Mindframe

“A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.” So said Mark Twain, printer, steamboat pilot, journalist, failed miner, entrepreneur, abolitionist, lecturer and supreme humorist. Twain is perhaps the greatest American storyteller and writer ever produced by the fifty states. Whether attacking kings, hypocrites, or the literary offenses of Fenimore Cooper , Twain was famous for his razor-sharp wit and his allergy to BS. Yet that same man drove himself into bankruptcy, ignoring the council of his most trusted pals in favor of pouring his fortune into a series of disastrous inventions. He once invested the equivalent of 8 million dollars in the Paige typesetting machine, a marvel of engineering that dazzled crowds but also constantly broke and was obsolete by about 1884. So why did a man renowned for not suffering fools pour his fortune into one fool’s errand after another? Could it be that Twain, like the rest of us, was seduced by a “magic bul...

By the time our ancestors were roaming the great savannas, alternating between chasing prey and being prey, their systems had already adapted to face the harsh environment, according to Rick Hanson PhD, author of Buddha's Brain: The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom . Today, those ancient adaptations show up in the most peculiar ways as we constantly hijack a system built for times long ago. Getting cut off on the highway might not seem an awful lot like being chased by a lion, but to the brain’s subcortical structures, it’s pretty much the same deal. Hanson explains how it all works. As you feel yourself careening across a lane of traffic, your brain sounds the ancient ‘lion alarm,’ and begins to prepare for battle. First, stress hormones like Epinephrine kick your heart rate up and Norepinephrine increases blood flow to bring your largest muscles online faster.  Your pupils dilate to take in more light for enhanced visibility, and your bronchioles exp...

Last week’s blog dealt with the inherent threat in complex systems, specifically your Grandmother, (or really, anybody’s Grandma) and corporations in general. This week, we’ll take a look at how not to get caught up on the sticky side of complex systems. A quick review: we’re using the word “complex” to describe systems where the relationships between parts are so multidimensional and tangled that you can’t use reductionist thinking to understand them. The reason for this is two-fold. First, in complex systems, cause and effect loops are tough to recognize because they can happen very slowly. Normally, we can observe the results of a given action in real time. In a complex system, the change can take hours, days, weeks or even months to register. When your grandma ingests multiple medications, the chemicals may need a while to build up in her system before anyone can detect a serious problem. The second problem? A complex system has so many connections that you can’t always ...

Imagine your grandma just celebrated her 85th birthday. She's beginning to forget things, but her doctor has reassured you that since, if given enough time, she can eventually pull the information through, it's probably not Alzheimer's. You take some comfort in a recent study that suggests memory retrieval problems might not necessarily be the deterioration of synaptic connections, but more of a space issue. Think of Grandma's hippocampus like a library that, over time, has run out of shelving for the books. As they begin to pile up on the floor, the librarian can still find that edition of Twain's Huckleberry Finn you're after, but it takes a a little more time to scour all the nooks and crannies of the library to locate it. The same might be true for the hippocampus, the memory library. In any event, modern medicine has been good to Grandma. The old family general practitioner has been replaced by a whole bevy of doctors who specialize in any number ...