Jonah Lehrer’s post this past Friday, Dreaming and Remembering, shares research around the role dreams play in sorting, consolidating and strengthening memories. In a New York Times post from March, Lehrer relates an experiment from Jan Born that showed sleeping between problem solving increased their pattern detection ability allowing the participants to use a short-cut instead of the more complex brute force method.
Born argues that deep sleep and dreaming “set the stage for the emergence of insight” by allowing us to mentally represent old ideas in new ways.
Lehrer ends presenting…
One of the main remaining controversies for sleep researchers is whether or not REM dreams are a mere side-effect of a subterranean process – this would suggest that the narratives themselves don’t matter – or are actually a core feature of the sleep-remembering cycle. This is an academic question with plenty of practical relevance, as it will determine whether or not it’s worth recounting our dreams in polite conversation.
Regardless of the potential findings people respond to storytelling as a method of engagement and understanding. Stories provide context for other more important content. Done well it involves the listener in a mentally interactive exercise making it easier for them to find meaning and relate the underlying messages to other important ideas. Dreams may be a “side-effect of a subterranean process” but it would be such a waste of fantastic stories.
Work has been running full speed on the Bonneville Salt Flats for so long that lifting my foot slightly off the gas made me realized my leg was asleep. Every day we wake up is one where we can choose to be greater, help others be greater and hopefully shape a better world. How do you ever lift your foot off the gas on that?
People do it all the time and yet complain that they haven’t traveled as far. That is not to say taking breaks from some of the journey is not important – heck required – they are! Your daily life diversity makes you better at everything you do. It is what makes you uniquely qualified to do something remarkable. In the variety of things you do, how far down is the gas pedal?
From the moment of conception, we are dying. Life is not a dress rehearsal, yet we deliberate over most of our waking moments. It is this that makes time so precious. We have plenty of time, but spend it and spread it thin, leaving fragmented leftovers. Time and attention management skills go beyond the workplace helping you more effectively execute your priorities. What are your priorities?
If you know what is important and have the intensity to focus and dedicate time to those things, then your foot is on the gas moving you in all the right directions. When your foot falls asleep make sure you look around and make sure you are where you intended to be. Finding yourself off course is less critical than moving quickly and correcting direction – think of it like Agile development for living.
Microsoft asked “Where do you want to go today?” with the help of Wieden+Kennedy, a bold question in a time where computers were in the infancy of becoming bullet train to station you. Aspire to the grander responsibility of making a better you by spending your time attentively on the activities you love. Along the way help everyone you can do the same. Stop fretting over the destinations and start getting there intently. How we do what we do is as important as the doing and destination. The world is happy to pay you to do less. What is your time worth?
One of the many things people can do to sustain a high-performing work life, is to care about what they do. This shifts the energy we usually reserve for our life and moves it to the workplace. It makes a significant difference in an individual’s ability to genuinely connect with other people and drive success across teams and projects. Making work personal is one of the simplest gas pedals people have to get things done, yet the highs it brings are matched equally by the lows.
The key to fantasy is knowing that you’re in one. So when you start thinking it’s real, things become complicated. Fantasy and reality and never-the-tween shall meet.
-Belle, Season 3, Episode 2, Secret Diary of a Call Girl
People tend not to manage their reality at work as a relationship, especially if they care. Consider the intimate relationships you have had and think of the ways you protected yourself during the moments of turmoil. Sometimes the protection is creating physical space – breaking up, separation and divorce. Other times it is far more subtle, a reminder that the person you love is upset about something and just needs compassion and support, not for you to feel angry and attacked. Are you managing your romance with work or are you pretending that it is different? How we react to changes in our reality is how we manage our relationships with it. In the workplace this is what distinguishes the best leaders.
Melt down with as few people as possible. Try to pick people you have a close and safe relationship with. If you don’t have any like that, then do it on your own, but do it nonetheless. If you care about your work, the melt down is unavoidable – it is literally the relationship having been malnourished. In business, the chances that it is getting fed all the time are unlikely. The key is to manage it separately from the prevailing brand you present as a professional. People have enough challenges dealing with their own reality, so when yours bleeds into theirs there is a level of dissonance that if not received with care tends to irritate. Regardless, taking the time to heal the complications of treating work like life is vital to keeping your mojo flowing.
Caring about what you do is powerful. It parts the tribe in two and those that care have the upper hand. It comes with additional responsibility to yourself, which is to manage your work (fantasy) as you would you life (reality). People tend to blend them and engage in the resulting complication. When you find yourself unable to distinguish, remind yourself that these two are really never meant to meet. That you introduced them to each other was a gift to you and others. If you see others going through challenging times where the emotional component is as high as business at hand, then receive it with care – it builds meaningful relationships between people that transcend the workplace. Some would say this makes for a messy world view, but I would argue it was messy when we started caring.
The shortest distance between a person becoming aware and buying – the act of exchanging currency at a higher rate than the service or product costs to produce – is the marketer’s benchmark. As such their motives should inherently be held suspect and yet we believe what they want us to believe.
Time is one of the key battles marketing message fight. Given enough time, anyone can sell anything (ideas or products), some better than others. People have been told time is money and usually that is true for the other person – your time is someone else’s money. Someone else’s time is likely yours. As such, marketing messages are short and repetitive – visually and aurally. It gets cleverer when the messages appear genuinely – products placed in unassuming ways that relate activity or quality to the product or service. Simplified messages attack the largest audience to force an action – thought or behavior. How much of what we know is fabricated?
Science and technology folks are all about details and complexity. One cannot fully appreciate wonders without understanding the complexity – one of the reasons we know less than we should. Scientists strive for truth or work with it to change it. Exactness is important. Any fudge work is noted and already calculated to be insignificant in the context of a more import result. They are biased, but their motives are purer. Of course corruption exists everywhere, so absolutes are tough to swallow. Scientific evidence is often positioned to accentuate the beauty but hid the wrinkles. We hold beliefs that are not always proven by a scientist or better yet ourselves-we call this faith. What do you have faith in?
I am not as interest in what people have faith in as much as that they do so readily. With good marketing, people believe and behave under the influence. People are generally anxious about mind control yet almost everything has been fabricated and more importantly specifically for you and people like you. As much as we are individuals we are actually more alike than not – scarily alike when it comes to what you think, what you believe and what you buy.
We are all participants in being under the influence
It is no wonder that so many people in the fields of communication, branding and marketing feel so powerful – their message in total create so much of the world. They start as the rock falling into the pond allowing ripples to hit us as they may. They drop more pebbles at the right times reinforcing messages, creating relationships and intimate richness. They are the origin and orchestration of the following conversation in what appears to be naturally occurring ripples. As individuals we faithfully internalize, reform and repeat – generating thoughts and actions that others listen to. These messages become defining attributes. Many people like fine wine, food, clothes, automobiles and the latest personal technology. Many desire upgrades to their current lifestyle in those ways and aspire for private jets, multiple homes in multiple countries and more. People consume what is made consumable. The rate of new content production for the individual is slower than the rate of content an individual produces based on someone else’s content. How much of what you think is new? When you talk, how much of what you say is something someone else said? How much of what you feel is yours?
Marketing messages create physiological changes in our understanding of reality – they are not artificial impacts. What is suspect is the initial message we chose to have faith in. If we inspected every message for such qualities we would crawl to a halt. It is not practical and, for better or worse, we are unavoidably consuming. This is excellent news for those who actually know how to communicate. The power to create the world’s thought and behavior is in the hands of those that strike clear and simple messages, rooted in fact and garnished in fashion.
Among the publications of Moses King is a curious postcard titled N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers”. John Timberman Newcomb, teacher at University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, wrote a piece titled The Footprint of the Twentieth Century: American Skyscrapers and Modernist Poems citing it as being published sometime in 1913-1918. I picked my copy up at a local store that sells old and used postcards.
N.Y. 11 Future New York "The city of skyscrapers" (Front)
The back reads, “Future New York will be pre-eminently the city of skyscrapers. The first steel frame structure that was regarded as a skyscraper is the Tower Building at 50 Broadway, a ten-story structure 129 feet high. There are now over a thousand buildings of that height in Manhattan, and hundreds in course of construction. The best known skyscrapers are the Singer Building, 612 feet height the Metropolitan Building, 700 feet high, and the Woolworth Tower which towers above them all at rises to a height of 790 feet. The proposed Pan-American Building is to be 801 feet high.”
N.Y. 11 Future New York “The city of skyscrapers” (Back)
For comparison, The Empire State Building is 1,472 feet including the spire, doubling what the 1900’s regarded as towering. It remains one of the tallest buildings in America and is currently number 15 world-wide. An impressive iconic structure, the Empire State Building is far from the vision that this postcard imagines.
Modern futuristic movies reach out into space (2001, Star Wars), explore extraterrestrials (ET, Alien) and robotic life (Short Circuit, Terminator). Others imagine close calls with the end of humanity (I Am Legend, Men in Black). Others yet explore genetic (Gattaca) and psychic phenomena (Minority Report). To make these movies commercially accessible they are kept edgy-plausible. In comparison, the minds of the 1900’s went far more radical imaging a metropolis of buildings stacked upon buildings with rail cars at high elevations and the possibility that a person’s world may be contained within one building. Movies have riffed on these concepts but at 750 ft, the Woolworth Tower was a far from the futuristic city New York was thought to become.
In general, the current state of futuristic thinking lacks radical imagination. The fiction has become too accessible offering probable possibilities instead of the kind of “what if” thinking that raises the societal consciousness – what could be beyond what we think.
There was a time that my work focused on managing technology diffusion and amplifying the volume on innovative activity at IBM. It is a space where there is literally no shortage of work to be done at every level. While people tended to focus on the tangible build out of infrastructure or web experience that facilitated innovation access, most failed to see how important the dream was. For example. “what if 30,000 employees were always running the n+1 version of the IT experience?” Dreams are lenses that provide a critical filter and check point as things naturally evolve and depart from the original motivations.
Making innovation accessible is an important part of the Darwinian selection. A more interesting topic is pushing innovation beyond current understanding. Quite simply, the majority of innovation today is incremental or copy cat – applying something from one domain to another in hopes it might be useful in a different context. Certainly interesting exploration, but not what I would call transformative. It seems real innovation comes in the form of individuals and when they move on for whatever reason, so does the dream. Who in your world is a dreamer that has started many fires but whose fires seem to be smothered or worse yet have burned the wrong forest?
Consider what is still an impressive demonstration, Jeff Han’s demo at TED in February 2006. It is 2009 and the best we have seen of gesture based and multi-touch, pressure sensitive computer screen technology and the best we can point to is Apple’s application in their mobile devices. More importantly, notice the first demo Han shows exploring human lava lamp interactions – more sophisticated than current interaction experiences that exploration is relegated to research scientists. The few hundred of audience members, purported to be some of the most connected in the world, were impressed and unmoved to imagine a different computing world, or if imagined selfishly horded.
What is beyond web-based anything, micro-blogging, social flows and the constant meme generation? I am not tired of the world we live in, but who is imagining the world beyond. If we simply evolve from here, the future will fall short, just like the New York and cities that never became. Some cite the state of the economical climate as the reason for such underwhelming thinking. I think it has been here for many years and it would be a good time to shake it up. If you are a dreamer, a futurist, a creative thinker, why is your volume so soft? The future is here and we need bigger thoughts.
