This video makes me want to get an EEG machine. It’s of Ken Wilber narrating footage of himself moving through a few different meditative states while hooked up to an EEG machine. (EEG machines show you a picture of the electrical activity from your brain from electrodes on your scalp.) He says what each state feels like, too. Pretty neat.
(Minor correction: He makes it sound like dreaming sleep is mostly associated with theta waves, which is not quite true. Dreaming sleep does have some theta activity, but it’s mostly beta or “beta-like” waves. Theta is strongly associated with stage 1 sleep, that 5 or 10 minute transition between waking and sleep. It’s a minor point, but I so rarely find corrections to make in his work, I thought I’d take this chance.)
Many years ago, my friend Chad told me if he could make even a very modest living fighting racism, that is what he would do with his life. The idea had never occurred to me before. In that conversation we also talked about how it was really only people who were on the fence about race that were good targets for intervention; good luck changing the mind of an entrenched racist! So where do you find these on-the-fence-folks, and how do you make a living working with them? We made no more progress on the question.
Lee Mun Wah does just what we imagined. He is a “diversity and communication trainer” and the founder of Stirfry Seminars & Consulting. The population of Whites he works with are a lot more egalitarian-minded than I had imagined necessary, back in those relatively naive days–they are Whites who consider racism appalling but don’t see their own part in perpetuating it.
I watched these clips from Lee Mun Wah’s documentary of one of his groups, called The Color of Fear. It was some of the most moving footage I’ve seen this year. If you watch it, watch both clips to the end, and be prepared for some members to express anger. (Keep in mind that (according to my teachers) both David and Victor became diversity and communication trainers after this film was made.) This is incredible work. I hope I get the opportunity to lead groups like this in my career.
A couple days ago I posted a great clip from Jay Smooth, called “How to Tell People They Sound Racist.” I’ve looked over his websites, illdoctrine.com and nildoctrine.com and his you tube channel and have decided to officially endorse him. He’s very smart, very hip, and I just like him. He’s a feminist hero, too in an often mysogynous hip hop culture. About half of his posts are political and about half are about hip hop. All of them seem insightful and funny, though keep in mind that I am no judge of hip hop or hip hop commentary.
Here are three clips I liked a lot. The first reminds me of Potter & Heath’s Rebel Sell: It’s a critique (and possibly a mocking) of the idea that you can simultaneously (and self-righteously) know nothing about politics and somehow “know” that politics is not worth paying attention to. It’s great. The second is about homosexuality in hip hop (this is him being a hero). The third is about hipsterism. They are all short and good.
This clip was part of a lecture in my Group Therapy class. It’s from video blogger Jay Smooth. I haven’t seen many of his clips but so far they are insightful and entertaining. The clip on top of his blog is about Rand Paul and called “Atlas Ducked.” It’s worth watching just for that hilarious title.
All right. I’ve been pitching the Long Now Foundation and their Seminars on Long Term Thinking for a while now, and no one is taking the bait. That is, some-number-less-than-three of you have clicked through the links I’ve put up. (WordPress only shows me links that hit three clicks in my stats.) You guys are missing out! These lectures are so good. Imagine, super-smart people giving entertaining, informative talks on their area of expertise and how it relates to long-term thinking. What’s better than that?
I just found out that LNF has video of the seminars up on FORA.tv, in full, for free. I prefer the audio versions, so I can simultaneously clean my kitchen, but if you’ve been holding off because you don’t like podcasts, check them out, in color, along with their slides and footage. Here is a list of all of the videos they have up.
And here are a couple of my current favorites:
Saul Griffith’s “Climate Change Recalculated,” in part about how he very rigorously figured out how much power (in Watts) his lifestyle uses, and then scaled back to his share of global energy production. Really, really good.
Steven Johnson’s “The Long Zoom,” about levels of complexity, cholera, television and video games, the evolution of the detective novel, and why bad ideas stick around, among many other things.
Posting about Albert Ellis yesterday reminded me of this cool film series made in 1965 called Three Approaches to Psychotherapy. It shows three very famous therapists talking with the same client, named Gloria. First is Carl Rogers doing his non-directive Person Centered Therapy. Next is Fritz Perls doing his demanding-total-authenticity Gestalt therapy. (This was developed with his wife, Laura, making it the only one having significant female authorship.) Last is Albert Ellis doing his the-way-you-are-thinking-about-things-makes-you-unhappy Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy.
I don’t know how much of the following is true, but this is what I’ve heard: Part of the deal in making this film was that Gloria could choose a therapist based on her very short sessions with each of them. She chose Fritz Perls. Later, she struck up a friendship with Carl Rogers that lasted the rest of her short life. She died in her 50s.
Recent research on what makes therapy effective suggests that the style of therapy you use is not a major factor. It seems to do more with the quality of the relationship between the client and the therapist and how much the client believes the therapy will help. In light of that it’s striking how different these approaches are. You will see what I mean.
Each therapist’s section is about 30 minutes. Each therapist presents his basic theory, talks with Gloria for a bit, and then talks about what he thinks he just did. Rogers’ is broken up into several clips–that’s the only way I could find it. Perls’ and Ellis’s videos are each in one piece, and from Google video instead of YouTube, so they take longer to load. You might let each of the longer clips run through before watching it to avoid it breaking up if you have a slow connection like I do.
Every year I work at a summer camp for home- and unschooled teenagers, Not Back to School Camp. This will be my twelfth year–thirty some sessions. It is usually the highlight of my year. An NBTSC alumni, Allen Ellis, made this video about it in 2009. Maya posted it on her blog a couple of months ago, and I’m copying her. In moments like this I really wonder who it is that reads my blog. I suspect you are 97% my family and NBTSC friends, who have already seen this. Oh well. This is for the other 3%, whose names are mostly David, Ceri, and Emily.
The guy in the still shot that heads the video is my friend Blake Boles. Every time I see this shot I wonder if Allen asked his permission to use it like that. It’s a funny one.
My friend Jeannie posted about the band OK Go a while ago, but I my internet was down at the time (thanks, Qwest) so didn’t watch the video she embedded. It took me until hearing about them on NPR (here’s the story) to look them up again. They have ditched their label (EMI/Capitol) in favor of independent internet distribution–a very cool business model for bands who are well known enough to get away with it. And others, too, who have the ambition, stamina, and talent to get to a high level of recognition on their own. OK Go is clearly set. They write good, catchy tunes, and their videos range from very good to amazing and get viewed many millions of times each, on Youtube. They tend to use a single, long shot to catch an elaborate, surprising sequence. I’ll put in three below. Two are for the same song. The first is the EMI version, and the second, with the Rube Goldberg machine, is their independent version, financed by State Farm. It took 60 takes to get, and they only counted a take if they got past the dominoes and ball-bearings-on-the-tabletop sequences, which they called “very flakey.” It sounds like they recorded different versions of the song (“This Too Shall Pass”) for the videos, too.
Oh, right. The NPR story was partly about how EMI is not letting anyone embed their version of the video… Well, you can still use this attempt to embed as a link to the video on Youtube:
Rube Goldberg version:
The Treadmill video, also financed by EMI, so you’ll have to use the link:
Here’s part 5 of the stuff I learned in my undergrad in psychology that I thought should have been headlines. If you missed them, here are part 1, part 2, part 3, & part 4. As always, if you are interested or skeptical, leave me a comment and I’ll give you my sources.
If You Punish Your Kids, Use the Mildest Effective Punishment: Do the mildest thing you can that stops the behavior you don’t want. The reason is that a punishment that is harsher than necessary takes the child’s initiative for stopping the behavior out of the picture. If you say “Hey, don’t do that,” and the child responds, they come to think that they didn’t really want to do that thing anyway, since such a mild rebuke got them to stop. Psychologists call these principles “insufficient punishment” and “self-persuasion.” These are research findings, not just speculation. If you sit on and beat your child to get them to stop doing something (as suggested by Mike & Debi Pearl), they will believe something more like “That activity was so great that I’ve only stopped because of that horrible punishment.” In other words, the form of the punishment affects the identity of the child–do they behave well because they think of themselves as well-behaved, or do they behave well only because they fear punishment?
You May Want Your Kids To Be Less Blindly Obedient Than Most People: One of the most famous psychological experiments of all time found that most people risked killing someone they barely knew, given an institutional setting and an authority telling them to do it. The Nazis were mostly not evil, just obedient, like most of us.
Humans Can Be Conformist to the Point of Doubting Their Own Senses:
Each Ethical Decision You Make Affects Your Future Ethical Decisions and Your Identity: If you, say, decide to cheat on a test, you will be more likely to cheat on tests in the future, think of yourself as someone who cheats on tests, and form permissive attitudes about cheating. The opposite is true if you decide not to cheat on a test.
Complement Your Kids For the How Hard They Work, Not How Smart They Are: Getting attention for being smart tends to make kids want to appear smart, which makes them choose easier challenges and lighter competition; it’s the success that matters. Getting attention for hard work does the opposite. This means that these kids will end up smarter than the kids who got attention for being smart.
Teach Your Kids to Think About Intelligence as a Fluid Property: That is, teach them that they can become more intelligent by trying. The more they believe it, the more it will be true for them.
If Your Kids Read, Don’t Reward Them For Reading: They will be more likely to stop, if you do, because they will start to think of reading as something they do to be rewarded, not because they like it. If they don’t read, reward them for reading. This goes for other activities, too.
Two of my good friends, Mo’ and Chad, have never met, even though I’ve known Chad for 33 years and Mo’ for 9. It’s geographical–Mo’ is part of my Oregon community and Chad is in southern California. It’s too bad because they’re both really funny and it would be great to get to watch them riff. Mo’, for example, early on, decided that Chad was my imaginary friend and made a lot of good fun of me: “Oh, riiight, Nathen– “Chad” climbed Mt. Whitney with you…” etc.
When Chad married another good friend of mine, Jeannie, a few years ago, Mo’ and his partner Vangie made this video for them. I’m not sure how funny it will be if you don’t know Mo’ or Chad, but if you’re reading this blog, you probably know one or both of them, and I think it’s just plain funny:
Nathen's Miraculous Escape 