GAME YOUR BRAIN

June 23rd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Terrence.  You can connect with Terrence on Twitter with the handle @inkwithterrence

You are a system.  Your brain, your body, and even your life, is an interconnected set of systems.

Mental health is highly correlated with a sense of agency, the sense that you can actually do something, that you can have an impact on the world around you.  Mental health declines when we lack a sense of this agency.  And what does that mean in terms of these ‘systems’?  It means that there’s a disconnect between your brain as a system and your larger life.  The two, as a larger system, aren’t functioning properly.  Many people point the finger outward, at the way the world is, and blame that system for the malfunction, the disconnect between their own self and their ability to have an effect.  But all this does is further relinquish a sense of agency. The system can’t really hear you.  Other people can, sure, and so such complaints might have a meaningful impact on the minds of others, but how does this effect your own sense of agency?  Can you see the impact?  Can you measure it?  Do you have evidence?  If you’re focus is on the so-called ‘system’ and it doesn’t seem to change, how does that inform your sense of agency?  Certainly, the result can easily be for the worse. 

In psychology, this leads to something called learned helplessness.  If a person, or even an animal like a dog, attempts to change their situation but their efforts have no effect, and this ineffective effort is taken enough times, the person will begin to believe that they can’t actually do anything.  When placed in a new environment where an impact can be made, such a person won’t even try.

Success, on a personal level, up to the level of society, boils down to gaming the system.  This phrase generally has a negative connotation associated with cheating and tricks.  Wikipedia has a definition ideally worded for this discussion.

Gaming the system can be defined as using the rules and procedures meant to protect a system to, instead, manipulate the system for a desired outcome.

There is nothing inherently malicious in this definition.  It’s certainly easy to see how this tactic is a good fit for nefarious aims, and we’re all quite certainly aware of how our larger shared systems have been gamed in ways that are perhaps unfair.  But now turn this mechanism back on to yourself.  If you consider yourself a system, defined by the way you habitually behave and think, encoded – we might say – by the structure of your brain, the layout of neurons and the way they are calibrated to habitually fire, then ask:  has your system been gamed?

Certainly.  The proof lies in the tension between the words influence and manipulate.  We’ve all been influenced by those around us, and certainly a great many of us would admit to being manipulated, be it by lovers or politicians or car salesmen.  But the two words mean the same thing, one is merely positive and the other is negative.  Both words define some sort of transitive effect that’s carried out on one party by another with the aim of creating a desired outcome.  Whether that outcome be to sell a broken car, or get a vote, or to avoid telling the truth about where exactly someone was last night and who they were with.

Notice for a moment that much the same thing is happening when someone is trying to tell a convincing lie, or someone is trying to tell the truth.  In both instances the effort is to convince the listener to  believe something in a certain way. 

Now consider this question: can a system game itself?

Time for a personal story – something that just about never happens on Tinkered Thinking.  Ever since I first read the book Siddhartha by Herman Hesse, I’ve had the desire to be a meditator.  And for all my effort, I couldn’t figure out how to make it a solid practice.  I tried many times over the course of many years until finally I stopped trying.  Despite the fact that countless people, just like me, had figured out how to make a practice of meditation over the millennia, somehow, I just couldn’t.  Does this sound familiar?  This was an instance of learned helplessness.  My efforts consistently failed to have the desired effect, and so, I stopped trying.  Seems sensible.  How many times can we remember hearing “well, if it’s not working out, then just stop, do something else.”  How many times a day is this the advice being given?  How many people are instead saying “well, if it’s possible, then there must be something you’re still not seeing about how it works.”

Many years later several key pieces of information fell into place that allowed me to game my brain.  The first is that structural changes in the brain as attributed to meditation are not detectable until after 3-4 months of daily practice.   What this means is that there’s just a bunch of grunt time that you’ve go to put in.  The next piece of information has to do with habit formation.  Doing something sporadically is the functional equivalent of not doing it at all.  On top of this, sporadic effort is far less likely to result in any tangible result, especially with something like meditation which takes a few months before anything worth much notice takes effect.  (That being said, as an aside there are recent clinical studies that show consistent meditation for just 10 days reduces stress by a noticeable percentage, and this percentage increases significantly by the time you hit 30 days in a row.)  Nonetheless, there appeared to me to be a virtuous fitting together of puzzle pieces.  By the time meditation starts having an effect on my brain, I’ll have already passed that critical habit threshold of doing something 30 days in a row.  The whole endeavor was suddenly much simpler:  I’m just going to sit here every day for at least 10 minutes and not worry about progress, or doing it correctly or anything.  I realized that I could game the system of my brain by focusing solely on the idea of creating a behavioral habit with the realization that if it just kept happening as a part of daily autopilot, then I would eventually reap the benefits.  It worked.

Something similar has happened with Tinkered Thinking. Today marks 800 episodes.  Over half a million words, churned out a little bit everyday.  It certainly seems like an impressive number, but somehow it has required surprisingly little effort.  How can that be?

The brain was gamed.  Tinkered Thinking became a habit, and now, the distinct behavior of a person sitting down to write for 20 or 30 minutes has become a default facet of each and every day.  800 episodes is just the compounded result of one thing done everyday. 

The effect of gaming systems in this way creates a rippling effect.  First you game your own brain, and begin to see better results in your day.  Then with that increased agency, your ability, probability and possibility of gaming a larger system in which you exist goes up.  Tinkered Thinking started off as a somewhat accidental gaming of one brain, and now the message of Tinkered Thinking has thousands of people paying attention, and the hope is that this content games their brains for the better.  We call this influence, but it’s my hope that Tinkered Thinking gives people the knowledge and the tools  and the curiosity to hopefully systematically manipulate and game their own brains, so that each and everyone of us can have a little more agency.  Not only does this make us have greater wellbeing, but it also means that our chances of having a meaningful impact on the world as a system, goes up.

It’s a stale platitude to say it all begins with one’s self.  It’s true, but the platitude is incomplete.  It implies some sort of magic combination of willpower and faith that somehow transforms you into this force for good, and that set up of expectation does little good.  It’s far more practical, and effective to look at yourself as a system, a system that can be gamed, a system that can game itself. 

That original description of gaming the system defines the use of rules and procedures that are meant to protect a system.  That’s a key right there.  Why do we as individuals have habits, both good and bad?  Well the brain can’t tell much difference between the good and the bad ones, it just does them because they make up the set of behaviors that have worked in the past.  One of the rules or procedures that is baked into our beings is this habit circuitry.  It may even be responsible for things as fundamental as breathing and eating – things which we do habitually, and which protect, support and maintain our system as a living organism. 

It’s this habit circuitry that is perhaps the most approachable and offers the greatest potential return.  It’s the thin edge of the wedge that helps us crack open the door to a better life.  But as with any system, there are many levers to pull and many buttons to press, and often we don’t hit upon the right combination for a while.  The same is true of our thoughts, many of which just aren’t helpful, and in order to game that mental world, in order to game your brain, you first have to start by tinkering with your thinking.  

AESTHETICS & FUNCTION

June 22nd, 2020

This episode is dedicated to the Twitter handle @BlkCab2016

What’s the difference between something that simply works, and something that works just as well but is also beautiful?

How much do aesthetics play in the efficaciousness of any given product, tool, or even an argument?

Most often we just need something that works, something that gets the job done.  Beauty is an afterthought.  A worthy example of this is ropework.  During the golden age of sail, the sort of ropework that evolved is truly a thing of beauty.  The far less august practice of macramé grew out of the ropework developed on ships.  When it comes to rope on a ship, there’s a simple, effective way to get it done, and then after that there is an endless number of ways to accomplish the same task in ways that are increasingly beautiful.  Naturally, these ways require time for the effort, something of which sailors at sea had an abundant amount. 

When the chores are done, beauty is the thing we seek.

As we learn a new skill, our efforts are almost never even concerned with the notion of performing that new skill beautifully.  When beginning, we just want to make something work.  We seek to gain the agency.  It’s only afterwards that our style of agency becomes a point of focus. 

Where exactly is the threshold that separates and joins these two realms of human endeavor?  What is the moment and point when a functioning tool begins to express a sense of beauty, designed or not?  At what point does the young sailor stare at the rope work and begin to see a larger pattern, that is then in the mind remixed, rearranged with a higher sense of design that doesn’t just achieve the original goal, but does so beautifully?

The realm of beauty is not separate from the function we design into our tools, our toys and our lives.  Beauty emerges as the original intent to creates reaches ever further toward the goal which it may have already achieved.  From there, questions of efficiency and improvement become investigations in elegance.  Beauty emerges as function is informed by aesthetics for the better, when the task is not merely done, but done well, and then done beautifully.

The best performers, athletes, sailors, carpenters, painters, dancers, all of these people achieve a better form of their art with an economy of effort, making their work look effortless.  And what does such a paring down of effort and energy achieve?  What is the grand point behind such aesthetic pursuits?

When an artist, or a craftsman has winnowed down their own abilities to bare essentials based on fundamentals, the mind and its energy is then free to abound upon new possibilities with fuel and focus that was once dedicated to sorting the mechanics of function.  Now the artist explores an insipient land. Function is no longer enough, and the task – to stay challenging cracks its own shell to reveal new aim, seeking forever more to refine itself down to an impossible point, always revealing more space to range, like the gap between the mathematician’s asymptote and the number it never reaches, seeing always with a wider imagination, a narrower, deeper realm to venture.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: GO FIGURE

June 21st, 2020

Lucilius was on the floor, looking at a set of instructions.  They weren’t clear, and he was having trouble figuring out exactly what the next step involved. It’s the fatal flaw with all instructions, Lucilius thought, they are always written by people who know how it’s supposed to go.  He flipped the instructions around and pointed out the spot he didn’t understand to the little boy he was watching over for the day.  The boy tilted his head at the picture and then looked at Lucilius’ progress.  He picked up model and then looked at the pieces strewn between the two of them.  Then he quickly gathered a few of them and put them together and snapped the combination onto Lucilius’ model.

“There,” the boy said, handing Lucilius back the model.

“How’d you do that?”

The boy shrugged his shoulders.  “I dunno,” he said as his attention drew back into his own project.

“Wait, wait,” Lucilius said.  He turned the model in his hands.  “That piece,” he said, “how did you know that one was in there?  You can’t see it from the angle of the picture in the instructions.”

The boy glanced at the piece Lucilius was pointing out.  “I dunno, how else would you make it that shape?”

Lucilius pondered the model and looked at the instructions again.  “Well, yes, of course you’re right, but there’s no way you could have figured that out while looking at the instructions, it doesn’t show that step.”

“Why did you think it would show you every step?”  The boy asked.

“Well, they’re instructions, that’s the whole point.  They show you each step.”

“Really?” the boy said.  He was genuinely curious with Lucilius’ description.  “I thought they were just to show you if you were on the right track or not while you figure it out.”

“Well yea,” Lucilius said, “that too.  But what good are they if they leave steps out?”

The boy was busy again, working on his own mode.  “But then where’s the fun?  What are you supposed to figure out?”

Lucilius mulled over the boy’s words, looking at his model and the steps in the instructions.  “And besides,” the boy said, “if you think the instructions are always supposed to show you every step then you’re definitely going to get stuck, and then you won’t know what to do because you don’t realize there’s something to figure out.  You just think there’s something wrong with the instructions.”

“So I’ve been thinking about instructions all wrong?”

“I think so,” said the boy.

“I guess there should be instructions for the instructions.”

The boy stopped with his tinkering and looked at Lucilius.  “Doesn’t that miss the point?”

Lucilius laughed, “yea, I guess.  Go figure.”

FLATTERY

June 20th, 2020

This episode is dedicated to Nick Hawkins who has been kind enough to share some of the content from Tinkered Thinking, and who has been a kind and generous companion in dialogue.

Some while ago Tinkered Thinking shared a quote online that is an essential principle for creativity.  It’s as follows:

“Good artists borrow, great artists steal.” – Tinkered Thinking

This is, of course, a lighthearted joke that utilizes the practice that it describes:  Tinkered Thinking didn’t come up with this combination of words, Picasso did.  Well, at least, that’s what’s popularly believed.  The actual origin of this idea seems to come from W. H. Davenport Adams in 1892, which may have influenced T.S. Eliot’s version of the quote.  In the end, by attributing this quote to yourself, it’s actually quite difficult to figure out who exactly you are stealing from.  The most accurate answer, which is also the least satisfying, is that you steal from a group of people who pondered the concept and batted the idea around in different variations.

The tense implication remains: is it art to steal?  Is that creativity?  And of course, there are the more difficult questions: is this good or bad?

Any moralistic question, like this last one, must be itself subjugated to some questions, principally: is this a question worth answering?  We may react quickly and say that all questions regarding right and wrong are essential and worth answering, but pause to genuinely wonder about this. 

Is it possible that we might create more harm by answering the question of whether something is good or bad?

The answer could be yes, which means that perhaps there are some moral questions that are simply less useful, and less interesting than others.

It’s not uncommon to see creators publicly bemoan the use of their material in contexts that don’t attribute the source of the material.  From a strictly material view point, this certainly seems justified.  But, there are deeper aspects of such an occasion that are far more important and almost always go overlooked.

What does it mean when your creation pops up in another place?  At base, this means that someone’s mind was so moved by what they encountered, that the content replicated.  That doesn’t happen with everything.  In fact, if you consider the sheer volume of content that we are inundated with, it’s amazing that it happens at all.  The first, and perhaps only conclusion we should draw from this situation is that the material is valuable.  Someone saw enough worth in it to spread it.  The concept of ownership might seem like it’s in conflict with this notion of valuable but again, we must ask: is such a connection helpful or useful?  Such a question makes more sense if someone steals your car.  In that case you’ve actually lost something.  And with this juxtaposition we get at the heart of the difference.  If someone replicates your work at no clear material cost to you, then this person has actually done you a favor, especially if your work is based in ideas.  Anyone who tinkers with ideas and seeks to be genuine and authentic about the meaning and value of such ideas must come to the question of effectiveness, or rather:

are your ideas working?

Replication, from a memetic standpoint, is the first sign that an idea may be effective.  If the idea readily finds a welcoming home in the minds of other people, then you might be on to something.  It might not actually be something good, as bad ideas can spread just as much as good ones, but the ability for an idea to spread is necessary for good ideas to have a larger impact – there’s just no way to get around that fact.  Point is, at the end of the day, if your material shows up somewhere else, then you’re on to something.

There’s also the issue of attention, and how we use it.  If someone else finds your material valuable, then it means you are capable of creating good material.  So are you going to waste time getting hung up on issues of ownership, credit and arguments that are likely to cause more harm than good… or are you going to spend that time and attention creating more?  Case in point:  at the urging of a disgruntled confidant Tinkered Thinking reached out to someone who was kind enough, and inspired enough to share some of the material from Tinkered Thinking, but this was attempted in a way that was intended to be gentle and curious, no more.  What resulted was an incredibly generous conversation.  Tinkered Thinking has clearly found a true friend.  Now observe, would this outcome still occurred if Tinkered Thinking had reacted with frustration and anger?  It’s entirely appropriate that the outcome could have been far worse.  In addition, the conversation helped generate this episode which is humbly, and gratefully dedicated to this companion in conversation.

And that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day, generosity, or rather: what we generate.

An authentic creator strives just to generate.  If people find our creations valuable, then generosity is likely to be the response, in the long term.

It’s a sign of deep weakness to get bent out of shape over things such as content appropriation.  Not only is it possible that we might be completely wrong about the intention, but such a reaction totally glosses over the important implication that our work is good.

There is only one appropriate response that honors the value of our content, and that reaction is

appreciation.

PUT A BOW ON IT

June 19th, 2020

Presentation is everything.  Or so they say.  It is fundamentally wrong to concentrate only on appearances, and this is exactly what presentation is: optics.  The confusion lies in the unseen, behind the presentation, where the real substance is, or isn’t.

First, something is far less likely to sell if the optics are bad.  We are a species that is vision primary.  For better or worse.  And for all your internet sales gurus and side hustle maniacs, this translates into the idea that you can make a living just by presenting a good looking image.  Some even make the deception work: selling snake-oil is as old as the invention of lying.

The puny kernel of truth that can be extracted from such nonsense is that style, design, aesthetics, and the overall optics of a thing makes it more likely that we will have some engagement, and engagement is required if anyone is going to discover the real substance of what’s on offer.  The hollow platitude presentation is everything, would make better sense with more substance in the sentence: presentation makes everything more approachable.  If the final result of all our work isn’t approachable, then it may have all been for nothing, making presentation everything.

We may spend 99% of our time and effort getting something to work, and be ready to call it a day, ship it, and wipe our hands of the project.  But all that work might be for nothing if no none engages with it.  And this is why it can be so useful to put a bow on it.

This phrase is actually used in the opposite manner.  We talk about ‘putting a bow on it’ when it’s clearly done and time to move on.  It’s the equivalent of “you’re done, let’s go.”  Strangely, the phrase doesn’t even stand by it’s own directive.  Put a bow on it, literally means: take that last extra step to make it look pretty, presentable, and clearly a gift.

There is something somewhat anticlimactic about an unwrapped gift, as though it lacks the signal of giving.  It’s the complement to the worse twin of a beautifully wrapped box that is empty, though while the first still fulfills it’s mission, this latter twin truly is a deception: a prank at the very best, a straight up con at the very worst.

We aren’t actually done when it’s time to put a bow on it.  Instead, the time has come to switch gears, and attempt to communicate genuinely just how much effort and love has gone into the substance of the product or gift.

Think about what it’s like to receive a beautifully wrapped gift, something that looks so good you don’t even want to unwrap it.  As creators we must seek to create a situation where the gift we give is a cake that’s eaten and kept forever: we should aim to produce something beautiful, that lives up to its own aesthetics.