Sulaiman and the UAV — Not pretty, but this thing with a motor hauls ass — 55 mph. Photo credit Brenna Meyer, another student. We went flying two days ago.
There’s a short piece that came across my news feed that adds a nice chunk of evidence to the Neurobiology of Education and Critical Thinking post. Researchers at Trinity College in Dublin, looking at memorization and retention, said this from this piece by Drake Baer:
“Exposure to information doesn’t ensure learning,” says Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College, Dublin. As he tells the Irish Times, it’s all about forcing yourself to recall what you’ve read or heard — “retrieval has a greater effect,” he says.
That means asking yourself questions about whatever it is you’re studying, whether it’s materials for a big meeting or presentation or notes for an exam. Flashcards, those standbys of overachievers everywhere, are effective for much the same reason: They force you to recall and thereby engage mentally with information. Rereading doesn’t put the same cognitive demands on your brain, so you don’t learn as much.
Your brain remembers things better when it’s been taught that what you’re looking at is important to your survival, Benedict Carey, author of How We Learn, once explained to me. How do you convince your brain that something is critical to your very existence? You expend mental energy on it.
The process of reflection, which basically forces one to create an autobiographical, holistic narrative, moves the knowledge from the left side of the neocortex, to the right side, and through the hippocampus, as we’ve covered before. Of course. It’s the way the brain works. Here’s the figure again to save you click, though if you haven’t read Neurobiology of Education and Critical Thinking, I highly recommend it.
And as far as that Survival v-Meme comment, there’s also no question that getting down to the Survival level can create a state of maximum neuroplasticity. Think of it as your brain going full Yoda on you:
The reason I bold-faced the “can” above is for reasons. Too much Survival v-Meme, too fast, otherwise known as trauma, can physically cause brain damage, which then has to be unpacked through a much larger process. This paper here is from 2001, but there is a fair amount of research in the trauma literature that shows the result. What’s even more fascinating (I just found this paper today) is the result of this paper in particular — that trauma can cause reduction in the size of the corpus callosum, the pathway between the left and right hemisphere of the brain, which then lines up with the disassociation trauma brings, which is then really a way of saying ‘explicit knowledge is piling up on the left side of the brain’ and doesn’t have time to make it to the right.
And then THIS lends strength to the argument that childhood trauma can be the trigger that leads to personality disorders and deficits of empathy in adults. This was supposed to be a quickie post, but here’s Baron-Cohen’s RSA presentation. It IS interesting that when one develops a reasonably accurate, functional model of the brain, lots of interesting things start dropping out as insights.
So — the short takeaway is there are two roads to learning things quickly — the high road and the low road. The high road involves reflection and creation of your own autobiographical, holistic narratives, with a definite meditative flair. The second involves trauma and survival, which then has to lead at some level to the same end. Both ends of the Spiral. Funny how that works. And, when you add mirroring behavior (the least likely to stick, as the original piece said,) is exactly what Confucius predicted:
Professor Schiedel has identified four primary mechanisms for dramatic wealth redistribution in human history and his analysis is sobering:
Mass-mobilization warfare (Think World War 2)
Transformative revolutions (Think communist revolutions)
State collapse (fall of the USSR)
Catastrophic plagues (think Bubonic plague a.k.a. the Black Death)
All of these events resulted in a system-structural change in the cultures and an increase in empathy — the realization that we are not all that different and that indeed humanity needs humanity.
and this one:
I will argue that Professor Schiedel’s conclusions require big caveats. Like many who predict the rise and fall of civilizations (many even using thermodynamic arguments), these arguments are based on our history, not our future. As we’ve increased the resources (temperature) of civilization, we’ve awakened totally new modes of interacting and being. The average thermodynamic temperature of society has increased immensely over the last several centuries. While the modes of old are still readily accessible, modern society will change phase and interact in fundamentally different ways than societies of old.
It’s a great post. There’s some thermo talk, but with all the hubbub about science swirling around these days, you can get some learning about thermo too!
One of the problems with familiarity with my own work (I am indeed aware that the reasoning, principles and evidence do come from inside my own brain!) is that I process most of my experience through the model I discuss on this blog. It is, of course, supposed to be a Theory of Everything, which means that it can be applied to Everything. At least in my mind.
So when I read an article such as this one (which I do recommend) about what the author calls the ‘biomedical portrait of psychiatric analysis’ — attempting to shed daylight on why most psychiatrists view psychological illness and disturbance as some individual brain level chemical imbalance, instead of the complex system of environment, experience, brain chemistry and culture it obviously is — (the author hasn’t read my blog to get the whole Theory of Everything portrait,) I intrinsically fill in the holes in the author’s reasoning with my stuff.
And therein lies the rub. The piece is a well-reasoned, well-documented piece that moves conceptually toward a lot of my writing, of the human mind as operating in a complex system — that in this case, psychological illness isn’t just a biomedical disturbance. It’s a combination of a larger complex of factors. But the author is still saddled with the cultural idea of the individual as iconic, and separated from others. Which is still far removed from the larger, easily validated reality of the individual as really just an connected, synergistic part/agent in a much larger system. (For those new readers that get stuck on THAT thought, I’d encourage you to read this piece on solitary confinement — or what happens when you really are alone. Not good.)
Nothing sums up the inevitability of connection like this scene from O Brother, Where Art Thou.
Getting back to the original article — the writing dwells on surface-level factors. It’s the way writing on psychology often runs. Some researcher in the discipline sets up an experiment (often with a group of 18-22 year old college students as part of a Psych 101 class) that tests some hypothesis, often undisclosed to the experimental subjects, about how students will behave. The behavior is then statistically aggregated after some fashion, and generalized to a larger population. More recently, the inevitable TED talk is made. This turns into a narrow, shoehorned generalization of all human behavior that is supposed to supersede all other work. To be fair, the Psychology Greats (like Freud, or Jung) attempt to get under the surface — with Freud it seems like it was all dreams and penises — but an amazing amount of work gets churned out that sports little connection to underlying systems. And if you do manage, you have to beat that horse past death. And then maybe someone gives you a Nobel Prize. One of the things that’s definitely lacking — virtually none of these advances are left open-ended, even the best ones (I need to get working on that Bowen Theory piece.) When I read through even the ones that I like, I still feel like if I’d show up at their annual conference, saying ‘hey, look, I extended and enveloped this iconic work, and it fits in so well inside a larger model, but there’s still a ton of unknowns here, and a couple assumptions you made that were obviously invalid,’ I’d be the proverbial leper at the cocktail party.
If I’ve learned something writing this blog, and reading the prodigious amount of material I cite, it’s that people like their perception of whatever they deem concrete. A simpler way of stating this might be that people like Mario Kart. For those without children, or have hidden under a rock on a desert island for the last twenty years, or have been on an extended trip to Saturn, Mario Kart is a driving game made by Nintendo, playable on any number of game platforms. Every kid in the universe with access to electricity and a little money has played Mario Kart. It’s a driving game, where Mario races Luigi, Princess Peach, and probably some squid. A screenshot is below:
Mario giving Luigi a run for his money, Mario Kart 7, from this website
And, as Wikipedia will remind you, there are a lot of versions. If you ask people to describe the laws of physics of Mario Kart, they will inevitably describe various scenes that they watch. I honestly haven’t played Mario Kart in three shades of forever, so I would not rank as an astute observer of the game. But I’m sure there are Koopa shells, banana peels and such, along with Princess Peach, our evolving intrepid heroine, and Mario and Luigi, doing all sorts of stuff that can be catalogued in excruciating detail.
Now here’s the rub — if you asked a cognitive psychologist HOW Mario Kart worked, they would likely describe the game. Mario and friends race through the countryside of the Mushroom Kingdom, around Bowser’s Castle, and so on. There may some allusions to competitions between Wario and Mario, or some plot device around saving someone, or eating mushrooms. There also might be some connection or interpretive allegory about Princess Peach’s role in the series, or Birdo’s occasional appearance.
And here’s the thing. From the integrated insight inside the discipline of psychology (the culture) combined with the knowledge structures produced from the social structure, which is decidedly Authoritarian/Legalistic v-Meme-centered, we’d expect mostly a fragmented description of players’ characteristics, some consultation with the Long Term magical story arc of the Mario franchise, as well as some algorithms for cause-and-effect (redeeming coins, or bopping Koopa turtles.) If you asked a garden-variety psychologist to describe what the next level might be like, unless, of course they played the game, they’d say ‘more of the same.’ There’s a high probability of little ability to estimate larger, discontinuous jumps in the story line. That’s the v-Memes a talkin’. Without larger reflection, even the best professionals are bound in the knowledge structures that map to their social structures.
Contrast that viewpoint of a hard-core game designer/computer scientist who works on these kinds of things for a living. He/She would likely refer to the story line of the Mario franchise only incidentally. Instead, there’d likely be a series of references to the hardware platform, the general structure of assembling object-oriented, virtual environments, and the challenges of coding a complex, entertaining game that ran at a speed that an eight-year-old master Mario Kart driver would be happy with. Descriptions of their world would not likely discuss the behavior of Mario or any of the characters at all! And if you added a master game design storyteller (think Deist God) to the mix, all discussing Mario Kart in the same room, you’d end up with a far more complete, meta-nonlinear representation of how these things have to work to entertain the mind, with Levels to Advance, Bosses to Whack, as well as technical details from the lower levels. Scaffolding is going to matter to someone attempting to create any workable universe.
And so it is with our Theory of Empathetic Evolution. The Theory gives us the ‘how’ and ‘why’ under the concrete observable. Without practice and study, much of this blog does not immediately map to the obvious. Which, more than anything, makes me feel embarrassed when I comment on other people’s blogs or Medium articles. I know they’re likely not getting what I talk about. Yet I persist, which says something about me.
The immediate response to that comment might be ‘well, all the surface-level observation of Mario Kart is just an illusion. The enlightened master will surely know all of that and more.’ But if we consider this comment inside the context of our own Theory of Everything, this viewpoint is actually very status-oriented, and Authority-based. We’re not granting the person watching or playing the game any agency at all. We’re assuming that they’re unaware, which they may well be. But there may be insights into the physical manifestation of Mario Kart that may inspire our own deeper understandings, especially when we accept the larger notion of collective intelligence — that we’re really all connected. If we shut those people off from our own deeper understanding, there’s a very real chance we’ll miss the boat on what really makes Mario Kart tick. Even if they’re describing intimate detail of Koopa-banana peel interaction.
Another way of looking at this might be the paradigm that Ken Wilber uses, called an Integral OS. Ken calls his Integral perspective more formally All Quadrants/All Levels (AQAL) an operating system for life. It’s deeply detailed and insightful, and since Wilber has served as a major inspiration for much of my own work, I won’t speak much ill of it. Yet at the same time, it assumes the individual largely without context of the surrounding system. It offers aspirational pathways, and ways to measure your own progress toward enlightenment. Yet, at the same time, it falls short of expanding itself into the integral whole we all operate under, at least if he’s not present for interpretation.
A better way of understanding our Theory of Empathetic Evolution might be to expand on this idea of a computer operating system, and maybe pull in a little Unix into the mix. Unix splits itself up into three layers: what’s called the Kernel, the software that interfaces directly with the hardware; the Shell, which is a set of customizable software commands that interface with the Kernel, and get the computer to execute specific tasks; and then finally, whatever application that runs on the top of the Shell. The application in our example is Mario Kart, and if you’re immersed in the game, Mario Kart is as real as it can get, down to winning a race with Donkey Kong. It’s what you see from your egocentric perspective, and that big ape is gonna get you!
Down another level is the Shell. The Shell starts the process of breaking up commands to the lower levels, of course. But there’s something else going on here. The Shell lets you know that there are lower levels, and those levels are structured around some set of physical laws. There are things that now have cause-and-effect built into them as far as those physical laws of computing exist, and no longer can Mario (except in your mind) magically fly away when his car turns into a hang glider.
Down at the bottom is the Kernel, which is now completely interlocked with the physical laws of our universe — how fast things run, when things are executed, the clock that keeps track of the ticking of time. It doesn’t look anything like Mario and Donkey Kong, but it’s what is really going on. Or rather, it’s the core of what’s going on, and only through a deeper understanding of how it works, can we start predicting more reliably the meta-nonlinear parts of our world.
And at the same time, it makes actual reality far more inaccessible to sharing with others. The comprehension, the insight, resist connection with others. It’s a funny duality. The more something is bound to the true physical world, the less comprehensible it is. The further up in abstraction, the easier it is to understand. I’m sure Zen Masters are shaking their head in agreement. So that’s the challenge. And filling in the answers of connection is going to have to involve all of us.
So what’s the point of all this? It is excellent to have a larger theory that captures the meta-dynamics of human (or really, sentient) interaction. It enables us to have some hope of predicting large scale changes in system behavior, and gives a framework for social evolution. But be aware that not everyone has that deeper view. And even though they may be racing Bowser in Mario Kart, you can still get something from their perspective. Just remember that Mario Kart isn’t real. I think. 😉
Postscript — One of my favorite books of all time, Richard Bach’s Illusions, still serves a sentimental purpose in my intellectual framework. As part of a difficult childhood, I needed to believe that everything was an illusion. Still worth a read, and consideration for those that need Mario Kart completely dismantled.
I write a column for our local paper, the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, that runs every two weeks. It serves as good exercise for me in working on moving many concepts in this blog down to a wider audience. The piece below is a good example of this — one I didn’t really want to write at the beginning, but was glad that I did when I finished it. It illustrates a solid appeal for a good empathetic ladder — science, when processed correctly, balancing ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’ helps develop the multi-solution mind.
Note that this doesn’t always apply to all sciences, all the time. Social structure still matters as far as perspective and knowledge creation. Which means that there’s no substitute for developed mindfulness and reflection, and realizing what v-Meme you operate under. Yet every scientist with developed reflective practice knows that every piece of knowledge they generate has some set of system boundaries, and recognizing that and contextualizing that information is as important for validity as it is for any other thought we have. We believed in Newtonian physics as truth until quantum mechanics came along.
One of the purposes of this blog has been to give a theoretical reach to the social sciences that they haven’t had. Physics has a great tool for rigorous metacognitive speculation and prediction. We call it ‘Math’. That helps physicists be a little more empathetic. My hope is that some critical group of social scientists will also recognize the need, of course, and adopt or modify the principles I’ve laid out here, instead of being captured by their social structure. That would cut down on the constant, arbitrary psychological philosophizing that occurs with every new experiment some academic does. While there are some promising signs of this occasionally (shout-out to the Bowen Systems folks!) I’m not holding my breath.
At any rate — here’s my piece on the upcoming March for Science. Feel free to borrow any messages you want without attribution. Science is important — and all of us that are committed to it have to be in it to win it. As I’ve stated over and over, science isn’t the answer to everything. But without it as part of our scaffolding toolkit, we’re pretty much screwed.
Here’s the piece.
March for Science on April 22
Chuck Pezeshki, Reality-Based Lefty April 14, 2017
On April 22, a week from now on Saturday, there will be a March for Science – an event that will happen both in communities around the U.S., as well as a large event in Washington, D.C. on the National Mall. The event in Pullman will start at Pine Street Plaza, outside the Taco del Mar, at 1:00 PM, and proceed to Reaney Park, where there will be speeches and activities that discuss the relevance science has in our lives on the Palouse.
But the reality of the influence of science across our entire modern society goes much deeper. Because the core of science is what is called the Scientific Method – and the short version of that is that various tools are used to collect and measure all sorts of phenomena in our world, and then propose models that explain things that humans otherwise would resort to magical interpretations.
The challenge in today’s society is that as science has gotten more sophisticated, many of the discoveries have gotten stranger. Not too many people have difficulty in accepting that the Earth is round, and that gravity pulls toward the center of the Earth – though if you go up on any college campus, and ask folks why people don’t fall off the Southern Hemisphere, you’ll find more than one student who looks at you confused. Basic scientific literacy is definitely a core problem.
But science itself reveals things that bend the minds of many. Take quantum mechanics, for example. The idea of relative perspective is fundamentally built into the fabric of our universe. Look at things as a wave, and they’re a wave. Look at them as a particle, and they’re a particle. And therein lies the rub. The core of modern science rests on foundations of accepting ambiguity as being essential to truth. That’s where things for many people start falling apart.
Why? It takes some intellectual horsepower to hold duality and uncertainty in one’s mind. And with the bombardment of media and politician’s speech asserting what is called ‘dichotomous thinking’ – a right/wrong, Left/Right interpretation to every event, science, with its careful, methodical processes, subject to many opinions and reviews, is suffering.
What’s to be done? Scientists have to get out in front of the public more. One of the key things for the public to understand is that science is done everywhere – not just in a laboratory. And the other thing that will help is for scientists to translate their work, which often consists of calculations and data, into personal experience that everyone can relate to. In my own world as an engineering scientist, I have no problem believing in global warming. And not just because I can read the papers and look at the charts. I have friends who work on the Greenland ice cap, and Antarctica. I get to hear their stories about glacial recession, or uncanny heat waves over frozen snow fields. I work with people that observe chimpanzees, and orangutans. They can tell me how much like humans they actually are, as well as how they differ.
But most importantly, by connecting with these people, they tell me when, with evidence, my assumptions about the world and the various things in it, are wrong. And by doing so, they keep my intellect developing. Because believing in the scientific method forces me to change my mind. That critical thing, linked to what is called ‘neuroplasticity’, keeps my brain alive, and keeps me learning.
Make no mistake that the current administration wants to gut science. They want to do that because then they get to control the end result – the truth – as well as your ability to take in information and make up your own mind. That’s beyond dangerous.
So turn out for the march. It’s a small thing. There are activities for the kids guaranteed. And you might walk away with your mind changed about something!
Here’s a piece that came flying across my feed today. Titled Donald Trump’s shifting positions have everything to do with the last person he spoke with, it makes the point that once you either make it into Trump’s In-Group, or an external influence is endorsed by someone in Trump’s profound In-Group, he assumes the role of a reflector, locked in at the lowest level of mirroring behavior. The article points out two examples — the first being Trump’s about-face on Chinese currency manipulation after meeting with Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, the second after a meeting with Chinese president Xi Jinping on the challenges of the situation with North Korea. Mnuchin definitely comes from Trump’s In-Group — a rich, New York globalist and former lead banker at Goldman Sachs. (I predicted Mnuchin’s meta-type in this piece.)
My guess about Xi is that the men have much, v-Meme-wise in common. Both are narcissistic authoritarians, and likely think alike on most issues regarding approach and dynamic, if not substance. That makes Trump’s disordered sense of boundaries feel at ease. President Xi is predictable, in a strange way, to the impulsive mind of Trump.
Which is scary — because the next person to walk through the door may want war with North Korea. Not good.
One of the more interesting contrasts in how promoting independent agency can save everyone money and increase performance just popped up in the last couple of days. United Airlines, in a viral public incident, yanked a seated passenger off a plane, in full view of a range of iPhones and Galaxies, in order to fly another United crew to a waiting plane. After not receiving any volunteers, and increasing the price of refunds/ticket vouchers, they hit some arbitrary ceiling in their pricing ($800) and instead decided to go the ‘forced eviction’ route. The various videos and such are contained in this Esquire article here. Calling in the po-po and having someone alleging to be a doctor flying home to see patients yanked out of his seat and dragged off the plane screaming (I haven’t seen the official confirmation of the fact that he was a doctor, but it’s still a great story) is about as Authoritarian v-Meme as you can get.
And now United is paying a price in stock price loss, as well as future market revenue loss. I have some choice when I fly, and I rarely, if ever, fly United. They’re a last-choice carrier for me, and nothing that happened yesterday will change that.
What’s interesting is that Delta has managed, through a more Performance v-Meme-based approach that emphasizes personal agency, to create a system creating the least numbers of kerfuffles for the chronic problem of over-booking. When Delta approaches an overbooking situation, they announce early, and have customers bid what they would take for getting bumped off the flight. It’s a little manipulative, to be sure, because passengers are bidding against each other, and can’t know what other passengers are also bidding. But it does do a good job of popping people out of their limbic brains through a form of ‘priming’ — and that’s not all bad. If you bid, you were obviously someone who thought they could miss that flight, and at least had time to activate a little Kahneman System 2 thinking, engaging that pre-frontal cortex, instead of just wallowing around in the amygdala. Details about Delta’s system are here in this National Public Radio piece.
Much better than selecting people, already seated, at random. Two cops approach you in an airplane seat, you’re going to get down into that Survival v-Meme pretty quickly. There will be blood — especially, for me, if I’m already seated in an exit row!
Conor with the Holy Grail — a Rainbow Bagel from Brooklyn. With cream cheese, it tasted like a cheesecake! February 2017.
In order to expand my media offerings, I’ve been making podcasts. This one has material that’s been covered on the blog, but now you can listen to my sonorous tones as you make the larger connection between Design Thinking, social structure, empathy, and leadership.
There are a couple of key concepts that I write about in my scholarly work that I lay out in this podcast. Largest of these is the idea of a meta-linear and a meta-nonlinear social system, and how it aggregates information. A typical hierarchy behaves like a meta-linear system, in that knowledge aggregation, is essentially additive (nothing much changes except putting stuff together) and happens above the knowledge producers. The node
above the leaves is responsible for combining the information. Since statistically, the person at the node can’t have the consummate knowledge of both the leaves, what happens is knowledge is added together, and passed up. No opportunities for synergy.
Contrast this to a more empathy-driven, real-time social network. See below:
Connections are dependent on agency of the individuals, and their level of empathetic development. These kinds of relationships take more time (connection is only partially driven by titles, and more by data-driven exploration) but are based on more realistic trust, and because they’re predicated on exchange, produce far more meta-nonlinear synergies and divergent design thinking.
And THAT leads to the need for Servant Leadership 2.0, which takes Jim Collins’ version of leadership, and couples that to an enhanced ability to connect with all sorts of different constituencies. Which in turn, enriches the idea AND the information pool for better designs, with much greater potential for breakthroughs.
Here’s the podcast:
I do understand that this is hard stuff. But it’s pretty cool. Here are some links below for folks who just want to read the text.
Just get on the bus — Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2017
There’s so much to unpack on modern authoritarianism. I’m listing a couple of links below that may help you understand some of the larger dynamics. Since the demand has been so high for understanding them, I’ve made a podcast that integrates many of these ideas that I’ve discussed earlier. As usual, I don’t dwell so much on particular issues, but work on understanding the larger social dynamics and information flow that underlay how these systems operate.
Well, I’ll be honest — I did the webinar, and it just really isn’t my thing. Part of doing a webinar is breaking stuff up into fragments, which is hard, because this blog is about, if nothing else, integration of thought.
So, to lick my wounds, I did something that suits me far better — a monologue about Donald Trump’s Alternate Facts. Click below to listen and let me know what you think. Folks have been after me to make podcasts forever. OK — now you have to listen to them!
What’s the takeaway? Your own v-Meme, which is keyed to your dominant social structure, will profoundly affect how you understand and filter Donald Trump. And that’s likely to cause conflict with someone you know. Which is exactly what he wants.
Austronesian Art exhibit — Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, February, 2017
In advance of my first webinar tomorrow, I thought I might shed some light on what I perceive think are some of the largest perceptive hurdles in understanding my Theory of Empathetic Evolution. Here goes!
Empathy is NOT Sympathy
This is a big one. Sympathy is an emotional response to someone else’s suffering, where connection does not play a large role. You can have sympathy for the drowned refugee infant, laying on the beach. Sympathy is a route to compassion, and is an important part of the human experience. But it is not empathy.
Empathy, as used in this blog, implies a duplex connection between at least two individuals, or as I would say, sentient agents. This is well-established in the peer-reviewed, scientific literature, and is the bedrock of my work. Not everyone, even in the scientific community, views empathy this way, but the vast majority of empathy researchers do. So it’s kind of like global warming. The consensus is that empathy is about connection, just like the consensus of scientists regard climate change as real.
The model of empathy used in my work is an augmentation of the scaffolded version put forward put forward by Frans de Waal, that maps empathy to the three primary brain activity areas, that, of course, are all linked together. They’re all part of the brain, and no part of the brain does something that is completely isolated from all the other parts.
Empathy is NOT Mind-Reading
One of the interesting observations I’ve had explaining empathy to people is the idea that somehow empathy is mind-reading. It’s not, though someone who is highly empathetic on all the various levels can definitely appear to be! Empathy is fundamentally statistical, or really probabilistic in how it works. We take in signals from others, and send signals back in the context of any exchange. These signals are language, sounds, facial expressions, hand gestures and so on, and interpretations our own minds make of various information we receive.
Understanding this, and truly internalizing it into our thinking process, is a big deal. Our brains like to work immediately and transactionally. Lots of famous people have documented this, like Daniel Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize for studying this kind of thing. Our brains don’t like statistics so much, or holding the idea of a probabilistic exchange. The reasons for that are laid out in what I write about (how your v-Meme helps you construct knowing) but as you read through the posts, you might put a self-check on your own thinking and understanding. On this blog, one of the biggest points I make is that empathy creates information coherence between people exchanging information. Think about the difference in information quantity between a phone conversation and a face-to-face meeting. Which one is easier to convey nuance? Which one is easier to make sure you both understand the same thing? There is really little definitive work that I’ve found (though there are dominant mental models!) on the ratio to verbal and non-verbal communication. The standard comes from the work of Albert Mehrabian, who came up with the 7%-38%-55% Rule (Words/Tone of Voice/Body Language). But it’s obviously highly contextual.
If you think that when you tell someone something, without any feedback or verbal cues, they understand, take it from someone who has taught for 30+ years. I find that students regularly walk with about 20% of the information you present in any given class. Or ask the parent of a teenager!
What business does a professor of engineering have writing about empathy?
I’ve found when I talk about empathy to academic audiences, the worst actors in attempting to understand my argument and theory are sociologists. Why that’s true is what I write about on my blog! It’s not 100%, but these individuals can’t get past what I am, to consider what I write. They are classic authority-based thinkers (entrenched deep in the Authoritarian v-Meme), and to them, a Ph.D. in sociology is the only gateway to being able to discuss many of the ideas presented in this blog.
Titles have purposes, and we cover that extensively on this blog. You don’t wander down the street asking strangers for diagnostic help if your liver hurts. You go to a doctor. That said, if you need some title validation, part of the reason we get a Ph.D. in general is that it gives the well-schooled the set of skills to investigate new areas of research. No one’s Ph.D. can completely educate them in their own discipline, in this day and age. There is simply too much knowledge out there. My Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from Duke, and the tutelage from my advisor, still profoundly helps me decipher all sorts of information, both engineering-related and not. I owe my schooling a great debt. But if your advisor does a good job, they school you in general inquiry as well.
If you decide to read my blog, and you’re getting stuck on the idea of me as a mechanical engineer, here are a couple of thoughts to help you get over your reticence.
My background is in a form of mathematics known as complex system theory, as well as design theory. The first I trained formally during my graduate study. What the math gives is a variety of paradigms — ways of thinking about patterns that help match to physical phenomena. The second is lots of practice watching people (my students and sponsors) design stuff. This gives me lots of experiential patterns that I then can map to the empathy literature, which I read extensively.
One of the things about empathy is that it’s largely a developed ability. And if you ask me personally, I think the best way to develop it is to meet people who are profoundly different from you, and figure out how they think. I’ve traveled to about 37 different countries, and speak a variety of languages poorly 🙂 . I’ve also had a pretty wild life, both good and bad, that’s given me a lot to reflect on. When scaffolded with the empathy literature and the stuff up above, it’s proven to be very useful in concepts, experiences, and enough self-doubt to keep down the confirmation bias! Like Mark Twain said, “never let school get in the way of getting an education.”
Empathy is NOT always an explicit moment/thought/action in time – it’s an encompassing dynamic
One of the interesting things I’ve observed about the empathy discussion is that most people having it want to isolate empathy, which is fundamentally about connection, onto its own little piece of intellectual real estate, that doesn’t affect the perceived model of constant, fundamental separation from other human beings.
That kind of thinking has its purpose. By isolating empathy, It can lead to some useful insights and techniques for practicing empathy. My empathy buddy Edwin Rutsch and others work on refining such techniques as Empathy Circles. These are great things, especially when you might be called into a company that is having problems from a lack of empathy, to daylight problems that are getting in the way of your company/society making progress.
At the same time, when you draw a circle around empathy in that manner, there is a very real risk that you miss the boat on what empathy is all about. Empathy is a constant dynamic that pervades our entire existence. When you walk into a room, and someone yawns, you don’t suddenly think “Mirroring Behavior — time to yawn!” It’s automatic. You just do it. And here’s a big secret. If you practice, empathy at the higher levels (or the lack of it!) becomes ingratiated into your fundamental Way of Being and becomes a core part of your cognitive and limbic processing.
Here’s an example. I was asked on this NPR show, To the Best of Our Knowledge, about why a professor of design would be interested in empathy. I gave a standard answer, expounding on the differences in design (which I also write about) — algorithmic and heuristic. The first, involving improving the performance of a rocket engine by about 5%, is more non-empathetic. The expert knows, and you listen to them. The second, involving coming up with a new concept for a cell phone, like the iPhone, is decidedly more explicitly empathetic. You go out, talk to customers, empathize with them and their actual uses, and then come back and create a whole new paradigm of how people will use phones. This likely appeals to you, my reader, and makes sense.
But what is missed in this discussion is that even with engineers working on designing a 5% improvement in rocket engine performance, the ability for empathetic exchange profoundly enhances the progress of development of that rocket engine, because it increases the information coherence in all information exchanges required.
This is a huge point, and one easily overlooked. Empathy is embedded, in a self-similar fashion — sometimes automatic, sometimes not automatic — in all our transactions with others. As well as ourselves. It’s nice when we can point to it in the context of product design. But we swim in a sea of empathy, whether we realize it or not. It’s time to move empathy off of Intellectual Flatland.
What are you really doing on this blog?
I don’t want to downplay my role on this blog as far as original ideas. There are a few. But mostly what I’m doing here is connecting the dots — drawing supportable, reasoned linkages between lots of different fields of study. How I do this is I operate under a dominant assumption — that nature does things with simple dynamics, that can generate all sorts of beautiful and complex patterns. I think some of this ability/line of thinking comes from my study of fractals — complex geometric patterns based on typically a very simple underlying dynamic.
The other thing that I’m doing is working on understanding how people understand, and boiling that down to first principles, which from thermodynamics has to be time, space and energetics. It’s likely an odd way for most people to think about what we consider a complex emotional and cognitive phenomenon. But Albert Einstein said it best (paraphrasing) — of all our thought processes, it’s all got to come down to thermo.
And who am I to speak against the genius of the age?
Sulaiman and the UAV — Not pretty, but this thing with a motor hauls ass — 55 mph. Photo credit Brenna Meyer, another student. We went flying two days ago.
And as far as that Survival v-Meme comment, there’s also no question that getting down to the Survival level can create a state of maximum neuroplasticity. Think of it as your brain going full Yoda on you:
Che Guevara grafitti, Universidad Nacional de Colombia, Bogota, CO, 2014
It's About Empathy - Connection Ties Us Together 