Neoteny and Wisdom

It seems we humans have been evolving quite rapidly over the last 50 years or so. We have been evolving in a way that prefers traits of youthfulness over decrepitude. These traits include big eyes  adaptable thinking, playfulness, and other juvenile features which explains love of anime characters,  pandas, sloths, kittens  and cute overload as well as explaining the longer time span adult children spend at home.

The phenomenon has lead to a study called neoteny which comes from the Greek neo meaning young and a German variant referring to tendency. People are living longer and the dilemma of facing a prolonged old age of senility is being rapidly evolved by middle life extension, before our eyes, as 20 somethings evolve into 30 somethings still involved in what seems to be frivolous play activities. Fur babies have satisfied the reproductive urges for young people as well as those who would have been anticipating grandparent hood. It seems everyone is in a holding phase as they try to work out whether the planet or world finances are going to implode. So it is a case of Keep Calm and Play. It also indicates supreme optimism that there will be enough time, a very typical juvenile trait.

It seems all the old paradigms are shifting including accepting rights of disabled people, rights for all to marry the ones they love, rights of animals not to be farmed for food or to be experimented on in cosmetic factories. So where do we point our collective fingers of disgust? Well if the world is changing to one of youthfulness then the aged and all those who show signs of ageing are going to be the new targets for discrimination.

Education is going to be a very important factor in this new world. At one end there will be fewer children spawned by very old zygotes, being cared for by ??? Hmm... decrepid old people who are even more divorced from modern technology and understanding of the modern world... or reluctant and middle aged parents who are paying IVF debts on top of HECS debts and mortgages in a world of spiralling costs and housing shortages.  Technology which is favoured now will age quickly and the bright young things at their zenith now will be flailing to re educate to keep up with the next bright stars. 

Edward de Bono suggested 30 years ago that a better education system than our current one would be to have it prolonged over a lifetime with breaks for work experience and skill development, returning to higher academic study in the late 20s and deeper intellectual study in mid life. This concept may need reviewing again (even though it was never implemented) as human intellectual capacity keeps growing just like data storage and faster computer speeds.

Being an artist is not just about filling in time and playing. It is about being aware of the changing times and seeing signs where no one else is looking. It is about being visionary and thinking outside the box. It is about self directed learning and enquiry. Art employs the imagination with a licence that no other practice has. It works perfectly with science to give both sides of the coin.   

It is important that no matter what age you are, if you wish to be relevant and share acquired wisdom to cope with an uncertain future, that you maintain connection to both ends of the age spectrum . If you don’t have a personal contact within every decade of the age spectrum, consider that maybe your life is not balanced, just as a diet can be unbalanced without certain nutritional food groups.

It is a delight to find yourself a young tutor no matter what age you are. Children born today are considered to be digital natives, in that the world they are born into is all digital, and they have an innate sense of digital media. But they cannot necessarily synthesise old understandings with new media and so their world is limited and dependant on older tutors who understand the past and the present. Their naivete is also charming and an inspiration for further imagining.

 Finding food, growing things, making things and understanding mechanical devices is further removed from these children than my generation is from the beginning of the industrial age. Show a child a video tape, a cassette tape, a vinyl record and they have no concept of what it is or how it works. Flour is white powder in a bag, but so is plaster, arsenic, and titanium oxide or cocaine and they have no means of understanding its origin or purpose just from observing it. Foundation skills are missing and as we travel into an uncertain future we need to hold hands across the generations and transmit the knowledge that might be necessary.

 Don’t be a Luddite and give up on the digital age because it might be a very long future, from which you are excluded.  There has never been an era of more accessibility in learning with facilities like online tutorials and contributing to these has never been easier either (if you feel you have something to contribute) There are many companies waiting to make a mint out of your helplessness, and reluctance to move with technology, and once you give up one skill  and one right to know, they can move in like fog and separate you from your soul. And it can happen to you  at 20 if you don’t keep tabs on your rights and responsibilities as well.

One of the joys of being a grey haired lady of no definable age is that I have perfected the famous Harry Potter cloak of invisibility. I can lurk and eavesdrop and learn whatever I like and no one suspects. I am closer to both ends of the age spectrum than I will ever be again in my life and have communication skills to interact throughout the full range.

You can share your time equally between being teacher and student. You can also use invisibility to do the unexpected. Just as “Nobody Expects the Spanish Inquisition”, nobody suspects little grey haired ladies to be so full of surprises. Here are the contents of my handbag this week.

Ll

Note 8 Tablet, media stick, wind up LED torch, earphone, iphone, black sharpie and white permanent pencil for graffiti, mechanical pencil, Rock- it mobile amplifier, slingshot, reusable roll up shopping bag, mini microscope,crocheted grass basket project.

Magnets and Thought Attraction

Sometimes I feel feverish and my head explodes with ideas but it can be messy like any explosion. There is no order to the ideas and they rub against each other creating friction and sparks and uncomfortable feelings. I have a wonderful set of magnetic poetry words which I keep on the  metal door of the cupboard in my studio and fiddle about with. 

It’s a fun diversion but is limited because all you have to draw on is the limits of the box of words. There must be a certain algorithm to illustrate the number of combinations that can be made and I am being a bit lame in suggesting I have exhausted the possibilities but that is not the problem. Our brains have an insatiable desire for novelty and I feel I have exhausted the novelty of the toy. The internet can be the same if you use it in the same way each day.

When I used to teach, my favourite resources were dictionaries, phone books, street directories and atlases. Google Earth is exciting and a valuable addition but it doesn’t lend itself to the same type of search. Google maps is limited by your search entry or the size of the page. The hard copy books could create curiosity and word trails. A random opening of a page of each book could lead to a search by chance and a rubbing together of completely unrelated ideas. For this reason I love the craziness of the book of answers. You have to have a question first and randomly open the book to find out if it will come to pass. A bit like the yes no oracle toy that was popular in the 90s.

 I like to start an adventure with chance. I am lucky that I have a head that retains odd ideas for a very long time but it is extremely poor at retaining any number facts. I am happy to be astounded by number facts and I understand them but cannot recall the truth of any of them in retelling a story that has excited me, which must be a great source of frustration to listeners. It also draws scepticism from my audience because I cannot nail a fact at will with a magical number. My greatest skill is in combining one idea with another. It’s good to know your strengths even if it has taken a long time to work that out and even if there doesn’t seem to be a current application for such talent.

I have been noticing a lot recently in my reading about electrical enhancement for the brain and that application of small amounts of charge to the brain can accelerate thinking.  http://theweek.com/article/index/226196/how-electrical-brain-stimulation-can-change-the-way-we-think   It can actually turn off the inner critical voice which fills us with self doubt by muting some synapses for the briefest moments making them more receptive to clearer thinking.
I also read recently of an older theory (like 4 years old!) that the human consciousness is just a magnetic field. That would explain ear worms, memes, zeitgeist  and crowd control to me.  Having had and lost a friend many years ago to depression for which she was unsuccessfully given convulsive electro therapy treatment and having lived near power lines that kept me in a constant fear of electric magnetic radiation, fiddling about with electricity and brains seems to be a dangerous and emotional field. Maybe you could change a person’s make up by changing their electrical levels. Chocolate does it for me! Too much and I am completely overcharged and unable to rest.

I have just listened to the books and music program on RadioNational and the discussion of a book called Lexicon by Max Barry which is all about the magical power of words and recruiting poets to control people’s minds. Max Barry had previously studied Marketing and Advertising so he knows about manipulating brains with words and ideas.

There is an interesting experiment which has come under different names, one being Takeluma, in which people were tested to see which line shape matched their interpretation of two different words. One was a prickly line and the other a rounded sinuous wave.

 The prickly line matched the word that had an" ick" sound and the sinuous wave matched the "oum" sound. Maybe words are magnetic or electrically charged in the way they are spoken and that is why they stick in your head or are able to move you to tears in certain combination. In cultures where there are words used differently by gender role I wonder if there is a different power in the words. In cultures where only men speak publicly does that limit the electrical balance of the brain and thus influence behaviour of the dominant gender?

Alfred Tomatis researched the frequency of sound and the influence it had on the smallest muscle in our body called the stapedius. It is the tiny little muscle that works the hammer and anvil in our inner ear. Not only does it respond to frequency of sound, it is also influenced by emotions, say through involuntary clamping of jaws or tensing of neck muscles and in turn influences physical balance and perception. Each cultural language has a different frequency and the amount of exercise the stapedius gets in listening to a variety of sound in turn enables the ear to hear more acutely, and the brain to flexibly perceive more things. This is the  triggering theory behind Mozart learning. American language frequency and French are quite different and Tomatis surmised among other things this had something to do with their perceived contempt of one another the living out of an adage of not being on the same wavelength.

Writing is my way of getting the scramble of scratching clashing ideas into a visual form so that I can redigest it. It’s a bit like crushing a whole lot of rock ingredients together and mixing and sieving to make a glaze which actually only comes together because of the right electrical balance of the molecules in it. It’s just annoying knowing that there is some thought in the back of your head that draws all these ideas together like a magnet and you just can’t get at it.

One of the pieces of music said to bring about the Mozart effect is this by Greek musician Yanni

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhS6asdNNy4

Maybe if I sit and listen to it, I will be able to make something that has magnetic attraction. 

TGIF and sweepstakes

As a child growing up in the prehistoric days, when classrooms were full to bursting point, assessment of children on intake was an intuitive skill by young, one year trained teachers. It relied on wisdom handed down by their own mothers and senior teachers to spot potential talent or difficulty in learning and they had to be as quick as cattlemen assessing their herds going through cattle crushes. There were 81 children (YES!) in my prep classroom and our teacher was a nun about 22 years old. I remember clearly some shining moments in that year and ah ha moments so despite her wild furies and lack of time for personal interaction she had an impact on my life.  

One of her assessment methods which I also came across in my later primary years was the broom method. A very quick assessment of a child’s organisational skills could be assessed from their use of a broom to sweep an area. It uncovered their sense of logic in finding a starting place that expended the least energy, their willingness to change plan if the prevailing breeze undid their work, their calmness in accumulating a dirt pile instead of creating a maelstrom of dust, their ability to predict traffic interceptions and adapt by either managing interceptors or diverting their flow. It also uncovered an ability to complete a task and care for the furniture and skirting boards, to return the equipment, to assess their own completion of the task and take pride in it. By looking at whether a child swept all along in front or made tight sweeping motions to their body could also be a possible indicator of personality type- introvert or extrovert. In those days it was the children’s job to participate in the cleaning as schools were too poor to afford cleaners. The poor novice nuns would scrub the bathrooms on their hands and knees, without rubber gloves, and cleanliness was next to godliness although they all suffered terribly from chilblains, an almost unheard of affliction these days.

 

Brooms are pretty well universal so their use is hard wired into cultures.  Indeed, I vaguely remember the Japanese symbol for wife or female is based on a pictograph of a hand on a broom. No doubt a reader will fill me in on this.

 

The actual design of brooms has not had much variation over time and I am not even going to count those abominations called electrical brooms in this discussion. (If you are paying for garden maintenance make sure you aren’t paying for some inept fool to sweep around one leaf with an electric broom for half an hour!) Probably one of the greatest design leaps was to put a longer handle on a broom so that the user did not have to bow over to inhale the dust at the business end. Apart from that the only noticeable change I have found in brooms is built in obsolescence in the cheapening of handles and flimsy connections between brush and handle. Making a good design that lasts for aeons is not a money maker and therein lies the conflict. Save trees by using plastic handles but fill up our tips with broken goods which will never break down.

I love to sweep! It is a task that I learned proficiency in during childhood through regular practice and which I find to be satisfying and mind clearing. As a childhood task it gave me pride to sweep our driveway and a chance to hang around the front gate and engage with passers by. It also enabled some initiative to choose to sweep. As our driveway was also our art gallery covered in the clay chalk scrawling of 5 children, being good at sweeping provided for new drawing space each day. We would fossick for good clay globs in our explorative walks around the creek land and home building sites near our home, not dissimilar to cavemen looking for the perfect flints. It is sad that some councils have banned the use of chalk on public paving. Such a big stick for a minor act.

Whenever I am agitated or my life feels cluttered, the regular meditative job of sweeping relaxes and invigorates me and seems to align all my thinking gears into order. It also requires clearing a path of objects in order to accomplish the task and so acts as a sort of touchstone process for re orienting me in my space. It’s a great job for Friday to clear away the disasters of the week and plan for the following week. My last 30 minutes in classrooms on Friday afternoons was all about cleaning and preparing for the coming week with the reward of a fun  weekend ahead when the job was done. The old mistakes didn’t haunt children and Monday was a chance of creating a new page.

Friday mayhem

 

Ceramic studios are dusty places, as clay slops and glaze drips dry and become dusty, and work drying on shelves sheds little rings of clay particles.

 

 

 

 

Unfortunately sweeping of clay is not a healthy practice as it stirs up loose silica, a regular component of claywork. Even with a mask on doing dusty work in a studio, dust still creeps under eyelids and into tear ducts creating unpleasant sinus conditions. I still like to sweep a little in there though in a very gentle and controlled way but I am very lucky to have a ducted vacuum system with one of those nifty pick up points built into my studio.

 

 

If I am doing any last minute fettling of lumpy glaze it is done in this corner as close as possible to the pick up spot. I find those microfiber fluffy brooms glide across the floor and pick up most of the loose particles and then it is a matter of using microfiber damp cloth under each foot to scoot around and mop the remainder.

 

Microfibre is something that didn’t exist until recently and we are lead to believe it is made from all our recycled plastic bottles. I would like to think so but I have my suspicions it may actually be freshly made from petro chemical by products like those so called green shopping bags. I hope there is a plan somewhere for reprocessing of microfiber cloths because I don’t know where I would be without them, but they will not break down naturally and so will become another piece of our world’s shameful legacy. 

Anyway its all clean now and my kiln is fixed and working again so Monday is looking rosy.