Curiosity Archives - Page 2 of 2

A Work of Art in Progress

October 27, 2022 by Joycelyn Campbell 3 Comments

This is a guest post by Regina Clarke, a beautiful, open-hearted, loving, curious, and determined, woman who is both up to something (or, in her case, many things) and committed to creating transformational change. We were out of touch for several years and I’m delighted she is back in my life. Regina wrote this piece in response to a writing prompt (you can find out more about it here) and generously agreed to let me share it.

I am a photographer. I see SO many beautiful things that inspire me and I want to capture them on film. I want to remember where I come from; my past, my history and my lineage. Each photograph is a memory, a piece of me, my life unfolding as a child into adulthood. My essence is captured in the photographs.

The lens through which I look dictates what I shoot. Everything is up for inspiration, beauty, interest and of course change. It all happens in my sight, the lens through which I look, and the development of the film. My eye is drawn to many things, what do I want to capture? What piece do I want to highlight or where do I want to edit?

Do I underexpose the film so that the picture of my life is unclear, not really taking shape? Or, do I overdevelop, do I overexpose my life’s film, taking too long so that the image – my results are blurry and of no significance?

Every so often it all comes together! I am inspired to look at something, anything really; a sunset, a flower, a person, a mountain or an idea and the lighting is just ideal. The shutter closes, the timing is right, and everything in my world comes together to make the perfect picture, the perfect experience. It is captured and admired until it is time for the next photograph.

In the process, I take lots and lots of photos. I try on many angles, distances, and ideas. It seems the work is never done, it’s NEVER over because there will always be another image to capture or another idea to follow. As the photographer I change, my perspectives change and so the picture changes as well.

Clarity – Color – Image – Timing …

What I see right now will change, I will want to view that, and capture the new idea, the new image to see what gets developed. What is preserved as my ME? How am I remembered? Who will hold the scrapbook of my life?

The Best Mindset for a Fresh Start

December 27, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

The so-called Fresh Start Effect is based on the idea that we use temporal landmarks—dates that hold significance for us—as motivators for behavior change.* Such temporal landmarks run the gamut from the beginning of a week, a month, or a school semester to the beginning of a new year or a birthday. The brain does appear to take note of temporal landmarks; it’s easier to recall your last birthday than another random day of the month.

As temporal landmarks go, the beginning of a new year is famous for generating resolutions for self-improvement. The fact that most of these resolutions will probably fall by the wayside doesn’t deter us. Nor should it. We can take advantage of the fact that the brain is more open to change at some times than at others, as long as we approach the process from the right mindset.

Wrong Way: Production Mindset

A majority of New Year’s resolutions tend to consist of habits we want to start or stop: things we believe we ought to do or not do—or do more or less of—because they’re good for us. They’re a reflection of what I call the production mindset, which is focused on:

Being right
Being good
Relieving psychological tension
Interpreting feedback as judgment
Determining objectives
Following rules
Performing

It’s no accident that being resolute is also an aspect of production mindset. This is the mindset of whipping oneself into shape. It’s easy and automatic to operate from this mindset, but it’s a mindset that is not at all conducive to change. Production mindset is a stern taskmistress.

Right Way: Experiment Mindset

Experiment mindset operates from both a more committed and a more detached perspective. The commitment is to a desired outcome—and to mastering the change process—rather than to achieving a specific objective. The detachment allows for curiosity and learning. Characteristics of this mindset include:

Willingness to be wrong
Focusing on getting better
Developing creative tension
Evaluating feedback to adjust course
Identifying desired outcomes
Using guidelines
Discovering

In place of resoluteness, experiment mindset leads to resilience, which is a great asset on the rocky road to behavior change.

Running Experiments

Instead of creating a list of habits to start or change, evidence suggests we’ll get better results by running an experiment or two instead. And less really is more in this case. We’ll get better short- and long-term benefits when we focus on a single habit and successfully start or change it. We can build on that success with another habit. When we give ourselves too many things to work on at the same time—all of which require limited System 2 (conscious) resources—we create multiple opportunities to fail.

Here are some guidelines for running experiments.

Identify your desired outcome (the change you want to create; the experience you want to have).
Determine a minimum of three different objectives that could possibly get you your desired outcome.
Consider how you would structure or conduct an experiment to test each one.
Select one.
Set up the parameters:
> What will you test?
> What data will you track and how will you record or track it?
> How and how often will you evaluate feedback?
> What is the timeframe (beginning and ending dates)?
> How will you measure success or failure?
> How will you reward yourself for following through
Run the experiment.
If you have comparative data available, check it against the results of your experiment.
Decide on your next course of action:
> Continue the experiment.
> Implement the new behavior.
> Run a different experiment.

I find the IAP (Intention/Attention/Perseverance) process useful when conducting experiments. A combination of the eight steps above and the four IAP steps below has led to significantly greater success than I’ve ever had in maintaining a strength training program—and that’s saying a lot considering my numerous attempts and multiple heart conditions.

Intention: Describe in writing exactly what you intend to do, as well as when, where, and how you intend to do it. Be specific.
Attention: Identify how you will keep your attention focused on your intention (post-it notes, phone reminders, calendar notations, etc.).
Perseverance: Decide what you will do when things don’t go according to plan (regardless of the reason). What step(s) will you take to get back on track?
Reward: Identify how you will reward yourself when you follow through. Make it something you know you will enjoy—and then follow through with giving yourself the reward!

A note on rewards: Rewarding yourself when you follow through with an intention activates memory and learning circuits in the brain, which makes it more likely you will follow through the next time. Experiment with rewards, too, to discover what works for you.

Remember that you can use any temporal landmark as a boost to start a new habit or change an existing one. I started my strength training experiment on a random Monday in April 36 weeks ago. I set up a series of 10 three-week experiments, all of which I completed, and I’m still going strong.

*The idea was espoused by Katy Milkman, a behavioral economist, and presented in a 2014 article co-authored by Dai Hengchen and Jason Riis.

The Map Is Not the Territory

December 13, 2021 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

And the menu is not the meal. In other words, beware of confusing models of reality with reality. It sounds obvious, but it’s much easier said than done, so we end up believing a lot of things that are just not true.

Many of our most basic assumptions about ourselves, and society, are false. —Leonard Mlodinow, Subliminal

There’s a handful of threshold concepts that can shed some light on how we might know ourselves (or think we do) and how we might know others (or think we do)—and cause us to consider the possibility that we might be wrong about how we do both.

In and of themselves, threshold concepts are both transformative and irreversible. Once you fully grasp them, your understanding of what underlies your experience, your perception, and your behavior will be transformed. Once you cross the threshold from not knowing to knowing, you will no longer be able to view yourself, others, or the world the way you did before.

Threshold concepts are inherently difficult to grasp.

That’s why these concepts are considered to be troublesome knowledge. They’re troublesome because they conflict with preexisting beliefs, they are counterintuitive and disconcerting, and/or they seem illogical. They don’t slip easily into the mental architecture most of us have already constructed. In fact, they often bounce right off. So they bear repeating…repeatedly. (Recently someone said she had probably heard me mention a particular threshold concept a hundred times, but it was just in that moment that she got it.)

Each of these concepts is important individually, but many of them connect with and relate to each other. That’s another aspect of threshold concepts: they are integrative.

One

The brain is not wired to experience reality as it is. That’s troublesome because it’s counterintuitive and conflicts with our belief that we experience an objective reality. But the interior of the brain is a dark, silent space, in which the primary activity is the interpretation of electrical impulses to give us a sense of what is going on inside and outside of us.

Even if all our senses are intact and our brain is functioning normally, we do not have direct access to the physical world. It may feel as if we have direct access, but this is an illusion created by our brain. —Chris Frith, neuropsychologist

There is a real world. But you’ve never lived there. You haven’t been there even for a visit. —Susana Martinez-Conde, neuroscientist

Two

The brain operates on autopilot approximately 95% of the time, which means System 1 (the unconscious) directs most of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. That’s troublesome because our experience is that our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are consciously determined. But consciousness can only process 40 bits of information at a time, while the unconscious process 11 million bits at a time.

If we were forced always to consider every aspect of the situation around us and had to weigh all our options about what to do, humankind would have died out long ago. —Timothy D. Wilson, social psychologist

It can take huge amounts of time for our conscious brain to think about every scenario deliberately. Everyday life requires us to suspend rationality, to be mindless about countless risks. —Shankar Vedantam, journalist and host of The Hidden Brain podcast

Three

The brain is predictive rather than reactive. It focuses on determining what’s going to happen next so it can figure out ahead of time what action to take instead of waiting for something to happen and then deciding what to do about it. That’s troublesome because, once again, our experience is that, moment-to-moment, we are making conscious or intentional decisions based on our conscious perceptions.

Your brain is wired to ask the question, “The last time I was in a situation like this, what sensations did I encounter and how did I act?” —Lisa Feldman Barrett, neuroscientist and psychologist

Our primary contact with the world…is via our expectations about what we are about to see or experience. —Andy Clark, cognitive philosopher

Four

The brain pays far more attention to what we do than to what we feel, what we think, or what we think about doing. This is troublesome because we tend to believe that the brain is for thinking and perceiving—I think, therefore I am, as Rene Descartes famously said—and not for figuring out what action to take. We also expect there to be a more direct correlation than there is between what we think about doing (intend) and the action we ultimately take.

Our brains interpret the world primarily as a forum for action and only secondarily as a realm of facts. —Colin G. DeYoung, psychologist

The course of an individual’s life is determined by the action she takes in the world. —Gabrielle Oettingen, psychologist

Five

The brain generates a mental model of the world that represents what’s normal for each of us both internally and externally. Our model of the world determines what we pay attention to, how we interpret what we pay attention to, and the meaning we assign to it. That’s troublesome because we have the sense that we directly perceive what is available for us to perceive, when in fact we perceive everything through our unique filters.

Consciousness is a way of projecting all the activity in your nervous system into a simpler form. [It] gives you a summary that is useful for the larger picture, useful at the scale of apples and rivers and humans with whom you might be able to mate. —David Eagleman, neuroscientist

When we experience things as being real, we are less able to appreciate that our perceptual worlds may differ from those of others. —Anil K. Seth, neuroscientist

We Ought to Be Less Certain…

In attempting to know ourselves, we’re faced with the same problems we encounter when attempting to know anyone else.

For one thing, we have no direct access to either our unconscious or the unconscious of anyone else, even though that’s the part of the brain that runs us most of the time. For another, just about every perception we have had or will have is an interpretation. We are interpreting ourselves just as we are interpreting others. And those interpretations, generated by internal or external cues, are based on our individual mental model of the world, which means they are all highly subjective and necessarily distorted.

Furthermore, we’re literally living in the past, since our predictive (autopilot) brain has already determined the nature of a situation and initiated the appropriate response before we’re consciously aware a response is called for.

In spite of all this, we have a strong, if false, sense of certainty about who we are, who others are and what they are experiencing, as well as our overall experience of being in the world.

…and More Curious

The best way to get a remotely objective clue as to who we—or someone else might be—is to pay attention to what we or they do, note our interpretation of the action, and attempt to reason backward. What might that behavior indicate about me or Joe or Olivia? What belief or character/personality trait might that reflect? What don’t I know? What other explanations could there be?

There’s no guarantee we’ll come up with the correct answer, of course. But curiosity gives us some room to maneuver, to question our assumptions and interpretations instead of merrily running off a cliff with them.

In the Groove: Meta Mindsets

November 5, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell Leave a Comment

Our brain looks out at the world through its own unique lens, which is called a mental model. The brain creates our mental model to quantify and qualify what’s normal in the world for us so it can determine the actions we should we take.

Our mental model is unconscious, so we can’t examine it directly to find out about it. We can only gain information from inference—by observing our actions in response to different situations and then reasoning backward a bit.

We do know our mental model consists of several different mindsets that operate together or separately under various sets of circumstances. A mindset is a set of ideas, beliefs, or attitudes with which we approach situations or through which we view them. Mindsets have something in common with habits since they tend to be habitual, which means they are mostly unconscious.

Some mindsets are:

In all three examples, one mindset isn’t automatically better than the other. It would be great if we readily shifted between, say, Be Good (focused on mastering a skill or body of knowledge and demonstrating that skill) and Get Better (focused on continued improvement of skill or knowledge rather than on performance) based on the mindset that was most appropriate to the situation. Unfortunately, we don’t tend to do that. The brain likes certainty and ease and so it prefers to lean in one direction or the other.

In the Groove

Furthermore, leaning in one direction in one area generally leads to leaning in that same direction in other areas. So we’re more likely to find Soldier, Be Good, and Productivity mindsets clustered together in one person and Scout, Get Better, and Creativity mindsets clustered together in another. One mindset reinforces the others. That’s what makes shifting back and forth between them so much more difficult.

Other mental processes and ways of thinking also tend to lean in the direction of one cluster or the other. All this clustering results in what I call the Meta Mindset: an overarching perspective that influences not only our responses to the events and situations we encounter but also our general attitudes and our beliefs about what’s possible for us to do, be, have, or create.

The two Meta Mindsets are Experiment and Production. Here are some of their qualities and attributes:

The Production mindset is the default because it requires less System 2 attention. It’s easy for all of us to fall back on it. Indeed, it’s difficult for some of us to ever get out of it.

There are definitely occasions when Production mindset is necessary and desirable. But the situation between these two mindsets is akin to the situation between System 1 (the unconscious) and System 2 (consciousness). Because we operate on autopilot approximately 95% of the time, both System 1 and the Production mindset are dominant. System 2 and the Experiment mindset require conscious attention which is costly in terms of energy and is also less available.

But System 2 and the Experiment mindset are what make humans unique as a species. They are also essential to the process of transformational change and creating and enjoying a satisfying and meaningful life. So it’s important for us to use them to harness the power and direction of System 1 and the Production mindset. It’s an important part of learning how to use our brain instead of letting our brain use us.

Note: Like most things, Meta Mindsets aren’t completely black or white (at least not for everyone). I’m developing a tool where you’ll be able to rate yourself on a continuum for each of the 15 items listed above. I’ll link to it in a future blog post.

Hunting for Foxhogs,
I Find a Foxcat Instead

September 10, 2020 by Joycelyn Campbell 1 Comment

In the last chapter of Curious, Ian Leslie lays out “seven ways to stay curious.” Item number three on the list is “forage like a foxhog.” The foraging he refers to is for information. The question under consideration is whether it’s better to have a depth of knowledge (specialize) or a breadth of knowledge (generalize).

Eventually he connects these two approaches to a quote from Greek poet Archilochus:

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

Leslie suggests that these animals represent two different ways of thinking, neither of which is really better than the other: the hedgehog knows a lot about a little, while the fox knows a little about a lot.

The thinkers best positioned to thrive today and in the future will be a hybrid of these two animals. In a highly competitive, high-information world, it’s crucial to know one or two big things and to know them in more depth and detail than most of your contemporaries. But to really ignite that knowledge, you need the ability to think about it from a variety of eclectic perspectives and to be able to collaborate fruitfully with people who have different specializations. —Ian Leslie

So by combining the fox and the hedgehog, we get the “foxhog.”

Leslie devotes six pages to this discussion, at the end of which I was not entirely clear about the distinctions he was making beyond specialization vs. generalization. So I did a little research of my own.

Assumptions Were Made (but not by me)

The first thing I discovered was that this concept of the hedgehog and the fox is fairly widely used. That was a little surprising. Also surprising was the fact that although people seem to have definite ideas about what the concept means, it doesn’t appear to mean the same thing to everyone.

I listened to a 38-minute podcast of The Hidden Brain titled The Fox and the Hedgehog, which I found interesting and worth listening to. But it did not advance my understanding at all.

It turns out that Archilochus may have been the source of the quote, but we have no elaboration from him on its meaning. That credit goes to philosopher Isaiah Berlin and his essay The Hedgehog and the Fox published as a book in 1953. It was Berlin who first classified various philosophers, writers, and scientists as either hedgehogs or foxes. But the focus of the essay was Leo Tolstoy, who Berlin conceived of as that hybrid creature, the “foxhog” (although he did not, of course, use that term).

According to Berlin, Tolstoy was really a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog, and this internal dissonance was a source of distress to him. That would make Tolstoy a bad example of a “foxhog,” but Leslie does give us a few positive role models.

After checking out Berlin, I understood that Shankar Vedantam (the Hidden Brain podcast) had based his understanding of the concept of the hedgehog and the fox on Berlin’s essay. But other people had somewhat different ideas, and I was still trying to understand it in terms of types of thinkers—or leaders—or learners. The characteristics associated with foxes and hedgehogs by various proponents didn’t really hang together.

Enter the Foxcat

Eventually, I came across a different perspective based on an Aesop’s fable. It turns out there is a fable titled The Fox and the Hedgehog, but the moral of that story doesn’t seem to have anything to do with what Berlin or Leslie or any of the others are talking about. The fable that does connect is The Fox and the Cat.

This fable sees the fox and cat discussing the various tricks and dodges they know: the fox has many, while the cat says he has just one. The fox appears to have the advantage, until a pack of wild dogs attacks them both. The cat’s one bright idea—climb a tree to get out of harm’s way—rewards him by saving him from the dogs, while the fox—busy chewing over which of his bright ideas to act upon—remains rooted to the spot and is torn apart by the hounds.

Clearly there’s a moral there: act quickly and decisively when you have to, rather than endlessly turning over the various options in your head. —interestingliterature.com

In this story, the fox represents System 2, conscious processing, which allows for more possibilities but is also slow and energy intensive. The cat represents System 1, unconscious processing, which is fast because it acts based on habit and instinct: what worked in the past. (I especially like this because I frequently use my cat as an example of a creature who acts exclusively on System 1 impulses.)

Is There a Moral to This Story?

Neither the fable of The Fox and the Hedgehog nor the fable of The Fox and the Cat are directly relevant to Leslie’s idea about foraging for information. (I don’t think they’re relevant to Isaiah Berlin’s ideas about Tolstoy, either, but that’s another rabbit hole.) In terms of staying curious, I definitely agree with Leslie that breadth is as important as depth. “T-shaped knowledge” combines specialization (the vertical axis) with broad understanding in other areas (the horizontal axis).

The same could be said of System 1 and System 2 thinking: one is as important as the other. It’s important to know when to apply logical, linear, critical thinking and when to allow unconscious associative thinking.

But the moral of the story is that there’s no good reason for us to believe that we know what we’re talking about—or what anyone else is talking about, for that matter. We take the world at face value when we ought to question our assumptions.

Sure, curiosity may have killed the cat. But satisfaction brought it back.