“mindfulness”
26 posts under this tag.
Last Saturday, Gwyn invited me to the First Flickr Phototour of GuadalajaraWP. I didn’t know what to expect or what the hell a phototour was (I brought my camera rather as an afterthought), but I wanted to meet that mysterious Gwyn and get some air. (My parents wouldn’t let me go at first, having read in the day’s newspaper about some local murderers that met their victims through the web. When they finally read the article more carefully and found the victims were local gays hooking up dates online, they exhaled, relieved, and let me go without further ado. Which was homophobic and then some but I can’t change the world all at once—I was too late already.)
Well, it was unbelievable fun. I read somewhere that as we grow old we stop seeing things and only name them instead. You look around your room and instead of seeing the bed—its shadows, texture, pattern, perspective—you call it “bed”—and move on. Precipice locals, from John Brunner’s WP Shockwave RiderWP novel, had a very peculiar way to fight this tendency:
“Say, I wonder how much further it is to Great Circle Course. Can we have come too far? No street names are marked up anywhere.”
“I noticed. That’s of a piece with everything else. Helps to force you back from the abstract set to the reality. Of course it’s something that can only work in a small community, but—well, how many thousands of streets have you passed along without registering anything but the name? I think that’s one of the forces driving people to distraction. One needs solid perceptual food same as one needs solid nutriment; without it, you die of bulk-hunger. There’s an intersection, see?”
With my formistELZR obsession and my “My kingdom is not from this world.” joke, I am of course guilty of such distracted overnaming. (It has been, in fact, a point of pride.) And so it was a revelation for me to be forced by the shutter to shut up and simply look around.
There was a point, while we visited the Hospicio Cabanhas, when my euphoria was reaching religious-experience proportions. Everything was suddenly so sensual, so fresh and poignant EEM, so physical, so there. I looked and looked at stones and tree bark and white walls, and they seemed suddenly infinite in their detail.
I have to go back there soon. Sit in the middle of that huge, geometric patio, and read, design, or program the morning away. Which reminds me, I had this weird impossible idea before breakfastELZR (I skipped it) that with its many patios, its huge rooms, and its beautiful cloisters, the Hospicio Cabanhas would be the perfect media hotel!ELZR We’ll see when we can afford it.
So, yeah, I had a great, crazy time. Check out my photoset, Gwyn’s, and Pedro’s.
Here some of my favorite shots:
 There was recently (November 2006) an article in Nature about the famous Antikythera MechanismWP, a strange Greek contraption from the second century B.C.E. that with its gears and dials is considered by some the first (astrological) computer. Nothing like it is known in human history until a thousand years later (which prompted Professor Mike Edmunds, one of the article’s authors, to regard it as “more valuable than the Mona Lisa.”). Using new advanced imaging techniques the researchers were able to discover much previously hidden complexity in the device and established it was used to model the position of the moon and probably that of other planets. The article was all over the news (in 2002, another famous analysis was released and it was also broadly covered).
Then there’s Richard Feynman and his letters, gathered by her daughter and published in an also fairly recent (April 5, 2005) book titled Perfectly Reasonable Deviations From The Beaten TrackAM. And there’s one from Athens that mentions Feynman’s encounter with a funny little Greek mechanism. It’s a gem of a letter, full of wisdom about science, history, and modernity.
Of late (and not a minute too late, some will say), I’ve been studying tact. Here are two nice anecdotes I’ve stumbled on.
Charles Schwab was passing through one of his steel mills one day at noon when he came across some of his employees smoking. Immediately above their heads was a sign that said “No Smoking.” Did Schwab point to the sign and say, “Can’t you read?” Oh, no not Schwab. He walked over to the men, handed each one a cigar, and said, “I’ll appreciate it, boys, if you will smoke these on the outside.” They knew that he knew that they had broken a rule—and they admired him because he said nothing about it and gave them a little present and made them feel important. Couldn’t keep from loving a man like that, could you?
Dale Carnegie, How To Win Friends And Influence PeopleAM
While he was prime minister of Great Britain, Winston Churchill once hosted a posh state dinner, attended by dignitaries from around the world. At one point, he was taken aside by the head butler, who quietly informed him that Lady So-and-so had been observed stealing a silver salt-shaker and placing it in her purse. “How do you suggest this matter be handled?” asked the butler.
“Leave it to me,” replied Churchill. The prime minister then made his way across the room, pausing along the way to pick up the matching pepper shaker from the dinner table. He stepped up to Lady So-and-so, took her by the arm, and guided her out of earshot of the other guests. Then he pulled the pepper shaker from his pocket and showed it to the woman. “My dear lady,” he said in a guilty-sounding voice, “I think we’ve been seen! Perhaps we’d better both put them back!”
Winston Churchill (You can find more anecdotes from him here and here. I can’t, for the life of me, find again that article where I read this anecdote first. After hours and hours of frustration, I found this version, which I think is the one that best approaches the one that originally captivated me, in this bizarre religious tract.)
Do you know more?
There’s an old story about two men on a train. One of
them, seeing some naked-looking sheep in a field, said,
“Those sheep have just been sheared.’; The other looked
a moment longer, and then said, “They seem to be—
on this side.” It is in such a cautious spirit that we
should say whatever we have to say about the workings
of the mind.
John Holt, How Children LearnWP
And since we’re at it, I might as well show off my other train-and-grazing-animals-through-the-window joke:
Two Englishmen are going by train. A conversation isn’t getting on. The train passes a meadow, on which a herd of sheeps pastures. One of the passengers says:
—1356.
The other man is surprised, but gives no answer. In some time the train passes another pasture. The first passenger says:
—1693.
His neighbor brakes and asks:
—Sir, our train moves at speed 60 miles per hour. How can you count so quickly?
—Oh, sir, it’s very simple! First I count a quantity of legs in a herd and then I divide this number by four.
That’s an example of the questions Ellen J. Langer, as she recounts in MindfulnessAM, p167-170, posed to a group of elementary school kids in a study on discrimination. I’ve been rattling my brain for good answers since: Why?
No satisfactory answers have been found but here are some stabs at it, in markedly decreasing order of quality:
Above-average manual dexterity
Since most of the deaf speak sign language WP and since sign language relies heavily on hands as the primary vehicle of expression, it is likely that the deaf develop above-average manual dexterity, which would sure come handy in many cooking tasks (say, chopping or cutting).
Since they have one less sense to distract them, they can focus more on flavors. The blind are known to have very refined senses of hearing and smelling, perhaps something similar happens to the deaf?
No stress in noisy environments
Kitchens can be pretty hectic environments, right?
Clear, quick note-writing (and reading)
It is likely that they have had to rely many times on writing clear, quick notes to strangers so they might have developed systems or experience for making them easily understood. That may come in handy in busy kitchens were a lot of information is passed on written notes (so that, say, orders don’t get all mixed up).
Different food cues
They may have discovered different cues for food quality or meal readiness (say, since they can’t hear milk burbling, they might smell when milk is just about to boil over).
Sign language is a noiseless language
So it might be better at restaurants where absolutely no noise is desired from the kitchen. (On the other hand, perhaps it’s hard for a deaf person to accurately assess just how much noise they inadvertently make with cooking instruments.)
More accurate people-reading
A deaf may have learned to rely more on other people’s body language and thus may be more accurate gauging whether people honestly liked her dishes or not.
Any thoughts?
Speaking of human possibilitiesELZR, I have found my personal slogan. No need to be jelous of Andrea’sELZR anymore.
In a book aptly called New Bottles for New Wine, Julian Huxley WP quotes his grandfather, the great nineteenth-century scientist Thomas Huxley WP, on the subject of belief: ”Everyone should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him. My faith is in human possibilities.”
Ellen J. Langer, MindfulnessAM, p195
Ellen J. Langer’s Mindfulness was a personal landmark: a wondrous book on human possibilities, their promise, and their everyday annihilation. I’ve already sprinkled several quotes from it in previous postsELZR (and will continue to do so) but there is one quote that deserves all the highlighting I can give it—this may rank as the most provocative thing I’ve ever read:
Teaching can be done in a much more conditional way.. Children are usually taught “this is a pen,” “this is a rose,” “this is a car.” It is assumed that the pen must be recognized as a pen so that a person can get on with the business of writing. It is also considered useful for the child to form the category “pen.” But consider an alternative: What happens if we instruct the child that “this could be a pen”? This conditional statement, simple as it seems, is a radical departure from telling the child “this is a pen.” What if a number of ordinary household objects were introduced to a child in a conditional way: “This could be a screwdriver, a fork, a sheet, a magnifying glass”? Would that child be more fit for survival on a desert island (when the fork and screwdriver could double as tent pegs for the sheet, near a fire made by the magnifying glass)? Or imagine the impact of a divorce on a child initially taught “a family’ is, a mother, a father, and a child” versus “a family could be…”
Ellen J. Langer, MindfulnessAM, p124
To the jaded eye, most of the paragraph can be easily dismissed as an extravagant, pie-in-the-sky rambling, and I dismissed it so when I first read it—so what if kiddos would make better Robinson CrusoesWP? Should we realign our education for that?—but then the last lightning sentence comes and in its flash we glimpse the world that could be. Do you see?
A dolphin’s ability to invent novel behaviours was put to the test in a famous experiment by the renowned dolphin expert Karen Pryor. Two rough-toothed dolphins were rewarded whenever they came up with a new behaviour. It took just a few trials for both dolphins to realise what was required. A similar trial was set up with humans. The humans took about as long to realise what they were being trained to do as did the dolphins. For both the dolphins and the humans, there was a period of frustration (even anger, in the humans) before they “caught on”. Once they figured it out, the humans expressed great relief, whereas the dolphins raced around the tank excitedly, displaying more and more novel behaviours.
Bach also spoke of the effortless flow of musical ideas. Asked how he found his melodies, he said, “The problem is not finding them, it’s—when getting up in the morning and getting out of bed—not stepping on them.”
Ellen J. Langer, Mindfulness, p118
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