Monday, May 22, 2006
As you think...
Notes Fuzzy Signals (from some time ago):By contrast, for generative thinking, a positive frame of reference pays off. In tracking brain waves and through other experiments, cognitive psychologists demonstrate that we perceive more options and opportunities when we're in a positive mindset, and far fewer when we're in a negative or depressed fame of thinking. Moreover, therapies that force us to dwell too long on the past (like many psychoanalytical techniques) can make us too passive about our future and embittered by our victimhood. Our lived experiences confirm this as well. We've all felt a deep sense of "stuckness" when we're depressed, that dark place where solutions seem elusive and where every option seems either wrong or undesirable.This sounds exactly like what James Allen was saying about disposition in As a Man Thinketh, and it fits to a T what his spiritual - though not actual - descendant, Marc Allen, pushes in everything from The Millionaire Course to The Type-Z Guide to Success. What Fuzzy Signals offers is a concern that we're hardwired for "adaptive thinking" - watching for dangers and threats and figuring out how to respond to them - rather than "generative thinking" - figuring out how to envision or shape what isn't but could be. What Marc Allen and other take-it-easy self-help gurus push is, in effect, expanding or harnessing the "generative" mindset - an antidote to this tendency.
What is worrying is that while Fuzzy Signals shows us the need for and logic of seeking ways to increase our "generative thinking," she doesn't tell us what to do about the millions - billions - who find their thinking normal enough (as it is) instead of reading self-help books to find out how we could all be better.
Wittgenstein tells us the world is the sum of facts - and not things. The post-modernists would tag onto this that facts are unstable things, all of us having different ones. And Fuzzy Signals tells us that the facts we're likely to find are the ones about protecting ourselves, not reaching out and building new things.
Are the Islamists hard-wired to fear cultural interchange with us?
Is the West hard-wired to fear Islam?
In other words, is the almost ubiquitious fear of the other the result of us all constructing worlds - emotional and mental universes - that arise when human beings think they know what they see but don't in fact even know why or what they're looking for?
My question, I confess, doesn't really offer any particularly new insights. We've know that babies smile at people who like them for years, for example. But here's the thing: What Fuzzy Signals tells us is that there is a way out. It's just that it's not "sensitivity training," so much as "generative thinking" that needs to be optimized.
The scarier thing for our politics is to wonder how many of our leaders - in government and business alike - think they're making the tough choices in tough times when what they're in fact doing is letting a fear mindset constrain their visions and set us on paths designed only to keep danger at bay a while, rather than preparing us for glorious things in the future.
The next time you read of troops being dispatched, layoffs announced or other such gloomy news, be sure to stop and wonder if fear or hope drove the decision and whether the choices were tough because life is tough or - sadly - because our race conspires inadvertently to make it so.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm getting back to my Instant Self-Hypnosis books, so that I, at least, can live in a world where things look a little better.
posted by gbarto at 10:38 AM