Where Are You, and Why Does It Matter?
Now that I’ve let go of one project, I have time and mental energy freed up to once again thoroughly enjoy David Amerland ‘s Sunday Read, and today’s is wonderful as always.
As I wrote, though far less eloquently and with no quality references, which is one of David’s most impressive achievements IMO, in the article on my personal blog a year ago on What is Reality, Anyway? (https://www.chipspersonallog.com/what-is-reality/) what we perceive as “reality” is far more fluid and influenced by unconcsious factors than we are ever aware. This understanding was thoroughly reinforced by reading Daniel Kahneman’s landmark book Thinking, Fast & Slow (http://goo.gl/9MQoOm), and now I’m reading yet another book about the functioning of the mind and how meditation can be a powerful method for mindfulness, Waking Up by Sam Harris (http://goo.gl/4aCDHp).
Where you are, what you wear, what you see, smell, and hear….all these things have powerful influencing effects on what we think and feel, without us ever knowing. And by “Place” as is evidenced in the comments from Mark Traphagen and myself regarding social media platforms, we don’t necessarily have to mean physical places, but online and “mental locations.” Quite frankly, it’s one of the reasons I prefer Google+ – because the nature of the debate and discussion here is so much higher than any other platform I’ve experienced, my experience here lead to different thought patterns, expectations, and behaviours than on Facebook, for example.
Anyway…..just go read the original. David’s always much more eloquent than I, and the comments this morning already indicate that you’d better have a pretty big and strong cup of coffee to juice your brain up, wherever you are. 🙂
Originally shared by David Amerland
The Power of Place
In the Nixon vs Kennedy episode of Mad Men Bert Cooper makes reference to the Japanese saying: “A man is whatever room he is in.” It’s a pithy statement that encompasses a whole universe of Zen meaning. From “the clothes make the man” (which opens up all sorts of speculation about enclothed cognition: http://goo.gl/5x7KeO) to the fluidity of our ‘real’ states and, ultimately, the synthesis of what is “us” filtered by the “where” we are. The place our subconscious functions in.
I state subconscious because, apparently, the non-aware part of us can process eleven million pieces of information per second as opposed to the conscious part of us that tanks out at just 40 items per second (http://goo.gl/id2nwG). The ability of the ‘room’ we are in to shape us took real form in the infamous Stanford “Prison Experiment” in the 70s (http://goo.gl/FeCAX) where bright, promising students and their professor were transformed into beings possessed of a much less august dynamic and ruled by way baser imperatives.
Publicly aired instances like the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq (http://goo.gl/QBQoj) only help show that while we learn, as a species, we learn slowly and imperfectly and are doomed to keep making the same mistakes.
This is not really that new. In the 70s (again) James Wilson gave use the “Broken Windows Syndrome” – http://goo.gl/dAqT0 which, incidentally, can be extended into the social media world (http://goo.gl/si9arx) and helps explain some of the differences we see here, in Google+.
We are beginning to understand that while we can, indeed tire, of the “Madding Crowd” (http://goo.gl/PgQXL) and wish to withdraw into serene isolation the truth is that when alone our brain loses some of its ability to normalize and in cases of extreme, enforced, isolation we have seen how badly it is affected: http://goo.gl/iUWR0b.
The ability of ecosystems to include the most remote of factors which acquire significance the moment an imbalance is introduced is demonstrated in the case of “The Wolves that Changed Rivers” shared by Yonatan Zunger (http://goo.gl/fYQ9iG) and surfaced on my stream by todd l lebeauc.
A very similar example is evident in the way carnivores help trees without thorns, thrive: http://goo.gl/13uWAL, or the way the lowly ant is changing the planet: http://goo.gl/NWhPkq.
All of this means that the environment we are in, the ‘place’ we find ourselves functioning within, the ‘room’ that contains us, also defines part of our behaviour, informs the context of our awareness and shapes both our personality and sense of identity.
It also affects our ability to change things as Jacqueline Novogratz so aptly states in this TED Talk about immersion: http://goo.gl/CWcc93.
This is Fengshui (http://goo.gl/TFRa) for the mind. In the broader context we can see that the environments we create, both physical and digital, have a direct impact on ourselves and others and, through causal effects, have an impact on the world we live in and, most importantly, on the world we want to live in.
The places we are in, the rooms where we can be found are multiplying and with them so is our ability to morph, to change, adapting to the environment just as we affect it with our presence. Where all this might lead we can only imagine. At a stretch we might just succeed in creating a world without borders, a monoculture that serves our best interests and still allows us to retain our local colours. The worst is decidedly less rosy and way easier to imagine which is probably why it’s best to stay positive: http://goo.gl/Pq5c5z.
It’s Sunday everywhere so I hope your immediate environment, at the very least, serves coffee without limit and donuts, croissants and sugary treats without end. Have one awesome day, wherever you are.
#davidamerlandsundayread
PS. I am notifying here all those of you who asked to be in the Sunday Read Circle. Please let me know if that notification has come through this time. 🙂