Wisdom from the 42nd Page

Cracking Creativity

On the forty-second page of “Cracking Creativity: The Secrets of Creative Genius” author Michael Michalko wrote (emphasis added):

that the other person can connect with and understand. The ideas stemming from the second scenario will probably be more bottom-line oriented and impersonal. Perhaps they will include an objective idea that the other person can readily understand and accept.

Da Vinci's Multiple Perspectives

Leonardo da Vinci equated comprehension of the deeper structure of his subject with having multiple perspectives, specifically, from at least three different points of view. This seems to be a very fundamental and key part of Leonardo's strategy—multiple points of view are synthesized together. Leonardo believed that until one perceived something from a minimum of three different perspectives, one did not yet have a basis for understanding it. A true and complete knowledge comes from the synthesizing of these views. For example, when he designed the first bicycle, he looked at this new form of transportation from the viewpoint of the inventor, investors who would sponsor prototypes and production, the bicycle rider or consumer, and the municipalities where bicycles would be used, and then he synthesized the views.

Just as the difference in point of view between your eyes allows you to perceive depth, multiple perspctives about your subject deepen your understanding. Educational psychologists have conducted many experiments illustrating how a multiplicity of perspectives open awareness and creativity. In one study of beginning piano students, two groups were introduced to a simple C-major scale. One group was told to learn the scale by responding to multiple perspectives, including thoughts and feelings; the other group was told to practice the scale by the traditional memorization through repetition. When the groups were evaluated, the psychologists found the playing of the first group to be much more competent and creative.

In other experiments, researchers assigned chapters about particular subjects (e.g., the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act) to two groups. one group was asked to read the passage from multiple perspectives: its own, as well as that of the participants, wondering what they must have felt or thought at the time. The other group was told simply to learn the passage. Invariably, when the groups were tested the group that studied using "multiple" perspectives outperformed the other group that used "traditional" learning methods, in terms of information retained, the content of the essays they wrote, and creative solutions proposed.

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(Ten Speed Press, January 2001. Paper Textbook, 320 pages. ISBN: 1580083110; EAN: 9781580083119.)

The Geography of Thought

On the forty-second page of “The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why” author Richard E. Nisbett wrote (emphasis added):

As history, the account I am proposing for why Greece and China diverged as they did is speculative. It is nevertheless a scientific theory—because it leads to predictions that can be tested, and tested moreover in the psychological laboratory.

Twentieth-century psychologists have provided evidence that economic and social factors can affect perceptual habits. Herman Witkin and his colleagues showed that some people are less likely than others to separate an object from its surrounding environment. They called their dimension "field dependence"—referring to the degree to which perception of an object is influenced by the background or environment in which it appears. Witkin and his colleagues measured field dependence in a variety of ways. One of these was the Rod and Frame Test. In this test the participant looks into a long box at the end of which is a rod with a frame around it. The rod and frame can be tilted independently of each other and the participant's task is to indicate when the rod is completely vertical. The participant is accounted field dependent to the extent that judgments of the rod's verticality are influenced by the position of the frame. A second way of testing field dependence is to place people in a chair that tils independently of the room in which it's placed. In this test, called the Body Adjustment Test, the participant is accounted field dependent to the extent that judgments of the verticality of the participant's own body are influenced by the tilt of the room. A third way, and the easiest to work with, is the Embedded Figures Test. In this test, the job is to locate a simple figure that is embedded in a much more complex figure. The longer it takes people to find

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(Free Press, April 2004. Paperback, 263 pages. ISBN: 0743255356; EAN: 9780743255356.)

Save the World on Your Own Time

On the forty-second page of “Save the World on Your Own Time” author Stanley Fish wrote (emphasis added):

You can imagine the reaction of students who think that "syntax" is something cigarette smokers pay, guess that "lexicon" is the name of a rebel tribe inhabiting a galaxy far away, and haven't the slightest idea of what words like "tense," "manner" and "mood" mean. They think I'm crazy. Yet fourteen weeks later—and this happens every time—each group has produced a language of incredible sophistication and precision.

How is this near miracle accomplished? The short answer is that in the course of the semester the students come to understand a single proposition: a sentence is a structure of logical relationships. In its bare form, this proposition is hardly edifying, which is why I immediately supplement it with a simple exercise. "Here," I say, "are five words randomly chosen; turn them into sentence." (The first time I did this the words were coffee, should, book, garbage, and quickly.) In no time at all I am presented with twenty sentences, all perfectly coherent and all quite different. Then comes the hard part. "What is it," I ask, "that you did? What did it take to turn a random list of words into a sentence?" A lot of fumbling and stumbling and false starts follow, but finally someone says, "I put the words into a relationship with one another."

Once the notion of a relationship is on the table, the next question almost asks itself: what exactly are the relationships? And working with the sentences they have created the students quickly realize two things: first, that the possible relationships form a limited set; and second, that it all comes down to an interaction of some kind between actors, the actions the perform, and the objects of those actions.

The next step (and this one takes weeks) is to explore the devices by which English indicates and distinguishes between the various components of these interactions. If in every sentence someone is doing something to someone or something else, how does English all you to tell who

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(Oxford University Press, USA, August 2008. Hardcover, 208 pages. ISBN: 0195369025; EAN: 9780195369021.)

Sources of Power

On the forty-second page of “Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions” author Gary Klein wrote (emphasis added):

He would stay until this civilian could not take it anymore, and then he would leave. So they both stayed where they were, while the cloud got closer. As the cloud floated directly overhead, the wind plunged the tear gas down at them. They tried to run, but it was too late. They collapsed, coughing uncontrollably, their faces covered with tears and mucus.

In terms of pure adrenaline rush, I do not think any of our experiences can exceed the time we were studying airport baggage screeners, to understand how they interpreted the X-ray images. Their difficult job is to identify weapons that may be rotated in any direction and may be superimposed on other metal objects. They need to make the judgment in only a few seconds. During this project sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration, two of our researchers, Steve Wolf and Dave Klinger, traveled to Cleveland to observe and conduct interviews. Approximately ten minutes after they arrived at the checkpoint, a baggage screener saw something suspicious in the bag that a large, expensively dressed man had sent through the machine. The baggage scanner did not know it was a gun (if she had, she would have locked it into the machine). She asked the man if she could open the bag. Security guards were summoned and quickly confiscated a gun, then led the man off in handcuffs. Our stunned researchers looked on in amazement. The odd part of the story is that the man had not intended to smuggle the weapon at all. He was carrying drugs and had forgotten to remove his .38 when he arrived at the airport.

Applications

The part of intuition that involves pattern matching and recognition of familiar and typical cases can be trained. If you want people to size up situations quickly and accurately, you need to expand their experience base. One way is to arrange for a person to receive more difficult cases. A fireground commander in a small, rural community may get little direct experience. Recall the case of the Christmas fire where the commanders acted like novices compared to the two consultants. In contrast, firefighters in a large city with many old buildings can get a tremendous amount of experience in a short time.

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(MIT Press, February 1999. Paperback, 348 pages. ISBN: 0262611465; EAN: 9780262611466.)

Have a New Kid by Friday

On the forty-second page of “Have a New Kid by Friday: How to Change Your Child's Attitude, Behavior & Character in 5 Days” psychologist Dr. Kevin Leman wrote (most emphasis added):

Put-downs. Struggles over getting up on time for school. Struggles over eating. Kids who don't stay in bed but pop out like the Energizer Bunny. Carelessness with money. Lying. Not completing a project.

Did you know that behavior is learned? And that children will model their behavior after the things they see you say and do?

Think how many times you've said, "I'm never going to do what my father did to me. I'll never speak to my kids the way my mother did to me." Then you find yourself using the same words and the same inflection your parents did.

Think about that little "white lie" you told your boss: "I'm not feeling very well today. I think I need a day to rest." And then you took the kids to the beach.

Or what about the time you promised your children that you'd take them out for ice cream...then you got busy with work and didn't get home until they were already in bed?

That's what I mean. Your attitude can't help but slip out through your behavior, and children are always watching. That means if you want to see your child change, you have to change yourself. If you yell when you get angry, should it surprise you when your 7-year old does it? If you give others the silent treatment, should it surprise you if your 13-year-old isn't talking? Do you break your promises? If so, you need to start honoring your promises—or not making them in the first place. My personal view is that you should never promise your children anything. Promising them is saying that (1) your car will never break down, (2) every day will go exactly as you've planned it, (3) you are perfect, and (4) it won't rain.

Misbehavior is going to happen. Kids are kids. Just accept the fact that they will say and do the dumbest and most embarrassing things you can imagine. I'll never forget what our pediatrician told us when we had Holly, our firstborn. "You have to safety-proof your house because kids are really dumb when it comes to putting things in their mouths." Kids will pull a dog's tail and get bit, they'll

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(Revell, March 2008. Hardcover, 304 pages. ISBN: 0800719026; EAN: 9780800719029.)

The Hidden Dimension

On the forty-second page of “The Hidden Dimension” anthropologist Edward T. Hall wrote (emphasis added):

This classification can be broken down even further. The skin, for example, is the chief organ of touch and is also sensitive to heat gain and loss; both radiant and conducted heat are detected by the skin. Hence, strictly speaking, the skin is both an immediate and a distance receptor.

There is a general relationship between the evolutionary age of the receptor system and the amount and quality of information it conveys to the central nervous system. The tactile, or touch, systems are as old as life itself; indeed, the ability to respond to stimuli is one of the basic criteria of life. Sight was the last and most specialized sense to be developed in man. Vision became more important and olfaction less essential when man's ancestors left the ground and took to the trees, as I mentioned in the last chapter. Stereoscopic vision is essential in arboreal life. Without it, jumping from branch to branch becomes very precarious.

Visual and Auditory Space

The amount of information gathered by the eyes as contrasted with the ears has not been precisely calculated. Such a calculation not only involves a translation process, but scientists have been handicapped by lack of knowledge of what to count. A general notion, however, of the relative complexities of the two systems can be obtained by comparing the size of the nerves connecting the eyes and the ears to the centers of the brain. Since the optic nerve contains roughly eighteen times as many neurons as the cochlear nerve, we assume it transmits at least that much more information. Actually, in normally alert subjects, it is probable that the eyes may be as much as a thousand times as effective as the ears in sweeping up information.

The area that the unaided ear can effectively cover in the course of daily living is quite limited. Up to twenty feet the ear is very efficient. At about one hundred feet, one-way vocal communication is possible, at somewhat slower rate than at conversational distances, while two-way conversation is very considerably altered. Beyond this distance, the auditory cues with which man works begin to break down rapidly.

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(Anchor Books, May 1975. Paperback, 240 pages. ISBN: 0385084765; EAN: 9780385084765.)

Beyond Rationality

On the forty-second page of “Beyond Rationality: The Search for Wisdom in a Troubled Time” author Kenneth Hammond wrote (emphasis added):

these may operate simultaneously to cause a single event, an attack on a second young man.

Similar examples can readily be found on other social occasions. Often, a number of causal systems are covertly related. For example, for many years, certain insurance companies were accused of charging poor blacks higher premiums for burial insurance than they charged whites. A class action lawsuit resulted in a 1999 settlement of $45-60 million in fines and compensation to black consumers. The insurance industry defended its higher charges on the grounds that blacks had shorter life spans than whites but now acknowledges that it is poverty rather than race that leads to shorter lives.⁶

Assets and Liabilities of Entangled Causality

Entangled causality may assist us in making accurate judgements for the same reason that redundant cues assist us; they help us make the correct judgment—to be right—but for the wrong reason. For example, it is easy to infer the wrong motive for an act—because the fallible indicators are fallible, that is, occasionally wrong. Yet, if the correct motive is related to the incorrect one, the ultimate prediction can be correct. In the above example, we may well assign the cause of the fight to jealousy when in fact it was because of an urge to demonstrate masculinity through fighting. Yet, if the two motives—jealousy and an urge to demonstrate masculinity—were closely related in the person fighting, then a prediction of a fight based on an (incorrect) inference of jealousy would lead us to believe we had made the correct inference about the cause, and perhaps, to congratulate ourselves on having once more predicted social behavior successfully. (Such "correct" inferences lead us to be overly confident about our inferences in redundancy rich environments.) So, to the extent entangled causality in the environment allows correct predictions for the wrong reason, it is an asset, provided that empirical accuracy is all we are interested in. But of course that is not always the case; on many occasions it will be important to be correct for the right reason.

In short, it is important to understand that the assets that entangled causality offers us—increased accuracy—come with a price: being right for the wrong reason. That "accuracy" misleads us about our competence, particularly in social environments.

The more obvious liability created by entanglement of causes is that it creates opportunities for incorrect judgments. If there are multiple causes of an act, then we must somehow exercise our judgment to decide which one actually controlled the observed behavior. Normally, our only resource is to rely on multiple fallible indicators, but since the indicators are fallible, this situation creates uncertainty. If we cannot manipulate any aspect of the situation—if we remain

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Why Parents Matter

On the forty-second page of “Why Parents Matter: Parental Investment and Child Outcomes” psychologist Nigel Barber wrote (emphasis added):

having failed, it is more objective, and a lot more optimistic, to recognize that people vary in how helpful or antisocial their behavior is without necessarily being "sick." On the contrary, there are some contexts in which acting "nice" is interpreted as weakness and ruthlessly exploited.

By the same token, children tend to mirror certain aspects of how they are treated by parents. Clinical psychologists often refer to the cycle of violence in families, according to which people who come from abusive homes tend to become abusive parents. A less professional formulation is, "What goes around comes around." Children who are raised by harsh, abusive parental figures are different from the unfortunate children raised without parents in orphanages. Instead of being deprived of socializing experiences, they are actually provided with some very emphatic examples of what adults do. For example, they learn that social problems may be solved by the use of force. They also learn that since their fathers are physically strong than their mothers, masculine will tends to prevail in family disputes. In addition, they learn that the social world of adults, from the family outward, is tough and competitive and that people are devious, mean, and unreliable.

Of course, these impressions of life form the perspective of an abusive home, whether it is in a poor urban neighborhood or a respectable suburb, are quire realistic. Children's brains have been designed by natural selection to keep them in efficient touch with the social environment in which they are raised. These attitudes can therefore be considered adaptive. They only come to seem like an illness when judged in terms of their bad social consequences. Such environments tend to undermine the potential of children to learn control over their impulses. They have difficulty grasphing complex rules of expected behavior and wanting to follow them. In short, they do not learn those things that they need to know to succeed in the workforce, from speaking correctly and politely to self-discipline and the work ethic, and what they have learned makes it much more likely that their personal behavior and income-generation activities will get them in trouble with the law.

Harsh and inconsistent parenting actively teaches children that there are no consistent social rules. If you cannot predict when a parent will punish you, then it makes little sense to try pleasing the parent by obeying the rules. If there is little justice—your sister is always indulged despite her bad behavior and you are punished even when you are being good—then it makes sense to be constantly vigilant to protect your selfish interests. Reduced parental investment associated with abusive homes increases the risk of the child being delinquent, using illegal drugs, dropping out of high school, joining gangs, being unemployed, and becoming the parents of an unplanned child during the teen years (particularly for girls).²¹

One very important practical consequence of reduced parental investment is that children in some ways come to treat themselves like they have

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