Antonym Brainz Edition
You only use 10% of your brain, the rest is for adz...
Dear Reader
We skipped a week again, but are back with another edition of Antonym. Thank you, thank you, thank you for feedback, likes and shares that fire just enough dopamine for my brain to want to do this every week. It knows getting thoughts out in a newsletter is a good thing for it to do, but then it also knows that running makes it feel great and work better, but somehow it finds ways to avoid that too.
Let’s get into things…
Curiosity
What makes you feel curious? A question, a glimpse of something that you don’t know but want to…
Trick question. Your brain makes you feel curious.
You have little choice in the matter, in the same way you don’t have a choice about seeing a word when some shapes of letters arranged in just such a fashion are held up in your field of vision.
See?
You don’t – and can’t – think, I shall interpret those letters – you just see the word. When you learned to read, you painstakingly sat there for hours with your flashcards and books and made neural pathways that recognised words, then you reinforced them again and again until reading is basically a reflex.
With being interested in something, Dr. Chantel Prat, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, said on The Next Big Idea podcast:
When you feel [curiosity]... your brain has already decided there is knowledge to be gained.
And one thing we should be very curious about is how and why our individual brains are so different, she says.
Listen to the podcast, read her book, check out her website — this is amazing stuff. We’re born with different brains, and then we develop different brains and they keep changing through our lives. I could write about this all day, but here are a couple of things that stuck with me:
Babies are born with the ability to hear all of the subtle sounds of different languages. By six months they have started ignoring sounds that aren’t part of the languages being spoken around them. Which is why it is so hard to learn another language well enough to sound like someone who has it as their first language.
That amazing fact that London taxi drivers enlarge the part of their brain that deals with spatial memory when they do “the knowledge” has a big caveat: another part of their brain shrinks slightly.
The neurodiversity movement is helping us appreciate the strengths of non-typical minds, but is only a start. What I am more curious about is the idea that there is no such thing as a normal brain.
[…] if you take a room full of people and calculate the average height, that number might not actually describe any person in the room. That’s similar to where neuroscience has gone. Some of my own research has shown that what we thought was true of how brains work was actually what you get when you mush together two really different ways of behaving and that no individual in the group actually looked like the group average. The mean might not describe any person.
Ouch! My brain…
In related content, I made the mistake of trying to read the article that led me to that podcast without ad-blockers in normal browser. I was immediately assaulted by 101 ads, pop-ups and alternate content playing as a video. If you don’t see what the problem is, then congratulations on having a brain that is sufficiently different from mine to be able to tolerate it.
Also I added a soundtrack to help understand what it feels like for my brain when it tries to make sense of it. Sorry.
The irony of having to battle algorithmic attention assaults to get to knowledge about brain health and focus is bathetic and typical.
Bare camembert
This week's addition to the list of hobbies I will take up if death is conquered and I have infinite time to pursue them is one I found on the wonderful Atlas Obscura blog:
Tyrosemiophilia is a mouthful to pronounce. Breaking it down, the meaning is still murky: in ancient Greek, tyro means cheese, semio is sign or label, and philos is love. The term does not refer to savoring rich, creamy cheese. Rather, it defines a surprisingly popular hobby: collecting the cheese labels that have been affixed to French Camembert’s round wooden boxes for over 100 years.
Something to look for the next time I’m in France pottering round a vide-grenier (French for car-boot sale).
Let's fight global warming with massive pollution!
From The New Yorker:
The idea behind solar geoengineering is essentially to mimic what happens when volcanoes push particles into the atmosphere; a large eruption, such as that of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, in 1992, can measurably cool the world for a year or two.
What could possibly go wrong?
Five million words
A rare edition of the collected works of Winston Churchill was on sale at a rare book dealer (apparently now sold). The historian, painter and sometime Prime Minister’s literary output was impressive:
“[…] five million words in 19,000 pages, weighing 19 lbs, taking up 4.5 ft of shelf space. To achieve publication, 11 publishing houses in Great Britain, the United States and Canada released their individual copyrights in exchange for the promise that no other complete edition of Churchill works would be published until the expiration of international copyright in 2019" (Richard M. Langworth)
New Occulus Pro is a pain in the everything
FacebookMeta has a new virtual reality headset on the market in time for Christmas. I literally burst out laughing and swore when I clicked through an ad for the FacebookMeta Quest Pro and saw the price: one–and–a–half–thousand quid! Are you having a giraffe?, as the cockernees say.
An in-depth review of the “Pro” on tech website The Verge was not promising. The reviewer, Adi Robertson was a fan of previous devices of the company but was unimpressed. A couple of things she said: “
“The battery doesn’t last as long as the Quest 2, but I had trouble using the Quest Pro long enough to wear it out[….]
”The headset in its default state made me consistently nauseated, likely thanks to the constant visual clash of real and virtual worlds.
Ads for FacebookMeta’s virtual reality products show people conjuring multiple virtual displays on their desks or mixing desks while playing with a live band, but none of these “pro” use cases sound like much fun with the current technology.
No wonder the “dogfooding” numbers we talked about in the last Antonym were so bad. It’s literally too painful for developers to replace Zoom with VR headsets.
All the things…
Writing and talking
A video of the Test–Learn–Lead™ webinar trailed in the last Antonym is up – me talking about why experiments can accelerate marketing, if that’s your thing.
Grand Plans vs. Expeditions: I wrote a perspective on why large change projects fail, which I enjoyed and brought out a number of themes. It was for a Brilliant Noise client, and specific to their challenges, but it’s inspired me to write bit more on this and expand some of the themes. The analogy that emerged was why grand plans fail while expeditions – prepared, rigorous, but exploratory by nature – are more useful in contexts that are extremely uncertain. Which is what led me to the Scott vs Amundsen book below…
Reading
Scott and Amundsen: The Last Place On Earth by Roland Huntford was first published in 1979, and is a stone cold classic [pun slipped out - sorry]. I came across by way of a more recent business classic, Great By Choice, by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen.
Love, love, love the FT Books of the Year list. There’s always some surprises. It’s like intellectual window shopping for the most part, as I couldn’t possibly read everything.
Our Missing Hearts by Celeste Ng was on my mind after listening to the interview with her on Adam Grant’s Work Life podcast. It’s a near-future dystopia about an America that has gone down a dark path. I’d not read her work before, but have been immediately gripped by the prose. Wonderful.
Watching
The first season of The Peripheral (Prime Video) concluded this week. I hope it’s the first and not the only – though it is satisfying as just these right episodes – as it is the most enjoyable sci-fi I’ve seen on TV for a long time. The writing team created HBO’s Westworld, and seem to have learned from the mistakes of over-complicated plots and shallow characters. If you haven’t watched it I’ve had resounding feedback from several Antonym readers that they loved it too. The production values are absolutely tip-top, and you could justify the watching of it for the costume design for the villains and players of far-future London alone. (Costume design was the work of Michele Clapton and her team.)
The Wonder (Netflix) is a Florence Pugh tour de force set in post-famine Ireland. Pugh plays a nurse sent to validate a supposed miracle. It’s a film about stories – it tells you this right up front with a fourth-wall breaking device that is clever but earned. Absolutely loved it.
The Menu (in cinemas) was the most fun I’d had at the cinema for a long time. Ralph Fiennes is a chef so famous he has a 12 seat restaurant on a private island. His guests oay $1500 a seat for the privilege and are as awful as you’d expect. So awful that Chef has plans to kill them all. Hilarity ensues…
C’est tout for this week, mes braves — thank you for reading…
Yours,
Antoine
Thanks for the Peripheral recommendation - we have loved it too.
Interested in your natural curiosity bit - I believe that feeds our desire to be creative, to solve problems and innovate.
Melanie Challenger (How to be Animal) answered my question to her thus;
What is our creative instinct?
It is the recognition that we need innovation to survive - that patterns and thoughts need to be disrupted.
This manifests in a drive for meaning and purpose, which mingles with aesthetics as well, to create the idea of beauty and achievement that push creativity forward & further ahead