Educating the Emotions: A Middle Aged Guy talks about Engaging Passion

if you could remember not to bring any food and drinks in here too that would be great this is a renovated space um my name is Sasha I work for the Aspen Institute and I edit the Aspen idea magazine you should definitely grab a copy uh and so to keep this on time I'm just going to bring him right out folks David Rooks thank you Sasha for that lavish and generous introduction um brought a teer to my eye uh well this was buillt as uh middle-age emotion so there was supposed to be a couch out here and I was just going to lie down and weep um if any of you are Germans it's your turn to weep they lost the World Cup semi-final just a few minutes ago Spain won one Zer uh no I'm I'm going to uh get to a motion but I'm going to talk about start uh by telling you a story a happy story a story about success and what better place than Aspen to talk about successful people it's sort of a lawyer jurga of successful people here uh and I personally encounter them out on the hiking trails uh you'll be walking up a trail I walked up the American Lake Trail a few uh yesterday and as happens often at Aspen you'll be hiking up the trail and there'll be a little old guy whizzing by you like an F18 uh and he's one of these 70-year-old Fitness Freaks and sort of he's shrunk down with age he's like 5 foot 90 lb covered head to toe in spandex he zooms up the trail past you leaving a little wake of contempt um it's like being passed by little iron raisinet uh going up there uh and so these uh old guys are everywhere uh in Aspen they've succeeded at everything they've ever done uh they made a few billion they own two planes they own four houses they sponsor three charter schools to be good uh they have five perfect Sons uh named bip chip rip tip and lip um they married a series of beautiful women and so uh if there's if he's like five foot usually they marry a series of like five six-footers in a row which is 30 ft of combined woman uh uh and they achieve a sort of genetic Miracle so while their own mother looked like gertude Stein uh their granddaughters look like Uma Thurman uh so they've and so now they're 70 years old and they just decide to beat the crap out of death they're not going to do it so they hire a personal trainer they take up wind surfing at age 75 they're popping Calis like breath mints uh if women were turned on by conversations about cholesterol they'd have a different B babe every night um and they've entered what you could call their Pluto adolescence uh which is they can now afford to do everything they wanted to do as teenagers so like these little raging libidos with Platinum AMX cards and they're sort of downtown traveling in packs and Aspen sort of a Vortex of smugness in athletic sandals uh they've dyed their her gold to match the interior of their jet uh they've their life is so calm and cool together uh they make Dick Cheney looks bipolar uh and so this is you know what you're thinking is how can I be rich and healthy and popular like these guys uh and there's a conventional story about how to get that way you get born with a superior IQ you have awesome good looks or some other tremendous trait you go to such and such a school and make the honor rooll you have high SAT scores you go to prestigious college graduate school and get an advant degree in MBA law degree medical degree you read self- Health Improvement books in search of Excellence Seven Habits of Highly Effective People everything Malcolm Gladwell has ever written uh and you become a great decision maker a great executive and a great manager and that's one version and one story of how you become successful like that uh but I'm going to tell you a different story of how one becomes successful maybe not quite like that uh and and I actually think it's a more important story uh we're living in a revolution in Consciousness we've learned more about the mind in the past 30 years than we did in the previous 3000 and one of the central findings of This research is that we're not primarily the products of our conscious decision- making we're primarily the products of thinking and cognition and Imagination and emotion that goes on below the level of awareness so the human mind is capable of taking in about 11 pieces of information a minute of which it can be conscious of about 40 uh and the rest is being processed in there and over the past 30 years in just tremendously exciting field neuroscientists psychologists cognitive scientists sociologists and others have been shining flashlights into this hidden Kingdom of the unconscious and they're learning it's not a primitive zone of animal passion it's not a dark zone of repressed sexual urges uh it's where some of the most impressive and complicated think takes place and a different kind of thinking that than is the voice in our head and so if the conscious mind is like a general sitting on top of platform analyzing a battlefield thinking in ways that are logical and linear and linguistic the unconscious mind is like a million little Scouts permeating the landscape and coding things with emotional attachments so you come across an old friend and you feel a surge of affection you see heroic action you feel a surge of admiration you see unfairness you feel a surge of anger and disgust and you don't have to think about this what these emotional Scouts do is they assign values they tell us what we want what to love what to hate they guide us forward like a GPS system except for instead of an atonal voice there's emotion guiding us forward now I'm a middle-aged man I'm generally uncomfortable with discussion of emotion there's a great apocryph though I think apocryphal brain scan story they took a bunch of middle-aged guys put them in a fmri machine and then they had them watch a horror movie and then they had them watch describe their feelings toward their wives and the brain scans were identical in both circumstances um it's just sheer panic and Terror uh and as my wife can tell you that's about where I am uh but I wanted to talk to you about this Enchanted world of the unconscious uh because I think what the scientists are finding will but has not yet had a huge effect on social thought and because my world the world of policy and politics hasn't even begun to Grapple uh with what they're finding and because there's a bias in our culture we're really good at talking about reason and material things but we're really bad at talking about emotion we can talk about materialism but we're terrible about talking about character and how character forms uh so I thought I'd talked to you about emotion uh but the scary thing for me is that I just thought I'd do it in the form of a story uh what I call social science performance art uh and I've never done this before I wrote this this morning and it could be a big disaster which would be historic to be witness but I wanted to show you in concrete as concrete terms as possible uh how on conscious skills grow and develop uh and how they really play out in real life so I thought I'd introduce you to a newborn little baby named Erica who was born to a Chinese American mother and a Mexican American father who planned on getting married someday but haven't gotten married yet and actually never will Erica is 1 hour old she opens her eyes and makes Visual contact with her mother uh she has nothing like what we would call Consciousness kids until they're about 18 months or three really don't have a sense that they can control their own minds but she is capable of sophisticated cognition in 1979 there was a guy named Alan meltzoff who was at the ideas Festival last year who began a change in the way we understand babies uh Allan went a he went to a baby who was 42 minutes old and he wagged he put his head down and he wagged his tongue in front of the baby and the baby wagged her tongue back this was at 42 minutes and this experiment has been now replicated many many times and it's opened up this Avenue into how infants think and what we've learned we used to think they were blank slates who thought nothing now we know they're capable of very impressive intellectual Feats even though they really don't have Consciousness uh they will cry in sympathy with other babies in the nursery but they will not cry in sympathy to a recording of their own voice they can distinguish one language over another they can distinguish one poem over another if you read them Cat in the Hat six times they'll suck on their past Affair a certain way and then if you switch they'll stop sucking because the Comfort level is not there infants are fantastic at reading faces you take 6 months old they can distinguish between different monkey faces something adults are not capable of doing Japanese infants are capable of distinguishing between the r and the L Sound which is an ability they lose as they get older uh and so the question that's just a fact I wasn't it's because the language the the Lang the weird weird uh so Erica is at an early age and what does she want well the first thing is she's desperate for affection these famous Harry harlo monkey experiments where they had a monkey with a a bottle and a monkey with a washcloth mothers uh found that uh monkeys will give up food in exchange for softness and they need to feel good to survive and it is literally a matter of survival in the 1960s they built orphanage which they thought were going to reduce infections so they isolated the babies and they didn't handle them the babies had such high mortality rates about 30 or 40% that they stopped giving them names because they were dying so quickly and they were getting perfectly good food and water but they lack the physical contact and that's because babies need affection in order to build their own brains rat pups who are licked have 25% more synapses than rat pups who are not in the 1930s a scientist named hm skels studied M mentally disabled orphans and some of the orphans at the this orphanage were adopted after four years he measured their IQs and the adopted orphans had iq's 50 percentage 50 points higher than the orphans that were not adopted and it's not because the mothers were tutoring them because the mothers were themselves mentally disabled and living in a different institution it was simply the mother's love that had wired the brain and produc this 50 point IQ Spike and so what Erica wants is a merger with her mother's mind and she needs it in order to create her own mind so you picture them one night Erica's lying on her mother's chest nursing her mother's in one of those chairs with all the things you get at baby showers these days monitors cribs air purifiers video cameras uh brain uh arousing mobils she looks like a um sort of a milkmaid sitting in the Starship Enterprise surrounded by technology and it looks kind of peaceful uh but inside what her mother is screaming is help help help I hate this thing because it's the middle of the night and she's exhausted babies demand attention every 20 seconds on average mothers in the first year of a child's life lose 700 hours of sleep marital satisfaction levels plunge 70% and that's because in order to survive what little Erica is doing is invading her mother's mind and getting in there and reshaping it we have what are called mirror neurons somewhat the somewhat controversial but mirror neurons essentially are regular neurons but they replicate what they see inside your own mind so we're not distant from each other when you see someone pick up a glass in your own mind your brain is replicating picking up a glass when you watch a car chase in a movie your brain is behaving as if it itself were being chased the reason pornography is so successful is because the brains of people watching pornography are just like the brains of people actually having sex at lower concentration so what Erica was doing was deeply penetrating and interfering with her mother's brain because she needed that mind merger in order to organize her own mind and this thing wasn't being done by words obviously Erica couldn't talk yet it was being done by gestures 90% of emotional content emotional communication is done not with words but with gestures and it's done by the movement of hands feet facial expressions it's what the scientists call parac conversations a psychology class played a trick on one of their professors using this they just he was one of these professors who would wander up and down the stairway the the stage as he spoke and they decided before class when he was over here they'd look at him and he was when he was over on this side of the stage they would look down at their notebooks with in about 5 minutes he was out the door over there and he had no idea what was going on he just felt better over there and he was picking it up unconsciously but the so the point is and the philosophical point is from childhood on we're not individuals who form relationships it's the relationships that come first that physically form individuals and we have and live in a very individualistic culture but in wrong in important ways that's the wrong way to look at human beings we are deeply interpenetrated with each others now Erica through the course of her childhood had a lot of happy things going on some uh not so happy some rough patches uh her mother would tell her stories Erica would sit on the floor put a piece of plastic in her mouth and her mother would talk and just tell long stories some of them were about a drive she took across the country before Erica was born some of how her ancestors lived in China some of them were about how her family cram across the Pacific and the stories would EB and Flow with Erica's needs her mother did The crucial thing which to understand Erica's moods when she needed to be excited when she needed to be calm and so as a result we would say Erica was firmly attached scientists look at how children attach to their parents and it's one of the most important ways you can predict what's going to happen to in a person's life 55% of the kids roughly in middle class homes are what they call firmly attached that means their parents respond to them in predictable ways to their moods and so they go through life of these working models of how relationships happen and people who are securely attached assume that people will respond to them in sensible ways they tend to be trusting they tend to be good at making friends 20% of infants are what they call avoidantly attached they send out signals to Mom and Dad but got nothing in return and so as they get older they seem very mature because they're very self-contained but they have trouble getting close to other people and they tend to preemptively withdraw and so I I rate it a great description from a teacher who had an avoidantly attached child in her classroom and the child would come into the room every morning like a sailboat tacking into the wind wouldn't wanted to get close to teacher just didn't know how to do it but the remaining 20% come are called uh disorganized attachments and these are people who got mixed and incoherent signals from their parents uh and these people do not know how to build relationships and find it very hard they hug and fight their mothers at the same time if you give them a shot in the doctor's office their cortisol levels Spike up because they living in with constant stress they tend later in life to have much more active sexual lives they become much more promiscuous now these early attachment patterns don't determine a life nothing is that baked in the cake but they shape a pathway and they're working models that can be changed but have powerful influences all through life uh University of Minnesota a very great longitudinal study looked at the attachment patterns and at Age 4 they could predict with 77% accuracy who was going to drop out of high school uh and adding IQ did not add the impr did not improve those predictions so attachment is just tremendously important the second thing Erica had was self-control and I never stopped talking about my favorite social science experiment which was done by a guy named Walter Michelle and I've used it here at Aspen but I'm going to say it again uh and some of you probably know it's called the marshmallow experiment and Michelle took four-year-olds put him in a room put them marshmallow in front of them and said you can eat this marshmallow now but I'll come back in 10 minutes if you haven't eaten the marshmallow I'll give you two marshmallows and he showed me the videos of the kids trying not to eat the marshmallows there's a little girl banging her head on the table trying not to eat the marshmallow uh one day Michelle was using an Oreo cookie and little guy picks up the Oreo carefully eats out the middle and carefully puts it back on the that kid is now a US senator um um but the scary thing about Michelle's experiment is the kids who could wait 8 10 12 minutes 20 years later have much higher College completion rates and 30 years later much higher incomes the kids who can only wait one minute some kids just pop the marshmallow right in they have much higher drug and alcohol addiction problems and much High incarceration rates 20 years later and that's because some kids grow up in homes where actions lead to consequences and they develop strategies to control their impulses and if you grow up in that home school will be okay if you can't control your impulses if you don't have strategies school will be miserable and the rest of your life will suck uh and and that is that's just part of the unconscious formation of how we see and interpret the world now all of this was going well CU Erica had self-control she had good attachment patterns but as she got older things got a little tougher for her her mother uh never got married and one of the reasons was she had periods of depression uh and starting in junior high she had some long and periods of depression she would tape shut all the windows in their apartment she would stop showering she would self-medicate with booze and drugs and Erica had to clean it up they would move down into poor neighborhoods and Erica would remember the days when she had put all her belongings in these cheap plastic bags and had to go to some rancid apartment in a terrible neighborhood uh she learned how to get her mother checked into the hospital when she needed to how to survive on baloney from the Boda when she needed to how to tell everyone at school that her mother mother had asthma in order to cover up what was going to happen uh and she found herself at these odd downward spiral moments in crappy horrible neighborhoods and she deduced in these new neighborhoods and she was in junior high that you can never take from anybody in these places the weaker cold and the strong survived and she had to get tougher and she became a harder and more difficult person and she was surrounded by families who did not have some of the advantages that middle class families have some of them probably know of children of professional parents hear about 487 words an hour children on welfare hear 187 words an hour over the course of a childhood the difference in number of words heard by a middle class kid and a poor kid is 32 million fewer words and that has an effect there's also a different in the tenor of the worlds middle class kids are praised for everything kids in some of these more disorganized homes most of what they hear is negative and critical and so she was in in a world of different social norms people in these neighborhoods were twice as likely to be obese twice as likely to smoke much less likely to plan for the future much less social trust much less thinking about the future but Erica did have one heroic Insight when she was in these neighborhoods the Insight was she couldn't get herself out on her own she'd perish in this environment and this was a key Instinct because even the best of us are the most privileged have trouble controlling our own minds but we can control the contexts in which we live and these contexts shape us in a million ways that we don't really understand we have the choice to join the Marine Corps to go to church or not and Erica understood that she needed to find some better place to surround herself with now at about that time a charter school opened up in her neighborhood which was called the academy and Erica knew that kids there she saw them they had these nice uniforms which she didn't have she knew they got food there and she she knew they had big nice new basketball courts so she went to a soci social welfare agency and she said she wanted to go to the academy and they turned her away uh they said she didn't have any legal residence in the in the uh neighborhood in the district and she refused to leave and they physically had to get her and pull her out of the office and throw her out of the building so she spent the next couple weeks hanging around the academy itself she hung around the students she hung around the fences excuse me and one day she heard there was a meeting inside a meeting of all the big wigs at the Academy she snuck into into the school through the back door some students were leaving and she found a room and she burst in and there was a big table there with 25 adults sitting around uh and immediately they barked her what are you doing here how'd you get in here and she said I want to go to your school next year and they didn't want to hear about it they said how'd you get in here you shouldn't be here and she just repeated it I want to go to your school next year and one of the founders of the school explained well we have a lottery system if you give your name we'll enter your name in the lottery to get into our school uh and she didn't back down she just said that's a way of saying no I need to go to your school I need to go to college and she gave them a long speech on the grades she had earned in junior high school and how hard she worked and how much she deserved to be uh in the academy now around the table there was a big fat man sitting on one side of the table with big suspenders and he was the hedge fund manager who funded large parts of this school and he listened to her speech and he pulled out a Mal Blanc pen from his pocket which he'd never seen before and he wrote something on a piece of paper and he slipped it across to the founders of the academy and on the paper it read rig the Lottery and the founder looked at her and gave her a stern lecture he told her never to burst into rooms like this never interrupt a meeting never be rude and make demands then he walked up to her handed her a piece of paper and said write down your name and address and we'll see you in September and she did and she walked away and after she was out of earshot the whole room burst into laughter because they knew if they were attracting kids like that they were probably doing something right so Erica got to go to the academy and it was different from her other school the jargon and education ease is that it was parent neutral but it was really the replacing the culture of her neighborhood they spent hours at the Academy on how to nod how to look people in the eye how to say excuse me they had chance every morning so a teacher would scream at the kids what is earned and the kids would all scream back everything is earned and they went through this military discipline day after day and they gave her a sense of the promised land of getting into college and her graduation date was not the year of her High School graduation ation date it was four years hence when she would graduate from college and it gave her most importantly a sense of an ordered existence and this was important because hundreds of Studies have been done on what leads especially to business success and the quick answer is there's no one personality trait what leads to business exess success but there is a most common trait and hundreds of Studies have come back and they come they send to congre congregate around the same traits attention to detail persistence efficiency the ability to work long hours and so in high school Erica became super organized she got out a notebook calendar she tried to read The Wall Street Journal she became very prim and proper and articulate she became sort of a ghetto Doris Day um and she lost some of her respect the respect of her friends who thought she'd sold out she felt she'd lost some of her Integrity but in 10th Grade she made the honor rooll and at an assembly they awarded her a blue shirt she got to wear to class which was the proudest moment of her life to that point so she did okay and the SAT is not so great but through the strength of her rise and the recommendations of her teachers she got to go to college uh the University of Denver not too far from here uh and she got out not because she was the greatest IQ but she did have the ability to work the ability to tune to others the ability to control her impulses and she also had a sense of existential danger if you look at the great figures of world history an amazing number of them have had a parent die between the ages of 8 and 12 and it's just historical Studies have been done on this and when they lose that parent at that crucial age they just get a sense that life is precarious and they got to work like hell I by the way already tell my kids that I failed them uh CU they um but Erica lost contact with her mother at those age and she did have that sense of existential danger so she went to college and she suddenly was in the world of upper middle class kids who had who seemed compared to the kids she grew up with forever ahead they if they talked about the Battle of aan Court those kids had already been there if they made a reference to Bob Dylan those kids knew all about Bob Dylan and she got the sense the kids back in her neighborhood were forever behind but she did have some advantages and one of the advantages she had was the stories her mother used to tell her about life in China and she had embed a certain culture that some of these kids didn't have and there's a great deal of research that's been done on Asian culture versus American culture and this crude summary of it is in Asia people are more likely to see relationships and in America we're more likely to see individuals they show people in both cultures a fish tank and in China they describe the surroundings of the tank the movements of the fish uh the the plant vegetation in the tank Americans tend to just pick out the biggest fish and describe that one uh they give them the word Experiment three words cow chicken and grass and they ask people to lump two of these words together Americans tend to L limp link uh Cow and Chicken together because they're both animals Asians and Chinese tend to link cow and grass together because cows eat grass they have a relationship with the grass when Chinese tourists look at the Mona Lisa and American tourists look at the Mona Lisa the sads the movements of their eyes are totally different Americans focus on the face the Chinese tourists have much more eye movement focusing on the context and these me these different mental processes are even visible in Brain Research when you ask a an American to solve a math problem you see a lot of activity in the linguistic areas of the brain when you ask Chinese you're more likely to see activity in the visual areas of the brain so these cultural differences are not superficial things they're deeply permanently wired in not permanently but deeply wired in and she had absorbed this unconsciously and she'd also had these experiences through her life of being in lots of different sorts of places middle class neighborhoods poor neighborhoods Chinese culture American culture neighborhood friends Academy friends she'd seen different parts of herself come out in different settings she'd seen people behaved in highly irrational ways dropping out of high school when that was almost a sentence of lifelong poverty getting pregnant as a teenager the same and she was aware not only of the conscious world above the waterline the stuff that was talked about in class technical knowledge and rational Behavior but she was much more aware because of this diverse upbringing of the things that go on below the level of Consciousness and she had sort of a deep Vision which I think helped her through life and this sort of deep Vision the ability to see not only the surface but the deep down helped her in in some serious ways the first it helped her evaluate other people there are many people in life who are sort of Smitten by the idea of IQ and IQ is important and it's great at predicting success in school like settings but even there once you get above 120 you really don't learn much people at 120 do just as well as people at 150 and it's a terrible predictor at predicting most other fields there have been giant surveys of IQ and whether it predicts success in most careers and the surveys tend to find that it predicts about four and 20% of the variance in job performance so IQ is kind of important but not that really that important in most jobs smart people do not make better marital decisions they're not better at raising kids they're not more trustworthy they're not even that much better at chess surprisingly um CH chess performance is relatively unrelated to IQ once you get above a certain level and that's because what's much more important uh and there's a guy named Keith stanovich who's written a lot about this is not the IQ but the mental disposition IQ is nestled in mental character traits are you curious are you open-minded do you adjust the strength of your conclusion to the strength of the evidence are you comfortable with ambiguity are you modest when you only have partial knowledge stanovich has tried to measure this in compare them to IQ and he's found that these traits these really virtues mental virtues are mostly unrelated to IQ scores and they're much more important so Erica could see down and see uh into the deeper traits rather than just the test scores in the IQ the second thing is she was pretty good at anticipating how people would actually behave we have a vast appar status uh of social science which I pay a lot of attention to which is based on mathematical models all of economics and a lot of other fields and these models are based on a simplified view of human nature that people are rational autonomous utility maximizing creatures who make decisions on the basis of cost benefit analysis well Erica was around people who dropped that high school and she knew that wasn't true because they didn't behave that way and when she went into the world of business she was around people who knew that wasn't true either Grocers put the fruit section in front of the grocery store because they know if you feel good about buying some pomegranates uh by the time you get back to the cereal section you'll give yourself permission to buy Froot Loops um they know that restaurant tours know that the larger the party the more people eat people dining alone eat the least people eating with one other person eat 35% more people dining with three other people eat 75% more they're not aware of these things but these things happen because things are flowing into their minds and so the lesson and this is really the Core lesson of Behavioral economics is that in many circumstances we're playing a game we don't understand we think we're making decisions but there are all sorts of influences coming through our unconscious minds which are really shaping and biasing the way we lead our lives so people named dentists are disproportionately likely to become dentists people named Lawrence are disproportionately likely to become lawyers and that's because people have a vague sense that they like the familiar and words that sound familiar gravitate they gravitate toward them which I is why I've named my own son president of the United States Brooks um then there's the example of priming uh we're influenced by the words that we hear even in unrelated circumstances if I give you the words Bingo Florida Social Security when you walk out of that out of this room you will walk more slowly than if I give you words related to youthfulness it permeates uh Asian-American women if you remind Asian-American women that they're Asian and then give them a math test their scores go up if you remind them they're women their scores go down and this actually has a serious component which was been much written about by Claude steel that if you remind African-Americans of African-American stereotypes they do worse on the tests just that one reminder and so we're deeply affected by a lot of these what they call priming then there's anchoring a $39 bottle of wine may seem expensive not to people in this room but to other people uh but it seems cheaper when it's sitting on the shelf next to $150 bottle of wine which is why those bottles are in the the wine stores then there's anchoring oh that I'm sorry that is anchoring and then there's well I won't go I'll quickly arousal Dan arieli the the great behavioral Economist took a bunch of kids showed them uh pornography on laptops covered with Saran Wrap uh and then asked them would you be willing to have sex with a 12-year-old before it was like 30% say but in the middle of the arousal 70% said they would these are hugely powerful effects and so Erica was sort of aware more aware of the irrational ways that people make decisions and finally I think it helped her in her course of her business career separating people who are rationalists from those who are wise rationalists are the people who come up with management theories and computer models they break problems down into discreet Parts they measure reality according to what be can be counted and calculated and they try to reduce human behavior to equations and this is what macro economics is about and PowerPoint slides is what most of business is about and in some way they're Children of the French Enlightenment the French Enlightenment emphasize reason and the power of reason to liberate us from Superstition and myth and they and they tend to have some skills but wise people tend to have tend to be Children of the British enlighten the British Enlightenment did not emphasize reason the British Enlightenment was led by people like David y Adam Smith at Edmund Burke they emphasize the sentiments they said the power of our reason is impressive but bounded the real strong thing we have is our sentiments our reactions to the world our aesthetic reactions to a mountain our reactions to moral actions and they had tremendous respect for our sentiments even though we knew we couldn't really get to the depths of them and understand them and so they proceeded uh with a phrase called epistemological modesty it's a way of acting in the world that says the world is too complicated for me to know and understand and so I will work with a sense of of modesty awareness of the limits of my own understanding I will not try to deduce the world into abstract logical formula and it suggests a different way of learning a way of learning which is not about calculation and adding up and building abstract systems it's about wandering and it's it's about absorbing Sensations as you go through life internalizing the structures of a field when Chess Masters see a chessboard they do not see chess pieces they see formations of pieces and so they have a much more complicated way of seeing the world than people who are not Chess Masters it's about mastering the structure of a field and then bringing it into a structure of another field what Picasso did essentially was take the structure of Modern Art which was its own field delve into it absorb its patterns and then delve into the world of African masks and absorb its patterns and then unconsciously he brought these two patterns together and that was the source of a lot of the creativity in one part of his field and people who do this develop a knack for a field and sometimes this Knack this unconscious intuition about a field which takes long work and arduous traveling and wandering and experience can be truly impressive at chicken farms chicken sexers pick up chick 800 chicks an hour and they can predict with 99 % accuracy which are male chicks and which are female chicks and you ask them how do they do it they don't know they just know there's something about the chicks soldiers in Iraq there was a good story in the New York Times about this certain soldiers had an ability to notice that they were beginning to feel cold while driving down the street and that feeling of coldness came about when subconsciously they became aware of an i IED an explosive device around and certain soldiers they their buddies knew they had this ability and they paid attention are you feeling cold are you feeling cold um artists and athletes lose the cautious thought thought process and get lost in the in the craft in the sport they have what the Greeks called metas which is this unconscious wisdom this awareness Antonio deasio was here last year as well gave people two decks of cards uh and a game they would draw from each deck and try to amass points but one of the decks of cards had much higher RI higher risk of losing losing a lot of points points and he just had people pick decks and he found that by the 10th pick or so the 10th round of the game as they reached for the risky pack the sweat would start flowing on their hands he would ask them are do you see any difference between the two packs consciously they did not but in their body and unconsciously they already saw the difference and people would begin figuring out the game at about the 10th and everybody had figured out by the 50th round even though they still couldn't tell you consciously uh why they were picking from this deck and not that one and he would ask them why are you picking and they would say well I sort of like that one better but they really didn't have a sense of the risks involved and so these are conscious unconscious tasks that are tremendously impressive that are being done at the level of awareness one of the most cognitively demanding things any of us do is Furniture shopping going into a furniture store and trying to imagine how a sofa will look in your house is really hard uh and so some dust researchers tested people as they did this and tried to figure out what's the best way to make this this decision the worst way to make this decision is by sudden Instinct immediate make a snap decision that was the worst the second worst way was to make a list of pros and cons rationally try to figure it out the best way was to look at all the furniture do some other task while unconsciously you sort of were figuring out the furniture and then an hour or two later make a decision and because all that time your mind's sort of figuring it out and that worked for furniture worked for posters it's just one of the ways impressive ways that the unconscious is not stupid it's kind of smart and so Erica had all these abilities and they helped her in business and by age 30 she'd become a consultant she was doing mergers and Acquisitions and she was a tough negotiator her happiest or most rewarding moment came when someone she heard a story of someone asking who was representing a company in a deal and the guy said well Erica is representing us and the guy at the other end of the deal said ah what don't I give you a billion dollarss and get it over with and to her that was a story of how tough she was but she still had her normal needs and she wanted to become married and have a family and so one day she was set up on a blind date and she was set up to meet a guy named Harold in front of a Barnes & Noble and both of them when they saw each other at the Barnes & Noble for the first time made instant judgments Harold made incredibly impressive he was very impressed by Erica all men at all stages like women with a 0.7 waist to hip ratio which Erica had uh she too made an instant judgment and the power of these judgments can be powerful there's a prinston research team that had a group of uh people look at rival politicians gave them a glimpse for one tenth of a second and those from those on tenth of a second looks they could predict with 70% accuracy who was going to win the election between those two people uh and so these are powerful and so Erica was doing the calculations that all of us do women tend to like men who were slightly older stronger and taller than themselves though online dating Studies have found that a guy who's 5'6 can get as many online date offers as a guy who's 6 foot so long as he makes $172,000 a year more don't ask me how I know that uh so she saw Harold across the way and he passed the symmetrical test uh he didn't wear any sports jewelry Erica didn't want to marry a Man Who Loved ER Jeter more than herself uh he didn't wear a Burberry raincoat she couldn't see herself looking at that damn pattern for the rest of her life uh she didn't he didn't wear cologne uh she view scented men The Way Church will view Germany they're either at your throat or at your feet uh and so she was looking for something deeper and it is true while the conscious mind wants money status and fame the unconscious mind wants something else it wants Harmony it wants the patterns that make up the unconscious mind to harmonize with the the patterns around and so when a Craftsman is lost in his craft they're experiencing that state which you could call limerance when a naturalist feels at one with nature they're also experiencing limerance when a Believer is at one with God's God's love they also feel it and when lovers are fused they feel it and that is the most delicious pleasure which is the TR uh the the great motivator and this is actually also measurable in the mind the brain is perpetually anticipating the future and the Brain anticipate something and then that something happens you a little drip of rewarding juice and that that's the physical correlation of this deep desire to be in harmony with the people around you and so Harold and Erica had a meal together uh and they found that they had gone to the same rock concerts they had the same opinions about the characters in The Breakfast Club uh they used the same and harmonized the same vocabularies one of the things we all do when we're conversing is we unconsciously harmonize with the people we're talking with so people with IQs of 80 or so will use uh use words like fabric enormous and conceal but people with IQs of about 90 will use words like sentence consume and Comm Commerce and so over the cores of conversation we very quickly figure out what conversational level the other person is at and we harmonize with them and Harold and Erica were doing great uh together uh Harold had unfortunately ordered one of those salads that were the green laes playay across both sides of your face when you shove it in your mouth so he sort of had some salad dressing uh but they were doing the gestures people do when they're falling in love women in love do what they call the head canant which is the tilting of the neck of the head that exposes the neck uh this is science baby uh men men do what they call the anchoring gaze which is the long look into someone else's eyes and they were meshing with each other now in the course of the relationship people mesh and they pick people who mesh in very deep ways one of the things that's fascinating May is people tend to marry at Great regularity people with immune systems that are complimentary to their own to improve the immune levels of their their kids the sense of smell turns out to be extraordinarily powerful in courtship uh one of the experiments that horrifies me was done by some researchers who to who took gauze pads taped it under the underarms of people who uh were watching a movie and they had some people watch a horror movie and some people watch a comedy then they collected the gauze pads and had some other research subjects who I assume were well paid to to sniff the gauze pads and those people who sniffed the gauze pads could tell with much better than average chance which Go Pad had been worned by a horror movie viewer and which had been worn by a comedy viewer and women by the way were twice as good at this as men um and so they're smiing they're getting together and they begin to live together and like any couple that's getting together they each have certain unconscious mental maps about how the world Works Harold thought toilet paper should roll this way she thought it should roll that way Harold thought dishes should be placed in the sink and then washed at the end of the day Erica thought they should be washed immediately and put in the dishwasher when they went to the grocery store Harold bought complete meal products so packet of torini frozen pizza kich Erica boing ingredients eggs milk flour Harold would be amazed she'd spend $200 and there'd still be nothing to eat um uh but they overcame these difficulties and they fell in love and they didn't make a conscious choice to fall in love with each other but it wed up inside and it welled up like an addiction in fact in in a brain scan people in love look like they're in the midst of a cocaine addiction and this is how the most important decision of their lives was made and this is how most decisions are made by emotions deciding what we value what we want and what we should Chase and so it came up from deep below and the relationship was not always perfect uh they had moments in the course of the Decades of their marriage when it was bad and they thought about divorce Erica's career was not perfect she started companies that failed she worked for jerks a lot of the time but she did have a long fulfilling life gave back to her community and she did in the course of these things have vision have this Vision that allowed her to see patterns in the world to anticipate things that were going to happen and she had character the ability to control her impulses and to know what would satisfy her deeply and what would only satisfy her in Shallow ways and so it was mostly a happy and fulfilling life and she softened a little as she got older and she retired here in Aspen uh they got a house on the North Fork River uh and they sat around on a porch watching the rafters go by and Harold used to think of a story he had heard that she had told him about a Chinese guy who was asked what's the happiest moment in your life and the Chinese guy looked sheepishly and said well you know my wife once went to to Beijing and she had some delicious chicken which she would talk about when she returned and so I would have to say the happiest moment of my life was my wife's trip and the chicken she ate there and so Harold would think of his life and his Devotion to Erica and he would think well the happiest life moment of his life was Erica earning that blue shirt at the Academy and the happiness he saw in her when she would talk about it and they got older and she got sick and went to the hospital once a year and she was old and it was hard to move and she was sitting one day on the porch over the North Fork River looking across at the rafters going by and looking across some pictures of her own self and memories and memorabilia she came across a picture of herself when she was six or seven and she was the top of playground slide and it was Winter somewhere and she had blue coat and mittens on and her mother must have taken that picture and she asked herself looking at that picture what do I have in common uh with that girl and so many things had changed in the course of her life but there was something alive in that six-year-old girl that was still alive in her now certain viewpoints certain ways of reacting certain hopes and fears and she looked at that picture and she could feel how that kid must have been feeling somehow even across the decades she had some of the same cast of character in her head the same unconscious Essence that we call the soul which starts with affections and turned by some miracle into neurons and synapses and then emerges through another miracle into Consciousness and she was looking at that picture and Harold asked if she wanted to have some lunch and he went in and got her some cold chicken and he came out with a chicken on a plate and when he got out on the porch he dropped the plate onto the ground and ran over to her uh and she was inert in the chair drifting in and out out of Consciousness and there were sort of images flowing through her head front stoop as a boy as a girl a day at the beach she had had her mother washing her hair in the sink playing with dolls and toys when she was little and through the fog of her mind she was vaguely aware of Harold out there somewhere and she felt intensely sorry for him and then what we would say is she lost Consciousness entirely and categories fell away along with the awareness of herself the awareness of death death and it was like it was just when she was born just a series of direct sensations of the world of Music images sounds and just presences and so she passed away and what she'd achieved in life was a Viewpoint a Viewpoint of not seeing others superficially but seeing others more deeply not only seeing people as chest pieces but as as deeper currents as Souls engaged in conversation and so I got into this subject and I told you the story because in my world we're in a world of policy analysts and macroeconomic Eon economics and we're often oblivious to these deeper emotional currents which when you actually look at a life are actually so Central to a life and so we do the things we try to do in the policy world we try to increase High School graduation rights we try to develop human capital we try to close the achievement Gap we try to reduce poverty we try to export capitalism to Russia and democracy to the Middle East but these policies often produce disappointing results and to me it's because they're based on a shallow view of human nature who we really are and what really motivates us and what levers you really need to pull to make some change and so my hope is that the cognitive Revolution by people like deasio and so many other people who visited Aspen will give us a new humanism a new view of who we are uh and my hope is that we'll be able to take the findings of the cognitive Revolution and and at someday apply them to social thought and public life and have a series of policies and a series of ways of relating to each other which are deeper than what we have now and more successful so thank you for your attention [Applause] thank you thank you now I don't know if that kind of talk arouses questions but uh if anybody would like to get up here and cry we'd be fine too so if there are any questions there's a question over here I only write about this stuff lady no I'm Norman Belmont I've been reading you for the last several years in the times I've seen you what appears to me to be evolv from Politics on a conservative side more to the Cent and much more of a social philosopher is this intentional or is this the way you have always been or is this is the way I perceive you um one should never trust one's perceptions unless unconsciously you know I've always been a Believer Tom Wolf was once asked what's the most important thing that happened in your lifetime uh and he said oh that's easy co-ed dorms uh and what he meant by that or at least what I take to have him have meant by that is that you know politics makes a difference but the most important things that happen in Social are are the are the autonomous decisions of just social individuals the the social contagions that sweep through a society and change the way we think the way we Orient ourselves in the world even politics I see as deeply uh deeply social and deeply emotional again to quote Tom Wolf uh he has a theory of the high school opposite that when you're in high school you know what click you fall into and you know which click is your opposite so if you're in the theater crowd maybe the jocks are your opposite and as you go through life you pick the party that is filled with people in your social identity that is against the party of your high school opposite and that actually is backed up by research when how do people pick a party mostly they inherit it from their parents but when they don't they pick the party that is filled with people like themselves and then they get the ideology of the party that comes later so a lot of what we do is is this kind of social uh connection and then I got into this stuff because most first because I was wondering why 30% of kids were dropping out of high school when it is so irrational to do that and second you know I would go to Russia this was the Soviet Union was collapsing and I'd go to the apartments and the apartments were beautiful and nice and clean you go out into the vestibule of the adjoining apartments and the vestibule would smell of urine it would be rotten and you'd ask the people in the Apartments why don't you clean out your vestibule and they would say oh I don't like so and so my other neighbors are drunk but the fact is after 70 years of Soviet rule they had they didn't know who was KGB and they had no social trust and so I was over there and we had economists giving privatization plans with the Russians because we thought everything was about economics but it was really about social trust and so that was another lesson then finally and a big thing for me was Iraq uh when Iraq happened we thought you just decapitate a regime you change a country and I once asked a member of the Bush Administration and I can't tell you who she is uh um uh you know didn't you guys get the culture of Iraq wrong uh and she said well I'm not sure I believe in culture I think you change institutions you change culture and I just don't think that's true I think there's science on my side and so all of those events made me much more concerned with these deeper human elements and that's sort of what led me in this direction um but I I would say um and then the final thing I'll say is you know we write about politics it's tremendously important but if you compare an Asian-American kid living in New Jersey to an American Indian kid living in South Dakota the odds are that Asian-American kid will live 26 years longer that's a gap of 26 years believe me there is no public policy that produces outcome gaps that big and that has to do with culture and economics and other things so that's what drew me there um there's down here in the thank you just based on just what you said and and so many of the sessions I've been here have said uh politics is broken in this country and so on uh are you weary of following politics and and just say I I can't take this anymore and moving on um I know I I'll still write my column um I mean it's depressing um time Jane Harmon's here she knows uh she's more in the middle of it I get to go hang out with brain scientists uh but um and and to me also by the way that is a uh that is a social thing too when you go to Capitol Hill why is it so much more polarized there are all these mechanical reasons but I think it has to do with uh first the team mentality and I and this is an extreme example but I cite it occasionally there was a French journalist who uh interviewed people in Rwanda who' committed ma Massacre genocide and uh one of the uh people he interviewed or She interviewed I think uh had decapitated his neighbor of 25 years and she said well what were you thinking that person when you decapitated them and he said well you know what come to think of it at that moment I only saw him very vaguely and I didn't really see him as a person and it was just a number of the other other tribe and that's obviously is a very extreme example what I observe and Congressman Haron can correct me is that still sometimes personal relationships across the aisle but when you get in the official business of politics it becomes a much more te tribal and team thing and you have de personal relationships and then we also because I think our social fabric has weakened a lot of people and people who watch the more partisan shows their party is now become their ethnic affiliation and they don't have anything else to attach to so they attach to party and when that happens then compromise is no longer possible because giving away is loss of honor and so that that uh that's also seeing through this prism but the fact is politics is still tremendously important and tremendously by the way brings out this is a point toille made brings out the highest virtues people in public life are faced with these Stern character tests but there's no area of life that brings out such virtues when they succeed at those character tests and so that's why I think politics is so important to pay attention to uh in the middle there thank you could you go back to the part you were referring to about the attributes that correlate highly with success like curiosity and also my pattern-seeking brain is trying to connect what Richard Florida was talking about this morning with regard to the rise of creativity as a requirement for economic success and I'm wondering what your views are on that well the first part and this is a big debate people have I guess I would call the debate between Jack Welsh and Jim Collins the author of good to great and Jack Welsh was a tremendously charismatic leader and he was a successful leader at GE but the trait I think most researchers if and they're as I said they're examples of everything but most researchers would say it's those traits that Jim Collins praises the people who do one thing really well and then they do it over and over and over again attention to detail and you know we're in a it's interesting how definitions of Genius change 50 years ago you would think most people would have said Mozart genius just came from God he just had this power now the conventional view Mozart very talented guy but many people this many kids around probably around Aspen have talent just Raw Talent just as much as him but he happened to have a father who worked him phenomenally hard he got his 10,000 hours in and then he just worked hard and hard and hard and you take a list there was a there was a study done of kids as they took up the violin and they wanted to predict who would succeed with the violin and who would not and it turned out musical ability at at that at the beginning stage moderately predicted it turned out IQ didn't predict what predicted the best was a question they asked the kids how long are you going to play the violin some kids said I might play it for a few years Some kids say I want to play it in school some kids said I'm a violinist I'm going to play this thing my whole life and if you part put it as part of your identity and you work at it at that level then you will be good at it and especially if you practice what they call deliberate practice most people practice in the easiest possible way the people who become good practice in the most boring and annoying way possible so they have a music camp which I read about in a book called The Talent Code they they slow down the the symphony or whatever it is they're playing so slowly that if you can tell what piece of music they're playing that's too fast and that's just phenomenally slowly and painstaking in the Russian t tennisy for four months the kids play tennis without a ball they volley back and forth because just to get the swing right and that's the sort of fanatical Devotion to practice that actually does lead to success so it's that persistence and then just Raw industriousness one of the things I one of the stories I admire was about Benjamin Franklin is that he wanted to teach himself to write better so he said who's the best writers right now and there was a magazine in England called The Spectator so what he would do was he would chop up The Spectator sentence by sentence and then uh try to scramble him come back in a couple weeks and try to put him in the right order just to understand how it flowed then he realized his vocabulary wasn't good so he took articles in The Spectator turned them into poetry and then 6 weeks later wrote them back into Pros and compared his Pros to the original article that's not fun but it's the sort of meticulous work people do to improve and so those I would say are the two things then uh finally on creativity I now sort of Forgotten what the question was because I give oh Richard Florida who I I've we write about the same stuff but I haven't met him but I guess the one thing I would say is my friend uh Tom fredman and as you know I'm the poor man's Tom fredman um uh I tell these jokes about Tom I rib him but we we are Neighbors at the Times Bureau in in uh DC I'm between Tom and Moren da so it's a good neighborhood uh and but we're also neighbors and I uh went to I'll repeat a line I think this Gail Collins's line went to the Middle East with Tom recently and somebody I think Gail said going to the Middle East with Tom is like going to the mall with Britney Spears yeah the other story I tell about Tom is uh he's got a nicer office than me uh and he's got a nicer house than me and he lives about a quarter of a mile away and my son and I was then 14 driving by Tom's house and my son elbows me points at Tom's house and says same job dad same so anyway that that was this was a very long intro uh but uh Tom has writes a lot about globalization I think globalization's important but to me the most important thing is the upsurge in cognitive demands so an information can travel around the world but the most important space is the last three inches between the ear and the brain and how that inter how that information is processed interpreted is just tremendously important and in this economy an economy where ideas follow money and where we live in much more diverse social Landscapes than ever before the demand for emotional and social skills are just much higher than ever before so to me the cognitive Revolution is a better Paradigm for the challenges we Face than globalization and that it demands in a in the space of a lot of people creativity something that was not demanded before uh if you want to become uh one of things you look at the labor markets people who are fungible their wages are stagnating people who are creative their wages are growing and so creativity as I mentioned with Picasso is essentially taking two idea spaces and merging them that's what creativity is and seeing what networks arise out of that uh and so I you know I think what Florida writes is um very useful the other the other thing to be said for I think he's to my mind and I get I've read him but I haven't met him um I think he a little overemphasizes the cities where a lot of us would like to live like Seattle San Francisco and underemphasizes cities which are also doing phenomenally well like Dallas and Houston which may have less artsy people but have creativity of a different sort in the front this will be the last question a lot of people had spoken uh in during this conference about the new generation that is our our our future for many reasons uh young adults today and teenagers have a way of communicating that we didn't have before they could have 20 names uh in their phones and they're texting simultaneously to others and and sharing information do you see this I mean and it's nerve-wracking for parents who are trying to get their attention when they're with them but uh do you see this as a silver lining is there a benefit to this interconnection this this constant sharing of communication uh what do you think about this who is doing that that could be a new reset and heal in creativity yeah well I often tell political candidates if you want to win this election promise that you will pass a law Banning texting after 10 p.m. and every parent in America will vote for you and you'll be happy um I guess my own view is it uh I'm a little skeptical and there are two studies that and there are just two but two studies I just came across recently school kids in school especially from lower income areas during the summer they have a summer slump they go down they did just did a study where they gave those kids for three successive years 12 books books at the start of the summer just giving them those 12 books was as effective of as having them go to summer school all summer having the ability to read and reading is a first of all it's demanding gets them in touch with characters but they see themselves as readers second study I happen to come across traced in computer usage and internet uses and high-speed internet usage in San Francisco into those areas into those homes where it was increasing internet use was accompanied by declining test scores in math and reading and so to me that's gay reading not so good for computers but that's probably a little too simplistic I would say it depends on how you use it one of the things uh kids do which I think is an is an complete plus as a parent is they keep in touch with their parents when I go to college campuses I always ask kids how many of you read newspapers in paper form I can get 5% I'm happy but then I asked them how many of you have been in touch with your parents in the last 48 hours 80% 90% in 1974 Gallup asked teenagers would you be better off running away from home 40% said yes 19 or 2008 they as they asked do you have an excellent relationship with your parents 92% said yes now I don't really believe that but they want to have an excellent relationship um and so I do think just in terms of getting people better relationships I think it's helped but as for intellectual development I think it entirely depends on what you do with the internet and here I think it's a class divide as I was talking at lunch and I give statistics about young people and they're incredibly wholesome productive incredibly inspiring generation so long as they have education there's a huge divide into outcomes in this younger group people who are graduating from high school and college are just amazing people who are not are falling way behind behind at a very early age and that goes back to the self-control and attachment issues I was talking about so I don't think technology determines it one way or another it's all about getting the right things and getting the right identity and the right ability to form Human Relationships uh both online and in real life anyway thank you very much for your [Applause] attention e e for

Channel: The Aspen Institute

Views: 51,684

Keywords: emotions, middle age, passion, education, David Brooks, new york times, learning tools, leadership, engaging students, learning, aspen, aspen institute, aspen ideas festival, AIF2010

Id: CurLhHP0ASE

Length: 70min 48sec (4248 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 08 2010