There are Benefits to Lack of Copyright

Have a fabulous TED talk about the benefits of no copyrights in lieu of a post. This says more than I could on the subject and is fascinating!

Sadly, Blogger will not allow me to embed the damn thing, so have a link. I'm sure TED will appreciate the traffic anyway. *blows raspberry at blogger*


Johanna Blakely's TED talk: Lessons from Fashion's Free Culture

Every Project Has Its Marshmallow

In yet another fabulously stimulating TED talk (about 7 min), Tom Wujec details a team building exercise where groups of people are challenged to build the tallest structures they can out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, tape, string, and a single marshmallow that has to go on top. He says that most teams spend time planning, jockeying for power in the group, building the structure, and then at the last moment they put the marshmallow on top, only to have the weight of the marshmallow cause their structure to collapse. 

This exercise demonstrates the hidden assumptions of any project, and all projects, he says, have their marshmallow. Interestingly, it is also the kindergartners who excel at this exercise more than most, and the MBAs who do the worst. The kindergartners do well because they use trial and error, including the marshmallow the entire time, rather than only designing one structure that creates a crisis when it fails at the last minute. 

In my own projects, I have noticed that I will plan it out, spend a lot of time designing and planning and breaking things down into steps, and then there will be that nagging sense of something else, something I am missing. Now I have a name for it: The Marshmallow. I have had more projects become frustrations if not failures or fiascos because of those damned Marshmallows. 

More importantly, though, I now have a plan for how to deal with the Marshmallow. Iteration. Do it, and then do it again, and keep doing it, all the way through completion, and learn from what does not work. At the end of 2008, I looked back on my year and dubbed it the Year of the Failures. (It was not crushing. In fact, realizing it helped me to understand my intense feelings of frustration at the time.) And if 2008 was about failure, then 2009 was the Year of the Fiascoes. (Forget failure, I was operating on a much grander scale!)

Now, with the Marshmallow Paradigm, these were not Failures and Fiascoes. They were Iterations. And the thing with Iterations is, the learning curve can be nice and steep and eventually lead somewhere. That's what I'm talking about.   

TED: Mirror Neurons Make the World Make More Sense

VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization (7:44)

I often watch TED talks because I find them absolutely fascinating and uplifting. This one, however, did what the best of TED talks do, and blew my mind. He talks about mirror neurons in the brain, and how they enable us to see someone do something and learn it ourselves. If we see someone else being touched, a percentage of the neurons that would fire if it were happening to us fire anyway. The way we know it is not happening to us is because the messages from our skin and body are not correlating the message. If that part of our body is numbed, however, we think we actually ARE feeling it.

He even says at the end that this works for people who have phantom limb syndrome. If they are in pain in their phantom limb, they can watch that same body part being massaged on someone else and it eases their pain! This is incredible!

The healing potentials of this are mind-blowing. We could watch other people receiving massage and feel relaxed ourselves. I wonder if the efficacy is reduced when we watch a recording of it, or if it works equally well in person or on tape. It makes me wonder if all the images of violence that saturate our media get mirrored into our own bodies. I would not be surprised if that were the case. Watch enough murder-crime shows, and perhaps our body begins to mirror that death.

On the other side of things, though, being around affectionate people gives us affection, too. I clearly remember my parents often being physically affectionate toward each other throughout my childhood, and I wonder if that is one of the reasons I feel so well loved deep down in the core of me.

I also know that my Mom once told me about how as a kid she watched others diving off the diving board, and once she had watched enough, she went up and was able to do it the first time without anyone actually telling her how. I have noticed that I can learn physical actions the same way, specifically with dance or sports. If I see it enough, then my body and my muscles know how to do it. I thought it was an inherited ability, and perhaps the degree of it is, but now I know the neuroscience behind it and that all our brains are wired for that kind of mirroring.

So if I watch someone pound a beat on a drum, part of me is beating that drum. If I watch someone dancing around a fire, part of me is dancing around that fire. This helps explain why I feel so good after a drum circle even if my health did not allow me to participate directly.

Suddenly, the fandom around professional sports makes a little more sense, too.