I believe we have to practice several new behaviors. Here are the principles I've learned to emphasize before we begin a formal conversation process:

We acknowledge one another as equals.

Conversation is an opportunity to meet together as peers, not as roles. What makes us equal is that we're human beings. A second thing that makes us equal is that we need each other. Whatever we know, it is not sufficient. We can't see enough of the whole. We can't figure it out alone. Somebody sees something that the rest of us might need.

We try to stay curious about each other.

When we begin a conversation with this humility, it helps us be interested in who's there. It's easier for us to tell our story, to share our dreams and fears, when we feel others are genuinely curious about us. Curiosity helps us discard our mask and let down our guard. It creates a spaciousness that is rare in other interactions.

I try to maintain curiosity by reminding myself that everyone here has something to teach me. When they're saying things I disagree with, or have never thought about, or that I consider foolish or wrong, I silently remind myself that they have something to teach me. Somehow this little reminder helps me be more attentive and less judgmental. It helps me stay open to people, rather than shut them out.

We recognize that we need each other's help to become better listeners.

I think that the greatest barrier to good conversation is that we've lost the capacity to listen. We're too busy, too certain, too stressed. We don't have time to listen. We just keep rushing past each other. This is true almost everywhere these days. One gift of conversation is that it helps us become good listeners again.

We slow down so we have time to think and reflect.

Listening is one of the skills required for good conversation. Slowing down is a second. Most of us work in places where we don't have time to sit together and think. We rush in and out of meetings where we make hurried, not thoughtful, decisions. Conversation creates the conditions for us to rediscover the joy of thinking together.

We remember that conversation is the natural way humans think together.

In conversation we are remembering perhaps as much as we are learning. Human beings know how to talk to each other--we've been doing this ever since we developed language. Language gives us the means to know each other better. That's why we invented it.

We've cultivated a lot of bad behaviors when we're together--speaking too fast, interrupting others, monopolizing the time, giving speeches or pronouncements. Many of us have been rewarded for these behaviors. We've become more powerful through their use. But none of these lead to wise thinking or healthy relationships. They only drive us away from each other.

We expect it to be messy at times.

Because conversation is the natural way that humans think together, it is, like all life, messy. Life doesn't move in straight lines and neither does a good conversation. When a conversation begins, people always say things that don't connect. What's important at the start is that everyone's voice gets heard, that everyone feels invited into the conversation. Everyone will speak from their unique perspective. Thus, they won't say the same things, at all. It can feel as if you're watching a ping pong ball bouncing off a wall as the conversation veers from one topic to another. If you're hosting the conversation, you may feel responsible to draw connections between these diverse contributions (even when you don't see them).

It's important to let go of that impulse and just sit with the messiness. Each person's contribution adds a different element or spice to the whole. If we connect these too early, we lose the variety we need. If we look for superficial commonalties, we never discover the collective wisdom found only in the depths. We have to be willing to listen, curious about the diversity of experiences and ideas. We don't have to make sense of it right away.

We have to be willing to listen, curious about the diversity of experiences and ideas. We don't have to make sense of it right away.

We will always experience some aspect of reality, of the Truth, but only from our perspectives as they are colored by who and where we are. Others will know a different color and none will see the whole, complete light.

Almost ten years ago, I reviewed the book Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work. My review begins:

For the past few years I've had a fascinating and fun journey working my way through a good collection of titles about how thinking works; more specifically, about how thinking doesn't work the way we think it works. That we are constantly lying to, misleading, and deluding ourselves. That our knowledge, perceptions, beliefs, memories, and actions aren't nearly as rational and reasonable as we like to think. That many of our decisions, both the little, daily ones and the big, life-changing ones aren't as sound and carefully reasoned as we believe. Titles on my shelves I'd include in this category: Predictably Irrational, Sway, You Are Not So Smart, Drive, True Enough, Practical Wisdom, Moonwalking with Einstein, The Social Animal, Connected, Thinking, Fast and Slow.

That review is one of my most "liked" on Goodreads that I've contributed and one of the top, most "liked" reviews for that title.

I mention this because Galef also references a number of these titles in The Scout Mindset. (Hello, confirmation bias.) Her goal with her book, though, is not simply pointing out how our thinking is flawed, but what to do about it. Here are a few more sections from her book that I noted:

Your reasoning changes as your motivations change. That the principles you're inclined to invoke or the objections that spring to your mind depend on your motives: the motive to defend your image or your in-group's status; the motive to advocate for a self-serving policy; fear of change or rejection.

Catching your brain in the act of motivated reasoning--noticing when an experiment's previously invisible flaws jump out at you, or noticing that your preferences change as you switch around supposedly irrelevant details of a scenario--breaks down the illusion that your initial judgment is the objective truth. It convinces you, viscerally, that your reasoning is contingent; that your initial judgments are a starting point for exploration, not an end point.

-----

Most of the time, being wrong doesn't mean you did something wrong. It's not something you need to apologize for, and the appropriate attitude to have about it is neither defensive nor humbly self-flagellating, but matter-of-fact.

Even the language scouts use to describe being wrong reflects this attitude. Instead of "admitting a mistake," scouts will sometimes talk about "updating." . . . 

You don't necessarily need to speak this way. But if you at least start to think in terms of "updating" instead of "admitting you were wrong," you may find that it takes a lot of friction out of the process. An update is routine. Low-key. It's the opposite of an overwrought confession of sin. An update makes something better or more current without implying that its previous form was a failure.

-----

Holding your identity lightly means thinking of it in a matter-of-fact way, rather than as a central source of pride and meaning in your life. It's a description, not a flag to be waved proudly. . . . 

That might sound like a minor distinction, but it feels very different from the inside. . . . 

Someone who holds her political identity lightly is happy when her party wins an election. But she's happy because she expects her party to do a better job leading the country, not because the other side suffered a humiliating defeat. She's not tempted to taunt the losers, the way some Democrats gloated over "right-wing temper tantrums" after Obama's 2012 win or the way some Republicans relished "liberal tears" after Donald Trump's 2016 win.

Holding an identity lightly means treating that identity as contingent, saying to yourself, "I'm a liberal, for as long as it continues to seem to me that liberalism is just." Or "I'm a feminist, but I would abandon the movement if for some reason I came to believe it was causing net harm." It means maintaining a sense of your own beliefs and values, independent of the tribe's beliefs and values, and acknowledging--at least in the privacy of your own head--the places where those two things diverge.

Since reasoning is contingent, identity should be contingent as well. You should always be willing to update your beliefs.

I want to go back to the quote I started with from Turning to One Another. Here it is again, with a bit more explanation.

Sacred is nothing special. It's just life, revealing its true nature. Life's true nature is wholeness, Indra's net embracing every living thing, able to contain all unique expressions. In a sacred moment, I experience that wholeness. I know I belong here. I don't think about it, I simply feel it. Without any work on my part, my heart opens and my sense of "me" expands. I'm no longer locked inside a small self. I don't feel alone or isolated. I feel here. I feel welcomed.

As I write this, through my window I've noticed a mother bird flying back and forth, worms dangling from her beak. She's working diligently to provide for her babies. Watching her, I remember my own mothering, and suddenly, I feel connected to all other beings who, as mothers, try to keep life going. A brief moment of noticing one hard-working bird, and I feel different, more connected. The bird, me, mothers everywhere, we're all doing our part to bring more life into the world. She does her own work, I do mine, and in this moment of recognition, my heart opens to the truth that we all share in this together. Instead of feeling tired by such responsibility, I feel blessed.

We can't experience sacred in isolation. It is always an experience of connecting. It doesn't have to be another person. (Remember, I just connected with a bird.) It can be a connection with an idea, a feeling, an object, a tradition. The connection moves us outside ourselves into something greater. Because we move out beyond ourselves, the experience of sacred is often described as spacious, open, liberating. We learn we are larger than we thought.

Experiencing sacredness is feeling open and connected, a part of something more. Boundless and enlarged. Sensing there is more out there than you and your perceptions, and that you belong to it. The more we let ourselves open up to others, to their experiences and perceptions, the more awareness we'll have of the sacred.

Here's an article from my recent feed that relates. It reports on a effective way that communities are connecting with disturbed individuals through listening and understanding instead of judgment and punishment.

The Alternative to Police That Is Proven to Reduce Violence

“Especially this day and age with all the violence by law enforcement toward men of color, you’re worried that if you call 911, it might be the police who show up,” says Hillary Ronen, a district supervisor who represents Bernal Heights. “If we had somebody we could call instead of 911, that would be better,” adds Gwendolyn Westbrook, who leads Mother Brown’s kitchen for unhoused people in the Bayview neighborhood, which has the city’s highest proportion of Black residents. As Tim Black told the nonprofit Vera Institute of Justice in 2020, “There’s a lot of privilege that comes along with having a healthy enough relationship with police that you can contact them.” . . . 

The city’s new Street Crisis Response Team, which responds to unarmed adults in crisis from mental illness, substance use, or homelessness, tries to reduce interactions between the public and the police, to prevent officers from reacting violently to people in these situations.  

Nationwide, cops fatally shoot hundreds of people experiencing mental health emergencies every year. The city’s crisis responders, by contrast, don’t carry weapons. And they don’t have law enforcement backgrounds: Each three-person team includes a Fire Department paramedic, a behavioral health specialist, and a peer support counselor to help connect people with social services. In their vans, they store supplies like blankets, socks, snacks, Narcan, tampons, and toothbrushes. They respond to calls within 16 minutes on average, sometimes spending hours with a single person. Since November 2020, the team has fielded thousands of incidents—and, according to the Department of Public Health, which manages the project, not one has led to a death or an arrest, and fewer than 1 percent have led to violence.

San Francisco isn’t the only place betting that a health-focused crisis response team is the key to reducing unnecessary violence on its streets: Dozens of cities around the country, including Los Angeles, New York, and Denver, have set up similar teams over the last couple of years. Many draw inspiration from a long-running program in Eugene, Oregon, called Crisis Assistance Helping Out on the Streets (CAHOOTS). Since its start in 1989, CAHOOTS has saved Eugene millions of dollars, according to the clinic that created the program, by freeing up police to focus on more dangerous crimes and by keeping mentally ill people out of jail.

The ideas from the two books might feel fluffy in the abstract, but they can be applied in very real, gritty ways. Communities are made safer and stronger through openness, empathy, and conversation.

I want to share one more thing from Turning to One Another. Wheatley includes this poem (among others) as food for thought and inspiration.

A Prayer For Children

by Ina J. Hughes (an American school teacher) and adapted by James Steyer.

We pray for children

who sneak popsicles before supper,

who erase holes in math workbooks,

who throw tantrums in the grocery store and pick at their food,

who like ghost stories,

who can never find their shoes.

And we pray for those

who stare at photographers from behind barbed wire,

who can’t bound down the street in a new pair of sneakers,

who are born in places we wouldn’t be caught dead in,

who never go to the circus,

who live in an X-rated world.

We pray for children

who sleep with the dog and bury the goldfish,

who bring us sticky kisses and fistfuls of dandelions,

who get visits from the tooth fairy,

who hug us in a hurry and forget their lunch money.

And we pray for those

who never get dessert,

who have no safe blanket to drag behind them.

who watch their parents watch them die

who can’t find any bread to steal,

who don’t have rooms to clean up,

whose pictures aren’t on anybody’s dresser,

whose monsters are real.

We pray for children

who spend all their allowance before Tuesday,

who shove dirty clothes under the bed, and never rinse out the tub,

who don’t like to be kissed in front of the car-pool,

who squire in church or temple and scream in the phone,

whose tears we sometimes laugh at and

whose smiles can make us cry.

And we pray for those

whose nightmares come in the daytime,

who will eat anything,

who have never seen a dentist,

who aren’t spoiled by anyone,

who go to bed hungry and cry themselves to sleep,

who live and move, but have no being.

We pray for children who want to be carried

and for those who must,

for those we never give up on and

for those who don’t get a second chance,

for those we smother….

and who for those who will grab the hand of anybody kind

enough to offer it.

It reminds me very much of this recent picture book, which captures the essence of Turning to One Another as perfectly as anything might.

I Wish You Knew

by Jackie Azua Kramer

Our school

wraps around

a hundred-year-old

oak tree.

Through shady branches,

we watch summer leaves

change in the autumn wind

and drop

into crunchy

piles.

My favorite place is the school garden.

Between leafy cabbages and tomatoes,

my father helped our class

plant rows

of sunflower seeds.

One day, he told me

that because he wasn't born here

like me,

he must return to

his native country.

He wrapped his arms around me.

"Te quiero mucho, Estrella . . . my little star.

I'll be back one day

to see the sunflowers

bloom."

I love to skp between

the tall stalks of yellow-rayed petals

and think of his smile.

I wish you knew that when I forget my homework

or sit alone at lunch

or cry over little things,

it's because

I miss him.

I wish you knew

that since my father

left,

my mother works

a lot.

An my little brother

has bad

dreams.

I wish everyone knw how much I miss him.

Our school

wraps around

a hundred-year-old

oak tree.

As a teacher, my favorite place is our busy

and curious classroom.

I love to watch my students play

in our noisy playground,

with its soft patch of sand.

I wish they knew

that when they forget their homework

or sit alone at lunch

or cry over little things,

they

are not

alone.

Our school

wraps around

a hundred-year-old

oak tree.

My classmates and my new favorite place

is our class's sharing circle,

called I Wish You Knew.

We write down things that have happened

and feelings we wish others knew

on a piece of paper.

They're secret,

but they don't have to be

if you're ready to share.

I wish you knew I'm here to help.

I wish you knew that I'm hungry a lot.

I wish you knew that my

mom's away in the military.

I wish you knew I lived in a shelter.

I wish you knew

I miss my father.

But now in our sharing circle . . . 

 . . . I love to share cool ball tricks he taught me

or dances he learned as a boy

or songs we sang together.

I wish you knew

that we'll be together soon.

Till then,

my friends and teacher

help me plant sunflower seeds,

and we wait

for them

to bloom.

How can we make more opportunities to share with each other those things "I wish you knew?" How can we help each other find more sacred?