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"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric."
British philosopher, mathematician, historian, and social critic Bertrand Russell endures as one of the most intellectually diverse and influential thinkers in modern history, his philosophy of religion in particular having shaped the work of such modern atheism champions as Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett, and Richard Dawkins. From the third volume of The Autobiography of Bertrand Russell: 1944-1969 comes this remarkable micro-manifesto, entitled A Liberal Decalogue – a vision for responsibilities of a teacher, in which Russell touches on a number of recurring themes from pickings past – the purpose of education, the value of uncertainty, the importance of critical thinking, the gift of intelligent criticism, and more.
It originally appeared in the December 16, 1951, issue of The New York Times Magazine, at the end of the article "The best answer to fanaticism: Liberalism."
Perhaps the essence of the Liberal outlook could be summed up in a new decalogue, not intended to replace the old one but only to supplement it. The Ten Commandments that, as a teacher, I should wish to promulgate, might be set forth as follows:
1. Do not feel absolutely certain of anything.
2. Do not think it worth while to proceed by concealing evidence, for the evidence is sure to come to light.
3. Never try to discourage thinking for you are sure to succeed.
4. When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory.
5. Have no respect for the authority of others, for there are always contrary authorities to be found.
6. Do not use power to suppress opinions you think pernicious, for if you do the opinions will suppress you.
7. Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.
8. Find more pleasure in intelligent dissent than in passive agreement, for, if you value intelligence as you should, the former implies a deeper agreement than the latter.
9. Be scrupulously truthful, even if the truth is inconvenient, for it is more inconvenient when you try to conceal it.
10. Do not feel envious of the happiness of those who live in a fool's paradise, for only a fool will think that it is happiness.
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What Frank Zappa's life has to do with e-waste, whale songs, and the black market for body parts.
Much has been said about visual storytelling andhow to tell stories of data in the information age, and there is no shortage of great books on data visualization. But count on Taschen to tackle a big conceptual challenge with a big, beautifully designed book: Information Graphics by art historian Sandra Rendgen explores the four key aspects of visualizing data – Location, Time, Category, and Hierarchy – through exemplary work from more than 200 projects, alongside essays by information architect and TED founder Richard Saul Wurman, Guardian Datablog editor Simon Rogers, Density Design's Paolo Ciuccarelli, and Rendgen herself.
'Geek Love,' The New York Times, newspaper article, 2008
Exposed to Dungeons & Dragons Early in Life. Design: Sam Potts. Art Direction: Brian Rea
'Medallandssandur,' a blend of the sound specters form sonar and whale song. From a series of drawings, 2010
Design: Torgeir Husevaag. Article: Adam Rogers
'The Very Many Varieties of Beer,' poster, 2010
Design: Ben Gibson, Patrick Mulligan (Pop Chart Lab)
'Two Mindsets,' Stanford, magazine article, 2007
Data Source: Carol Dweck: 'Mindset: The New Psychology of Success', 2006. Design: Nigel Holmes
'Mission(s) to Mars,' IEEE Spectrum, magazine article, 2009
Data Source: Cornell University; European Space Agency; NASA; RussianSpaceWeb.com. Design: Bryan Christie, Joe Lertola. Art Direction: Mark Montgomery, Michael Solita
Information Graphics features work by a number of Brain Pickings favorites, including Stefanie Posavec, Nicholas Felton, Ward Shelley, Hans Rosling,Nathalie Miebach, David McCandless, Toby Ng, Michael Paukner, Christoph Niemann, Sam Potts, and Jonathan Harris. The cover image is, of course, the unmistakable Web Trend Map by Information Architects.
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Where a third of our entire life goes, or what professional wrestling has to do with War and Peace.
"The universe is made of stories, not atoms," poet Muriel Rukeyser memorably asserted, and Harvard sociobiologist E. O. Wilson recently pointed to the similarity between innovators in art and science, both of whom he called "dreamers and storytellers."Stories aren't merely essential to how we understand the world – they are how we understand the world. We weave and seek stories everywhere, from data visualization tochildren's illustration to cultural hegemony. InThe Storytelling Animal, educator and science writer Jonathan Gottschall traces the roots, both evolutionary and sociocultural, of the transfixing grip storytelling has on our hearts and minds, individually and collectively. What emerges is a kind of "unified theory of storytelling," revealing not only our gift for manufacturing truthiness in the narratives we tell ourselves and others, but also the remarkable capacity of stories – the right kinds of them – to change our shared experience for the better.
Gottschall articulates a familiar mesmerism:
Human minds yield helplessly to the suction of story. No matter how hard we concentrate, no matter how deep we dig in our heels, we just can't resist the gravity of alternate worlds.
Joining these favorite book trailers is a wonderful short black-and-white teaser animation:
One particularly important aspect of storytelling Gottschall touches on is the osmotic balance between the writer's intention and the reader's interpretation, something Mortimer Adler argued for decades ago in his eloquent case for marginalia. Gottschall writes:
The writer is not…an all-powerful architect of our reading experience. The writer guides the way we imagine but does not determine it. A film begins with a writer producing a screenplay. But it is the director who brings the screenplay to life, filling in most of the details. So it is with any story. A writer lays down words, but they are inert. They need a catalyst to come to life. The catalyst is the reader's imagination.
In discussing the extent to which we live in stories, Gottschall puts in concrete terms something most of us suspect – fear, perhaps – on an abstract, intuitive level: the astounding amount of time we spend daydreaming.
Clever scientific studies involving beepers and diaries suggest that an average daydream is about fourteen seconds long and that we have about two thousand of them per day. In other words, we spend about half of our waking hours – one-third of our lives on earth – spinning fantasies. We daydream about the past: things we should have said or done, working through our victories and failures. We daydream about mundane stuff such as imagining different ways of handling conflict at work. But we also daydream in a much more intense, storylike way. We screen films with happy endings in our minds, where all our wishes – vain, aggressive, dirty – come true. And we screen little horror films, too, in which our worst fears are realized.
From War and Peace to pro wrestling, from REM sleep to the "fictional screen media" of commercials, from our small serialized personal stories on Facebook and Twitter to the large cultural stories of religious traditions, The Storytelling Animal dives into what science knows – and what it's still trying to find out – about our propensity for storytelling to reveal not only the science of story but also its seemingly mystical yet palpably present power.
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"…the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas."
Literature is the original "inter-net," woven of a web of allusions, references, and citations that link different works together into an endless rabbit hole of discovery. Case in point: Last week's wonderful field guide to creativity, Dancing About Architecture, mentioned in passing an intriguing old book originally published by James Webb Young in 1939 – A Technique for Producing Ideas (public library), which I promptly hunted down and which will be the best $5 you spend this year, or the most justified trip to your public library.
Young – an ad man by trade but, as we'll see, a voraciously curious and cross-disciplinary thinker at heart – lays out with striking lucidity and clarity the five essential steps for a productive creative process, touching on a number of elements corroborated by modern science and thinking on creativity: its reliance on process over mystical talent, its combinatorial nature, its demand for a pondering period, its dependence on the brain's unconscious processes, and more.
Right from the introduction, original Mad Man and DDB founder Bill Bernbach captures the essence of Young's ideas, with which Steve Jobs would have no doubt agreed when he proclaimed that "creativity is just connecting things":
Mr. Young is in the tradition of some of our greatest thinkers when he describes the workings of the creative process. It is a tribute to him that such scientific giants as Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein have written similarly on this subject. They agree that knowledge is basic to good creative thinking but that it is not enough, that this knowledge must be digested and eventually emerge in the form of fresh, new combinations and relationships. Einsteinrefers to this as intuition, which he considers the only path to new insights.
To be sure, however, Young marries the intuitive with the practical in his formulation:
[T]he production of ideas is just as definite a process as the production of Fords; that the production of ideas, too, runs on an assembly line; that in this production the mind follows an operative technique which can be learned and controlled; and that its effective use is just as much a matter of practice in the technique as is the effective use of any tool.
In a chapter on training the mind, Young offers:
In learning any art the important things to learn are, first, Principles, and second, Method. This is true of the art of producing ideas.
Particular bits of knowledge are nothing, because they are made up [of] called rapidly aging facts. Principles and method are everything.
[…]
So with the art of producing ideas. What is most valuable to know is not where to look for a particular idea, but how to train the mind in the method by which all ideas are produced and how to grasp the principles which are at the source of all ideas.
But the most compelling part of Young's treatise, in a true embodiment of combinatorial creativity, builds upon the work of legendary Italian sociologist Vilfredo Pareto (of Pareto principle fame) and his The Mind and Society. Young proposes two key principles for creating – that an idea is a new combination and that the ability to generate new combinations depends on the ability to see relationships between different elements.
The first [principle is] that an idea is nothing more nor less than a new combination of old elements.
[…]
The second important principle involved is that the capacity to bring old elements into new combinations depends largely on the ability to see relationships. Here, I suspect, is where minds differ to the greatest degree when it comes to the production of ideas. To some minds each fact is a separate bit of knowledge. To others it is a link in a chain of knowledge. It has relationships and similarities. It is not so much a fact as it is an illustration of a general law applying to a whole series of facts.
[…]
Consequently the habit of mind which leads to a search for relationships between facts becomes of the highest importance in the production of ideas.
STEP 1: GATHERING RAW MATERIAL
Young talks about the importance of building a rich pool of "raw material" – mental resources from which to build new combinations – in a way that resonates deeply with the Brain Pickings founding philosophy, and also articulates the increasing importance of quality information filters in our modern information diet. This notion of gathering raw material is the first step in his outline of the creative process:
Gathering raw material in a real way is not as simple as it sounds. It is such a terrible chore that we are constantly trying to dodge it. The time that ought to be spent in material gathering is spent in wool gathering. Instead of working systematically at the job of gathering raw material we sit around hoping for inspiration to strike us. When we do that we are trying to get the mind to take the fourth step in the idea-producing process while we dodge the preceding steps.
Even seven decades into the past, Young knew that the future belongs to the curious. His insistence on the importance of curiosity would make Richard Feynman nod in agreement:
Every really good creative person…whom I have ever known has always had two noticeable characteristics. First, there was no subject under the sun in which he could not easily get interested-from, say, Egyptian burial customs to modern art. Every facet of life had fascination for him. Second, he was an extensive browser in all sorts of fields of information. For it is with the advertising man as with the cow: no browsing, no milk.
[…]
The process is something like that which takes place in the kaleidoscope. The kaleidoscope, as you know, is an instrument which designers sometimes use in searching for new patterns. It has little pieces of colored glass in it, and when these are viewed through a prism they reveal all sorts of geometrical designs. Every turn of its crank shifts these bits of glass into a new relationship and reveals a new pattern. The mathematical possibilities of such new combinations in the kaleidoscope are enormous, and the greater the number of pieces of glass in it the greater become the possibilities for new and striking combinations.
(I once used a similar analogy with LEGO.)
STEP 2: DIGESTING THE MATERIAL
In his second stage of the creative process, digesting the material, Young affirms Paola Antonelli's brilliant metaphor of the curious octopus:
What you do is to take the different bits of material which you have gathered and feel them all over, as it were, with the tentacles of the mind. You take one fact, turn it this way and that, look at it in different lights, and feel for the meaning of it. You bring two facts together and see how they fit. What you are seeking now is the relationship, a synthesis where everything will come together in a neat combination, like a jig-saw puzzle.
STEP 3: UNCONSCIOUS PROCESSING
In his third stage of the creative process, Young stresses the importance of making absolutely "no effort of a direct nature":
It is important to realize that this is just as definite and just as necessary a stage in the process as the two preceding ones. What you have to do at this time, apparently, is to turn the problem over to your unconscious mind and let it work while you sleep.
[…]
[W]hen you reach this third stage in the production of an idea, drop the problem completely and turn to whatever stimulates your imagination and emotions. Listen to music, go to the theater or movies, read poetry or a detective story.
STEP 4: THE A-HA MOMENT
Then and only then, Young promises, everything will click in the fourth stage of theseemingly serendipitous a-ha! moment:
Out of nowhere the Idea will appear.
It will come to you when you are least expecting it-while shaving, or bathing, or most often when you are half awake in the morning. It may waken you in the middle of the night.
STEP 5: IDEA MEETS REALITY
Young calls the last stage "the cold, gray dawn of the morning after," when your newborn idea has to face reality:
It requires a deal of patient working over to make most ideas fit the exact conditions, or the practical exigencies, under which they must work. And here is where many good ideas are lost. The idea man, like the inventor, is often not patient enough or practical enough to go through with this adapting part of the process. But it has to be done if you are to put ideas to work in a work-a-day world.
Do not make the mistake of holding your idea close to your chest at this stage. Submit it to the criticism of the judicious.
When you do, a surprising thing will happen. You will find that a good idea has, as it were, self-expanding qualities. It stimulates those who see it to add to it. Thus possibilities in it which you have overlooked will come to light.
* * *
Years later, upon reissuing A Technique for Producing Ideas, Young recounted the many letters he had gotten from "poets, painters, engineers, scientists, and even one writer of legal briefs" who had found his technique empowering and helpful. But what's perhaps most interesting is the following note he made to the postscript of a reprint:
From my own further experience in advertising, government, and public affairs I find no essential points which I would modify in the idea-producing process. There is one, however, on which I would put greater emphasis. This is as to the store of general materials in the idea-producer's reservoir.
[…]
I am convinced, however, that you gather this vicarious experience best, not when you are boning up on it for an immediate purpose, but when you are pursuing it as an end in itself.
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