Cultural Intelligence – Page 783 – Public Intelligence Blog

How Not to Kill Creativity – Jonah Lehrer LIVE on Big Think

Jonathan Fowler and Elizabeth Rodd on April 17, 2012

Jonah Lehrer has been described as a kind of “one man third culture” – after training in Neuroscience at Columbia with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel, he studied literature and philosophy on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Since then, he has written three books that examine and blur the boundaries between science and art, reason and imagination. His latest: IMAGINE: How Creativity Works, looks at the neuroscience and the real-world phenomenon of creativity in case studies ranging from the emotional and spiritual burnout that led to Bob Dylan's brilliant album Highway 61 Revisited to the invention of the Swiffer.

Here, Lehrer talks with Big Think's Jason Gots about failure as an integral, essential part of the creative process, and why American schools are so good at killing creativity.

VIDEO (16: 29)

Phi Beta Iota: Tip of the Hat to Berto Jongman for this find. Lehrer is an M4IS2 master — “the brain is a category buster.” Honorably priced to begin with, Amazon has taken another $10 off, this book is a major bargain in hardcover at $15.00.

Review: A First-Rate Madness – Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness

Review: Redesigning Society

Sean Eaton: Reflections on Education

Search: global brain human brain + RECAP

What Presidents Don’t Know About Education Plus RECAP of 6 Star Plus Books Relevant to Creating a Smart Nation with a Strategic Narrative that WORKS

2012/04/182012/04/18

Marcus Aurelius: Leon Panetta Prances Around the Truth–Congress Goes Along with Blatant Misrepresentations

Commerce, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

Marcus-Aurelius-150x150 — Marcus Aurelius

I urge that you reject SECDEF's assertions; also urge that you contact your Congressional delegations and ask them to also reject what SECDEF is saying.

Panetta ties TRICARE fee increases to maintaining key programs, personnel

By Bob Brewin 04/16/2012

At a Pentagon press briefing on Monday, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said congressional tinkering with the $613 billion 2013 Defense Department budget could have unintended consequences and result in a hollow force. Flanked by Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Panetta also defended the long-term Defense strategy unveiled in January, saying it will help the Pentagon to slash its budget by $487 billion over the next 10 years.

In March, Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., chairman of the House Budget Committee, told a National Journal forum that senior military commanders were dishonest in presenting Congress with a budget request he doesn't believe they fully support. After Dempsey charged Ryan with calling senior military leaders liars, Ryan backed off and said, “I really misspoke.”

Continue reading “Marcus Aurelius: Leon Panetta Prances Around the Truth–Congress Goes Along with Blatant Misrepresentations”

2012/04/182012/04/18

NIGHTWATCH: Afghanistan Lost, Syria Holding

Cultural Intelligence, Government, Military

Afghanistan: Comment: On the 16th, US and NATO officials praised the Afghan commandos for leading the counterattack against the small group of anti-government fighters who assaulted Kabul on Sunday. However, some seemed to undermine the significance of the Afghan achievement by minimizing the significance of the assault itself, calling it the last gasp of the anti-government forces. Evidently, the Afghans fought well against a weak force and the sensational set of attacks actually signifies an improving security situation. Hmmm.

Thus, Readers might be confused on the 17th by multiple press services reports that the NATO command plans a large offensive to improve security in Kabul in May.

NightWatch has written that violent instability is centripetal. It moves from the border marches and other peripheries to the center of power, the capital. Victory for the anti-government forces means seizing and holding the capital. Victory for the government forces means holding a secure center and expanding a secure perimeter outward to the national borders.

A government that cannot maintain a secure center of power, the capital, cannot survive. It does not matter whether it falls to the Taliban or the Haqqanis. It will fall. Thus, attacks in the capital are always signs of weakness at the center. The only question is how weak.

For example, the Syrian government understands this phenomenology, which is why there have been less than a handful of attacks in Damascus during a year of violent instability. Damascus has experienced no 18-hour battles. The occasional attacks do not signify significant weakness. The Syrian center is holding.

Syria is not Afghanistan and the two fights are quite different, but the importance of security at the center is the same. This week's outbreak of fighting in Kabul means one thing: Kabul is not secure even with NATO forces. If the center is not secure, nowhere else matters.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

2012/04/15

DefDog: Nurturing Innovation in Spite of Really Rotten Rote Education + RECAP

04 Education, Cultural Intelligence

For years I have done similar approaches when teaching….and have been told to stop because “it is not the way it is done!” My classes were consistently better equipped to deal with the problems they faced as intelligence officers than the school house folks……they weren't afraid of an intelligence failure of the information kind, only the grey matter kind…..

Educating the Next Steve Jobs

How can schools teach students to be more innovative? Offer hands-on classes and don't penalize failure

By TONY WAGNER

Wall Street Journal, 13 April 2012

Most of our high schools and colleges are not preparing students to become innovators. To succeed in the 21st-century economy, students must learn to analyze and solve problems, collaborate, persevere, take calculated risks and learn from failure. To find out how to encourage these skills, I interviewed scores of innovators and their parents, teachers and employers. What I learned is that young Americans learn how to innovate most often despite their schooling—not because of it.

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota: The article restates what has been known for decades. That the WSJ should think this is in any way new is itself a statement on the WSJ state of mindlessness. Schools today — the exceptions aside — are industrial era rote prisons that beat the creativity out of children by the fifth grade. There is a need to learn history and memorize formulas — no question on that point — but learning to learn in the modern era — and learning to program the electronic tools with which we can learn and share and make sense despite the moral and intellectual constipation of Google, Microsoft, and Oracle, to name just three dead-end companies — this matters.

2012/04/15

Jon Lebkowsky: Terrence McKenna (RIP) Reclaim Your Mind Our Culture – Reject Media Iconization

Cultural Intelligence

2012/04/14

Berto Jongman: Deena Metzger– Seeing through Indigenous Eyes, Weaving Community Dreams, Stories and Spirit

Augmented Reality, Civil Society, Collective Intelligence, Cultural Intelligence, Ethics

Indigenous “intelligence” appears to be making a comeback in public consciousness.

Deena Metzger– Seeing through Indigenous Eyes, Weaving Community Dreams, Stories and Spirit

Deena Metzger's Bio

Deena Metzger is a poet, novelist, essayist, storyteller, teacher, healer and medicine woman who has taught and counseled for over forty years, in the process of which she has developed therapies (Healing Stories) which creatively address life threatening diseases, spiritual and emotional crises, as well as community, political and environmental disintegration.

She has spent a lifetime investigating Story as a form of knowing and healing. As a writer, she asks: Who do we have to become to find the forms and sacred language with which to meet these times?

She conducts training groups on the spiritual, creative, political and ethical aspects of healing and peacemaking, individual, community and global, drawing deeply on alliance with spirit, indigenous teachings and the many wisdom traditions. One focus is on uniting Western medical ways with indigenous medicine traditions.

With her husband, writer/healer Michael Ortiz Hill, she has introduced the concept of Daré, meaning Council, to North America. The Topanga Daré relies on Council, alliance with Spirit and the natural world, ancestor work, indigenous and wisdom traditions and teachings, music healing, dream telling, divination, kinship, and story telling to achieve personal transformation, community healing and social change.

She is the author of many books, including most recently, the novels La Negra y Blanca and Feral; Ruin and Beauty: New and Selected Poems; From Grief Into Vision: A Council; Doors: A fiction for Jazz Horn; Entering the Ghost River: Meditations on the Theory and Practice of Healing; The Other Hand; Tree: Essays and Pieces, A Sabbath Among the Ruins, Looking for the Faces of God andWriting For Your Life.

Very VERY rough interview notes

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Deena Metzger– Seeing through Indigenous Eyes, Weaving Community Dreams, Stories and Spirit”

2012/04/14

Theophillis Goodyear: Reflections on Anarchy versus Open Source

Blog Wisdom, Cultural Intelligence

The term anarchy is antithetical to Open Source, because anarchy, by strict definition at least, sees all forms of state organization as structures that need to be eliminated. Open Source, on the other hand, is about spreading control of these systems of organization to the general population, rather than leaving them concentrated in the hands of the few at the top. It's not about eliminating systems of organization. That can have disastrous and unforeseeable social consequences.

And although many anarchists may agree with this basic component of Open Source systems, the term anarchy is a relic that needs to be discarded. It can only confuse things and hold back the Open Source movement from reaching it's ultimate potential. People have been talking about the information age for decades. But the true information age hasn't even arrived yet. It will arrive when it has become commonplace for humans to link their brains through computer systems and thereby increase human intelligence exponentially. The true age of information means intelligence squared.

Prematurely killing “the state” could kill the very systems of organization required to make Open Source a reality. And once open source becomes a reality, what anarchists currently call “the state,” as we know it, will no longer exist anyway. Anarchists need to catch up with the times and stop getting so hung up on worn out terminologies and ideologies. Often the greatest obstacles to human progress are our antiquated intellectual models and habitual mindsets. Just as the founding fathers of America could never have envisioned the complexities and potentials of contemporary society, neither could the original anarchists. Strict constitutionalists often use the ideas of the founding fathers to block reasonable progress. At times it looks to like anarchists are doing the same thing. They need to let go of the past and start looking toward the future.

Category: Cultural Intelligence

Jonah Lehrer: How NOT to Kill Creativity