Our brains love to make connections, tell stories, etc. We all do it. Especially when sleeping, but also when awake. Here’s an interesting article about how creativity comes from this ability to confabulate:

While it only affects a tiny minority of those with brain damage, confabulation tells us something important: that spontaneous, fluid, even riotous creativity is a natural part of the design of the mind. The damage associated with confabulation—usually to the frontal lobes—adds nothing to the brain’s makeup. Instead it releases a capacity for fiction that lies dormant inside all of us. Anyone who has seen children at play knows that the desire to make up stories is deeply embedded in human nature.

via Tall Stories « idiolect.

The whole article is interesting. I’m particularly interested in how our ability to make connections between wildly different things, and our ability to filter those connections so that they have an element of justifiability, might mean that even the sanest of us, and the most rational, are really just the best story-tellers.

Confabulation is how we solve problems. We have a problem, and we let our brains explore potential scenarios until one of them passes all of our self-critiquing filters and presents itself as the best potential answer.

Confabulation is how we understand ourselves and the world. Without it, we’d have nothing but a pool of unconnected thoughts. No beliefs about how things should be, no visions of the future, no understanding of how each of our personalities and beings remain consistent from moment to moment.

We’re all making things up all the time.

Make it up and make it happen.

Fascinating (though somewhat long) article about the idea of what people have been calling the “vulnerability gene”. A gene that makes you more vulnerable to depression, anxiety, aggression, etc. Some new studies are saying that it’s not necessarily only a negative gene, but that it makes you more sensitive to both positive and negative experiences, and could have something to do with the rapid evolution of humans in the last 50,000 years.

Of special interest to the team was a new interpretation of one of the most important and influential ideas in recent psychiatric and personality research: that certain variants of key behavioral genes (most of which affect either brain development or the processing of the brain’s chemical messengers) make people more vulnerable to certain mood, psychiatric, or personality disorders. Bolstered over the past 15 years by numerous studies, this hypothesis, often called the “stress diathesis” or “genetic vulnerability” model, has come to saturate psychiatry and behavioral science. During that time, researchers have identified a dozen-odd gene variants that can increase a person’s susceptibility to depression, anxiety, attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, heightened risk-taking, and antisocial, sociopathic, or violent behaviors, and other problems—if, and only if, the person carrying the variant suffers a traumatic or stressful childhood or faces particularly trying experiences later in life.

This vulnerability hypothesis, as we can call it, has already changed our conception of many psychic and behavioral problems. It casts them as products not of nature or nurture but of complex “gene-environment interactions.” Your genes don’t doom you to these disorders. But if you have “bad” versions of certain genes and life treats you ill, you’re more prone to them.

Recently, however, an alternate hypothesis has emerged from this one and is turning it inside out. This new model suggests that it’s a mistake to understand these “risk” genes only as liabilities. Yes, this new thinking goes, these bad genes can create dysfunction in unfavorable contexts—but they can also enhance function in favorable contexts. The genetic sensitivities to negative experience that the vulnerability hypothesis has identified, it follows, are just the downside of a bigger phenomenon: a heightened genetic sensitivity to all experience.

via The Science of Success – The Atlantic (December 2009).

I like the colloquial names for the two kinds of genes: dandelion genes (that make you resistant to experiences, and generally stable) and orchid genes (more unstable, but more likely to benefit from positive experience or be damaged by negative experience).

Of course, all of this genetic talk is dangerous, if it encourages stereotypes or feelings of self-worth or pre-determination of personality traits. Still, what it’s really saying is that genetics and experience are interwoven in really complicated ways (some genetics are only triggered by certain environmental conditions) and that really it’s all important, and it’s all malleable, and it all matters.

This post has a ton of Mad Men spoilers if you haven’t seen the Season 3 finale yet.

Mostly, I want to transcribe my favorite conversation in the episode, if not the entire season.  It comes near the beginning, when Don makes the pitch to buy the company back.

Bert Cooper: Young men love risk because they can’t imagine the consequences.

Don Draper: And you old men love building golden tombs and sealing the rest of us in with you.  You’re done, you know that right?

Bert: So I  should just throw away my fortune?  I don’t have the rest of my life to earn it back.

Don: I understand.  I’ll let you go back to sleep.

Bert: Why do you care?

Don: Because I’m sick of being batted around like a ping pong ball.  Who the hell is in charge?  A bunch of accountants trying to make a dollar into a dollar ten?  I want to work.  I want to build something of my own.  How do you not understand that?  You did it yourself 40 years ago!

Bert: That’s true.  But I’m not sure you have a stomach for the realities.

Don: Try me.

Awesome. I think this dialogue has been happening inside my own head now for the last 5 or 6 years.  And probably any other entrepreneur who has to decide between safe stability and risky possibility.  What’s really going on here though?

There is a tension between youth and risk versus age and stability.  It’s easier to take risks when you’re younger for two reasons.  One: you don’t know the consequences as intimately.  Two: you have more time to recover from mistakes and therefore it’s a little less risky.

But there’s another level to it.  Being young and taking risks is also equated with being awake, being alive, and possibly even doing the right thing.  Doing things because you have a passion for it (I want to WORK) rather than because you can turn a dollar into a dollar ten while asleep.  But is that true?

The third level: fear.  Don has lost almost everything, and needs something to cling on to in the midst of his divorce, his past creeping up on him, and his potential obsolescence in the face of joining the “sausage factory”.  It’s as much of a last thing to cling to rather than a choice of pure motivation and passion.  And, it almost comes back to bite him as he realizes that people like Peggy, Peter, and even Roger Sterling know that Don doesn’t actually value his relationships to them, he uses them to his own end and takes them for granted.  He is smart enough to realize this before his social capital is completely depleted.

Roger Sterling: And now you’re sniffing around because I have a golden pork chop dangling from my neck. I want to see what you look like with your tail between your legs. I’m not going to throw it all away just because he doesn’t want to work with McCann.

Don: Do you want to work there?

Roger: You don’t value what I do any more than they do.

Don: I was wrong.  I learned that with Hilton.  I can sell ideas but I’m not an account man.

Roger: You’re not good at relationships because you don’t value them.

Don: I value my relationship with you.

Roger: You do now.

Don: I do.

He admits that he’s wrong to several people in this episode.  He thought he was the shit because of people like Hilton.  When Hilton abandons him, he realizes that he’s not as great as he thought he was.  He has to go back to the people who he’s been using, and he is able to persuade all of them (except Betty, who, it could be argued, he doesn’t really try to win back and therefore probably doesn’t want back).

Winning Pete Campbell back:

Don: Pete, I don’t blame you for bailing out, the way you’ve been treated.

Roger: We want your talent.

Pete: Really, what are my talents?

Roger: You’ll do what it takes.

Pete: No, I want to hear it from him.

Don: It’s not hard for me to say, Pete. You saw this coming, we didn’t. In fact, you’ve been ahead on a lot of things: aeronautics, teenagers, the negro market.  We need you to keep us looking forward.  I do, anyway.

Winning Peggy back:

Peggy: Do you want anything?

Don: Yes I do.  You were right. I’ve taken you for granted. And I’ve been hard on you. But only because I think I see you as an extension of myself. And you’re not.

Peggy: Well thank you for stopping by.

Don: Sit down. Do you know why I don’t want to go to McCann?

Peggy: Because you don’t want to work for anyone else.

Don: No. Because there are people out there who buy things, people like you or me. Then something happened, something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that’s very valuable.

Peggy: Is it?

Don: With you or without you, I’m moving on. And I don’t know if I can do it alone. Will you help me?

This is the third time that Don has said that he needs someone this episode (Roger, Pete, Peggy). It’s pretty clear that he doesn’t want to be alone.

The lesson here

We can take risks, but we can not abandon people.

It’s sometimes difficult to distinguish passion from fear.

If you rally people to your vision, and do it with their best interests in mind along with your own, then risk and fear are not powerful and the illusion of bravery and drive can take you forward.

In many ways, not being alone is the true reward.

In order to not be alone, you have to commit.

Roger: So you want to be in advertising after all.

Before I met Kellianne I was thinking of downsizing my living quarters from 880 to about 300 sq ft.  I’m all for the tiny house movement, and totally agree that we try to fill the space that we live in. Given that I only have a fraction of my attention to devote to my living space, a smaller house means being able to pay more attention to the details.

This guy has a company that designs and builds tiny houses.  He built one for himself that’s 96 square feet (8x12ft).

Homes are shrinking in America. After doubling in size since 1960, the national average dropped for the first time in nearly 15 years (by 9%, the size of an average room). But far from this new average of 2,000 plus square feet are the so-called tiny houses.

From A Tiny Home Tour (via @jasonfried)

Ten Years of My Life is softly relaunching. Happy to see Matt’s long-term photo project coming back to life. That’s the challenge with these long-term projects, how do we keep them on track?  I think it’s all about course correction, not being a perfectionist, and enjoying the big picture that emerges from the small pictures, one at a time.

While browsing the new Flickr App Garden I came across this cool game that I think I’ll start playing, called Noticin.gs.  It’s my favorite kind of game, the kind you play slowly, during your day, that attempts to improve the quality of your day while capturing something novel and interesting about it. Along the lines of 8:36pm and Plus 1.

The rules: They seem to be evolving still, but here are the basics. During your day, you take pictures of things that you notice (interesting things, things you might otherwise not notice about your environment, and they can’t be people), upload them to Flickr, and tag them with “noticings”. Once a day, at 3pm GMT (or 8am PST), they bring in all the pictures from Flickr and you will get points for each photo.  What’s interesting is that the scoring algorithm seems to change depending on the kind of thing you noticed, where you noticed it, etc.  For example:

• +10 for noticing something.
• +5 for noticing something near someone else’s noticing.
• +10 for being the first person to notice something in a certain neighborhood.
• +50 for noticing something during 12pm and 2pm every day for a week.
• +70 for noticing something every day for a week.
• x2 for noticing something that has been lost (until Nov 8th, when this rule will change)

Of course, I know that I have a particular fondness for this because of the point system.  And while I REALLY LOVE that there is some editorial process to this (someone has to be there to approve when something is lost, obviously), I worry about how this will scale.  What if the creators stop wanting to do this every day?  Will the game stop?

They also get points for referencing my favorite self-referencing game of all time, Nomic, in their post about rules.  Nomic is a game where each turn involves the players changing the rules of the game.  It’s one of the most mind-bending and interesting games ever invented.

There currently isn’t anyone playing in Seattle, but I hope to change that sometime today.

Tackling the empathy deficit, the first post in what looks to be an interesting new blog on empathy. Here’s the intro video:

I think empathy is something we should all be constantly working on improving. It’s the ability to imagine what it’s like to be someone else, to feel the same emotions and think the same thoughts. Not only is it a great tool for expanding our understanding of the world (at which we are definitely not the center) but it’s also a rich and interesting exercise that can break us out of ruts and trained patterns of reaction.

Curious to see how this blog develops.

Via The School of Life.

“If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”
—Legal Adage

I like that, it rings true as advice on how to win (even if you’re wrong).  Of course, it’s bad advice, and, the rest of John Gruber’s post, Pound the Quality, mostly about the iPhone’s advantage over the competition, hits on the true advise we should take.

The iPhone has turned that around, and it’s driving Microsoft executives batty. The situation is so at odds with Microsoft’s view of the computing universe that Steve Ballmer came up with this cockamamie explanation: “The Internet was designed for the PC. The Internet is not designed for the iPhone. That’s why they’ve got 75,000 applications — they’re all trying to make the Internet look decent on the iPhone.” Pound the table, indeed.

The simplest reduction of the age-old Mac-vs.-Windows debate is quality-vs.-quantity. But I don’t blame Apple for bragging about the sheer number of iPhone apps available, because it’s something that can be measured. It’s a powerful marketing point because it is an undeniable fact: there are nearly 100,000 apps, and more every week. You can’t quantify the advantage Mac software has over Windows.

It’s almost impossible to pound the quality, cause it’s not quantifiable.  It’s not irrefutable.  It’s an aesthetic.  That doesn’t stop it from being the most important thing, though.

An old Grandfather said to his grandson, who came to him with anger at a friend who had done him an injustice, “Let me tell you a story.”

“I too, at times, have felt a great hate for those that have taken so much, with no sorrow for what they do.

But hate wears you down, and does not hurt your enemy. It is like taking poison and wishing your enemy would die. I have struggled with these feelings many times.” He continued, “It is as if there are two wolves inside me. One is good and does no harm. He lives in harmony with all around him, and does not take offense when no offense was intended. He will only fight when it is right to do so, and in the right way.

But the other wolf, ah! He is full of anger. The littlest thing will set him into a fit of temper. He fights everyone, all the time, for no reason. He cannot think because his anger and hate are so great. It is helpless anger, for his anger will change nothing.

Sometimes, it is hard to live with these two wolves inside me, for both of them try to dominate my spirit.”

The boy looked intently into his Grandfather’s eyes and asked, “Which one wins, Grandfather?”

He replied, “The one I feed.”

This jibes with my simplified understanding of Marvin Minsky’s book, “The Society of Mind” that I read many years ago but still think about all the time.  About we each have basically a “society” of contained forces within us.  Separate people, almost.

Today I’ve been in a foul mood. Someone mentioned this story on the internet a few days ago and it came at a time when I could almost physically feel myself feeding the angry mean wolf.  I happened to also be eating junk food at the time, which made the allegory more literal than it was perhaps meant to be taken.  But, at the same time, it feels true that certain foods also feed different wolves, right?

When I’m angry I want foods that are heavy, that’ll drag my mood down a little bit, beat it up.  But in the end that just makes me feel worse.

A healthy meal, while it doesn’t have an immediate impact on my mental state, will in the long run probably feed the healthy wolf more.  So, for lunch, I had a salad and some lentil soup.

Anyway, it’s an old allegory, but it sort of helped me out today.

Why is it that we cannot correct flaws in ourselves that we know we have?  Why can’t we adjust for our own biases and prejudices by sheer force of will?  Why can’t we change priorities and desires simply by wanting to?

Clearly there is a wire missing between our conscious and subconscious minds.  Our subconscious mind can tell us what to do, but we can’t bully our subconscious around in the same way.  Mostly because it’s sub… we don’t know what is going on in there at all. We have a limit to our self-knowledge.

It’s not just psychologists who experience the limitations of self-knowledge. Just consider Harry Markowitz, a Nobel Prize winning economist who practically invented the field of investment portfolio theory. In the early 1950′s, while working at the RAND Corporation, Markowitz became intrigued by a practical financial problem: how much of his savings should he invest in the stock market? Markowitz’s breakthrough was to derive a complicated mathematical equation that could calculate the optimal mix of assets. He had come up with a rational solution to the old problem of risk versus reward.

But Markowitz was incapable of using his own equation. When he divided up his investment portfolio, he ignored the investment advice that had won him the Nobel Prize. Instead of relying on the math, he fell into the familiar trap of loss aversion – this leads people to reject investments that might lead to losses – and he split his portfolio equally between stocks and bonds. Markowitz was so worried about the possibility of losing his savings that he failed to optimize his own retirement account.

via The Limits of Self-Knowledge : The Frontal Cortex.

The best we can do is be on guard to see what our subconscious is doing, and to try to correct anything that is not aligned with our conscious values, goals, desires.  And perhaps that is simply the difference between children and adults… that guard.

Along with the guard come a few tradeoffs.  First reactions.  Unguarded vulnerability.  True, innocent, glee.  And in exchange we get a little control, a little consistency of action and behavior, manners, etiquette, kindness, and fairness.

Is that a fair trade?

Interesting, if pretty surface-level, article about how nonsense makes our brains eager to find a new pattern, and sometimes might even help learning.

An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”

At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.

Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.

via Mind – How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect – NYTimes.com.

Another way of describing it is that nonsense turns on the seeking button in our brains.  We expect sense, we get none, and we are left hungry for something to fill the void left by that expectation.

Magical words from Caterina:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be. Being able to read what people want. Putting yourself in the right place where information is flowing freely and interesting new juxtapositions can be seen. But you can save yourself a lot of time by working on the right thing. Working hard, even, if that’s what you like to do.

via Caterina.net: Working hard is overrated.

I agree with this, even though my subconscious flip flops on the issue pretty regularly.  Of course, wisdom like this is easy to take advantage of, or use in the wrong way.  A lot of people who don’t work hard are also not working on the right thing… probably a bigger percent actually.

And then, what’s the right thing?  Is it that magical task that history has put you right in front of?  That you must do as the right ideas and right technologies come together in the right place?  And, what if that right thing isn’t fulfilling?

Is it better to work hard on the right thing that is not fulfilling or the wrong thing that is fulfilling?  Or, does fulfillment come from the sense that you are working on the right thing? I don’t know.

If you’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard, there’s something new in Automator that I sort of like.  It’s called an iCal Alarm.  You can create any Automator flow (an alarm clock that plays a certain playlist, something that clears all the items on your desktop and files them, etc) and save it to iCal so that it gets run at a certain time every day, week, or on whatever schedule you want.  Here’s how:

1. Upgrade to Snow Leopard
2. Open Automator
3. Choose “iCal Alarm” from the templates
4. Build your workflow… you could, for example:
   1. Start playing a playlist
      1. Find iTunes Playlist (specify by name)
      2. Play iTunes Playlist
   2. Archive your desktop files
      1. Get Specified Finder Items (select Desktop)
      2. Get Folder Contents
      3. Filter Finder Items (maybe, for example, any with a label so that if you want something to stay on your desktop you just need to give it a label)
      4. Move Finder Items (I have a “Junk” folder in “Documents” that has all of the random stuff I collect but never delete)
5. Save it
6. Open iCal, schedule the event to repeat on whatever schedule you want.
7. Edit the “alarm”. I did notice that if you schedule it to repeat the alarm defaults to scheduling on a certain date (the current date).  Change that to be “0 minutes before” the event so that it’ll happen on the same time and date every time.

A couple other interesting things you can make it do:

1. Open your email at a certain time (so that you can close it and not have to think about it until it opens itself each day).
2. Have it read your iCal events to you in a robot voice every morning.
3. Take a screenshot of whatever you’re doing (for people who like to randomly record things).

Browse additional Automator plugins and come up with something else.

Kurt Vonnegut explains, by way of Derek Sivers, why some of us are addicted to drama:

[...] life is really like this…

Our lives drifts along with normal things happening. Some ups, some downs, but nothing to go down in history about. Nothing so fantastic or terrible that it’ll be told for a thousand years.

via Kurt Vonnegut explains drama | Derek Sivers.

And fairy tales are all about huge swings up and down.  So we either pretend that the small ups and downs of our lives are actually much bigger, or we try to bend the curves to fit more dramatic storylines.

I followed Andre Torrez’s link to a neat image to a very nice blog called Monoscope (that I’ve since added to my RSS reader) and from there found what is perhaps the most perfect watchmaker (which I didn’t even know was a category one could belong to).

And by most perfect I mostly mean perfect for me.  LOOK AT THESE WATCHES!

My favorite, The Cyclops, has a color for every hour. I like the colors and I like how the little black circle moves around from hour to hour. Beautiful.

The New Decider is like a constantly flipping coin. Every second, either YES or NO will appear next to the time, and it’ll help you decide on very important matters.

The New Decider may not always be right, but as Tony Soprano observes,“a wrong decision is better than indecision.”

The Average Day lets you travel along your average activity rather than worry about hours.

The Accurate is a bit morbid in an awesome way. The hour hand says “REMEMBER” and the minute hand says “YOU WILL DIE” and the rim of the watch is a mirror. A bit of a momento mori for modern times.

My second favorite is this one, The Mantra, which has a positive and negative mantra for each hour, designed to make the cocky man more humble and the insecure man more confident.

To see all of Mr. Jones’s Watches without the broken frames (since that was the only way to direct link to particular watches), check it out here.