William Mortensen: The Anti-Christ of American Photography?

Photographer Ansel Adams, whose beautiful black and white landscapes full of mountains still grace both museum and office walls, called fellow photographer William Mortensen “the anti-Christ” for what he did to the art of photography. Mortensen inspired a great passion in his near-contemporary Adams thanks to the Pictorialism of his images, whose illusions and painterly gestures offered a devilish alternative to Adams’ “straight,” realistic photography. In the exhibition William Mortensen: American Grotesque , which runs through November 30, 2014 at Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, Ansel Adams worst nightmare comes true, as his personal “anti-Christ” rises from the grave of unfair neglect to collect fresh converts to the eerie beauty of his decades-before-their-time artistry.

Mortensen’s path to becoming the “father of Pictorialism” in American photography began with his training as a painter at The Art Student’s League in New York after serving in World War I. In 1920, Mortensen traveled to Greece, Italy, Egypt, and Constantinople to see the old world as well as the Old Masters, who would be a lasting influence on and ideal of his photography. Upon his return, a friend asked him to escort his teenage sister to Hollywood and, she hoped, a career in the movies. That friend’s sister was Fay Wray, who after a decade of bit parts found lasting fame as the object of King Kong’s affections in 1933. Mortensen initially found work as a gardener in Hollywood before a chance encounter with director Cecil B. DeMille led to a job in the studios.

Mortensen quickly rose in the ranks from set mask maker (examples of which appear in the exhibition) to still photographer of DeMille’s epics. While other still photographers would wait until the shooting stopped and ask the actors to restage the scene, Mortensen took his photographs during the shooting, capturing the sense of movement amidst epic proportions of such movies as DeMille’s 1927 film The King of Kings . DeMille’s sprawling, prop-laden sets became Mortensen’s playground as he experimented with his still camera to create his earliest photographs full of fantasy and fantastic beauty.

With the portraitist approach of the Old Masters in mind, Mortensen began taking portraits of the elite of early Hollywood: Norma Shearer, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, Marlene Dietrich, and others. Vanity Fair published many of Mortensen’s glamour shots of the stars, making him a key cog in the mythologizing machine of the movie industry. In many ways, Mortensen’s career parallels the history of the silent film as his Pictorialism perfectly matched the romanticism and fantasy that dominated movies of the 1920s. As an old documentary on Mortensen suggests, the heights of the macabre in many 1920s films, as epitomized by director Tod Browning’s work with legendary horror actor Lon Chaney, may have inspired the grotesque images Mortensen staged with costumes and makeup.

Similarly, the sexual freedom of 1920s Pre-Code Hollywood found its way into Mortensen’s nudes, many of which incorporated in tandem elements of the macabre. Mortensen’s Untitled (detail shown above) photo of two nude women from 1926 or 1927 from his series "A Pictorial Compendium of Witchcraft" exemplifies this still startlingly fresh but then deeply controversial aspect of Mortensen’s work. The models in these images seem as modern as anything in contemporary advertising, yet this exhibition comes on the half century anniversary of Mortensen’s death. What today’s photographers do through digital manipulation, Mortensen pioneered with texture screens and other hands-on techniques in the darkroom.

Truly before his time in technique as well as subject matter, despite being deeply steeped in art history, Mortensen shocked many with these highly sexual, occult photographs. Among the shocked were Fay Wray’s mother, who upon a visit in 1931 to Mortensen’s studio in Hollywood saw these nudes (some of which may have included Fay herself). When Mrs. Wray vowed to drag her daughter back to the safety and morality of Utah as King Kong was in mid-production, studio executives kept their leading lady in Hollywood by giving in to Mrs. Wray’s demand for Mortensen to be fired. Severed from Hollywood, Mortensen slipped into obscurity, now rejected both by the film industry and the photographic community led by Adams and other anti-Pictorialists. In 1936, Mortensen staged a photo simply titled L’Amour in which an amorous ape drools over a helpless, half-naked woman stretched on the ground before him—a King Kong in miniature and perhaps a personally defiant gesture towards Hollywood, Mrs. Wray, and all those who Puritanically rejected his work while hypocritically profiting from the combination of sex and violence that survived the Hays Code.

Despite these setbacks, Mortensen continued to take his type of pictures and even opened up his own school of photography, which drew in thousands of students—amateurs and professionals—over the years, mostly through the beguiling power of his photographs. Unfortunately, lasting damage had been done. As A.D. Coleman writes in his introduction to the exhibition’s catalog, “Anathematized, ostracized, and eventually purged from the dominant narratives of 20^th-century photography due to the biases of a small but influential cluster of historians, curators, and photographers, Mortensen plunged into an obscurity so deep that by 1980 most considered him unworthy of even a footnote.” Factoring in Mortensen’s own uncompromising ruthlessness that drove him to take a razor to any photograph below his exacting standards and, as Coleman puts it “the apparently haphazard dispersal of his archive… scattered and, for the most part, presumed lost,” William Mortensen: American Grotesque emerges not only as a valuable correction to an unjust error, but also a miraculous resurrection from the critical graveyard.

In 1932, Mortensen titled a photograph Human Relations. It shows a bejeweled arm reaching up and gouging out the eyes from a defenseless head. “Hatred is frequently the emotion that lies behind grotesque art,” Mortensen later said of this possible self-portrait. Referring to the Great Depression then ravaging America when he made that image, Mortensen continued, “These were the days when stocks were stopping dividends, when lives of thrift and industry were being wiped out by the foreclosing of mortgages and the closing of banks… Everywhere there was the spirit of ‘Take what you can, and to hell with your neighbor.’ Those who were strong seemed to be, in sheer wantonness, gouging the eyes of humanity.” Ansel Adams, Hollywood, and other power players stuck a finger in Mortensen’s artistic eye long ago, but now, 50 years after his death, William Mortensen: American Grotesque challenges us to open our eyes to an artist whose honesty and humanity allowed him to picture a dark and ugly side of life inseparable from its beauty that others refused to acknowledge.

[Image: William Mortensen. Untitled (detail), c 1926-1927. From the series "A Pictorial Compendium of Witchcraft." Courtesy The Museum of Everything, London, UK, via Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.]

[Many thanks to Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, for providing me with the image above and other press materials related to the exhibition, William Mortensen: American Grotesque , which runs through November 30, 2014.]

Cesar Chavez: "Farm workers are not beasts of burden to be used and discarded."

Cesar Chavez (1927-1993) was a Mexican-American labor leader and civil rights activist who co-founded the United Farm Workers of America in 1952. He oversaw numerous strikes and boycotts, including the famous Salad Bowl Strike of 1970-71, the largest of its kind in U.S. history. Chavez' insistence on nonviolent tactics and community service led to national support for his and the farm workers' plight. His legacy as a Latin-American folk hero has been solidified since his death in 1993. Many schools, streets, and and parks across the country now bear his name. The states of California, Colorado, and Texas observe his birthday, March 31, as Cesar Chavez Day.

Cesar Chavez described his life's work in his "What the Future Holds" speech from 1984:

"All my life, I have been driven by one dream, one goal, one vision: to overthrow a farm labor system in this nation that treats farm workers as if they were not important human beings. Farm workers are not agricultural implements; they are not beasts of burden to be used and discarded."

(h/t Wikiquote)

Why We're So Easily Manipulated by Political Appeals to Fear

Be afraid. Be VERY afraid! Of Ebola. Of ISIS. Of immigrants threatening to bring both threats across a porous border that can’t be protected by a President who can’t even protect his own house. Be afraid! Vote Republican.

As the midterm elections near, the latest version of “they can’t keep you safe, so vote for me” is showing up in campaign ads and conservative commentaries. It’s just the latest in a long tradition of political fear mongering that has proven effective in swaying voters. In 1964 Lyndon Johnson’s 1964 Daisy ad promoted the fear that Barry Goldwater would lead the country to nuclear holocaust; Jimmy Carter’s ads in 1980 featured people-on-the-street saying “Reagan scares me.” George Bush’s 1988 ad suggested that a president Michael Dukakis would give all the Willie Hortons in prison weekend passes to go rape and pillage.

It’s easy to see how excessive and manipulative these claims are, so easy you’d think people would not be so readily taken in. But research on human cognition and the psychology of risk perception offers several explanations for why these campaigns work.

The first is that Ambrose Bierce was right when he wrote in the Devil’s Dictionary (paraphrasing) “the brain is only the organ with which we think we think.” As research in human cognition has established, most of what the brain does that turns into our judgments and behaviors happens subconsciously and is based as much as or more on emotion and instinct than on cold hard logic. And Job One for all those instincts is survival. The brain’s chief purpose, from the moment you get out of bed in the morning, is to get you safely to bed at night, not to get good grades or win Nobel prizes.

So we are constantly on the lookout for signs of danger. And cognition research has found that we are quick to judge those signs. We don’t take the time to get all the facts and think things through. We use a number of mental shortcuts to rapidly turn a few initial hints into snap judgments about whether something feels risky. One of those shortcuts is called “the availability heuristic.” The more available something is to our consciousness - the more aware of it we are - the more emotional weight it is likely to carry. Bogeymen in the news feel like bigger bogeymen.

Risk perception research by Paul Slovic and others has found that another psychological factor has a far more profound effect than availability on how worried we are, and this one has been spreading worry deep and wide in America for years. In a word, the issue is control. Do we feel like we can do what we need to do to keep ourselves safe? Tens of millions of Americans don’t.

But it’s not a matter of being able to keep ourselves safe from Ebola or ISIS. The real threat eating at a majority of Americans is from falling behind financially and losing the economic capacity to control our lives and protect ourselves. A Pew Survey last month found that three Americans in four say economic conditions are either only fair or poor. One in five thinks things are getting worse. Forty-five percent have been unable to pay doctor bills or rent or had trouble with credit agencies. Fifty-six percent of Americans feel they are falling behind financially. (Views of Job Market Tick Up, No Rise in Economic Optimism)

That feeling of economic pessimism, of falling behind, of not being able to pay the bills or buy groceries or fix the car or afford insurance or send your kids to college or even just enjoy an occasional night out for dinner at Denny’s…that’s the feeling of losing control…over your welfare, your safety, your future.

And one of the responses to that threatening sense of powerlessness is to turn to your tribe. Humans are social animals. We instinctively depend on each other for safety and protection. The more threatened we feel as individuals, the more we look to our tribe to provide a sense of power and control that we have in a group but lack as individuals. And one of the ways we turn to our tribe for protection is by adopting and espousing the tribe’s beliefs, so the others in the tribe consider us as members in good standing.

And this circles us back to the gullibility we have for partisan appeals to fear. Conservative Republicans who want to be considered members in good standing and not rejected as RINOs – Republicans in Name Only – are more likely to buy the current fear sales pitch that Democrats can’t keep them safe; from Ebola, or ISIS, or immigrants, or anything. Democrats in the 60’s and 80’s were ready to believe that Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan were ready to start nuclear war. This phenomenon is absolutely bipartisan. Buying into the fear beliefs of the tribe is a way to feel safe.

So the partisan nature of the current Republican fear appeal magnifies its effectiveness, by tapping into not only our innate sensitivity to anything that might be a threat and our greater sensitivity to threats making news, but to our instinct to circle the tribal wagons to protect ourselves when we feel like we can’t protect ourselves as individuals.

Fear is good. It helps keeps us alive. And most of the time we get things right. But oh how the instinctive nature of our risk perception system makes us gullible, manipulable, simple-minded fish chasing the shiny false lure of safety. We might make smarter choices if we are wary of that lure when we step into the voting booth.

You Have More Willpower Than You Think

One of the trendiest ideas in popular psychology in the last few years has been that of “ego depletion” or willpower as a limited resource. Many different books have been written on the topic, with the most recent being field luminary Roy Baumeister’s magnum opus on the topic, aptly entitled “Willpower: Rediscovering the Greatest Human Strength”.

For reasons varied and unknown, the idea of mental capacities as limited and expendable has been promptly and enthusiastically taken up by our society in recent history. After all, it’s a lot easier to feel better about cheating on our diets, or yelling out in frustration at the end of a long day at work, when we have “scientific justification” for being so rash. In addition, most of us spend a non trivial portion of our days mentally accounting for our money – judging the appropriateness of getting the twenty dollar steak at dinner instead of the eight dollar burger, and so on. We’re familiar, maybe too much so, with the bank account metaphor, and apply it liberally throughout our cognitive lives.

Thus, because of a variety of coalescing factors, we have gotten to the point where we sell ourselves short – seeing ourselves as limited, even weak, creatures incapable of saying no and exerting self control. Life, then, is not a robust creation full of adaptive agency but, rather, a precarious kluge ready to break down to temptation at any moment.

But, as is the case in science, not all findings are truths. Recent studies have failed to replicate the finding that willpower is, indeed, a limited resource. Other research, done in 2013 by Carol Dweck and colleagues, has shown that one’s beliefs about willpower affect how much willpower one has. Far from being a limiting factor, willpower seems to be a reflection of one’s beliefs and biology. Beliefs are things, and they can change how we survive and thrive within the world. If you see yourself as containing a limited amount of self control, it’s unlikely that you’ll make the extra effort to forgo desert, or hit the gym, since you’ll “burn out anyways”.

Even though a substantial amount of research has challenged the idea of limited willpower, millions of people throughout the world have incorporated this spurious idea into their mental models of themselves and people in general. In addition, many different products and policies have been created with this “fundamental fact about the human brain” in mind. This is an unfortunate feature of the popular psychology industry, which turns almost every single surprising research area or finding into an easy-to-digest book with an (often) counterintuitive revelation. However, science is a process that is ever refining and destroying itself – collecting more observations and building a better and better model of the world. Scientists are fairly good at continually updating their understandings of these things. But how many regular consumers and book readers are now going to read an article of book that contradicts what they learned from “that other science book on willpower”? They probably won’t; and that’s a shame. This means that they’ll be acting in the world with a woefully inaccurate model of how they work and what they’re capable of. There is no greater shackle than a false idea and, as the willpower field shows, ideas once “true” can become questionable, even false, in due time.

The key is to stay up to date. Otherwise, we may see ourselves as limited beings, who struggle to avoid eating cupcakes, rather than beings of some agency that never tire from such trivial exertions. Maybe at that point we’ll dream a bit bigger and spend our time thinking about how to change the world, or follow our passions, instead of sighing at the end of a long, exhausting day of stopping ourselves from checking Facebook and eating that extra slice of pizza.

Image:Nuggets4Nobles

Performance Art and Modern Political Protest

“War is simply a continuation of political intercourse, with the addition of other means,” Carl von Clausewitz wrote in his famous book on battle strategy, On War . Many misquote that saying more pithily as “War is politics by other means,” but the idea that politics plays out on different battlefields remains true. Several recent performance pieces responding to political issues in America make a case for performance art as politics by other means, too. From Dread Scott's performance On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide (shown above) tackling the long history and sad continuation of racism in America to Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight challenging America, especially American colleges, to address the issue of rape, performance artists are creating powerfully direct pieces that visualize and humanize sometimes faceless and forgotten issues.

The biggest complaints about performance art usually center on relevance and relatability. Performance art can often be too smart for its own good, literally shrinking the potential audience conceptually before the show even starts. Take, for example, the Guggenheim’s upcoming series of performance art performances collected under the title “Blood Makes Noise.” Leading off “this series of intimate performances explor[ing] the interrelations between corporeal presence, sculptural objects, and sonic space,” Lesley Flanigan plays “on minimal electronic instruments she builds from speakers and microphones” to “accumulate[] layers of feedback and vocalization to create a physical field of noise.” Next, Holly Herndon “map[s] a sonic territory that hovers between bodily experience and the virtual realm of computer technology,” before Naama Tsabar ends by “challeng[ing] conventions of museum display while drawing on a range of cultural references, from Post-Minimalist art to arena rock music.”

Let me first say that I, personally, would love to watch these artists in “Blood Makes Noise,” but I’ll be the first to admit that I may not be the typical audience member. Part of the problem in selling such performances lies in the hyperbolic excesses of typical “artspeak,” that MFA-driven argot of art intelligentsia, but a bigger part rests in the near-total absence of topical interest in “the interrelations between corporeal presence, sculptural objects, and sonic space.” Why are such shows being staged right now and right here? Bottom line—why should we care? The powerfully political and timely topical performance art that’s recently hit the headlines may not satisfy critical appetites, but it feeds a more populist, more general hunger for art that addresses the right now and the right here.

In On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide , performance artists Dread Scott restaged the iconic imagery of the 1963 Civil Rights conflicts in Birmingham, Alabama, when the infamous "Bull" Connor ordered high-powered fire hoses and attack dogs to be set upon the peaceful African-American protesters. The pictures capturing those acts soon spread across the country and the world, essentially guilting the American government into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 one year later. In Dread Scott’s version, retired firefighter John Riker trains a fire hose (set to a lower pressure for safety) on the artist as he attempts to walk forward with hands raised in surrender—another allusion, but this time to the shooting of Michael Brown and resulting civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri (shown above; more photos of the performance can be seen here).

Even Dread Scott’s name alludes to America’s troubled racial past by referencing the Dred Scott of the notorious “Dred Scott Decision” that tightened the grip of slavery on American democracy and contributed to the eventual Civil War. But the artist puns on the first name by accentuating the “dread” in the “Dred Scott Decision” and suggesting that African-Americans still dread many aspects of life in America a century and a half after the end of slavery. Scott’s targeted other types of inequality in America beyond race. In 2010’s Money to Burn, Scott occupied Wall Street and began burning small bills while encouraging others to follow suit. “The transgressive act of burning my own money alluded to the absurdity of a system based on profit,” the artist explained. “It’s crazy to burn money but it is the height of rationality to have a market where billions can vanish.” The cruel irony of history repeating itself, whether it be racial frictions or bank bailouts, isn’t lost on Scott and drives the interest behind his performances.

Similarly, Columbia University studio art major Emma Sulkowicz’s Mattress Performance: Carry That Weight captures the interest of a broad audience in a way that most art fails to do today. The victim of a sexual assault in her own dorm room bed, Sulkowicz decided at the beginning of the fall semester to carry her mattress around until the man who raped her left Columbia’s campus. While moving a mattress over the summer break, Sulkowicz “thought about how I was raped in my own bed at Columbia; and how the mattress represents a private place where a lot of your intimate life happens; and how I have brought my life out in front for the public to see; and the act of bringing something private and intimate out into the public mirrors the way my life has been.”

The fact that Columbia’s administration failed to discipline Sulkowicz’s attacker and her performance piece soon became a larger discussion of the issue of sexual assault both in colleges and American in general. Her solo performance piece soon became part of a larger protest. Sulkowicz soon found others literally assisting her in her performance. As one of the ground rules for her piece, Sulkowicz refuses to ask for help carrying the mattress, but she will accept help from others who offer. Other women and men soon began to participate in Sulkowicz’s now weeks-long performance, eventually forming the student group “Carry The Weight Together.” Breaking the frightened silence of the victims and complicit silence of authorities, Sulkowicz’s performance piece has struck a chord that may finally change the culture that permits sexual assaults to happen and to go unpunished.

“I make revolutionary art to propel history forward,” Dread Scott begins his artist’s statement. This new kind of overtly political performance art by Scott, Sulkowicz, and others “propels history forward” by giving tangible form to the senselessly cyclical nature of American racial and sexual politics. Sulkowicz credits as influences pioneering performance artists Tehching Hsieh (whose works address enduring imprisonment and homelessness) and Chris Burden (whose 1975 piece titled simply Doomed addressed the essence of human compassion and its absence), so political performance art is nothing new. What sets these pieces and artists apart is a new willingness to make their art unashamedly apolitical and to speak loud and clear (blessedly free of “artspeak”) to issues that concern not just specific groups but ultimately all of us. If artists stop making such art and we stop paying attention, then we may truly be doomed.

[Image: Dread Scott's performance On the Impossibility of Freedom in a Country Founded on Slavery and Genocide , which took place underneath the Manhattan bridge in DUMBO on Tuesday, October 7th. ©2014 Mark Von Holden/Mark Von Holden Photography. All Rights Reserved. Courtesy of More Art.]

[Many thanks to More Art for providing the image above.]

How to Boost Your Memory While You Sleep

At certain points during, our brain works to sift through the day's events and determine which memories were valuable enough to keep. As researchers have found, there are ways to subconsciously affect this process and prioritize certain memories over others. As Erin Brodwin writes at Business Insider, listening to certain sounds while you sleep can help strengthen your ability to learn a new language, memorize a piece of music, or recall specific events from the previous day.

Brodwin details several studies that proved this fact. In one, German speakers learning Dutch demonstrated a heightened ability to memorize vocabulary words when those particular words were played to them while they slept. A similar study found that subjects taught to play music in a manner similar to the video game Guitar Hero performed better after a nap during which the tune was played in the room. A third study showed that when you associate a sound with an act, such as a bell's "ding" when placing an object on a shelf, hearing that sound while you sleep will boost your ability to remember where you placed the object.

Of note: Brodwin explains that it's not just the sense of hearing that can help you augment your memory; the sense of smell has a similar effect.

Read more at Business Insider

Photo credit: AntonioDiaz / Shutterstock

In the following clip, DSN expert Michio Kaku discusses the science of sleep, focusing in particular on dreams:

How Much Violence Is Being Committed In Your Name?

My neighborhood is a tranquil place—the sort of area where you watch images of war and oppression from far away. Those columns of black smoke, the men riding by with their Kalashnikovs at at the ready, seem to come from another world. And, as always in such situations, such unfamiliar people are easily made to feel as if they are Not Like Us. We, after all, get into political shouting matches and root for opposing teams. They shoot and bomb each other. What is wrong with such people? But the differences between a peaceful street in, say, Belgium and a war-torn street in Iraq are deceptive. We live in a single world of organized mayhem. It's just that those of us who live in comfortable local circumstances are separated from all the actual and potential brutality that is required to maintain our quiet oases.

How to express this, and analyze it? Perhaps we could use data to put all the world's collective violence—the work of armies, police forces, bandits, guerrilla bands, terrorists and other any other organization that wields lethal force—on a single scale. A single metric might be the amount that any population spends, per person, on committing violence in the name of that population. I'll take myself as an example. I live in New York City. So, let's take the annual budget of the police force here. In 2014 its budget (pdf) was $4.75 billion. Of course, most of that money was spent on non-violent activities, like detective work, traffic enforcement, school safety, refurbishing dowdy buildings and so on and on. Let's assume for the sake of argument that only 10 percent of the budget actually supports violence—acts in which the police beat, choke, taze, shoot or otherwise hurt people (or seriously threaten to do so). If that's correct, that's $460 million, divided by 8 million people, or a little less than $60 a year per person.

In addition, according to this report (pdf) New York state spent another $5 billion in 2013-2014 on public safety—state troopers, prison guards, the national guard, anti-terrorism investigators, and so on. This spending covered disaster preparedness and relief, and of course much of the work of these units of government does not involve hurting others (the state's public-safety budget also includes all it does to help veterans). So again let's assume 90 percent of the money does not buy bullets or tasers or pay for time spent inflicting harm on others. That leaves $500 million, divided by 19.65 million New York State residents, or $25 per person spent for violent acts or the credible threat of violent acts.

Now we come to the big, ahem, guns. The United States defense budget for the coming fiscal year is $495.6 billion. Divided by a population of 317 million, that's roughly $1,500 per person. But, again, defense spending encompasses disaster relief, basic scientific research, medical care, pensions—all manner of activities that do not involve firing bullets into people or dropping bombs on them. Let's take, again, my quite rough guess that only 10 percent of spending supports organized lethality. That's $150 per person on the Federal level.

According to this very rough guess, them, as I walk down my peaceful Brooklyn street, watching the children play without a care, various levels of government that represent me are spending about $240 a year—or $20 a month—on me alone, to pay for violent acts. To buy and maintain drones and missiles, fighter jets and battleships, sniper rifles and rocket-propelled grenades, rifles and service revolvers, bullets, tasers, pepper spray, tasers and other tools of organized lethality. And, of course, for the pay and maintenance of the people who use them. For my family of three, this collective commitment to violence costs $60 a month.

Now, this calculation is a thought experiment. An analysis based on really careful parsing of government spending might come out lower, or higher, by a lot. Moreover, I haven't allowed for the fact that within the nation police don't protect all 317 million Americans equally. The police in any given area are spending their time protecting some people against others. That this line of protection is heavily racialized is increasingly obvious. How to work that fact into the estimates is not clear to me.

But more accurate figures, whatever they might come to, would still represent a very large amount of annual spending for the purpose of either threatening or inflicting injury on people all over the world, from Raqqa to Rikers. I don't write this to argue that all of those people are innocent victims, or that we should never do violence. But we should face up to the world we really live in, and the things that are done in it, in our name. We should not be like the young student in Tolstoy's After the Dance , content with life and full of romantic notions, because he doesn't see the brutality all around him. The angry man in the Mad Max truck on the evening news is no alien. In a bloody, angry world, we are all playing the same game.

Illustration: Scene from After the Dance, via Wikimedia.

Follow me on Twitter: @davidberreby

On This Day in 1356, a Major Earthquake Destroyed the Town of Basel, Switzerland

Major seismic activity is rare in the areas of Europe north of the Alps, yet on this date in 1356, a huge earthquake decimated the region and left the Swiss town of Basel in ruins. Over a thousand people perished in the destruction. Every church within 30 km of Basel was reduced to rubble. It's said the quake could be felt as far as Paris.

As Switzerland sits upon an active fault, the country has spent years preparing for a potential catastrophic quake. A major geothermal project was abandoned a few years back for cautionary reasons amidst fears of unwanted seismic repercussions. Switzerland's earthquake risk is considered average to moderate relative to other seismically volatile world regions.

The above image is the work of 19th-century Swiss painter Karl Jauslin, who has been written about plenty in the German language yet is virtually unknown in the English-speaking world. Jauslin's body of work consisted mostly of paintings depicting notable events in Swiss history. I've included a few below.

The Assassination of Swiss Reformation Leader Huldrych Zwingli in 1531

The 1339 Siege of Solothurn

The 1386 Battle of Sempach

For more of Jauslin's work, visit his page on WikiCommons.

Michio Kaku on Lucid Dreaming

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Neuroscience Proves (However Reluctantly) That We Have Free Will

Recent discoveries in neurology and quantum physics offer opposing support for the two traditional camps in the free will debate. On one hand, our brain is affected by causal events and the degree to which we think we control our mental processes is greatly exaggerated. On the other hand, random fluctuations in the realm of elementary particles provides an out from the causal chain.

In most respects, neurology's attack on free will seems to have won the day, not the least reason being that randomness is a far cry from making free and intentioned decisions. But still, philosopher and DSN expert Daniel Dennett recently outlined the flaws of neurology's approach to the brain. It's true that experiments have shown we are less in control of our actions than we'd like to believe--whether as a result of subconscious drives or supervening social influences--but as Dennett points out, exceptions may prove the rule:

"[T]hese experiments invariably exhibit the capacity of a stalwart few to resist the enormous pressures arrayed against them. Is there a heroic minority of folks, then, with genuine free will, capable of being moved by good reasons even under duress? It’s better than that: you can learn—or be trained—to be on the alert for these pressures, and to resist them readily."

Here, Dennett elaborates his position in a DSN interview:

Read more at Prospect

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Women in the Workplace: Would You Freeze Your Eggs to Free Your Career?

The nation's highest-profile technology companies are creating some unusual policies in order to encourage women to keep working through the peak of their childbearing years. As part of its insurance benefits package, Facebook covers medical procedures that allow women to freeze their eggs so they can delay having children. Apple is expected to offer its employees the same benefit by January of next year.

In Silicon Valley, gender diversity comes at a price:

"The cost of freezing eggs typically adds up to at least $10,000 for each round of treatment, plus $500 or more annually for storage, according to NBC News. ... Facebook, which introduced the benefit in January, covers all eligible fertility treatments up to a maximum of $20,000."

Both Facebook and Apple have a workforce that is over 70% male at all levels of the business, and that trend skews higher the further up the corporate ladder one looks. But is the right path toward gender equality making women conform to the patterns that men have traditionally observed? As business tycoon Azim Premji said in his DSN interview, women may benefit more from flexible working schedules rather than ones that restrain their natural tendencies.

Read more at Market Watch

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Extraordinary Experiences Are Socially Isolating (So Next Time, Take a Friend)

Think twice before motorbiking across India or seeking out other extraordinary experiences, say a team of Ph.D. students studying the effects of great experience on conversation. Having a much more interesting time with life than your peers is a recipe for social isolation, according to their report published in Psychological Science. In an experiment which supported the group's conclusion, individuals given a very interesting video to watch later felt excluded when the majority of the group had watched a far more boring video. Contrary to what the people who watched the interesting video expected, conversation seems to thrive on the mundane.

"Participants expected an extraordinary experience to leave them feeling better than an ordinary experience at all points in time," the authors wrote. In other words, we think seeing or doing amazing things will make us feel better than people who haven't; it actually makes us feel worse.

A similar study reports that experiencing intense events with another person, even if they are a stranger, results in yet a more intense experience whether it's eating a piece of chocolate or jumping out of an airplane. So if you are set on having a great time, do it with another person. You'll have a fuller experience and have someone to talk to about it.

In his DSN interview, writer Robert Stone recounts some of the harrowing adventures he took on his path toward recounting them on the page:

Read more at the Atlantic

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The Future of the U.S. Military Rests on Innovative Leadership

In a guest post over at Tom Ricks' National Defense blog at ForeignPolicy.com, Captain Justin J. Belford of the U.S. Army proposes a new step forward for how the military should prioritize leadership selection. Belford, an active duty company commander, advocates for a more innovative and adaptive brand of leaders and explains how an investment in better leadership is really an investment in the future of the U.S. military.

Belford, who writes with a soldierly concision and conviction, details his ideas at the outset of the piece:

"The idea of flexible planning that incorporates learning is an important concept, and is a break from the predictable doctrine of the past. But in order for it to work, today's military must identify talented leaders, properly incentivize them, and provide them with the resources they need to drive change. Additionally, I would argue that Western militaries must break from the established idea that time equals rank, and focus on promoting its leaders based on their talent and initiative."

What's interesting here is that Capt. Belford vouches for a similar change in pedagogy as folks like Dr. Madhav Chavan, whose focus is educating young children rather than soldiers. The common refrain is that institutions should strive to instill in their pupils the abilities to adapt, problem-solve, and learn from experience. With how technology has shifted operating procedures for industries ranging from charter schools to the U.S Army, the traditional manner of learning via memorization doesn't quite cut it. The modern world, whether it be in the classroom or on the battlefield, is far too dynamic to rely on the same old by-the-book training.

For more from Capt. Belford (his piece is well worth a read), check out the link below.

Read more at ForeignPolicy.com

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When Maps Stare Back: IJsseloog and Makian

I always go for the window seat on airplanes. I say always. To be honest, only recently did it dawn on me: It looks like a map down there! And then, on a recent flight over the Netherlands, I found the map staring back at me. I blinked first.
Airplane windows are designed to let light in, not to ...



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More Philosophers Believe in God than Are Agnostic. Here's How They Do It.

In a recent survey of the nation's philosophy professors, Notre Dame philosopher Gary Gutting found that agnosticism is the minority view by a wide margin; 73 percent of philosophers incline toward atheism while 15 percent incline toward theism, leaving a mere 6 percent for agnosticism.

Those who do believe in a greater power tend to be drawn by either rational argument or religious experience, both of which defy scientific/empirical investigation. But insisting that the deity be scientifically testable tends to misunderstand religion's true purpose, says Gutting:

"There’s nothing in the Bible that presents God as a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis, and there’s a great deal that emphasizes that the truths of religion are beyond human comprehension. In spite of this, believers too often play the double game of insisting on God’s transcendence and mystery to meet rational objections, but then acting as if they’d justified a straightforward literal understanding of their beliefs."

What atheism fails consistently at is modeling the human communal experience. What it provides is rejection of tradition, rejection of ritual, and rejection of mystery. But it has a great deal of difficultly offering anything in its place. In that way, it parallels the rise of individualistic materialism.

Josh Lieb, producer of the Late Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, explains how he's maintained faith in God despite all the evidence to the contrary:

Read more at the New York Times

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The Internet Is Good for Your Brain. But Is That Enough?

While taking the metro to work this morning, I sent about six emails during my 30-minute commute. Many of the people around me were doing the same. It's our new normal, and whether strangers once spoke to each other cordially, being social now means attending to our mobile devices. So while grappling with ever-evolving technology stimulates our brain like a thick piece of chocolate cake, to what degree we benefit as a society remains an open question.

As Fast Company mocks the late John Philips Sousa for fearing the rise of the phonograph, can there be any doubt that the musicality of popular songs have steadily decreased as the medium has become more democratic? When cultural commentators remark on the dangers of technology, they are not all Luddites by trade. But when the investment society has made in certain traditions is threatened, they are right to express concern. Our communities are more than a sum of working brains.

Photo credit: Shutterstock

Fabulous Colors at the Orkjärve Nature Reserve, Estonia

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson on the Arctic

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Women Working on a Bomber, 1942

Seventy-two years ago, a pair of real-life Rosies assemble a bomber at the Douglas Aircraft Company in Long Beach, Calif. Over 300,000 women worked in the U.S. aircraft industry during World War II (with another 350,000 serving in the Armed Forces). Despite making up 65% of the factory workforce during this time, it probably doesn't come as much surprise that these women's wages were often 50% below those of their male peers.

For more on women in the 1940s aerospace industry, check out "American Women in World War II" from History.com

Photo credit: Library of Congress

Is Indiana Jones Better as a Silent Movie?

It’s one of the most unforgettable opening acts of any 20^th century film. In the midst of a dense jungle, a mercenary pulls a gun on the man paying the bills in the search for buried treasure, hoping to pull a double-cross now that the payoff is near. With the crack of a bullwhip, however, the disarmed man scurries off into the jungle. The hero turns and we see for the first time the sweaty, unshaven, handsome face of Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones in Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (shown above). Raiders, as fans now call it, remains one of the highest-grossing films ever, launched the Indiana Jones film franchise, and continues to rank among the greatest action-adventure films ever made. But could it be even better as a black and white, silent movie?

Steven Soderbergh, director of Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Erin Brockovich , Traffic, and other remarkable films, wondered what Raiders would look like if you stripped away the color, original iconic John Williams soundtrack, and audio, thus reimagining what Steven Spielberg’s 1981 film might look like if were filmed in the silent era that ended in the late 1920s. Soderbergh doesn’t specifically intend to create a silent film, claiming instead that his reimagining is a teaching tool, but that’s what he essentially ends up with—with startling results.

On his website page hosting the reconceived film, Soderbergh can’t say quickly enough that “This posting is for educational purposes only,” perhaps to avoid copyright litigation, but more honestly to justify his creation of and your close viewing of this “new,” old film. What interests Soderbergh about Raiders specifically and filmmaking in general is staging. “Of course understanding story, character, and performance are crucial to directing well,” Soderbergh explains, “but I operate under the theory a movie should work with the sound off, and under that theory, staging becomes paramount.” To prove his theory, Soderbergh turns down Raiders’ volume to turn up awareness of its imagery.

The fact that Soderbergh makes his experiment available to the public is a great opportunity for any aspiring filmmaker or anyone interested in motion pictures to learn what makes a great film great—the elusive “it” factor the uninitiated can identify with their hearts but can’t always appreciate with their heads. “So I want you to watch this movie and think only about staging,” Soderbergh instructs, “how the shots are built and laid out, what the rules of movement are, what the cutting patterns are. See if you can reproduce the thought process that resulted in these choices by asking yourself: why was each shot—whether short or long—held for that exact length of time and placed in that order? Sounds like fun, right? It actually is. To me.” As Soderbergh self-deprecatingly admits, such intense, purposeful watching might not be for anyone, but is well worth the effort.

Armed with Soderbergh’s advice, I found myself watching just the imagery, focused in my viewing in a way most of us normally are not today as we multitask on our devices as we take in our visual entertainment from television and movies, even when we’re in movie theaters. I recently wrote here about Zen and the art of silent movie watching, specifically how silent films and their dependence on visuals force us to pay attention and achieve an almost meditative state of single-minded focus on the moment on the screen before us. Even if you don’t get all Soderbergh hopes you will from his crash course in “Staging 101,” you might at the very least have an old school moment of Zen watching Soderbergh’s Raiders.

But why did Soderbergh pick Raiders? The main reason Soderbergh cites is the cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe, whose “stark, high-contrast lighting style was eye-popping regardless of medium,” praises Soderbergh. Slocombe worked on 84 feature films over the course of nearly a half century, including Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Lavender Hill Mob , before working beside Spielberg on the Indiana Jones series. Slocombe learned lighting and contrasts while working in black and white and applied those lessons even when working in color.

Another reason why Raiders works so well as a silent film could be the content. George Lucas, author of the original Indiana Jones story and producer of the films, proudly acknowledged the influence of movie serials from the 1930s and 1940s on the story. However, by Lucas’ childhood, the American movie serial was in decline from its heyday in the silent era. The Perils of Pauline , The Hazards of Helen , and four separate Tarzan serials, as well as great European silent film serials such as Fantômas , Les Vampires , and Judex represent just some of the great silent serials that created an audience for fast-paced, episodic action that continued long after the introduction of synchronized sound. Many details of Raiders can be traced to the silent era, including stunts involving hanging from trucks and other vehicles (a common Indy problem) pioneered by silent stunt man Yakima Canutt. Finally, if Harrison Ford was channeling any film predecessor in his portrayal of Indiana Jones, it was the original laughing swashbuckler—silent film star Douglas Fairbanks.

Although I realize that Soderbergh wanted to eliminate all distractions from the visuals, part of me wishes he had gone all the way into silent film territory and introduced intertitles, the dialogue and explanatory text silent film audiences sped read through. I also wish Soderbergh had forgone a soundtrack entirely instead of replacing Williams’ marches with disconcerting techno pop that made me hit mute early on. Despite these minor, understandable omissions, Soderbergh’s Raiders recreates the spirit of the silent film and raises the tantalizing question of what other films might benefit from this silent treatment. Perhaps even more revolutionary is the idea that, if fervent audiophiles can go back to vinyl for a more “human” sound, why can’t filmmakers go back to the good old days of silent films, when images and staging ruled over megamillion contracts and blockbuster special effects?

[Image credit: screen capture taken from Steven Soderbergh's educational copy of Raiders. ]

Douglas Adams on Environmentalism

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Study: You'll Be Happier Throwing Out That Bucket List Than Chasing It

In my motley career I have had long conversations with heads of state and Nobel Prize winners. I have hiked north of the Arctic Circle and watched humpback whales amble by while snorkeling in the tropics. I've published a book and watched the birth of my son. And it has not escaped my notice that compared to these (and other) peak experiences, most of my days are rather mousy and glum, when not twisted in anxieties as cutting as they are trivial. Such is life, as many have noted (here's just one fine example of the sentiment). So of course we chase adventure, excitement and glamor. They're a bulwark against sadness. Right? Wrong, says this paper. The emotional cost of such adventures is greater than their rewards, write the authors. Peak experiences will make you feel worse in the long run than you would have if you had stayed home.

The kind of peak experience that interests the buzz-killing authors (Gus Cooney, Daniel T. Gilbert and Timothy D. Wilson, whose paper will appear soon in the journal Psychological Science) is the kind that is rare: going into orbit, for example, or dining with the President. (They thus excuse themselves from addressing peak experiences that aren't rare, like the birth of a child, about which more later.) If you've spent time in orbit, for instance, you are unlike almost everyone else on earth, and the object of envy for millions of people. And, Cooney et al. write, "being both alien and enviable is an unlikely recipe for popularity." You say you don't care about being popular? Cooney et al. decided to see if that was really true.

Unable to take their undergraduate volunteers to the Clooney wedding or into orbit or into the Titanic, the authors simulated a "peak experience" as best they could. They had people watch short videos.

Each watching session involved 4 participants. They were told they'd be experiencing one of two videos, one highly rated and the other not so great. Before the experiment, each person answered the question "how do you feel right now?" by marking where s/he felt on a 100 point scale from "not very good" to "very good." Then s/he sat alone in a cubicle and watched a video. One of the four would get the fun video (an engaging scene in which a street magician entertains a happy crowd) ; the other three got the meh one (some low-budget animation).

Afterwards, the four were brought back together for a brief conversation at a table near their cubicles. Then each went back to the cubicle and answered some more questions: "how do you feel right now?" (again); and "In general, how did you feel during the interaction that took place?"; and how excluded did you feel during the conversation with the others? The experiment put 17 of these four-member panels through the process.

Who felt worse after their conversation with the others in their group? It turned out to be the people who'd had the better video (on the 100-point scale, their answer to "how do you feel right now?" averaged 53.26, where the blah-video-viewers averaged at 64.37). Moreover, the "lucky" viewers felt far more excluded (average just over 80 on the 100-point scale, versus 51 for the "ordinary experiencers"). A statistical analysis of the before and after results stongly suggests that the feeling of exclusion was in fact the reason those people felt worse.

In a second experiment, Cooney et al. repeated the procedure but also asked their volunteers to predict ahead of time how they would feel. People expected to feel better if they got the superior video, both before and after the conversation with others. In other words, people had unrealistic expectations: They didn't understand that they'd feel worse after having the better experience. Finally, a third experiment asked volunteers to make predictions about how others would feel. (The idea was to eliminate the possibility that people are realistic in general but delusional about themselves—"the general rule is disappointment but I will be the exception.") Again, they found the same pattern of false expectation. Their volunteers expected that having a better experience would leave the lucky people feeling better than the peons who had to watch the dull video. But the reality was that, again, those who had had the "better" experience felt worse, after their conversation with others.

In all three experiments, it seems, the volunteers were subject to the same delusion that Cass Sunstein describes in this amusing column about bragging. When we brag, according to this paper, which Sunstein quotes, we fail to anticipate that other people will not share our emotions. Similarly, the people in Cooney et al.'s study didn't anticipate that people who didn't share their experience would feel differently about it—and then leave them out in the cold because of that difference.

The point here, Cooney et al. say, is that there is a tension between two kinds of rush. One kind —"the cool tingle of Dom Pérignon or the hot snarl of a new Maserati"—is fun in and of itself (at least until we get used to it, as we quickly do). The other sort of pleasure (like, I'd say, attending a wedding, watching sports, throwing a dinner party) is inherently social. The whole point of doing it is doing it with others.

The quest for the first kind of experience demands that you do something few others have ever done; the other demands that you be like everyone else. If you've kayaked all the way around Iceland you really don't want Carnival Lines setting up stations everywhere so that any nincompoop can do it. On the other hand, at your high school graduation you are devoutly hoping for an experience that is much like everyone else's. By failing to distinguish between these two types of pleasure, we mistakenly think that the first type of experience is the same as the second. And we'll be surprised when people who haven't driven the Maserati make us feel bad about that experience.

A couple of caveats need to be caveated here. The first is that watching a neat video (versus watching a dull one) is really not the same contrast as going into orbit (versus riding the F train to your office). The authors neatly finesse this by writing "experiences need not be all that extraordinary to have unfortunate consequence" that they describe. OK, but it may be that the impact of a really extraordinary experience on the peasants is more positive. Yes, if you tell your inane story about meeting Harrison Ford, I'll be annoyed. But if you tell me you have been in orbit around the Earth, I am more inclined to ask about what that was like than I am to hate you. I think. Maybe. Moreover, many peaks of experience don't involve the sort of recreational fooling around that the authors describe. We ordinary lunkheads may well resent someone who has gone into orbit as a lark. I doubt we'd feel that way about a professional astronaut and her adventures.

Secondly, I wonder about the way the authors have neatly separated peak experiences from social ones, and insisted that "peak" means "rare." I don't know about you, but it seems to me many of my life's most amazing experiences were amazing because they happened to me, not because they were objectively rare. The birth of my son tops my list, which would also include getting married, surviving a potentially fatal accident, winning some competitions, and assorted other adventures. Even the social events on this list had an intensely personal, just-for-me aspect. Being the point of the wedding is not the same as being a guest at the wedding. Even lying around in the park with a girlfriend or boyfriend is a tremendous peak experience if you happen to be 14.

How do these common-for-the-population-but-special-for-the-individual events fit into the researchers' taxonomy? At first blush you would think they fall into the "mundane and social" category, but they don't—some (like childbirth) are not social events, and others (like a wedding or graduation) are mundane only to those outside the experience. True, we tend to get surly if we hear that someone has tried to make a mundane event into a super-rare one (didn't you cringe when you heard Jay-Z and Beyoncé had taken over an entire hospital floor for one newborn?). But there's still an unexplored realm, it seems to me, of experiences that are both ordinary (for the population) but peak (for the individual).

In any event, these experiments do seem to offer an explanation for a common and seemingly inexplicable fact: Much of what people post on social networks is extremely banal. Why do people flood Facebook with pictures of dinner, cats, kids, neighbors? Why don't they save social media for announcements that they're running for Congress or are spending October at the summit of Mount McKinley or something? Perhaps they have an instinctive feel for the contrast that Cooney et al. have explored here—a social hunch that says it's better to talk up the kind of day we all share rather than the kind the rest of us can never hope to see.

Cooney, G., Gilbert, D., & Wilson, T. (2014). The Unforeseen Costs of Extraordinary Experience Psychological Science DOI: 10.1177/0956797614551372

Illustration: God speaks to Moses through a burning bush. Painting from Saint Isaac's Cathedral, Saint Petersburg, via Wikimedia. About Moses' next day, occupied with the usual problems of headgear maintenance and missing sheep, the scriptures are silent.

Follow me on Twitter: @davidberreby

Chris Cole on How Skateboarders Think

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? DSN is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of DSN

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate DSN. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.