heliograph

Prehistoric Artist Paint Factory

2011-10-15T17:32:00.000-04:00

By John Noble Wilford
New York Times
Digging deeper in a South African cave that had already yielded surprises from the Middle Stone Age, archaeologists have uncovered a 100,000-year-old workshop holding the tools and ingredients with which early modern humans apparently mixed some of the first known paint.

These cave artisans had stones for pounding and grinding colorful dirt enriched with a kind of iron oxide to a powder, known as ocher. This was blended with the binding fat of mammal-bone marrow and a dash of charcoal. Traces of ocher were left on the tools, and samples of the reddish compound were collected in large abalone shells, where the paint was liquefied, stirred and scooped out with a bone spatula.
Archaeologists said that in the workshop remains they were seeing the earliest example yet of how emergent Homo sapiens processed ocher, one of the species’ first pigments in wide use, its red color apparently rich in symbolic significance. The early humans may have applied the concoction to their skin for protection or simply decoration, experts suggested. Perhaps it was their way of making social and artistic statements on their bodies or their artifacts.
Of special importance to the scientists who made the discovery, the ocher workshop showed that early humans, whose anatomy was modern, had also begun thinking like us. In a report published online on Thursday in the journal Science, the researchers called this evidence of early conceptual abilities “a benchmark in the evolution of complex human cognition.”
The discovery dials back the date when the modern Homo sapiens population was known to have started using paint. Previously, no workshop older than 60,000 years had come to light, and the earliest cave and rock art began appearing about 40,000 years ago. The exuberant flowering among the Cro-Magnon artists in the caves of Europe would come even later; the parade of animals on the walls of Lascaux in France, for example, was executed 17,000 years ago.
The cave people in South Africa were already learning to find, combine and store substances, skills that reflected advanced technology and social practices as well as the creativity of the self-aware.
The paint makers also appeared to have developed an elementary knowledge of chemistry and some understanding of long-term planning earlier than previously thought.
The discovery was made at Blombos Cave, 200 miles east of Cape Town, on a high cliff facing the Indian Ocean at the tip of South Africa. Christopher S. Henshilwood, of the University of Bergen in Norway and the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, led the team of researchers from Australia, France, Norway and South Africa.
Much of the analysis and dating of the material was directed by Francesco d’Errico of the University of Bordeaux in France.
The two clusters of tools and two ocher-filled abalone shells were found in 2008.
But Dr. Henshilwood said in an e-mail that it had taken a great deal of time and repeated testing to determine the age of the material and “make sure that the ocherous-looking deposits on each tool did in fact relate to the substance within the shells.”
Alison S. Brooks, an archaeologist at George Washington University who studies the Middle Stone Age in Africa but was not involved in this research, said, “This is another spectacular discovery from Blombos.”
Archaeologists and other scholars have come to expect the unexpected from Blombos Cave. In the past decade, Dr. Henshilwood’s teams have shaken conventional wisdom by finding persuasive evidence that people living in the cave were taking important strides toward modern behavior.
The researchers reported in 2001 finding tools there made from animal bones and finely worked stone weapon points. They gathered hundreds of pieces of ocher stone, including two inscribed with crisscrossed triangles and horizontal lines. This was occurring 75,000 years ago, some 40,000 years before the “creative explosion” of self-adornment and cave paintings once thought of as the sudden origin of human self-expression.
At the time of the first Blombos discovery, Dr. Henshilwood said, “We’re pushing back the date of symbolic thinking in modern humans — far, far back.”
And a few years earlier, Dr. Brooks and Sally McBrearty, an anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, published a comprehensive study of various African sites showing, they said, “the gradual assembling of the package of modern human behaviors in Africa and its later export to other regions of the Old World.”
Dr. Brooks noted this week that large quantities of ocher had been found elsewhere in Africa even before the 100,000-year-old workshop.
Recent research has also documented ocher’s early use in Africa as an adhesive to haft small points onto weapon shafts.
“But the Blombos discovery, not only of elaborate ocher processing but also of its mixture with marrow fat to produce a paint, rather than with plant resin to produce a mastic, argues strongly for its symbolic function,” Dr. Brooks said in an interview.
The assumed symbolic role of red ocher, Dr. Henshilwood said, comes from the large amounts of the predominantly red material found at a number of African sites as old as 160,000 years.
It is supposed that the color red relates to blood’s being associated with life and death or menstruation and fertility.
Based on the absence of scattered animal and seafood bones, hearths and other evidence of typical living quarters, the archaeologists said that the ocher artisans did not occupy the cave for long periods.
They came only to work, collecting their hammer stones and grindstones nearby and the chunks of ocher from perhaps as far away as 12 miles.
Inside the cave, the artisans chipped and crushed the soft ocher stones. They may have heated the mammal bones before crushing them, to enhance the extraction of the marrow fat. Then the fat, iron oxide powder, charcoal, stone chips, quartz grains and an unknown liquid were gently stirred in the shells from the abalone they may have feasted on the day before.
Over the years, windblown sand enveloped the workshop, preserving its tools in hardened sediments just below younger layers when life flourished at Blombos Cave and, most likely, it was often painted red.

Learning Games Through The Ages

2011-10-03T05:54:00.003-04:00

Plato observed one could learn more about another person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation. Learning though play and games is primal. The word game stems from old English gamen– meaning joy, fun, amusement. This is echoed in the ancient Greek en Theos meaning god within, the basis of enthusiasm. A special kind of learning occurs during play and games when students are enthusiastic and joyful. The following is a brief, incomplete survey of some innovative learning games through the ages. It's inspired by and builds on Don Pavey’s Art-Based Games published in 1979.

Arenas: A circle provides the basis for learning games in many different cultures. The arena is the most common example. Spectators sit around the circumference and are able to watch the game play from all points. In some cultures, such as the Maya, these games were sacred events of life and death.

Mandalas: Mandala’ is "circle" in Sanskrit. It symbolizes the cosmos. Its root words are manda, meaning essence and la, meaning to partake. Mandalas generally feature four cardinal points. Working co-cooperatively, each area is filled in with color. In Buddhism this is meant to bring together the four attributes - loving kindness, compassion, sympathy, and equanimity.

Medicine Wheels: Medicine wheels made of stone are found throughout the high plains of North America. The First Peoples of this continent created them to symbolize Mother Earth. Some are 5,000 years old. Many have diameters of 70 feet. Like Mandalas these are also divided in four cardinal points. Medicine Wheels are still reverenced by today’s First Peoples. They are also called Sacred Hoops.

Snakes + Ladders: The popular board game Snakes + Ladders was invented in India about three millennia ago. In the 13th century C.E. The Tibetan monk Sa-pan created a Buddhist version for educational purposes and as occupational therapy [Pavey, 1979]. Sa-pan’s innovation featured “a table of Buddhist moral and spiritual principles ... [A] throw of the dice determined the aspirant’s progress towards liberation” [Pavey, 1979:7.8]. The ladders are located on squares representing various types of good. The more numerous snakes are based in squares representing various forms of evil. The good squares allow a player to evolve higher in life whereas evil will throw a player back through the aegis of reincarnation to lower levels of existence. The last square represents Nirvana or transcendence. Sa-pan wrote: Words have no real pith. By means of a dharma of conventional usage one will not gain enlightenment. He understood effective learning is done intuitively, non-verbally, and creatively.

Putting It Together, Taking It Apart: Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (1782-1852) is considered the creator of the modern kindergarten. Compare Froebel’s thinking with that of Sa-pan several hundred years earlier - "The mind grows by self revelation. In play the child ascertains what he can do, discovers his possibilities of will and thought by exerting his power spontaneously. In play he reveals his own original power." (Froebel, Education of Man) [www.froebelfoundation.org] Froebel believed that humans are essentially productive and creative - and fulfillment comes through developing their gifts. He went on to create special materials [such as shaped wooden bricks and balls], a series of recommended activities…and movement activities, and a linking set of theories [www.infed.org].

Surrealist Games: In the 1760s, an English schoolteacher – John Spilsbury – developed a teaching tool made of dissected puzzles in order to assist children’s studies of history and geography [Pavey, 1979]. Another example is the nineteenth century ‘Metamorphosis game’ which consisted of a set of tiles or slabs with dissected images on each face” [Pavey, 1979:9]. The introduction of the jigsaw, which could turn out mass produced standard cut out shapes, revolutionized the use of dissected puzzles for learning and for social leisure activities. The early 20th century Surrealists created their own versions of these older games of dissected images including Hybrid, Cadavre Exquis “a version of the party game ‘Heads, Bodies and Legs’ in which they drew objects and landscape as well as human and animal details. After each portion was finished it was covered with paper so that the next artist would not be influenced by what went before. These exercises did a great deal to stretch the imagination of players and to show how plastic and malleable our conceptions of reality are.

Collaborative Creative Play: Certain art-based games naturally encouraged creative collaboration. Pavey was “particularly interested in the Bauhaus idea of integration, and in their group exercises and experiments which aimed at training both the intellect and the emotions” [14]. This helped establish a certain appreciation within education that ‘play’ as a serious element could lead to ‘purposeful results’ through largely non-verbal and non-didactic means. For example, Vige Langevan, the WWII French Resistance fighter, animated all sorts of striking collective mural painting with large numbers of children.

Montessori: Maria Montessori [1870–1952] was an Italian educator and physician who pioneered the use of basic games or play exercises using colours and forms. Montessori was also the first woman in Italy to ever receive a medical degree. Echoing Sa-pan, Froebel, and the Bauhaus, Montessori practitioners believe that individuals and groups learn best through self-directed exploration and discovery. She developed a suite of tools and learning games designed to further individual and group abilities and interests. Teacher observers intervene only if help is needed. Pavey [1979] also examined initiatives like the Islington Circle Project, a maze-painting system in which children painted large mazes up to 40 feet in diameter.

Glass Bead Game: In 1949, Herman Hesse described a multidimensional, international game played in the 23rd century. The Glass Bead Game attempts to unite science, mathematics, logic, philosophy, art, music, and spirituality into a single grand theory. The players play the glass bead game by identifying and correlating the knowledge of different times and cultures – and creating unique but intellectually rigorous theses or artifacts - thus establishing entirely new and plausible departure points for further inquiry, that also become grist in the game’s ever-spiraling whirl. The winner becomes a Magister Ludi, or Master of the Game. At the heart of Magister Ludi is an understanding of creativity and learning as a kind of bricolage. Bricolage is defined as “something that is made or put together with whatever materials happen to be available” [Encarta World English Dictionary]. Western education and art derive from this approach. Five hundred years ago, a Master of Arts degree holder was someone who has successfully ‘joined together’ several ‘branches of learning’. In the 1960s, Jerome Bruner advocated has therefore less to do with learning facts and more about learning how to connect ‘the dots’ and identify the hidden patterns they create. Indeed, this dynamic, unpredictable lateral, synthetic, and transformative capacity is the basis of all creativity, invention, and innovation. Learning games can help us to grasp the holistic, systemic nature of our connection to each other and to our greater world. There is a growing recognition of their value and increasing use today. What was old is new again....

2010-11-14T13:48:00.003-05:00

The Blue Rose

My study of the imagination began several years ago. The more I learn, the more mysterious this faculty becomes. I mean this in the original sense, from the ancient Greek mysterion for what is sacred and hidden. From the start, I’ve sought symbols to help convey what words alone cannot. One spring evening, as I lay half asleep, a blue rose came to mind out of nowhere. In the twelfth century Attar wrote the secret is hidden in the rose. Dante described it as the divine word made flesh. If the rose is queen of flowers, the blue rose is sublimity, for it lives only in the imagination.

The Blue Rose Society
The twentieth century dawned with a global revolution. Traditional order was overthrown and modernity emerged in the carnage. It wasn’t simply that empires collapsed. Explorations in science and the arts challenged every fundamental notion and belief. Powerful, invisible forces were brought to light such as microbes, X-rays, and the unconscious. Nowhere was this revolution felt more powerfully or violently than in Russia, straddling the great fault line between the West and Asia.

Against this tumultuous backdrop, a number of St. Petersburg artists and philosophers banded together in 1907. Guided by a radical political doctrine called Mystical Anarchism, their aim was to reconcile individual freedom with social harmony. They called themselves The Blue Rose Society. Nicholas Berdyaev, one of its illustrious members, later wrote Man is not a unit in the universe, forming part of an unrational machine, but a living member of an organic hierarchy, belonging to a real and living whole.

Nicholas Roerich was another prominent member. Among other achievements, this artist, explorer, diplomat, and mystic helped establish the first Tibetan Buddhist temple in Europe. Also located in St. Petersburg, it was dedicated to the ancient teachings of the Kalachakra Tantric School. In Sanskrit, Kalachakra means the Wheel of Time and Tantra means the everlasting thread. These teachings aver that the outer conditions of our world are the reflection of the inner condition of our state of mind collectively. Our goal is therefore to strive for enlightenment and to serve all who suffer. No doubt these teachings also profoundly influenced the society’s members.

Why they chose the blue rose for its symbol is unknown. There’s a possible clue in Slavic myth of Baba Yaga, the goddess of death and rebirth, which the members likely knew. Sometimes a friendly guide and sometimes inimical to humans, she was believed to live in the darkest, deepest forest, far removed from civilization. Baba Yaga could only be renewed drinking tea brewed from the blue rose. She’d also therefore grant the wishes of those few brave souls who brought her one.

This depiction of the sacred feminine in her light and dark aspects is primal. So is her association with the rose, with its own duality of beautiful fragrant bloom and painful bloody thorn. Indeed, its Sanskrit root wrdho means thorn, from which rose and red derive. A beloved teacher once said to me: The nightingale cannot sing until the thorn pierces its breast. And so, only the blue rose can renew Baba Yaga, goddess of death and rebirth. Curiously, two famed British authors of that era, Maurice Baring and Rudyard Kipling, each touch on this theme in their writings. Baring was actually a journalist in St. Petersburg when the Blue Rose Society was founded and likely knew its members. He penned a charming story about the daughter of an ancient Chinese emperor who desires a blue rose for a very clever reason. Kipling’s poem is about a silly love that dies seeking one with her last breath. Whatever the inspiration for choosing the blue rose as its symbol, the member’s intention is unmistakable. This is echoed in the society’s credo, coined by Viacheslav Ivanov another of its luminaries. De realibus a realora, meaning from the real to the more real.

The Scientists
The reason that blue roses don’t exist in the natural world is molecular. Simply put, roses don’t have the gene pigment needed to produce blue petals. Over the centuries, there’s been a sustained effort to grow one, without success. For the past several years, a flurry of costly scientific activity has been devoted to growing the worlds first blue rose. The first news story appeared 2002. -

Biotechnology aiding pursuit of blue rose... Breakthrough in research on plants, human liver provides clues. For the past several years, a biochemist by the name of Elizabeth Gillam has been working in the labs of Vanderbilt University's Medical School. Her research is focused on how drugs metabolize in the human liver. One day, during an otherwise routine experiment, a human liver enzyme she had inserted into a flask of bacteria unexpectedly turned the bacteria blue. Making an imaginative leap, she thought that perhaps this human enzyme might be similarly inserted into the genetic material of a rose to turn it blue too. Now she and fellow biochemist Peter Guengerich are talking to biotechnology companies to help them to do exactly this for commercial purposes. Guengerich in an interview with the Associated Press stated that: I would have called you crazy five years ago if you told me I would be pursuing a blue rose. [Associated Press, November 25, 2002]

This initiative appears to have ended without success. Then, in 2005, another news article appeared. Again it promised the creation of a blue rose, this time from a different company using different scientific methods.

Today A Lavender Rose, Tomorrow True Blue? A promising tactic in biotech called RNA interference may succeed where gardeners over the centuries have failed -- creating blue roses that grow "naturally" on the bush. Although more than 25,000 rose varieties exist, growers have never been able to create blue ones, other than by dying them, because rose petals lack the gene that codes for delphinidin, the enzyme that produces blue pigment in flowers. An Australian company, Florigene, says its RNA-i technique has produced lavender roses, and the company's bioengineers are closing in on blue ones. Florigene, which is 98.5% owned by Suntory of Japan, first tried splicing blue genes from petunias into roses, but powerful red and orange enzymes drowned out delphinidin. Florigene then used RNA interference to silence the enzymes that compete with delphinidin. Florigene says it could be selling blue roses within three years. [BusinessWeek July 18, 2005]

In fact, scientists have only produced a dark blue-violet bloom thus far. This perennial quest has aptly been compared to that for the Holy Grail. We have ever been driven from the beginning to materialize our dreams and deepest longings. Sometimes these are noble and sometimes base. Certainly the creation of a true blue rose would have enormous financial reward for the owners of the genetic code. Suntory’s sale of alcoholic beverages runs in the billions. Its management therefore understands how to cater profitably to our universal thirst for intoxication. The company’s success first began in 1907 when it produced the first Japanese red wine. In a strange synchrony, the Blue Rose Society was also founded the same year. Its members that the imaginal realm is well beyond the grasp and measure of the rational mind. So it is this sublime bloom. De realibus a realora

Appendix - Rosa Mundi

The domestic rose likely originated in Asia five thousand years ago. Its name derives from the Sanskrit for red. With their ineffable bloom, haunting perfume, and prickly thorns - roses have enchanted humans from the dawn of recorded time. And for as long, it has been used as a spiritual metaphor and sacred symbol. The rose has been especially associated with the feminine aspect of the divine. Ancient Hindus, for example, believed that the goddess Lakshmi, most beautiful in the pantheon, was born of a rose. Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of Heaven was also depicted with roses. The rose also prefigures in narratives about Aphrodite and Mary.

Rose wreaths have been found in Egyptian tombs dating back thousands of years. The first known painted roses appeared in Minoan wall frescos about1450 BCE. A seventh century Babylonian cuneiform tablet describes a wild rose. The Torah contains three notable references. In Ecclesiastes, it is written, "Wisdom grew up as a rosebush in Jericho" [24:14]. In the Song of Songs, Solomon rhapsodized, "I am the rose of Sharon, and the lily of the valleys" [2.1-17]. In Isaiah it is written "when the kingdom of righteousness shall be established on earth, the desert shall rejoice and blossom as a rose" [35.1]. There is also a Cabalistic legend that Adam was placed in the Garden of Eden to grow roses.

The rose also played a prominent role in ancient Grecian thought. It was believed, for example, that when Aphrodite sprang to life from the ocean, white roses grew wherever sea foam fell. Homer sang of its perfume in 800 BCE. In the Iliad, Aphrodite anoints Hector's body with rose oil. In another tale of Aphrodite, while helping her wounded lover Adonis, she is badly scratched by the thorns of white roses. The blood she sheds turns the roses red. The Greeks also believed that Cupid bribed the God of Silence with a rose. When they conducted a secret meeting, a rose was always suspended from the ceiling. The meeting was therefore called sub rosa, a term still in use today. The Greek philosopher Epicurus had his own private rose garden in Athens, where he taught students about the highest pleasure.

Grecian rose symbolism was transplanted to Rome. Major Roman military successes, for example, were celebrated by wearing rose wreaths. During a festival called the Rosalia, rose buds were left as offerings to the deceased. Many frescos have been discovered featuring roses including at Pompeii. The Romans were so avid for roses they developed hothouse technology that allowed them to speed up the blooming process. They also imported massive quantities of roses from Egypt. In the 1st century CE, Pliny the Elder recorded thirty-two different medicinal uses of the rose. Roses were used in official medicine well into the 1930s when a tincture of the Apothecary’s Rose was prescribed for sore throats. They were also widely used as mild astringents and to flavour other medicines. Their use in alternative and non-western healing has continued to this day.

Both Arab and Persian society cultivated roses with ardor. They also represented it in their literature and artwork with great sensitivity and subtlety. The Persians, for example, believed that when a nightingale sees a rose plucked it sings mournfully. In the twelfth century CE, Fariduddin Attar wrote that 'Mystery glows in the rose bed, the secret is hidden in the rose". Sa'adi of Shiraz wrote, "I shall pluck roses from the garden, but I am drunk with the scent of the rose bush." Shabistari wrote The Secret Rose Garden. Abdelkadir Gilani, yet another contemporary Sufi, was called the Light of the Rose. The rose also played a central role in the Tale Of The Genjii, a classic of Japanese literature from the 11th century.

Given such ancient roots, the domestic rose came relatively late to the West. During the middle ages, Christian knights brought home rose-cuttings they’d plundered in the Middle East. These violent and crude warriors, who had bathed the streets of Jerusalem in the innocent blood of Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike, could not help becoming enchanted. Roses were cultivated in secret sacred gardens called Hortus Conclusus designed to promote contemplation and prayer. These gardens also generally featured a small fountain, well, or spring. As the rose garden spread so did its influence. In the fourteenth century, Dante wrote that, the rose is “the divine word became flesh." This sensibility is perhaps best expressed in the exquisite stained-glass rose windows featured in Gothic cathedrals.

In the early 1400s, paintings began depicting the Annunciation in a new way. For the first time, this is shown occurring in the Hortus Conclusus. Some paintings also featured Mary in the act of fetching water. This image echoes ancient beliefs about the divine feminine as the source of all life. The Song of Songs, for example also uses images of an enclosed garden, a fountain, and roses, to celebrate the divine feminine, or Shekinah. With the rose’s advent in the West, men slowly started to become gentler and women accorded more respect. Courtly love, took the relation between men and women to a more idealized and symbolic level.

This symbolism was elaborated upon, century after century. In 1476, the artist Froment painted an ancient legend that God spoke to Moses through a burning rose bush. The 1500s saw the widespread introduction of the rosary, initially made from dried rosehips or carved from rose wood. In the 1600s, Rosicrucians circulated images of a rose at the center of a cross. This illustrated a then popular maxim, "as the rose blossoms under the sun, I shall blossom under the eyes of God". And, Shakespeare penned, “by any name a rose would smell as sweet.” No wonder that Christian theologians and mystics called it Rosa Mundi, or soul of the world.

Today hundreds of varieties of roses featuring thousands of colours are grown around the world. Moreover, horticulturalists are always growing new types. However, perhaps our greatest delight comes not from the rose but from its essence, called attar. To produce one pound of attar some four thousand roses must be distilled. One ounce of attar sells for $700 US. By comparison an ounce of gold sells for less than half. Adding to its rarity, practically all attar is produced in a very small region in Bulgaria.

2010-07-27T08:53:00.016-04:00

Airbender: Elemental Truths

The new film Airbender, based on the popular animated TV series, is worth examining more closely. In the storyline, humanity “is divided into four nations: the Water Tribes, the Earth Kingdom, the Air Nomads, and the Fire Nation. Each nation has its own natural element, on which it bases its society … Each country is also associated with a season: autumn for the Air Nomads, winter for the Water Tribe, spring for the Earth Kingdom and summer for the Fire Nation”. This idea of the world being made up of these four elements is shared by many ancient cultures and philosophies including Hindu, Taoist, Buddhist, and Greek. In the new film, the heroes must save the world, by defeating the Nazi-like industrial Fire Nation and its evil Fire Lord.

It’s interesting that of all the elements fire is the great problem. In fact, each element has a natural destructive capacity. Tornadoes from air, earthquakes from earth, floods from water. Fire in particular however is associated with industry. In 1804, William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills’ in reference to the advent of the Industrial Revolution's destruction of nature and human relationships.

Airbender is an exteriorization of very deep subliminal archetypes. The Pythagoreans called the elements the “Fourfold Roots of Everything”. The ancients believed all was well when the elements were in harmony. This is mirrored in the enduring First Nations worldview here in North America. For example, the contemporary Cree Elder, Pauline Shirt Dodem Kanosha’ states: What we have to do is teach all the four colours so we can work together, all peoples, in a good way.

The influence of the four-fold model, or quaternary, is more present in our lives than we realize. The Western Age of Reason banished holism for centuries. However, the four-fold model resurfaced in the 19th and 20th centuries as a response to the increasing fragmentation of society and alienation from life. My initial research has identified over 35 distinct models introduced between the 1800s and 1990s. Perhaps the best-known example is the work of Carl Jung in the early 20th century. Trained as a psychiatrist he identified four basic psychological temperaments - Thinking, Feeling, Sensation, and Intuition. This pioneering spurred further research and development. Examples include the Myers Briggs Type Indicator and the Keirsey Temperament Sorter. Both psychometric instruments are used in over thirty countries by schools, business, hospitals, non-profits, and the military.

If there's any doubt how deep and pervasive these elemental dynamics are consider the following corporate logos. Hint - fire is red, water is blue, earth is green, and air is yellow [representing breath and spirit] --

2010-05-24T18:55:00.018-04:00

Red Shift, Black Swan, & Blue Ocean

Each of the following colorful metaphors calls for a tremendous stretching of the imagination vis-a-vis the vastness of time/space, anticipating unforeseeable events, and ingeniously envisioning new enterprise.

Red Shift

Red Shift describes how we perceive the expanding universe relative to our position on earth. The light from stars we see is from the distant past. Light coming to us from great distance shifts into the red spectrum. The greater the distance is the greater the red shift. In April, astronomers received data from NASA’s space-based Swift satellite that shows the most distant, farthest object is 13.1 billion light-years away.

Black Swan

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is the author of The Black Swan: The Impact Of The Highly Improbable. It explains how we deal with very hard to predict, very high impact events such as the plane attacks on the World Trade Centers on September 11 2001 in New York. In a nutshell, randomness occurs more than we believe. But we develop retroactive interpretations that provide a false sense of security and predictability after the fact. Taleb calls for a profound mind shift that accepts escalating unpredictability as the norm and not the other way around. The term Black Swan historically meant rarity in that only white swans were known in the West. This changed in 1697 when a Dutch expedition encountered the black swans of Australia for the first time. The meaning of Black Swan then evolved to signify not the impossible per se, but the impossible as possible. For Australians the Black Swan proudly symbolizes their antipodean culture as distinct from the white swan-ness of the northern hemisphere.

Blue Ocean

Blue Ocean Strategy is the title of a book by W. Chan Kin and R, Mauborgne from the institute of the same name at INSEAD. Essentially, this proven strategy promotes the idea that enterprise succeeds “by creating new demand in an uncontested market space, or a "Blue Ocean", than by competing head-to-head with other suppliers for known customers in an existing industry ... BOS frameworks and tools are designed to be visual in order to not only effectively build the collective wisdom of the company but also allow for effective strategy execution through easy communication.”

Blurring Boundaries, Quickening Magnitudes

In 1964, the philosopher Henri Corbin wrote, “The most astounding information of modern science regarding the physical universe remains inferior to [the imagination].” It appears that the more we learn, the subtler the line becomes between what is real and what is imaginary. This is not simple metaphor. Cosmologists and physicists are studying ever-larger vistas of space and ever-smaller units of matter. Just how fine is the line between mind and matter, imagination and reality? The answer is pithily summed up in a recent luxury car advert: “What if has become what is.” Or, as William Blake once noted, “What’s now proved was once only imagined.”

2010-03-30T14:00:00.019-04:00

More On The EQ Gap

New York Times columnist David Brooks posed a question to his readers today. “Would you exchange a professional triumph for a personal blow?” This is problematic. One does not choose between these things. Worse, he gives this false choice more weight because he uses the example of a public figure. [The American actress Sandra Bullock recently won an Academy Award for Best Actress of the year. Shortly after, it was revealed in the public media that her husband, also a celebrity, was in an adulterous relation with yet another celebrity.]

Notwithstanding Brooks particular biases or agenda, he rightly acknowledges that “teams of researchers have been studying happiness ... [with] an impressive rigor”. He also states “Modern societies have developed vast institutions oriented around the things that are easy to count, not around the things that matter most. They have an affinity for material concerns and a primordial fear of moral and social ones”. If there was any doubt of this, consider the billions of dollars spent in education to test literacy and numeracy against the rising costs of school dropouts and bullying, also in the billions. We can teach people to count but teaching empathy is a different matter. Dr. Nancy Snyderman, NBC News Chief Medical Editor, refers to this an ‘EQ Gap’.

Brooks “overall impression from this research’ is a bit muddled. He states for example “that economic and professional success exists on the surface of life, and that they emerge out of interpersonal relationships, which are much deeper and more important.” I’d state this somewhat differently. Economic and professional success is the result of mastery of one’s métier, hard work, good fortune, and strong interpersonal relationships.

2010-02-28T12:11:00.032-05:00

The EQ Gap

The news media regularly report on yet another famous individual caught out in inappropriate, injudicious behaviours [often through arrogance and/or greed]. This includes leaders in industry and government as well as popular ‘stars’. Such individuals, despite their brilliance, talent, wealth, and power, are shown to have feet of clay. This metaphor is from the Book of Daniel, written over 2000 years ago. We’ve known about our self-delusional and self-destructive capacity for a long time indeed. As television night show host Jay Leno famously asked of the British actor Hugh Grant, “What were you thinking?” This “EQ Gap” plays out in our own lives at school, work, and the community. While it usually doesn’t become a news story, the consequences are just as dramatic and destructive. The term the EQ Gap is from in an article by Dr. N. Snyderman in which she decried the lack of emotional intelligence on the part of the automakers who flew to Washington in private jets to ask for financial aid.

EQ, also known as Emotional Intelligence, has four broad dimensions - self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. It’s a natural complement to Cognitive Intelligence, or IQ. Like IQ, EQ is also needed at all life stages. However, the development of EQ is largely ad hoc and informal. This is in stark contrast to the importance given to cognitive development within K-12 education. As a result, schools are seeing alarming rates of bullying and dropping out. Both are linked to poor EQ. These epidemics are costing society billions of dollars.

Problematically, this imbalance between cognitive and emotional intelligence continues into adulthood. The continuing EQ Gap is responsible for the same kinds of problems at work as at school. Except now the consequences and costs are even higher. Consider the following negative impacts, all of which are rising: Absenteeism & turnover, Presenteeism, Depression & anxiety, Declining morale, Declining work productivity & focus, Increasing conflict & bullying, Increased disability premiums, Rising health & benefits costs, Employment replacement costs. Bullying in particular is worth singling out. ABC News reported that over 54 million employees experience bullying, this is 37% of the US workforce [10/2009]. The good news is systemic EQ development is being introduced increasingly throughout education and industry. Good social and emotional skills are seen as a crucial prelude to learning academically as well as to workplace productivity and wellbeing. Even better news is that EQ is easy to cultivate and can be done at any age.

2010-01-17T20:26:00.019-05:00

The Heliotropic Effect of Abundance

The following is an essay extract from a much larger symposium document Explaining Extraordinary Organizational Performance and Transformation: Lessons from Rocky Flats. The Heliotropic Effect of Abundance is by Dr. Kim Cameron a co-founder of The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship. The Center for Positive Organizational Scholarship is a community of scholars devoted to energizing and transforming organizations through research on the theory and practice of positive organizing and leadership. It is located at The Ross School of Business. Not surprisingly, it’s consistently ranked as one of the top business schools in the world.

Positive Organizational Scholarship is a relatively new field of study. It looks at organizations in the way positive psychology looks at individuals. “Just as positive psychology focuses on exploring optimal individual psychological states rather than pathological ones, Positive Organizational Scholarship focuses attention on optimal organizational states—the dynamics in organizations that lead to the development of human strength, foster resiliency in employees, make healing, restoration, and reconciliation possible, and cultivate extraordinary individual and organizational performance”.

EXTRACT

To explain the heliotropic effect, let us pose the question: What happens over time when you put a plant in a window? The answer, of course, is that the plant begins to lean toward the light. That is, a natural tendency exists in every living system to be inclined toward positive energy—toward light—and away from negative energy or from the dark. The reason is that light is life giving and energy creating. All living systems are inclined toward that which gives life.

The heliotropic effect is evident in many ways within individuals and organizations—physiologically, psychologically, emotionally, visually, socially, and so forth (see Cooperrider, 1990; Cameron, 2003; Bright, Cameron, & Caza, 2006). At the individual level, the heliotropic effect may be manifest physiologically as the placebo effect. That is, if a person believes that a medication will be effective, it will, in fact, produce the desired effect about 60 percent of the time. Psychologically, the heliotropic effect is manifest as the Pygmalion effect. That is, not only does my system respond to my own positive expectations, but the expectations of others also can produce a heliotropic effect for me. The essence of this effect is that the perception of a teacher appears to affect the performance outcome of the class. If thinks that learners are bright, they are. Those expectations are more powerful than any other single factor, including actual IQ scores (Rosenthal & Jacobsen, 1968) on performance.

2009-12-27T16:00:00.018-05:00

New Heliotrope Website Launch

Since the last blog post, Heliotrope has gone through an incredible growth period. As a result, we're about to launch a new, more interactive website on January 6. It will feature a Heliotrope blog as well. This will report on activities related to Prelude and the enterprise more generally. This also allowed us to re-imagine this blog's role in relationship. New Heliograph posts will therefore be more personal explorations of ideas, trends, and discoveries that relate to Heliotrope and Prelude but go beyond them as well.

Hopefully this new approach will also encourage more dialogue with visitors. Martin Buber wrote: “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” This brings to mind the late greatly esteemed Sufi teacher Pir Vilayat Khan. I can well imagine him saying this ‘divine electricity’ helps ‘fray new neural pathways for human connectivity and creativity'. Buber also wrote that “play is an exaltation of the possible”. All the research I’ve seen suggests that play is an ideal way to foster integral relationships and innovation. These ideas also reflect Daniel Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence and the power of the limbic lock: -

"In a neurological sense, laughing represents the shortest distance between two people because it instantly interlocks limbic systems. This immediate, involuntary reaction, as one researcher puts it, involves the most direct communication possible between people – brain to brain – with our intellect just going for the ride, in what might be called a 'limbic lock” [Primal Leadership: Realizing the Power of Emotional Intelligence; Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee; Harvard Business School Press].

2009-06-21T16:27:00.006-04:00

The Dream Chrysalis

The protective outer covering of the pupa of a butterfly or moth is called a chrysalis. The term, of 17th century coinage, derives from the Greek root khrusos, for gold. This was inspired by the golden sheen on the pupa of several species.

“When [caterpillars] finally fall asleep and a chrysalis forms around them, tiny new imaginal cells, as biologists call them, begin to take form within their bodies.The caterpillar's immune system fights these new cells as though they were foreign intruders, and only when they crop up in greater numbers and link themselves together are they strong enough to survive. Then the caterpillar's immune system fails and its body dissolves into a nutritive soup" [Elisabet Sahtouris].

This imaginal cell soup coalesces into buds. These then constellate into a completely new creature. Emerging from the chrysalis, the butterfly flutters away. This natural metamorphosis has become a metaphor of the ages. Imaginal cells indeed.

2009-04-18T10:22:00.008-04:00

Holistic Thinking, Innovative Marketing

Brock University in St. Catharines Ontario has 17,000 full-time students. “Brock champions smaller class sizes and - this is key - a whole brain approach to the students ... [This] means a student's social awareness, emotional development, connection to the community - artistic development.... [The marketing firm therefore] created a bold look that explores a whole-brain examination of students, faculty and alumni. And so we meet Rohan Kothari, majoring in biological sciences but working on mastering the sax, and MSc candidate Lisa Neville, a licensed gliding instructor who lauds Brock's dual major course offering (Earth sciences and biology). Each image is bifurcated: an oil painting substitutes for half of Mr. Kothari's face; a raptor for half of Ms. Neville's.” This novel university campaign literally illustrates the primal creative relation between self-identity, language, and image. "Both sides of the brain", as the campaign tag goes, indeed.

Globe & Mail Article - Brock offers a lesson in boldness
Brock University

2009-04-05T17:52:00.009-04:00

More On Happiness

As a T-shirt design on zazzle.com archly proclaims, "Happiness is a fragment of your imagination!" Happiness today is defined as a “a state of well being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy" [http://wordnet.princeton.edu]. Our original understanding was more complex, nuanced, and pragmatic.

For example, ‘Hap’ in the Old English of the 1300s meant ‘fortune or chance’. This basic link between happiness and luck is found in most northern European languages of that time. Yet, happiness was also associated with two other related emotional states - beatitude and blitheness.

The first is defined as “perfect happiness and inner peace” and stems from the Latin beatus. The second term means, “having a casual and cheerful indifference to convention and rules”. Bliss is yet another related term. Over ensuing centuries, these associated meanings for happiness’ changed in keeping with the West’s overarching worldview and ethos.

For example, ‘silly’ originally meant ‘happy’. It stems from the Latin ‘solari’, meaning ‘to comfort’ and ‘salvus’ meaning ‘whole and safe’. Over the course of six hundred years its meaning devolved from: "blessed to pious,to innocent (1200), to harmless, to pitiable(c.1280), to weak (c.1300), to feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish (1576)" [www.etymonline.com].

It’s interesting to consider the continuum of emotional states associated with happiness. Of course, sheer good luck is a common factor. [Anthropological research indicates that the reason most of us can’t resist sweets is because of primal hardwiring. In the long millennia before civilization, our hardy nomadic ancestors rarely encountered sweets like honey. They therefore happily gorged on their good luck knowing it would be a long time until they discovered more.]

Yet our ancestors also cane to understand that the more enduring type of happiness doesn’t depend on blind luck but on an inner attitude. The ancient link between happiness, wholeness, and solace is especially resonant today given recent global events. Interestingly, contemporary happiness research bears out what past generations readily understood.

2009-03-01T10:56:00.012-05:00

On Creating Happiness

Two centuries ago, the United States was founded on the ideal that the pursuit of happiness is a human right. The Statue of Liberty with its torch held high perhaps best symbolizes this enduring aspiration for those seeking the American Dream, even now during a global economic crisis. In The How of Happiness, Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky explores the relation between intentional activity and happiness. Research shows there are simple and proven ongoing ways to enhance happiness. These include counting one's blessings, performing kind acts, and seeing negative situations in a positive light. Circumstantial happiness in contrast is dependent on external factors, which often we have no direct control over as recent events sadly show.

The idea of intentional happiness is similar to the ‘broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions’ first formulated by Dr. Barbara Fredrickson in 1998. This holds that positive emotions and intentions help broaden awareness. And this helps encourage new exploration, creativity, and social bonds. Positive emotions are seen as expansive and inclusive. Negative emotions are linked directly to narrow survival-oriented behaviours such as flight or fight.

Although daunting, remaining positive within the midst of adversity has great benefit. Finding intrinsic meaning and value in such experiences helps transmute their painful impacts. It also provides a powerful basis for profound growth and transformation. This can hold true especially for the hundreds of thousands of people being laid off. often from long-held positions. Many will believe they have no other skills or are too old to learn new ones.

In her July/August 2003 article in American Scientific, The Value of Positive Emotions, Dr. Fredrickson writes -

It seems that positive emotions do more than simply feel good in the present. The undoing effect suggests that positive emotions can reduce the physiological "damage" on the cardiovascular system sustained by feeling negative emotions. But some other research suggests that there's more to it than that. It appears that experiencing positive emotions increases the likelihood that one will feel good in the future. Positive meaning can be obtained by finding benefits within adversity, by infusing ordinary events with meaning and by effective problem solving. You can find benefits in a grim world, for instance, by focusing on the new found strengths and resolve within yourself and others. You can infuse ordinary events with meaning by expressing appreciation, love and gratitude, even for simple things. And you can find positive meaning through problem solving by supporting compassionate acts toward people in need. So although the active ingredient within growth and resilience may be positive emotions, the leverage point for accessing these benefits is finding positive meaning.

2008-09-21T18:04:00.008-04:00

21st Century Learning

Several initiatives are underway using the rubric of 21st Century Learning. They share similar perspectives about what additional skills are needed in today's global knowledge economy in addition to the 3Rs. -

Partnership for 21st Century for Learning
P21 is a US national advocacy group focused on infusing 21st-century skills into education. P21’s website states: It has identified several ‘soft’ skills crucial for success in the global knowledge economy. These include: problem solving, critical thinking, communication, collaboration, and creativity. "It has become apparent that there isn't a lack of employees who are technically proficient, but a lack of employees who can adequately communicate and collaborate, innovate, and think critically," said Ken Kay, P21 president. However, in a P21 poll virtually unanimous 99% of US voters say teaching students these skills is important to our country’s future economic success.

The 21st Century Learning Initiative
This British-Canadian initiative is facilitating “the emergence of new approaches to learning that draw upon a range of insights into the human brain, the functioning of human societies, and learning as a community-wide activity”. It has just published Overschooled But Undereducated. This argues for the overhaul of the current education system and the reassessment of educational policy and attitudes towards learning and schooling.

The 21st Century Learning Alliance
The alliance “brings together industry, government and teachers to help to make 21st century learning a reality”. It was founded by key UK organizations involved in education including: Oracle, Cisco, Partnerships for Schools, Futurelab, & Northern Grid for Learning.

School of the Future
The School District of Philadelphia and Microsoft collaborated for several years on imagining and constructing a “School of the Future.” This was opened in 2006 to “create a living blueprint for learning environments in the 21st century”. It is part of Microsoft’s global Partners in Learning initiative.

Enquiring Minds
This UK initiative is involved in a comprehensive curriculum redesign that “takes students’ ideas, interests and experiences as its starting point, and provides them with more responsibility for the direction and content of their learning”.

2008-09-01T18:15:00.005-04:00

Life Span Positive Development

A number of innovative initiatives are emerging focused on understanding and fostering emotional and social intelligence. These address all stages of life and learning. Each has its own conceptual framework, methodology, and ecosystem of institutions and practitioners. Seen together these initiatives have significant critical mass. They underscore how widely recognized the importance of soft skills are for individual and social well being globally.

2008-08-30T18:50:00.020-04:00

Positive Youth Development

Overview
A new dynamic approach to learning in schools is emerging from chrysalis. And like a butterfly it has two wings carrying it aloft. I refer to the recognition that academic knowledge must be balanced with life knowledge, hard skills with soft skills, head with heart, and individual sensibility with that of the group.

Positive Youth Development is a helpful rubric for describing a wide range of initiatives designed to foster emotional and social intelligence along with more traditional education goals. These have emerged in response to a crucial gap perceived by practitioners in schools and youth agencies. Simply put, learning is a social process within which human emotions and relationships are powerful intrinsic influencers.

This is a relatively new field and highly interdisciplinary. Moreover, each of these initiatives has a distinct theoretical framework, methodology, and ecosystem of institutions and practitioners. The Social Development Research Group at the University of Washington has identified 161 PYD programs. Some 3 million young people have been involved in related research projects across North America [Search Institute].

PYD is part of an even broader shift in psychological theory, research, and praxis. Related developments include Positive Psychology, Positive Scholarship, and Appreciative Inquiry. These all share a common perspective. That is, that the positive images we create and share - of ourselves, of each other, and our futures - help drive their actualization.

"As you ramble through Life,
Whatever be your goal.
Keep your eye upon the doughnut,
And not upon the hole."

What Parents Are Saying
Teaching social skills has tremendous importance for the nearly 1,000 people surveyed by Hasbro. 90% of parents consider social skills to be vital to their children's happiness and confidence and nearly 80% consider these more important than academic skills when it comes to happiness.

Social and Emotional Learning
SEL is an umbrella term used to describe the skills needed “to recognize and manage emotions, develop care and concern for others, make responsible decisions, establish positive relationships, and handle challenging situations effectively" (CASEL) SEL has grown increasingly important within primary and secondary schools across Canada and the United States.

Developmental Asset Framework
This framework developed by the Search Institute outlines those ‘assets’, or ‘development building blocks’ essential to the health and well being of Middle and High School students. Young people draw on these assets to make positive choices, avoid high-risk behaviors, and thrive. Internal Assets include competencies and values that young people learn and internalize on their way to becoming responsible and healthy adults. External Assets consist of resources like friends, family, mentors, school, and community organizations.

Resilience Education
Resilience Education is concerned with how some youth, despite terribly challenging lives, are able to overcome adversity and thrive. Research has identified these core characteristics and strengths, which are key to healthy development and effective learning. “Changing the life trajectories of children and youth from risk to resilience starts with changing the beliefs of the adults in the families, schools, and communities”. [Benard, Bonnie 2004, Resiliency: What We Have Learned. San Francisco, CA: WestEd]

Character Education
Character Education is an umbrella-term used to describe the teaching of children in a manner that will help them to develop. Concepts that fall under this term include social and emotional learning, moral reasoning/cognitive development, life skills education, health education; violence prevention, critical thinking, ethical reasoning, and conflict resolution and mediation. This form of education involves teaching children and adolescents’ values including honesty, stewardship, kindness, generosity, courage, freedom, justice, equality, and respect.

Positive Behaviour Support
PBS is the application of evidence-based strategies and systems that work at an individual level and school wide level. This is designed to help establish a positive and safe environment, which in turn is conducive to increased academic performance.

“One of the wonderful features of a “PBS School” is that the ... selection of interventions and programs is often done collaboratively by a school team ... Positive Behavior Support is different from traditional behavior modification in three ways. First, it is focused on the use of positive intervention strategies that are respectful of the individual. Second, the interventions that are developed are individualized and are based on an understanding of the individual, the individual’s communication abilities, and the unique situations of the individual. Third, the intervention strategies that are developed are focused on helping the individual gain access to new environments, have positive social interactions, develop friendships, and learn new communication skills.”

School Climate
School Climate is another term with a fairly broad definition. In essence, school climate refers to the overall quality and feel of the attitudes, feelings, and behaviours of individuals - students, teachers, administrators, staff. School climate establishes the bounds of acceptable behaviour among all stakeholders, and all are deemed responsible for its maintenance. There are four overlapping relation fields.

The relationship of a student to her or himself
A student to her or his peers
A student to her or his parents and community
A student to her or his school workers, including teachers, administrators, and all staff

2008-08-28T06:58:00.016-04:00

Visual Thinking Is A Snap

The following article from eSchool News caught my eye. It's worth noting that in 2008 alone over 110 million digital cameras will be sold worldwide.

Montpelier High School Principal Peter Evans was meeting with a parent recently when the conversation turned to technology in the classroom, reports the Times Argus of Vermont. What is the school's policy on the use of electronics--iPods, MP3 players, PDAs, digital cameras, and laptops--in class, the father asked Evans. He had been opposed to students using tech devices, the dad told Evans, until he saw his son pull out a cell phone while he was working on his homework one night. The teenager explained that he hadn't had a chance to copy down math equations on the board at the end of class, so he used his phone to snap a picture of it. That really changed [the dad's] mind about how wise kids are using technology.

2008-08-23T10:57:00.028-04:00

On Visual Thinking

We think in pictures and words and we use both to communicate. We also tend to favour one cognitive style over the other, just as cultures do. Since the advent of the printing press, the written word has had the upper hand in western society, to mangle a metaphor. This is now changing rapidly.

Thanks to easy-to-use inexpensive computers, digital cameras, and high speed Internet, there’s been a profound upsurge in our society’s capacity to think and communicate visually. The following lists a few ways this is manifesting. As Dan Roam, The Back of the Napkin, observes: Drawing things out helps us look, see, imagine, and show ideas that would have remained hidden had we not picked up the pen.

Visual Thinking & Education

Thinking Through Stone
My own study of visual thinking began in earnest in the early 90s. For my doctoral fieldwork, I lived two years in a remote village in western Kenya. Tabaka is the epicenter of a century-old soapstone carving cottage industry. My research focused on how one generation of carvers transferred their visual knowledge to the next generation. Of course, this was largely non-verbal, indirect, and informal. It’s an interesting process to try to externalize a creative visual activity. There’s an entire literature and methodology on this subject. Vera John-Steiner’s Notebooks of the Mind is an exemplar.

Visual Spatial Learners
A significant number of students are visual spatial learners. Dr. Linda Kreger Silverman’s research and website are a tremendous resource. Slightly over half of all early school leavers have a visual spatial orientation. Dr. Silverman makes a powerful case that these young people could be and should be taught to their strengths. -

A computer is as indispensable to the visual-spatial child as a book is to an auditory-sequential child. It is visual, graphic, unconcerned with time, highly motivating, responsive to the inquisitive mind of the visual-spatial learner, and accesses the right hemisphere. It is the skating rink where a visual-spatial mind can perform dazzling feats ... Success in our technological era depends upon different skills than are currently emphasized in school: visualization, grasping the big picture, multi-dimensional perception, pattern finding, thinking graphically, and creativity.

New Innovation: Picturing To Learn
There’s a remarkable pilot program underway called Picturing To Learn through the aegis of Harvard and MIT. One of the co-founders, Felice Frankel, states that ‘visually explaining concepts can be a powerful learning tool.’ Part of the reason is that creating a picture can reveal connections that words alone may not. It fosters a holistic perspective and the ability to tell a complete story. When used to help high school students learn and express scientific concepts, the most amazing results occur. Ms. Frankel and her colleagues have already developed a database with more than 4000 drawings.

Visual Communication Tools

Paper & Pencil
We've been creating images to communicate from the start. The drawing featured below was created in Lascaux 17,000 years ago. How easily we can 'read it' today. The means to communicate visually are almost always at hand. What a profoundly simple and immediate way to convey so much at once.

Mind Maps
A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged radially around a central key word or idea. It is used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing. There are many variations of this mapping process, for example Concept Maps and Semantic Maps. Each has its own centre of gravity, protocols, and practitioners. Mo st have software equivalents too.

Graphic Facilitation
Practitioners help groups better picture what they are thinking and trying to express to each other. They are skilled in literally drawing out the groups’ thoughts and feelings as they emerge through guided dialogue. The results can be very impressive. A graphic facilitator generally works with marking pens on a large (4-feet-high and 10-to-15-feet-long) sheets of butcher paper.

Image Maps
An image map is an online tool featuring one overall diagram with specific parts hyperlinked to relevant destinations. The example here is from the emerging field of Positive Psychology. As its creator’s note, these image maps can help people get a mental structure for storing information about positive psychology, and the attached articles form a reader’s guide for learning about the subject.

Interactive White Boards
This large interactive display enables an individual or group to write or draw on the surface, print off the image, save it to computer or distribute it over a network. Images can also be projected on the screen from a computer and worked on a life size scale, which in turn is recorded on the computer. SMART Technologies, a Canadian based producer of interactive whiteboards alone generates about a billion dollars in revenues.

Surface
Microsoft Surface is a 30-inch display in a table-like form factor that several people can use simultaneously. The intuitive user interface works without a traditional mouse or keyboard, allowing small groups to interact with visual content and information in a more natural and familiar way, by using their hands, gestures, and creativity.

Vision Boards
This is an interesting trend that takes the dynamics of visual thinking to another level. Vision Boards are just that, boards on which people draw or collage images of their goals and dreams. It is believe by practitioners that creating a vision board and using it as meditation will help their goals and dreams to materialize. As with practically every other tool, a community of practice and ecosystem of enterprise has evolved. There are software companies offering a streamlined online digital approach as well. I will revisit the related practices of visualization and imagineering in another post. Suffice it to say there’s extensive research underscoring the value of these processes.

Black Boards

2008-08-22T19:23:00.016-04:00

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Dylan Thomas

2008-07-12T15:37:00.016-04:00

The Kaleidoscope

Sir David Brewster invented the kaleidoscope in 1816 while conducting experiments on light polarization. Its name derives from the ancient Greek kalos ‘beautiful’ and eidos ‘form’. This optical device is made from ‘tube containing mirrors and pieces of colored glass or paper, whose reflections produce changing patterns that are visible through an eyehole when the tube is rotated’. It became a social phenomenon. In 1818 Blackwood's Magazine stated that: " no invention, and no work, whether addressed to the imagination or to the understanding, ever produced such an effect." Hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions were purchased in the course of the century. Some adjectives that describe its effect – psychedelic, polychromatic…. ever-shifting, fluid, fluctuating, unpredictable, impermanent.

2007-08-19T18:52:00.013-04:00

The Golden Gavel

My grandfather was an ornamental ironsmith. He created the gavel pictured here almost a century ago. I’ve always loved its simple, powerful design and balanced heft. Gilded iron. His creative spirit, will, and skill are enfolded into its very materiality.

Iron is heavy and dense due to rigidly ordered, closely aligned molecules. Water, by way of contrast, consists of volatile, random molecules with lots of space between them. Smiths heat the iron to loosen up the rigid molecules. It becomes more malleable and therefore easier to work with.

Like iron, our thinking can sometimes be dense and rigid. It needs to be loosened up if we want to forge something new and better. The heating and hammering is an apt metaphor of the psychic processes entailed.

Blacksmiths: Magicians of Transformation
In many cultures, ironsmiths are also diviners, priests, and healers. They were often feared as much as revered for their skill in transforming inert metal through fire and force into tools and weapons for life and survival. For example, in Dogon myth, it was the blacksmith who brought fire to earth for the first time. Among many Mande cultures, blacksmiths are called

“The First Sons of the Earth. They are associatedn always present at the forge: fire, air of the bellows, water, and earth. In this setting they are thought to harness the forces or energy of nature (called nyama) to transform materials of the earth into tools, art, and ritual objects"

This idea is also found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. Tubal-Cain is referred to in the King James Bible as a master artificer of iron weapons and tools. In the 1850s, the Scottish poet and songwriter Charles Mackay wrote his famous verse .

Old Tubal Cain was a man of might
In the days when earth was young:
By the fierce red light of his furnace bright
The strokes of his hammer rung;
And he lifted high his brawny hand
On the iron glowing clear,
Till the sparks rush'd out in scarlet showers,
As he fashion'd the sword and spear.And he sang - "Hurrah for my handiwork!
... And the red sparks lit the air;
"Not alone for the blade was the bright steel made;"
And he fashion'd the first ploughshare!

The Great Hammering
In Alchemy there are several stages involved in transmuting a base metal into gold. The fourth stage - Sublimatio - has also been described as a great grinding down to rhinisima, refers to the micro filings that result. It’s this ultra fine powder, almost gas, which is key to the final step of transformation. This idea is also echoed in Norse Mythology. The Norse believed that Thor, the god of thunder and lightning, wielded a hammer called Mjolnir. It’s Indo-European root mel means to crush or grind. In turn, it’s related to the Latin malleus, for hammer, as well as the Latin mola, for mill.

2007-05-27T17:17:00.005-04:00

The Whole Picture

A word’s meaning evolves over a long period of time. Tracing its roots can be revealing. Seemingly disparate words often share common roots and import. Such is the case with synapse, yoga, algebra, and art. Each in its own way denotes joining things together to create greater wholes.

Synapse
It’s apt to start with this biological term as millions of mine and yours are sparking now as I write and you read! A synapse is like a junction. It facilitates the exchange of electrical signals from nerve cells via interconnected circuits throughout the central nervous system. Young children have some 1,000 trillion in their brains. As we age, this declines. Most adults have between 100 and 500 trillion synapses. Through this synaptic activity, biological impulse is magically transmuted into perception and cognition.

The term is derived from the ancient Greek synapsis meaning conjunction. It was first coined in the late nineteenth century by the British physiologist Sir Michael Foster. It gained wider exposure through his student, Sir Charles Sherringon, who won the 1932 Nobel Prize in Medicine and Physiology.Apse is a related architectural term. Both stem from haptein, which originally meant joining arcs to form a circle, especially in reference to wheel making.

Yoga
Yoga is an ancient Indian practice, dating back to 2500 BCE, possibly even earlier. Its name derives from the Sanskrit yuga, which means to join, or yoke together. A yoke is a wooden bar that fits over the necks of animals to pull a cart or plow. Generally associated with servitude, the yoke once had a more positive social meaning. In Old English, for example, it meant a bond of partnership or cooperation. The goal of yoga is to yoke our temporal being to the divine imperative, just as the oxen is yoked to the higher purpose of drawing the plow.

Algebra
Algebra is concerned with that branch of mathematics in which symbols, usually letters of the alphabet, are used to represent unknown numbers. In 830 CE, Al’Khwarizmi wrote Hisab al-jabr w’al-muqabala, or The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing, from whence algebra got its name. In Arabic, Al-Jabr means the reunion of broken parts. Al’Khwarizmi also developed the concept of algorithms so crucial to computational technologies today. In an earlier post I discuss how Fibonacci introduced the term zero to the West. His source was Al’Khwarizmi. Al’Khwarizmi also led a team of seventy geographers to calculate the earth’s circumference and develop a world map.

This idea of measured calculation is also expressed by the term ratiocinate, to reason methodically with precise logic. Its root is the Latin ra, which means to fit together. Ra in Latin is actually a transposed Ar. We will come back to Ar below. This transposition between letter and sound, called metathesis, is common in many languages. Of course, there’s always the danger of too much adherence to strict reason and logic. Shaw describes one his characters in 'Androcles and the Lion' as an “inveterate Roman Rationalist, always discarding the irrational real thing for the unreal but ratiocinable postulate".

Art
The Latin root ar means to join together. Related terms include arm, artery, are, article, and articulate. Art is another related term. However, in its definitions there aren’t any related to the idea of joining things together. It’s actually there but hidden. Between the Middle Ages and Renaissance, education was largely the Church’s purview. It was the only institutional steward of knowledge in the West after the fall of the Roman Empire. It took several centuries to rebuild civil authority and society. During this period, the Church continued to use Latin, the empire’s lingua franca, throughout Europe and the British Isles. It also established universities in the larger cities.

The curriculum then consisted of several required ‘branches’ of learning (called the Trivium and Quadrivium respectively). These included mathematics, rhetoric, music, and philosophy. A student who successfully completed the entire course graduated as a Master of the Arts. One could have easily called him or her Master of Joinery. For that is essentially what they did. They integrated the knowledge gained in each branch within one larger conceptual frame and worldview. The value of artem - this ability to effectively join things together - was widely understood and appreciated, whether in producing good walls, wheels, and scholars। It takes skill and creativity to build something whole and enduring from smaller bits, whether these are stone, wood, or ideas. True then and now.

This calls to mind those master artisans who construct works of great beauty and utility by joining natural elements together. For example, the stonewall mason able to fit rough stone to stone, without cement, so that their walls stand for centuries। Or, consider for example, a furniture wright who joins disparate wood pieces together without nails, so that the piece serves for ages too.

The Greater Conjunctio
Alchemy is concerned with nothing less than the union of opposites, the squaring of the circle, and the rebirth of the phoenix. In its final stage, called the greater conjunctio, all one-sidedness is rectified. Alchemists also called this stage, zygon, which is ancient Greek for the even older Sanskrit yuga, which means, of course, joining. In The Act Of Creation (1964), Arthur Koestler provides a tour de force analysis of the creative process within the arts and sciences. His principle finding is that all acts of creation involve the novel intersection of idioms, concepts, processes, and materials. He developed a conceptual framework called the bisociative pattern of creative synthesis to describe this process.

One of his many examples involves Guttenberg’s quest to create what didn’t exist and had no name। After great challenge and set back, Guttenberg wrote in his journal: What am I to do? I do not know: but I know what I want to do: I wish to manifold the Bible. I wish to have copies ready for the pilgrimage . . .[1964:122]. In his fervent and fertile inventiveness, and through much trial and error, Guttenberg ultimately and ingeniously married together three entirely different manufacturing processes – the manual hand printing of pictures from wood blocks, the metal die casting of standardized coins, and the wine press.

This is bisociation, or Ar, in action.I call yoga, algebra, and art the primary imaginal joints। Each joins things together in its own way. The symbolism of their colors further underscores this, yellow [yoga] for spirit and faith, blue [algebra] for science and reason, and red [art] for creativity and feeling.

E.O. Wilson, the biologist, foresaw the potential integration of the sciences and humanities. In 1998, he introduced the term consilience to describe this “jumping together of knowledge... across disciplines to create a common groundwork for explanation." Seven years later, Bill Gates, a Microsoft founder, refers to consilience in a special essay he wrote for Business Week: These technologies promote "consilience" -- literally, the "jumping together" of knowledge from different disciplines. They help people combine their own ideas with at least some existing knowledge far more efficiently than was previously possible.

Fractal Logic
Tellingly, Mandelbrot derived the term fractal from the Latin fractus for broken, uneven. The fractal is another good term for these times. It’s an irregular or fragmented geometric shape that can be repeatedly subdivided into parts, each a smaller copy of the whole. Fractals are used in computer modeling of natural structures that do not have simple geometric shapes, for example, clouds, mountainous landscapes, and coastlines. They’re used to digitally reproduce complex natural shapes like clouds, coastlines, and mountain ranges. Digital artists also use them to create luminous works of computer art.

2007-05-26T09:57:00.001-04:00

Island in Space

In 1986 I had a chance to visit the Vancouver World’s Fair. The United Nations Pavilion made the strongest impact. I purchased a beautiful publication - Island In Space: Prospectus For A New Idea. This is where I first read Hoyle’s prescient 1948 observation: Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from the outside, is available . . . an idea as powerful as any other in history will be let loose.

Further on in the text, there’s an essay by the astronaut Russell Schweickart. After his 1969 space flight he wrote:

You look down there and you can't imagine how many borders and boundaries you cross again and again ... and you don't even see them. From where you see it the thing is a whole and it is so beautiful ... And there you are - hundreds of people killing each other over some imaginary line that you're not even aware of, that you can't even see ... You realize that on that small spot, that little blue-and-white thing is everything that means anything to you - all history, and music, and poetry, and art, and birth, and death, love, tears, joy, games [1986:10]

The first photo of earth from space I ever saw was on cover of the Whole Earth Catalogue in fall 1969. It affected me from the start just as Hoyle predicted. The catalogue’s founding publisher, Stewart Brand, had first learned about an earth photo taken by a NASA satellite in 1966. In fact, he vigorously lobbied to have the photo released to the public. In a 2003 interview, Brand said he felt it would become a ‘powerful symbol’ of Earth ‘as an island’.

We finally saw our home planet as it is. No escaping the visible fact we live on a ball. The photo also gave new credence and impetus to that old saying what goes round comes round. One-sided, narrow thinking slowly began giving way. Great thinkers from diverse fields - such as Kuhn, McLuhan, Fuller, and Bohm - began creating a new language to help describe such holistic concepts as global village, geodome, paradigm, and holomovement.

It’s almost forty years since that first photo of earth. During this time, ingenious new tools like computers and the World Wide Web have emerged to further catalyze this budding consciousness of the greater whole. And yet such tools have always been available through the ages. For example, Mandalas, Labyrinths, and Medicine Wheels are all designed to help us perceive and live life holistically.

TED Media Director June Cohen states this well: The newest digital technologies are returning us to the most ancient form of media — one in which a natural order is restored; our individual stories take center stage, with the rest of the world as a backdrop.

Birds make their nests in circles; we dance in circles, the circle stands for the Sun and Moon and all round things in the natural world. The circle is an endless creation, with endless connections to the present, all that went before and all that will come in the future. ~ Black Elk

2007-05-13T14:10:00.001-04:00

A Question of Perspective

In 1948, Sir Frederick Hoyle, the physicist-cosmologist who coined the term ‘the big bang’, predicted that once the earth was photographed, its image would unleash “a new idea as powerful as any in history.” Twenty years later, during their extraordinary flight to the moon and back, the crew of Apollo 8 took that very first snapshot. Only now are we beginning to grasp the full import of this powerful ‘new idea’. With it, we truly see ourselves – that is humanity and life entire – in a global context. As Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders said: "We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth."

2007-05-06T18:49:00.004-04:00

The Zero

The concept of zero was first conceived of in ancient India. Its graphic symbol was a dot called a Bindu in Sanskrit. This dot was also called śūnya, meaning void or empty. It was perceived as being like a seed. That is, in itself inert and unmanifest, but from which life springs and returns. The Brhadaranyaka Upanishad compares this to a tiny spider at the center of its web, spinning out and reeling in concentric circles of silken threads.

Even today, thousands of years later, Hindus still paint a bindi on their foreheads for spiritual, cultural, and aesthetic reasons. It’s applied mid point just above the eyebrows where the ajna chakra, or third eye, is located. This chakra is associated with concealed wisdom. The Buddha is often depicted with the index finger and thumb of one hand in the form of a circle. This too symbolizes the void. Given the commercial and cultural exchange between the Indian sub continent and the Arab gulf, the term sunya was eventually transliterated into Arabic as sifra, or cipher.

In the twelfth century C.E, an Italian mathematician nicknamed Fibonacci wrote the Liber Abaci, or The Book of Calculation. In it he introduces the Hindu-Arabic numeral system to the West for the first time. Of course, the cipher for nothingness was included. Being fluently multilingual, Fibonacci transliterated sifra into the similar sounding Latinate term, zefiro. This term, which had wide currency in the Greco-Roman world, was used to signify the West Wind.

In ancient times, Zephyrus, was believed to be god of the West Wind. Interestingly, many cultures associate this cardinal direction, where the sun sets, with death, imagination, metamorphosis, and rebirth. The ancients also believed that Zephyrus and Iris, the rainbow goddess, had two children, Eros, god of love and Porthos, god of longing. Of the four cardinal winds, the zefiro was considered the gentlest. Associated with spring, it was also called the fructifying wind. Over time, zefiro became zero. However, it also continued in modern usage as zephyr, which still means gentle wind. Fibonacci’s transliteration was based on similarity of Arabic and Latin vocalizations. While the two terms sound the same, their meanings are different. This unintended semantic link merits further consideration. Is there perhaps a subliminal relation between zefiro as wind and zefiro as nothing?

The original concept of zero has been depicted in other ways as well. For example, in ancient Vedic belief, Hiranyagarbha is the golden egg of the universe.The Ouroboros biting it's own tale is another striking example. This also recalls Einstein’s famous comment that imagination encircles the world.

2007-04-29T18:05:00.001-04:00

One Picture 1000 Words

The saying that one picture is worth a thousand words is wrongly attributed to Confucius. It was actually coined by an early American advertising manager, Fred R. Barnard. He wrote it as copy for an ad that appeared in Printers' Ink in 1927. The ad, in turn, promoted the sale of yet other ad space on the sides of city streetcars. His pitch was that an ad with a large picture on the side of a fast moving streetcar would be quickly and easily ‘read’ by pedestrians.

The saying fast gained wide currency. This isn’t surprising. It succinctly expresses what people already intuitively understood. Given its resonance and given the advent of mass communications advertising, it was bound to spread. That Barnard unethically called it a Chinese proverb is an even more revealing insight about the power of images and the social imagination. Clearly he wanted to give the saying a patina of legitimacy by associating it with an ancient culture. It almost immediately became ascribed to Confucius.

This too isn’t surprising. Confucius had been known in the West since the 1600s, thanks to Jesuit missionaries. Later, leading philosophers such as Voltaire embraced Confucian ideas such as atheistic philosophy and political morality and ethics. By the early 20th century, Confucius was well ensconced in the popular Western mind as a symbol of wisdom. Paradoxically, Bernard’s false attribution registered authentic precisely because one could easily imagine Confucius saying it. It isn’t just that the Chinese alphabet is composed of ideograms, or word pictures, thus giving the attribution extra credibility. It’s rather because Barnard’s saying actually embodies timeless wisdom. He simply brought this to light in ‘modern’ times.

2007-04-28T09:53:00.001-04:00

A New Earth

The European Organisation  for Astronomical Research in the Southern Hemisphere reports that: “Astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like planet outside our Solar System to date...and capable of having liquid water...it orbits a red dwarf... [There’s] also strong evidence for the presence of a third planet”

The implications are immense. As Xavier Delfosse, one of astronomers, states: “On the treasure map of the universe, one would be tempted to mark this planet with an X”. What a profound insight wrapped in such apt whimsy. This reminds me somehow of that beautiful hadith; I was a hidden treasure longing to be known.

Over fifty years ago, Henri Corbin suggested "that the most astounding information of modern science regarding the physical universe remains inferior to [the Imagination].” Yet, some of Lene Hau’s fellow scientists discouraged her from trying her ultimately successful experiments desribed in the previous post, saying they couldn’t be done. Imagination liberates vision, and gives hope a map to steer by.

2007-04-24T08:55:00.001-04:00

Transmuting Light Into Matter

"Lene Hau has already shaken scientists' beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can't be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic…. Now Mallinckrodt Professor of Physics and of Applied Physics, Hau has done it again. She and her team made a light pulse disappear from one cold cloud then retrieved it from another cloud nearby. In the process, light was converted into matter then back into light. For the first time in history, this gives science a way to control light with matter and vice versa… It's a thing that most scientists never thought was possible. Some colleagues had asked Hau, "Why try that experiment? It can't be done।"

2007-04-22T16:45:00.004-04:00

Pixelation

There’s a wonderful scene in Frank Capra’s 1936 film - Mr. Deeds Goes To Town - in which the hero is characterized as being pixilated. Longfellow Deeds is on trial to prove his sanity because he wants to give away his large fortune to the needy. The big-city legal team representing Deed’s rich, greedy relations have called two elderly sisters from his small town as witnesses. It’s they who call him pixilated. By this they meant Deeds typically behaved in a whimsical way and often seemed intoxicated.

This term was used throughout rural America in the nineteenth century. It likely stems from the Celtic pixy. A pixy is defined as a supernatural being with magical powers; a fairy, an elf. Many of the early American colonists came from the Celtic regions of Great Britain -Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, and Wales. In these regions, it was believed from ancient times that someone who encountered pixies would become disoriented, bewildered, and often lost to this world. It was also believed that a pixie-path linked the two overlapping worlds. The person who has stepped over the boundary between 'them' and 'us' is in both places at the same time. Many…have experienced a dislocation in time: a short while…may be months or even years in human time.

This pervasive mythos reflects a deep but inchoate societal understanding of the power of imagination to mediate reality. Longfellow Deeds appeared pixilated because his orientation was different than the norm. He has seen farther and deeper into the nature of life and cannot help but be affected. His story is that of all the light bearers, from Plato’s Cave onwards. And he too pays a price. In many societies, for example, the blacksmith is someone who must live apart because of their particular skill. That is, mysteriously forging hard raw iron into implements of great utility and beauty using fire, force, and art. Often, for these same reasons, the blacksmith was also seen as a wizard and healer.

The concept of pixie dust is a delightfully apt metaphor for this transmutation of imagination into manifestation. I haven’t yet located a good historic source for when this concept first appears. It is popularly defined on Wikipedia as the trail of sparkling material that often follows mythical creatures such as pixies and fairies in general when they are visually represented. Sometimes, this trail is interpreted as being a tangible substance, often imbued with magic powers. The most notable example of this is in the 1953 Disney version of Peter Pan, where pixie dust allows one to fly if one is thinking happy thoughts, specifically the song "You can fly".

You can fly! You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!
Soon you'll zoom all around the room 
All it takes is faith and trust
But the thing that's a positive must
Is a little bit of pixie dust 
The dust is a positive must
You can fly! You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!

You can fly! You can fly! You can fly! You can fly!
When there's a smile in your heart 
There's no better time to start
It's a very simple plan 
You can do what the birdies can

At least it's worth a try

You can fly! You can fly!  You can fly! You can fly!
Music: Sammy Fain  & Lyrics: Sammy Cahn

Positive Imagination

Longfellow Deeds may well have been led down the pixie path. But society is enriched by his wise enchantment. This idea of positively imagining our worlds and our selves anew is at the heart of such tales as The Ugly Duckling, Pygmalion, and A Christmas Carol. Frank Capra directed yet another classic film in this vein called It’s A Wonderful Life. In this 1946 story, the hero - George Bailey- faces ruin at every turn no matter how great his efforts or good his intentions. He’s on the verge of jumping off a bridge when he hears someone below drowning in the dark night and calling for help. Instinctively, because of innate decency, he dives into the water to save the individual. This turns out to be an angel-in-training named Clarence. He too is striving to earn his wings, also without success. In fact, he’s been told that George represents his last chance to turn things around for both of them, hence the ruse. Clarence then helps stretch George’s imagination beyond belief. As he says to our hapless hero: You've been given a great gift, George: A chance to see what the world would be like without you.. After several more trials, George returns to the world a changed man. And Clarence, who symbolizes his higher angelic self, is transfigured.

Trans-Pixelation
There are two distinct pixelations currently used in the English language. And while they share the same spelling and pronunciation, their meanings and origins are decidedly different. The first term, described above, represents the illogical, irrational, and magical world of imagination. The other is used in contemporary digital imaging, where there are no true curves. This becomes immediately apparent to the naked eye when a digital image is magnified. Instead of the seamless smooth sweep of an arc, one sees a series of stair like gradations. This is referred to as pixelation. It’s been suggested that this graphic design problem will be solved when the square is finally circled.

We seem to intuitively grasp that the power of positive imagination is a nexus between what is and might be. Yet this awareness largely remains inchoate and implicit. We reveal it to ourselves indirectly and beguilingly through our stories, myths, legends, and worldviews. Interestingly, pixie dust, an imaginary concept, is now being consciously used as a reference point within science and technology. For example, Don Brownlee, principal investigator for the Stardust initiative, and his colleagues are studying the organic molecular composition of Wild Comet २. Their findings are challenging fundamental notions about the origins of life. Brownlee states that if all takes pixie dust to get life going and it has all these magical organics, it could be very significant. A lot of this stuff got flung all around the early solar system। [The photo above is of the coma of dust and gas around Comet Wild २ and the one below is a representation of smart dust.]

This semantic confluence of the worlds of imagination and reality seems to be gathering speed and power. For example, in 2001 IBM introduced a hard disk technology using a layer of a precious metal called ruthenium, three atoms thick. Engineers also whimsically called this pixie dust because of its seemingly magical qualities. There’s yet another technological equivalent of pixie dust. Smart dust is composed of hundreds of individual mechanical motes, the size of a grain of sand. Each mote has sensors, computational capacity, wireless connectivity, and a power source. Smart dust clouds will be used to access information that otherwise might be dangerous or difficult to obtain such as tracking enemy movements in war or monitoring a buildings heating and lighting conditions.

2007-04-15T12:00:00.004-04:00

Light & Imagination

There’s a wonderful and growing literature on the relation between imagination and light. This goes back to antiquity and encompasses the work of such luminaries as Suhrawardi, Corbin, and Cooperrider. I believe imagination, like sunlight, is instantly and easily accessible, ubiquitous, inexhaustible, and endlessly transformative.

Einstein said imagination is more important than knowledge. Curiously, the word ‘imagination’ is still rarely found in public discourse and policy. Consider, for example, the Partnership for the 21st Century, a consortium of American business, education, and policy makers. In its landmark report, Learning for the 21st Century, the word knowledge is mentioned 47 times, imagination not once. In fairness to the Partnership, this is a widespread social phenomenon. Googling ‘knowledge’ generates 1,720,000,000 links; ‘imagination’ generates only १३८,०००,००० or ०८% in comparison.

Children enter school just brimming with imagination. They’re masters of make believe and visualization, honed through years of preschool play.However, given schooling’s focus on tests and scores, imagination doesn’t figure much in formal curricula. Most students therefore leave school with a greatly diminished capacity. The community and workforce are poorer for it too given just how crucial imagination is to knowledge creation and innovation.

There are deep historic and cultural reasons why this particular faculty has been so devalued. It has defied precise definition, despite some of the greatest minds, precisely because of its

inherent irrationality. However, imagination is being enfranchised anew in the global knowledge economy. Consider, for example, the recent observation by Thomas Friedman, NY Times editorialist and author of the World Is Flat - "If whatever can be done will be done...the biggest competition is between you and your imagination". General Electric's corporate tag line is "imagination at work' and one oft its website states" "The human imagination is one of our most valuable resources".