Rowan's Future of Choice

Put your mind to work without thinking about it

Roger C. Parker at Squidoo makes a good suggestion for writing a newsletter that could be applied to any project:

Experience has shown that, before creating the first issue of your monthly One-Page Newsletter, you should identify the topics of your first 12 issues. Identifying the titles of upcoming topics puts your mind to work. While sleeping and driving, your mind will be unconsciously gathering ideas for use in the future issues. As a result, when you sit down to prepare each issue, you'll be amazed at how much work has already been done!

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Setting aside a place to laugh and talk, alone

I wrote recently that our intentions before making a decision are more important than the decision itself.

Metaphorically, our intentions and ultimate decisions are a house of many rooms, just as our sub-conscious minds have many compartments and passageways. It is important that at least one of these places is ours alone, a room where our thoughts and feelings are free to mingle, a refuge from our conscious and public world.

From Michel Montaigne, the French writer who died in 1592:

"We should set aside a room, just for ourselves, at the back of the shop, keeping it entirely free and establishing there our true liberty, our principal solitude and asylum. Within it our normal conversation should be of ourselves, with ourselves, so privy that no commerce or communication with the outside world should find a place there; there we should talk and laugh as though we had no wife or children, no possessions, no followers, no menservants, so that when the occasion arises that we must lose them it should not be a new experience to do without them. We have a soul able to turn in on herself; she can keep herself company; she has the wherewithal to attack, to defend, to receive and to give."  -- Montaigne, On Solitude
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Thanks to Caterina Fake for posting this excerpt from an essay by Montaigne; Picasso reproduction.

Brain scans begin to reveal our future decisions

Our brains are incredibly busy processing thoughts and feelings without our awareness or conscious direction. We have either known or suspected this forever.

In attempting to describe this hidden and indescribable world we have invented words and concepts such as 'mind' and 'pre-conscious.' There is no map to guide us. Scientists have called it 'terra incognito.' Until now.

Researcher John-Dylan Haynes and his colleagues are using new scanning technologies to explore the birth and journey of covert intentions deep in our brains, along the path to public choices and actions, which eventually incubate new intentions and choices.

The implications are stunning.

It has never before been possible to read out of brain activity how a person has decided to act in the future.

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Max Planck Society press release; full report in Current Biology, Reading Hidden Intentions in the Human Brain; Seth Godin and his gray goo here.

 

Stop paying so much attention

Have you ever put off something distasteful until the last minute? Have you ever gone ahead with something painful "just to get it over with?" I do both.

Decision theory attributes a value to the time between the decision point and the distasteful event, calling it--rather dryly, the “cost of waiting.”

When we are apprehensive about such decisions, we experience dread, which occurs in a different part of the brain from fear or anxiety. New research using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) suggests that the attention paid during the waiting time is distinct from the anxiety or fear we feel about the coming event. And, there may be something we can do about it.

"The dread associated with things like medical procedures or public speaking, while real, can probably be alleviated by diverting one's attention during the waiting period," says [study author] Dr. Berns.

I hate to come off sounding too much like Woody Allen, but it seems to me we live in almost constant dread of something: the dentist, terrorist attacks, public embarrassment.  Some of us are effected more than others.

In addition to diverting our attention, if we could learn to either shorten the waiting time, or lessen the emotional costs of attention, we might lead much happier and smoother lives.
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Medical News Today story; Science Magazine abstracts; "Dread and Resignation" sculpture