Jay Kshatri's Blog, page 16

The Subtle Shift of Mind that Allows You to Harness the World’s Collective Knowledge

In today’s digital age, one of the key skills required for success is being able to control the massive amounts of information and knowledge we have coming at us from all directions. Because most of us are rightly overwhelmed by this constant barrage, we must go beyond passively receiving information that others think we want or need to proactively target, seek, organize, and understand the information that will make our lives better.  

Image: Will Lion, Flickr

The truth is, the constant influx of news, images, and video is giving us a digital hangover, much like you get after one too many drinks. And in the case of the digital world, the bottle never runs dry—it just keeps flowing. So just as we need to be responsible in consuming other pleasurable items in moderation, the same goes for our various digitally enabled entertainment technologies, including practicing and teaching our children responsible and effective digital consumption.

The vast amount of information and entertainment at our fingertips is mostly consumed in a passive way.  Either through watching a television program, or reading a news feed on a social media site, or through listening to the radio or other audio broadcast.  Yes, we’ve made a choice at some level in the sense of what to watch or listen to, but it’s at a high level. After that decision point, we hand over control to the media.

The problem with this is that we often end up consuming information and content that we didn’t intend to or that is particularly useful for our needs.  Yet, the irony is that most of the world’s collective knowledge and information is right at our fingertips through the internet.  The question is are we being conscious and proactive in finding the most useful information or are we being reactive and consuming what others have programmed for us? 

Journalist John Noughton, writing in the Observer newspaper in 2010 said:

…the increasing complexity of our environment means that we need the net as ‘power steering for the mind’.

The futurologist Jamais Cascio adds:

The trouble isn’t that we have too much information at our fingertips, but that our tools for managing it are still in their infancy. Worries about ‘information overload’ predate the rise of the Web.  Google isn’t the problem—it’s the beginning of a solution.

And that is in fact what the book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled world aims to address: how we can use digital tools like Google—and many others—to harness our digital information world and get control over the flood of data and ideas.  In essence, we need to change our pattern of being in a receiving or reactive mode and move to a proactive mode where we become conscious and explicit of the knowledge we want to acquire, and then use tools and techniques to get it.

So how do we start to take more control of what knowledge we want to acquire on a daily basis? The answer is by Asking Questions.

 

Over the years, great thinkers have realized that it’s in asking questions that we drive ourselves to significant leaps in understanding—and in turn augment our level of consciousness.

It isn’t the answer that enlightens, but the question – Decouvertes
If you do not ask the right questions, you do not get the right answers.  A question asked in the right way often points to its own answer.  Asking questions is the A-B-C of diagnosis.  Only the inquiring mind solves problems. – Edward Hodnet

In other words, by posing intelligent questions, we change the paradigm from being passive receivers of an overwhelming amount of information thrown at us on a daily basis (drinking from a fire hydrant) to making deliberate conscious choices of the information we do want to consume by identifying the areas we would like to know more about. 

To break this down in simpler terms, here are some examples of broad questions to get you going in the right direction:

Key Questions to Drive Proactive Thinking

What have I not learned that I need to?
What could I be doing better?
Is there a better way of doing something I do now? Is there something holding me back from doing it that way?
What do I wish I knew more about?
What past experiences have created biases in me that I need to go beyond?
What beliefs or ways of thinking have I held onto too tightly that have hampered my knowledge of the world or my ability to interact with people effectively?
What could I learn that would make me more effective at work, with my family, and/or with my friends?
What current event or issue on the national or global stage do I need to know more about?
What have I read about, seen on TV, or heard on the radio or in a podcast that I would like to know more about?

The act of asking these questions naturally leads us to wanting to find answers.  And this is where it gets interesting – because in the beginning phases of the 21st century, we have incredible access through the internet in being able to find those answers relatively easily.  Those of us who can take advantage of the power of the internet will have a significant advantage in our professional and personal lives.  Information, insight, experience, and wisdom that in the past was beyond our reach is now at our beck and call.  However, we need to take the first step and decide what it is that we are looking for.  We need to ask questions and become proactive.   The next step is to master the art of internet search.  More on that next time…

Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

Resources  

Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World , by Jay Kshatri – Chapter Two – Moving from a Reactive to Proactive State of Mind to Harness the World’s Collective Knowledge
Smart Questions: Learn to Ask the Right Questions for Powerful Results  - by Gerald Nadler and William J. Chandon – Learn to Ask the Right Questions for Powerful Results
“ ‘A Holy Curiosity’: We Can Vastly Improve Education By Teaching This One Skill ” – http://cognoscenti.wbur.org/2014/03/14/ask-the-question-dan-rothstein
A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas , by Warren Berger

 

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If you want to gain more insight into the topics in this post, please see Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World.   The book is about changing the world through mastering holistic systems thinking.  With massive technological change and globalization affecting almost every facet of our lives, the “Killer App” in the 21st century will be the ability to Continuously Learn and leverage our capability for Proactive Thought. With the Internet, we now have instantaneous access to the world’s collective knowledge – which grows exponentially every year.  Those who can access it, analyze it, make sense of it, organize it, and put it into action will deeply accelerate their personal and professional success.  It will require using a new set of thinking tools, fully harnessing our digital technologies and apps, understanding how to see the systemic interconnections in our daily lives, and learning to maximize the combination of our logical left brain and our intuitive, creative, and spiritual right brain.  The book gives the reader the tools, techniques, and strategies to accomplish this goal.

The post The Subtle Shift of Mind that Allows You to Harness the World’s Collective Knowledge appeared first on Think Smarter World.

21 Ideas to Free your Mind from Mass Media

As we struggle to control the quality of the food we put in our bodies, equally important is the quality of information that we feed our minds. But not only for the usual reason that better information leads to better knowledge.

You see, the mind is much more than the brain, which is essentially a microprocessor with on-board memory. Think of the mind as the operating system with an internet connection. The connection in this case being not the word wide web, but the universal or collective consciousness. The mind in this capacity, takes what you feed it – the daily stream of thoughts and images, and fetches similar things from the universal consciousness in order to create your physical reality.

How? By the physical law of E=mcˆ2. Einstein’s famous equation essentially says that energy translates into mass. Thoughts are the highest form of energy (vibration) that we know. (See Note 1 for the Quantum Physics explanation). So whatever you put into your conscious mind, makes its way into your subconscious, where the always on search engine goes and gets a similar reality to what you are thinking and feeling. If you doubt this is true, just look at the numerous number of pro and advanced amateur athletes who practice the art of positive visualization in their sport to achieve top performance. They know that the act of creating an image of exactly the result they seek to achieve enhances their ability manifest that result. Along with this, they activate the increased likelihood that circumstances will arise for them to have an opportunity to achieve their desired result (the opportunity to take the winning shot as an example). They also know that they must keep their minds clear of distracting or negative thoughts – thoughts that will manifest a different result or cancel the result that they are seeking.

So, how’s this relevant to our daily media intake? Simple.

The media we consume directly or indirectly creates images within our mind, which then work at creating our physical reality.

The 10 car pile-up, the botched hold-up resulting in a murder, the daily partisan political hostilities, and the most recent account of any of the many armed conflicts around the globe – all reported faithfully on our 24/7 news apparatus, have a detrimental effect on your mental and physical health. Pay attention to how you are feeling the next time you watch one of these broadcasts, or consume any other form of media. Do you feel positive, negative, tense, relaxed, hopeful, fearful, optimistic? Over the course of the entire show, movie, or article, you may feel a number of different emotions. Either way, the fact is that our thoughts are occurring at a very fast rate.

Researchers estimate that our brains create a thought within 20-30 milliseconds after some type of stimulus (see report link in resources section). You can’t stop a negative (or positive) thought from occurring. Once its out there, it’s out.

What you can do in the case of a negative thought, is to quickly switch your mind into more positive territory.

But a better alternative is to limit your intake of negative, unhelpful, and sensationalist content to begin with. For some reason, our major media outlets believe that based on their research of our viewing habits and attention characteristics, we seem to pay more attention to something that is bad than something that is good.

It’s like when everyone slows down to look at an accident on a highway – something has gone wrong, and we need to know why. If everything is normal, then keep on moving. And, with ever more competition for our eyeballs, media outlets feel the heat to amp up the volume on their content so that we pay attention to them versus their competitors.

Why do we love bad news?

Psychology Today magazine reported in 2010 on the evolutionary basis of our addiction to bad news:

Is the media negative? Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every one good news report. Why? The answer may lie in the work of evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists.  Humans seek out news of dramatic, negative events. These experts say that our brains evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment where anything novel or dramatic had to be attended to immediately for survival. So while we no longer defend ourselves against saber-toothed tigers, our brains have not caught up.

So, news organizations oblige us and shows us as many saber-toothed tigers they can get their hands on. A research paper titled “Bad News Revised: The Portrayal of Violence, Conflict, and Suffering on Television News” by Roger N. Johnson of Ramapo College done in the mid 90’s assessed the content of Violence, Conflict, and Suffering (VCS) depicted by some of the major broadcast news organizations, including CNN and CBS.

The results showed that the news programs averaged 54.5% of their content in the VCS area. Viewers, on average, saw about 13 stories per hour in the VCS category. Furthermore, about two thirds of the shows began with a VCS infused story and 64% of the first five stories were VCS fare.

They like to hit you early and hard. In contrast, Canadian news channels that were studied, registered half of the VCS stories and content as their American counterparts (still too much, but significantly less). You can imagine that same analysis done today, would produce even more severe results.

Wow. That’s an enormous amount of negativity to start your day. Now imagine getting a dose of that, then getting in your car, putting on another news or talk show, and then taking another hit. By the time you get to work, your mind has been battered with thoughts and images that are anything but rainbows and unicorns. Those images and thoughts are now deep into your subconscious and will play themselves out in ways you never intended. If athletes and business people are using positive visualization – creating sustained images of what they want to achieve, then wouldn’t watching images of what you don’t want, have the opposite effect (unless, you are looking to experience anger, sadness, disease, etc).

The same logic of positive versus negative imagery applies of course to other media content besides news. Movies, TV shows, Video Games, Music, Books, Newspapers, Magazines, Blogs, Podcasts, etc.

What to do?

Change your media diet.

Easier said than done, you say. I agree. A main reason why we keep tuning into the same old same old, is that it’s easy – turn on the TV – it’s simple. Pop on the radio in the car, its easy. We don’t need to work too hard. It’s there, it keeps us company, and some times we even think we’re learning something useful (which we certainly do from time to time). So, like any major change initiative, we need to replace what’s easy in a way that is also relatively easy, or at least not too difficult. Only then can new habits be born.

There are a number of different drivers for why we consumer various forms of media:

To be informed
To be entertained
To occupy our time

In each category, if we are currently ingesting low quality media, we can exchange those for higher quality fare more easily if we identify alternative sources and means for getting the good stuff.

Technology

Let’s first start with technology. The television / couch ensemble is still our most favored set up to ingest a lot of our media. It’s easy and comfortable. Many people have large flat screen televisions and some also have good audio systems connected as well. Traditionally, what gets played through this set up is still driven mainly by the major networks and cable channels. But we now have the technology at our disposal to turn the equation around.

If you are an Apple user, Apple’s Airplay feature allows you to stream content via your WiFi network directly from your phone or tablet to a small set to box device called Apple TV ($99), which is in turn connected to your television. Your iPad or iPhone then becomes a hand held media controller and any content on the internet or from an app can be easily watched on the big screen. (You can also stream directly from your MAC laptop or desktop). You now no longer need to be limited to what’s on at any given time or what the major media outlets want to serve you. If you are an Android user, you can essentially do the same thing with your Android phone or tablet (or from a Chrome browser on a Windows or MAC PC). In this case, you’ll use a device you plug into your TV called Chromecast that is made by Google ($35).

This small technology investment in Apple TV or Chromecast will be a dramatic step in giving you the proactive control to take your media consumption into a more positive territory. Why this is so powerful is that most of the media outlets have put their shows and other content into app format for various mobile platforms. Consuming their content through the apps gives you much more control over what and when to watch or listen. As an example, shows are often broken down into individual segments and you can choose to watch the more positive and nutritious segments and skip the rest.

The second piece of must have technology is a Digital Video Recorder (DVR’s). If you want to control the flow of information and images into your mind, then a key place to start is to remove the advertisements from your mental diet. DVR’s of course also allow you to time shift your viewing (record and watch whenever is convenient for you) and provide a key tool to replace other forms of low-calorie media content with higher quality fare. For instance, instead of watching your traditional morning or evening news program, since you’ll have shows and programs recorded on your DVR, you can watch one of them instead. Meal replacement becomes media replacement! As for DVR technology, Tivo’s software and user interface far surpasses what is available from the cable companies. You will find it easier to use and be more likely to get the most out of using DVR as part of your media diet.

Lastly, for those times in the car, find a way to connect your smartphone into your car’s audio system. The latest vehicles allow you to do this via your bluetooth connection. Otherwise, if you have an audio-in jack in the car, you can connect to that via your phone’s headphone jack.

So, now that we’ve got the technology pieces covered – Tablet, Smartphone, Apple TV / Chromecast, and DVR. Let’s move on to the actual list of 21 Ways  of how We Can Improve Our Media Diet.

Use the full power off YouTube. YouTube is thought of by many people as a place for short funny home made video clips, how-to videos, and comedy shorts. Which it is. But the reality is that YouTube is also the home to a vast array of meaningful and educational content – lectures, webinars, conference talks, documentaries, movies, and a lot more. To harness the power of Youtube to access higher quality media content- use the following approach with their website or IOS or Android App. When you find something to watch – if it’s a channel, then subscribe to it. If it’s an individual video save it to the “Watch Later” menu. If after you’ve watched something you really like and want easy access to it, save it then to the “Favorites” menu (and remove it from the Watch Later menu). Now, instead of watching what the mass media outlets want to feed you, you’ll have built up a library of specific content that you are interested in and can access easily on your PC, Tablet, or beam via Airplay or Chromecast to your Television. *On Apple TV, there is also a built in YouTube app so you can access it directly from there if you like. One tech note – the YouTube site is much improved of late, but their tablet / smart phone app (and especially the apple tv app) doesn’t seem to have all the functionality of the main site. If you find some limitations, try the free 3rd party YouTube app from Jasmine. It’s excellent.
Go to School in your Living Room with MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). You’ve probably heard of the company Coursera and Udacity – early pioneers of bringing courses from various colleges via the internet to people all over the world and free of charge. It’s an amazing opportunity to learn from the same professors who teach the course live at those schools. The format is composed of recorded video lectures, some off line reading, and online forums for students to collaborate, ask questions, and learn from each other. You can participate 100% and do all the viewing, reading, participating, and test taking, or just pick and choose what you want to do and don’t take any tests. It’s up to you. You can access the material any time you want. For our purposes here, what’s interesting is to work the videos of these courses into our media consumption diet. Using the technology platform described above, you could access a Coursera class for example on your tablet, and via Airplay or Chromecast view it on your TV. Instead of watching some low calore content while you’re getting ready in the morning or preparing dinner, pop on a lecture instead from a Harvard professor (most are 15 to 30 minutes in length). There are many universities now offering courses directly and there are a number of other platforms besides Coursera and Udacity. A good resource is MOOC Advisor – http://www.mooc.student.advisor.com. You can also find the listing of over 800 free online courses from universities at OpenCulture.com – http://www.openculture.com/freeonline.... MOOC platforms:  http://www.coursera.org; http://www.udacity.com; http://www.edx.org; http://futurelearn.com; http://open2study.com
Use Apps of major news shows instead of watching broadcast versions. PBS, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and many more have apps that will allow you to pick and choose which shows to watch (and even segments within shows sometimes) and when. Though as we discussed, much of what’s on the major news networks is less than healthy for us, these stations also carry some interesting and useful content. These apps allow us to find those morsels more easily.
Substitute music in place of other media. “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” Plato said that. Deep stuff. Music that elevates your mood and increases your energy is priceless. We are of course very fortunate to have almost an endless supply now at our fingertips. If you like live concert videos try Qello. You can view on your PC or MAC, tablet or phone, or there is a built in app on Apple TV. Of course, the usual music streaming services get better daily – Spotify, Pandora, iTunes Radio, Rdio, Songza, and more. If you implement Apple TV with your stereo / TV system you could of course stream content directly from one of these apps to your main system. Apple TV also has a built in app for internet radio stations which is excellent. Other apps to capture the power of radio on the internet include: Radio Paradise;  Calm Radio;  NPR Music App;  Jazz Radio; Public Radio App; Tunes Apps
Save interesting articles and other web content to Pocket for reading and viewing at a later time. The amount of content available is endless and when we first encounter something we want to read, we usually don’t have the time right then to do it. The Pocket app (formerly read it later) solves that problem – it’s a parking space for all your online content. It also formats it for you in a very clean and easy to read fashion. See my previous post on Pocket – http://www.thinksmarterworld.com/2013...
Watch less. Read more books. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a study in 2007 titled – “To Read or Not To Read – A Question of National Consequence.” The study found the following: “All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals—whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact— books change lives for the better.” With e-books becoming ubiquitous and tablets making it easy to carry all of your new and old books with you anywhere you go, there is no excuse to read more.
Use Netflix or Amazon instant video. They both have Interesting new shows (House of Cards, etc), but don’t forget the old classics – some were just much funnier and more positive than what we have today. Frazier re-runs anyone? Portlandia and Lillehammer are worth watching for a fresh approach to comedy and drama – both on Netflix.
Go off the beaten path – The Flipboard and Zite apps make it easier to harness web content. Both of these apps bring you curated content from a wide variety of sources allowing you to essentially create your own custom magazine. Flipboard also allows you to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts and create a visually stunning display of tweets and FB posts and the associated content people have posted. One of the more interesting uses of Twitter is to tap into the content shared by fellow users who have similar (or not so similar) interests. Flipboard makes viewing these shared links more accessible and inviting.
Rediscover long-form journalism and other more in-depth, higher quality writing. Our overly stressed and multitasked brains have gotten used to in information in small chunks – from the minuscule 140 characters of Twitter to the blog post “golden rule” of 500 words. But to really understand a topic, there really isn’t any way around it, you need to consume more in-depth writing. A large number of magazines have excelled at it over the years. A few definitely worth considering include The New Yorker, The Atlantic Magazine, and The Economist. There is also a renewal underway at the The New Republic. For a shortcut, try a site called Longform – http://www.longform.com, that curates the best of long form writing from magazines and websites across the globe. In addition, there is a new site called Medium, that has was founded last year by ex-Twitter founders to promote long-form writing.
Do an audit on your current newspaper. Having travelled to over 30 countries and 40 U.S. states, I’ve had the chance to read a lot of different newspapers. There is certainly strong writing going on in a lot of different places. But for overall depth and consistency, the New York Times takes the prize. Here’s a recent piece on why NYT is so good – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-f.... The Times also has an excellent tablet app that makes reading the paper a pleasure.
Explore ITunes University – Though MOOC’s are getting all the attention now, don’t forget ITunes U. They have content that MOOC’s don’t, so it’s worthwhile to check in with them. http://www.apple.com/education/ipad/i...
Visit The Internet Archive – The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.”  Wow. Books, music, videos, and a lot more. This is an amazing resource. https://archive.org
Tap into the Khan Academy – with over 5,000 video tutorials covering an enormous array of topics, Sal Khan’s contribution to the advancement of knowledge for everyone cannot be overstated. Using our tech savvy content consumption method discussed earlier, we can certainly gain a lot of from including the Khan Academy in our media diets. https://www.khanacademy.org
Tune into Silence – With our abundance of ways to be entertained and educated, one thing we’ve forgotten to cherish is the benefit of silence. When we’re quiet, we can achieve greater calmness and focus, as well as generate the link to our true spiritual selves and the Universal Consciousness. With the various multimedia devices at our side nonstop, our ability to achieve stillness and silence has dwindled, and along with it the insight that comes in these moments. The good news is that we can get it back quickly; all we have to do is turn those devices off for a while, breathe deeply, be still, and listen.
Be surprised – StumbleUpon – The web is vast and we manage to interact only with a minuscule piece of it in our online travels. The site StumbleUpon helps remedy this and introduces serendipity into our web surfing. You tell SU what you like, and it will then introduce you to amazing web pages, videos, photos and more that you wouldn’t have found on your own. http://www.stumbleupon.com
Build your own media library. If we build our own collection of media, it can help us to side-step the negative fare that may happen to be on at any given time. We can then become proactive instead of reactive to our media environment. You can create a healthy collection of books, audiobooks, videos, movies, music, podcasts, and magazines that you can access easily from your multimedia devices. With so many cloud based apps, this becomes even easier and most apps allow you to create folders and playlists to keep things organized and easy to find.
Step up into Higher Consciousness with Gaiam TV.  Gaiam TV streams inspirational movies, documentaries, and educational videos on six different on-line channels. http://www.gaiamtv.com. You can also try Spiritual Cinema Circle, which is a sister site to Gaiam TV. Spiritual Cinema Circle sends 4 actual DVD’s to you per month (which you keep) and also includes a subscription to Gaiam TV as part of their offering. http://www.spiritualcinemacircle.com
Read these magazines to keep your mind focused on the positive and the possible – The Intelligent Optimist, Mindful Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Good Magazine, Utne Reader
Read these websites and blogs to feed your mind and soul healthy, insightful, and nutritious fare: Open Culture, Farnam Street Blog, Truth Dig, Big Think, Brain Pickings, Asian Efficiency Blog, Conscious Life News, The Daily Good. There is a big, positive, beautiful world out there that the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover. These resources, and many others, will show it to you.
Turn off all your devices take a 20-minute meditation break instead. Meditation, the practice of calming your mind by slowing down and eliminating random thoughts, is perhaps the best stress reduction technique available to us. Scientists and Physicians are even finding it useful for treating depression, as consistent meditation is being shown in functional MRI scans to positively alter the areas of the brain that are used in emotional response, memory capability, and even our ability to learn. For an outstanding resource to view explanatory videos on meditation, visit: http://www.how-to-meditate.org/videos
Get inspired by TED talks and tap into the cutting edge of thinking in 18 minute portions. TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues. A newly designed website is coming soon and will have links and additional content to explore with each of the videos.  https://www.ted.com

I hope you’ll try some (or many) of the 21 ideas. I am confident they will make a very positive impact on your life. For now, I’ll leave you a brief paragraph from Reiki teacher Ted Murray on Starting and Ending your day well:

End your day well, start your day well

~Ted Murray

What is the last thing you fill your mind with before going to bed and the first thing you begin your day with in the morning? This time is very critical, as it will determine what your subconscious brain focuses on during sleep and what sets your mood for the day. Watching TV or scary movies may help cause disturbed sleep or dreams, whereas jumping immediately into the problems of the world by reading the newspaper may not lead to a great frame of mind either.

Why not try developing a habit of reading something uplifting just before dozing off to sleep and immediately upon awakening? If this becomes your habit you will be reinforcing the positive changes you wish to experience. Your mind processes what is being input into it. If you continually input empowering statements and inspiring thoughts about the pure source energy of the universe you will naturally increase that presence in your life. Why not put one of your favorite books as your bedside inspirational reading and begin to develop that habit today?

Notes

“String theory (within Quantum Physics) holds that everything in the universe is composed of tiny vibrating strings of energy. In this view, every particle in your body, every speck of light that lets you read these words, and every force of gravity that pushes you into your chair is just a variant of this one fundamental entity. The denser something is, the lower its vibration, and the smaller its footprint. On our world, humans interpret a stone as being denser than a tree, and vibrating at a slower frequency. A tree is denser than a human. After nothingness, a thought is the least dense thing in our experience. Therefore, its first intriguing property is that it has the highest energy of anything we can conceptualize. It can kill or cure, invent a nuclear weapon or a romantic moment.” Futhermore, “The Law of Conservation of Energy is a law of physics that states the total amount of energy in an isolated system (such as a thought) remains constant over time. It cannot be destroyed, and it does not deplete if we simply forget we had it. Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that mass is energy, and the two are interchangeable. Energy becomes mass and vice versa. A thought has no other role than to try to become its physical equivalent (mass). Therefore, because their energy remains conserved, the reality of your life experience today is the result of the thoughts you emitted in your life up to now, regardless of whether you remember having them” Excerpt From: Trevor Blake. “Three Simple Steps.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/bRmaC.l

Resources

“How Fast is the Speed of a Thought?” – Martin J. Tovee, Psychology Department, Newcastle University, UK – https://www.science.smith.edu/departments/NeuroSci/courses/bio330/pdf/94CurrBiolTovee.pdf
“Bad News Revised: The Portrayal of Violence, Confllict, and Suffering on Television News” by Roger N. Johnson of Ramapo College http://arapaho.nsuok.edu/~scottd/bodybag2.pdf
“Why we love bad news”, Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-we-love-bad-news
“To Read or Not To Read – A Question of National Consequence.” – http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf

The post 21 Ideas to Free your Mind from Mass Media appeared first on Think Smarter World.

21 Ideas to Free the Mind from Mass Media

As we struggle to control the quality of the food we put in our bodies, equally important is the quality of information that we feed our minds. But not only for the usual reason that better information leads to better knowledge.

You see, the mind is much more than the brain, which is essentially a microprocessor with on-board memory. Think of the mind as the operating system with an internet connection. The connection in this case being not the word wide web, but the universal or collective consciousness. The mind in this capacity, takes what you feed it – the daily stream of thoughts and images, and fetches similar things from the universal consciousness in order to create your physical reality.

How? By the physical law of E=mcˆ2. Einstein’s famous equation essentially says that energy translates into mass. Thoughts are the highest form of energy (vibration) that we know. (See Note 1 for the Quantum Physics explanation). So whatever you put into your conscious mind, makes its way into your subconscious, where the always on search engine goes and gets a similar reality to what you are thinking and feeling. If you doubt this is true, just look at the numerous number of pro and advanced amateur athletes who practice the art of positive visualization in their sport to achieve top performance. They know that the act of creating an image of exactly the result they seek to achieve enhances their ability manifest that result. Along with this, they activate the increased likelihood that circumstances will arise for them to have an opportunity to achieve their desired result (the opportunity to take the winning shot as an example). They also know that they must keep their minds clear of distracting or negative thoughts – thoughts that will manifest a different result or cancel the result that they are seeking.

So, how’s this relevant to our daily media intake? Simple.

The media we consume directly or indirectly creates images within our mind, which then work at creating our physical reality.

The 10 car pile-up, the botched hold-up resulting in a murder, the daily partisan political hostilities, and the most recent account of any of the many armed conflicts around the globe – all reported faithfully on our 24/7 news apparatus, have a detrimental effect on your mental and physical health. Pay attention to how you are feeling the next time you watch one of these broadcasts, or consume any other form of media. Do you feel positive, negative, tense, relaxed, hopeful, fearful, optimistic? Over the course of the entire show, movie, or article, you may feel a number of different emotions. Either way, the fact is that our thoughts are occurring at a very fast rate.

Researchers estimate that our brains create a thought within 20-30 milliseconds after some type of stimulus (see report link in resources section). You can’t stop a negative (or positive) thought from occurring. Once its out there, it’s out.

What you can do in the case of a negative thought, is to quickly switch your mind into more positive territory.

But a better alternative is to limit your intake of negative, unhelpful, and sensationalist content to begin with. For some reason, our major media outlets believe that based on their research of our viewing habits and attention characteristics, we seem to pay more attention to something that is bad than something that is good.

It’s like when everyone slows down to look at an accident on a highway – something has gone wrong, and we need to know why. If everything is normal, then keep on moving. And, with ever more competition for our eyeballs, media outlets feel the heat to amp up the volume on their content so that we pay attention to them versus their competitors.

Why do we love bad news?

Psychology Today magazine reported in 2010 on the evolutionary basis of our addiction to bad news:

Is the media negative? Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every one good news report. Why? The answer may lie in the work of evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists.  Humans seek out news of dramatic, negative events. These experts say that our brains evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment where anything novel or dramatic had to be attended to immediately for survival. So while we no longer defend ourselves against saber-toothed tigers, our brains have not caught up.

So, news organizations oblige us and shows us as many saber-toothed tigers they can get their hands on. A research paper titled “Bad News Revised: The Portrayal of Violence, Conflict, and Suffering on Television News” by Roger N. Johnson of Ramapo College done in the mid 90’s assessed the content of Violence, Conflict, and Suffering (VCS) depicted by some of the major broadcast news organizations, including CNN and CBS.

The results showed that the news programs averaged 54.5% of their content in the VCS area. Viewers, on average, saw about 13 stories per hour in the VCS category. Furthermore, about two thirds of the shows began with a VCS infused story and 64% of the first five stories were VCS fare.

They like to hit you early and hard. In contrast, Canadian news channels that were studied, registered half of the VCS stories and content as their American counterparts (still too much, but significantly less). You can imagine that same analysis done today, would produce even more severe results.

Wow. That’s an enormous amount of negativity to start your day. Now imagine getting a dose of that, then getting in your car, putting on another news or talk show, and then taking another hit. By the time you get to work, your mind has been battered with thoughts and images that are anything but rainbows and unicorns. Those images and thoughts are now deep into your subconscious and will play themselves out in ways you never intended. If athletes and business people are using positive visualization – creating sustained images of what they want to achieve, then wouldn’t watching images of what you don’t want, have the opposite effect (unless, you are looking to experience anger, sadness, disease, etc).

The same logic of positive versus negative imagery applies of course to other media content besides news. Movies, TV shows, Video Games, Music, Books, Newspapers, Magazines, Blogs, Podcasts, etc.

What to do?

Change your media diet.

Easier said than done, you say. I agree. A main reason why we keep tuning into the same old same old, is that it’s easy – turn on the TV – it’s simple. Pop on the radio in the car, its easy. We don’t need to work too hard. It’s there, it keeps us company, and some times we even think we’re learning something useful (which we certainly do from time to time). So, like any major change initiative, we need to replace what’s easy in a way that is also relatively easy, or at least not too difficult. Only then can new habits be born.

There are a number of different drivers for why we consumer various forms of media:

To be informed
To be entertained
To occupy our time

In each category, if we are currently ingesting low quality media, we can exchange those for higher quality fare more easily if we identify alternative sources and means for getting the good stuff.

Technology

Let’s first start with technology. The television / couch ensemble is still our most favored set up to ingest a lot of our media. It’s easy and comfortable. Many people have large flat screen televisions and some also have good audio systems connected as well. Traditionally, what gets played through this set up is still driven mainly by the major networks and cable channels. But we now have the technology at our disposal to turn the equation around.

If you are an Apple user, Apple’s Airplay feature allows you to stream content via your WiFi network directly from your phone or tablet to a small set to box device called Apple TV ($99), which is in turn connected to your television. Your iPad or iPhone then becomes a hand held media controller and any content on the internet or from an app can be easily watched on the big screen. (You can also stream directly from your MAC laptop or desktop). You now no longer need to be limited to what’s on at any given time or what the major media outlets want to serve you. If you are an Android user, you can essentially do the same thing with your Android phone or tablet (or from a Chrome browser on a Windows or MAC PC). In this case, you’ll use a device you plug into your TV called Chromecast that is made by Google ($35).

This small technology investment in Apple TV or Chromecast will be a dramatic step in giving you the proactive control to take your media consumption into a more positive territory. Why this is so powerful is that most of the media outlets have put their shows and other content into app format for various mobile platforms. Consuming their content through the apps gives you much more control over what and when to watch or listen. As an example, shows are often broken down into individual segments and you can choose to watch the more positive and nutritious segments and skip the rest.

The second piece of must have technology is a Digital Video Recorder (DVR’s). If you want to control the flow of information and images into your mind, then a key place to start is to remove the advertisements from your mental diet. DVR’s of course also allow you to time shift your viewing (record and watch whenever is convenient for you) and provide a key tool to replace other forms of low-calorie media content with higher quality fare. For instance, instead of watching your traditional morning or evening news program, since you’ll have shows and programs recorded on your DVR, you can watch one of them instead. Meal replacement becomes media replacement! As for DVR technology, Tivo’s software and user interface far surpasses what is available from the cable companies. You will find it easier to use and be more likely to get the most out of using DVR as part of your media diet.

Lastly, for those times in the car, find a way to connect your smartphone into your car’s audio system. The latest vehicles allow you to do this via your bluetooth connection. Otherwise, if you have an audio-in jack in the car, you can connect to that via your phone’s headphone jack.

So, now that we’ve got the technology pieces covered – Tablet, Smartphone, Apple TV / Chromecast, and DVR. Let’s move on to the actual list of 21 Ways  of how We Can Improve Our Media Diet.

Use the full power off YouTube. YouTube is thought of by many people as a place for short funny home made video clips, how-to videos, and comedy shorts. Which it is. But the reality is that YouTube is also the home to a vast array of meaningful and educational content – lectures, webinars, conference talks, documentaries, movies, and a lot more. To harness the power of Youtube to access higher quality media content- use the following approach with their website or IOS or Android App. When you find something to watch – if it’s a channel, then subscribe to it. If it’s an individual video save it to the “Watch Later” menu. If after you’ve watched something you really like and want easy access to it, save it then to the “Favorites” menu (and remove it from the Watch Later menu). Now, instead of watching what the mass media outlets want to feed you, you’ll have built up a library of specific content that you are interested in and can access easily on your PC, Tablet, or beam via Airplay or Chromecast to your Television. *On Apple TV, there is also a built in YouTube app so you can access it directly from there if you like. One tech note – the YouTube site is much improved of late, but their tablet / smart phone app (and especially the apple tv app) doesn’t seem to have all the functionality of the main site. If you find some limitations, try the free 3rd party YouTube app from Jasmine. It’s excellent.
Go to School in your Living Room with MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). You’ve probably heard of the company Coursera and Udacity – early pioneers of bringing courses from various colleges via the internet to people all over the world and free of charge. It’s an amazing opportunity to learn from the same professors who teach the course live at those schools. The format is composed of recorded video lectures, some off line reading, and online forums for students to collaborate, ask questions, and learn from each other. You can participate 100% and do all the viewing, reading, participating, and test taking, or just pick and choose what you want to do and don’t take any tests. It’s up to you. You can access the material any time you want. For our purposes here, what’s interesting is to work the videos of these courses into our media consumption diet. Using the technology platform described above, you could access a Coursera class for example on your tablet, and via Airplay or Chromecast view it on your TV. Instead of watching some low calore content while you’re getting ready in the morning or preparing dinner, pop on a lecture instead from a Harvard professor (most are 15 to 30 minutes in length). There are many universities now offering courses directly and there are a number of other platforms besides Coursera and Udacity. A good resource is MOOC Advisor – http://www.mooc.student.advisor.com. You can also find the listing of over 800 free online courses from universities at OpenCulture.com – http://www.openculture.com/freeonline.... MOOC platforms:  http://www.coursera.org; http://www.udacity.com; http://www.edx.org; http://futurelearn.com; http://open2study.com
Use Apps of major news shows instead of watching broadcast versions. PBS, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and many more have apps that will allow you to pick and choose which shows to watch (and even segments within shows sometimes) and when. Though as we discussed, much of what’s on the major news networks is less than healthy for us, these stations also carry some interesting and useful content. These apps allow us to find those morsels more easily.
Substitute music in place of other media. “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” Plato said that. Deep stuff. Music that elevates your mood and increases your energy is priceless. We are of course very fortunate to have almost an endless supply now at our fingertips. If you like live concert videos try Qello. You can view on your PC or MAC, tablet or phone, or there is a built in app on Apple TV. Of course, the usual music streaming services get better daily – Spotify, Pandora, iTunes Radio, Rdio, Songza, and more. If you implement Apple TV with your stereo / TV system you could of course stream content directly from one of these apps to your main system. Apple TV also has a built in app for internet radio stations which is excellent. Other apps to capture the power of radio on the internet include: Radio Paradise;  Calm Radio;  NPR Music App;  Jazz Radio; Public Radio App; Tunes Apps
Save interesting articles and other web content to Pocket for reading and viewing at a later time. The amount of content available is endless and when we first encounter something we want to read, we usually don’t have the time right then to do it. The Pocket app (formerly read it later) solves that problem – it’s a parking space for all your online content. It also formats it for you in a very clean and easy to read fashion. See my previous post on Pocket – http://www.thinksmarterworld.com/2013...
Watch less. Read more books. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a study in 2007 titled – “To Read or Not To Read – A Question of National Consequence.” The study found the following: “All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals—whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact— books change lives for the better.” With e-books becoming ubiquitous and tablets making it easy to carry all of your new and old books with you anywhere you go, there is no excuse to read more.
Use Netflix or Amazon instant video. They both have Interesting new shows (House of Cards, etc), but don’t forget the old classics – some were just much funnier and more positive than what we have today. Frazier re-runs anyone? Portlandia and Lillehammer are worth watching for a fresh approach to comedy and drama – both on Netflix.
Go off the beaten path – The Flipboard and Zite apps make it easier to harness web content. Both of these apps bring you curated content from a wide variety of sources allowing you to essentially create your own custom magazine. Flipboard also allows you to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts and create a visually stunning display of tweets and FB posts and the associated content people have posted. One of the more interesting uses of Twitter is to tap into the content shared by fellow users who have similar (or not so similar) interests. Flipboard makes viewing these shared links more accessible and inviting.
Rediscover long-form journalism and other more in-depth, higher quality writing. Our overly stressed and multitasked brains have gotten used to in information in small chunks – from the minuscule 140 characters of Twitter to the blog post “golden rule” of 500 words. But to really understand a topic, there really isn’t any way around it, you need to consume more in-depth writing. A large number of magazines have excelled at it over the years. A few definitely worth considering include The New Yorker, The Atlantic Magazine, and The Economist. There is also a renewal underway at the The New Republic. For a shortcut, try a site called Longform – http://www.longform.com, that curates the best of long form writing from magazines and websites across the globe. In addition, there is a new site called Medium, that has was founded last year by ex-Twitter founders to promote long-form writing.
Do an audit on your current newspaper. Having travelled to over 30 countries and 40 U.S. states, I’ve had the chance to read a lot of different newspapers. There is certainly strong writing going on in a lot of different places. But for overall depth and consistency, the New York Times takes the prize. Here’s a recent piece on why NYT is so good – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-f.... The Times also has an excellent tablet app that makes reading the paper a pleasure.
Explore ITunes University – Though MOOC’s are getting all the attention now, don’t forget ITunes U. They have content that MOOC’s don’t, so it’s worthwhile to check in with them. http://www.apple.com/education/ipad/i...
Visit The Internet Archive – The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.”  Wow. Books, music, videos, and a lot more. This is an amazing resource. https://archive.org
Tap into the Khan Academy – with over 5,000 video tutorials covering an enormous array of topics, Sal Khan’s contribution to the advancement of knowledge for everyone cannot be overstated. Using our tech savvy content consumption method discussed earlier, we can certainly gain a lot of from including the Khan Academy in our media diets. https://www.khanacademy.org
Tune into Silence – With our abundance of ways to be entertained and educated, one thing we’ve forgotten to cherish is the benefit of silence. When we’re quiet, we can achieve greater calmness and focus, as well as generate the link to our true spiritual selves and the Universal Consciousness. With the various multimedia devices at our side nonstop, our ability to achieve stillness and silence has dwindled, and along with it the insight that comes in these moments. The good news is that we can get it back quickly; all we have to do is turn those devices off for a while, breathe deeply, be still, and listen.
Be surprised – StumbleUpon – The web is vast and we manage to interact only with a minuscule piece of it in our online travels. The site StumbleUpon helps remedy this and introduces serendipity into our web surfing. You tell SU what you like, and it will then introduce you to amazing web pages, videos, photos and more that you wouldn’t have found on your own. http://www.stumbleupon.com
Build your own media library. If we build our own collection of media, it can help us to side-step the negative fare that may happen to be on at any given time. We can then become proactive instead of reactive to our media environment. You can create a healthy collection of books, audiobooks, videos, movies, music, podcasts, and magazines that you can access easily from your multimedia devices. With so many cloud based apps, this becomes even easier and most apps allow you to create folders and playlists to keep things organized and easy to find.
Step up into Higher Consciousness with Gaiam TV.  Gaiam TV streams inspirational movies, documentaries, and educational videos on six different on-line channels. http://www.gaiamtv.com. You can also try Spiritual Cinema Circle, which is a sister site to Gaiam TV. Spiritual Cinema Circle sends 4 actual DVD’s to you per month (which you keep) and also includes a subscription to Gaiam TV as part of their offering. http://www.spiritualcinemacircle.com
Read these magazines to keep your mind focused on the positive and the possible – The Intelligent Optimist, Mindful Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Good Magazine, Utne Reader
Read these websites and blogs to feed your mind and soul healthy, insightful, and nutritious fare: Open Culture, Farnam Street Blog, Truth Dig, Big Think, Brain Pickings, Asian Efficiency Blog, Conscious Life News, The Daily Good. There is a big, positive, beautiful world out there that the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover. These resources, and many others, will show it to you.
Turn off all your devices take a 20-minute meditation break instead. Meditation, the practice of calming your mind by slowing down and eliminating random thoughts, is perhaps the best stress reduction technique available to us. Scientists and Physicians are even finding it useful for treating depression, as consistent meditation is being shown in functional MRI scans to positively alter the areas of the brain that are used in emotional response, memory capability, and even our ability to learn. For an outstanding resource to view explanatory videos on meditation, visit: http://www.how-to-meditate.org/videos
Get inspired by TED talks and tap into the cutting edge of thinking in 18 minute portions. TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues. A newly designed website is coming soon and will have links and additional content to explore with each of the videos.  https://www.ted.com

I hope you’ll try some (or many) of the 21 ideas. I am confident they will make a very positive impact on your life. For now, I’ll leave you a brief paragraph from Reiki teacher Ted Murray on Starting and Ending your day well:

End your day well, start your day well

~Ted Murray

What is the last thing you fill your mind with before going to bed and the first thing you begin your day with in the morning? This time is very critical, as it will determine what your subconscious brain focuses on during sleep and what sets your mood for the day. Watching TV or scary movies may help cause disturbed sleep or dreams, whereas jumping immediately into the problems of the world by reading the newspaper may not lead to a great frame of mind either.

Why not try developing a habit of reading something uplifting just before dozing off to sleep and immediately upon awakening? If this becomes your habit you will be reinforcing the positive changes you wish to experience. Your mind processes what is being input into it. If you continually input empowering statements and inspiring thoughts about the pure source energy of the universe you will naturally increase that presence in your life. Why not put one of your favorite books as your bedside inspirational reading and begin to develop that habit today?

Notes

“String theory (within Quantum Physics) holds that everything in the universe is composed of tiny vibrating strings of energy. In this view, every particle in your body, every speck of light that lets you read these words, and every force of gravity that pushes you into your chair is just a variant of this one fundamental entity. The denser something is, the lower its vibration, and the smaller its footprint. On our world, humans interpret a stone as being denser than a tree, and vibrating at a slower frequency. A tree is denser than a human. After nothingness, a thought is the least dense thing in our experience. Therefore, its first intriguing property is that it has the highest energy of anything we can conceptualize. It can kill or cure, invent a nuclear weapon or a romantic moment.” Futhermore, “The Law of Conservation of Energy is a law of physics that states the total amount of energy in an isolated system (such as a thought) remains constant over time. It cannot be destroyed, and it does not deplete if we simply forget we had it. Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that mass is energy, and the two are interchangeable. Energy becomes mass and vice versa. A thought has no other role than to try to become its physical equivalent (mass). Therefore, because their energy remains conserved, the reality of your life experience today is the result of the thoughts you emitted in your life up to now, regardless of whether you remember having them” Excerpt From: Trevor Blake. “Three Simple Steps.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/bRmaC.l

Resources

“How Fast is the Speed of a Thought?” – Martin J. Tovee, Psychology Department, Newcastle University, UK – https://www.science.smith.edu/departments/NeuroSci/courses/bio330/pdf/94CurrBiolTovee.pdf
“Bad News Revised: The Portrayal of Violence, Confllict, and Suffering on Television News” by Roger N. Johnson of Ramapo College http://arapaho.nsuok.edu/~scottd/bodybag2.pdf
“Why we love bad news”, Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201012/why-we-love-bad-news
“To Read or Not To Read – A Question of National Consequence.” – http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/ToRead.pdf

The post 21 Ideas to Free the Mind from Mass Media appeared first on Think Smarter World.

21 Ingredients for a Healthy and Delicious Media Diet

As we struggle to control the quality of the food we put in our bodies, equally important is the quality of information that we feed our minds. But not only for the usual reason that better information leads to better knowledge.

You see, the mind is much more than the brain, which is essentially a microprocessor with on-board memory. Think of the mind as the operating system with an internet connection. The connection in this case being not the word wide web, but the universal or collective consciousness. The mind in this capacity, takes what you feed it – the daily stream of thoughts and images, and fetches similar things from the universal consciousness in order to create your physical reality.

How? By the physical law of E=mcˆ2. Einstein’s famous equation essentially says that energy translates into mass. Thoughts are the highest form of energy (vibration) that we know. (See Note 1 for the Quantum Physics explanation). So whatever you put into your conscious mind, makes its way into your subconscious, where the always on search engine goes and gets a similar reality to what you are thinking and feeling. If you doubt this is true, just look at the numerous number of pro and advanced amateur athletes who practice the art of positive visualization in their sport to achieve top performance. They know that the act of creating an image of exactly the result they seek to achieve enhances their ability manifest that result. Along with this, they activate the increased likelihood that circumstances will arise for them to have an opportunity to achieve their desired result (the opportunity to take the winning shot as an example). They also know that they must keep their minds clear of distracting or negative thoughts – thoughts that will manifest a different result or cancel the result that they are seeking.

So, how’s this relevant to our daily media intake? Simple.

The media we consume directly or indirectly creates images within our mind, which then work at creating our physical reality.

The 10 car pile-up, the botched hold-up resulting in a murder, the daily partisan political hostilities, and the most recent account of any of the many armed conflicts around the globe – all reported faithfully on our 24/7 news apparatus, have a detrimental effect on your mental and physical health. Pay attention to how you are feeling the next time you watch one of these broadcasts, or consume any other form of media. Do you feel positive, negative, tense, relaxed, hopeful, fearful, optimistic? Over the course of the entire show, movie, or article, you may feel a number of different emotions. Either way, the fact is that our thoughts are occurring at a very fast rate.

Researchers estimate that our brains create a thought within 20-30 milliseconds after some type of stimulus (see report link in resources section). You can’t stop a negative (or positive) thought from occurring. Once its out there, it’s out.

What you can do in the case of a negative thought, is to quickly switch your mind into more positive territory.

But a better alternative is to limit your intake of negative, unhelpful, and sensationalist content to begin with. For some reason, our major media outlets believe that based on their research of our viewing habits and attention characteristics, we seem to pay more attention to something that is bad than something that is good.

It’s like when everyone slows down to look at an accident on a highway – something has gone wrong, and we need to know why. If everything is normal, then keep on moving. And, with ever more competition for our eyeballs, media outlets feel the heat to amp up the volume on their content so that we pay attention to them versus their competitors.

Why do we love bad news?

Psychology Today magazine reported in 2010 on the evolutionary basis of our addiction to bad news:

Is the media negative? Media studies show that bad news far outweighs good news by as much as seventeen negative news reports for every one good news report. Why? The answer may lie in the work of evolutionary psychologists and neuroscientists.  Humans seek out news of dramatic, negative events. These experts say that our brains evolved in a hunter-gatherer environment where anything novel or dramatic had to be attended to immediately for survival. So while we no longer defend ourselves against saber-toothed tigers, our brains have not caught up.

So, news organizations oblige us and shows us as many saber-toothed tigers they can get their hands on. A research paper titled “Bad News Revised: The Portrayal of Violence, Conflict, and Suffering on Television News” by Roger N. Johnson of Ramapo College done in the mid 90’s assessed the content of Violence, Conflict, and Suffering (VCS) depicted by some of the major broadcast news organizations, including CNN and CBS.

The results showed that the news programs averaged 54.5% of their content in the VCS area. Viewers, on average, saw about 13 stories per hour in the VCS category. Furthermore, about two thirds of the shows began with a VCS infused story and 64% of the first five stories were VCS fare.

They like to hit you early and hard. In contrast, Canadian news channels that were studied, registered half of the VCS stories and content as their American counterparts (still too much, but significantly less). You can imagine that same analysis done today, would produce even more severe results.

Wow. That’s an enormous amount of negativity to start your day. Now imagine getting a dose of that, then getting in your car, putting on another news or talk show, and then taking another hit. By the time you get to work, your mind has been battered with thoughts and images that are anything but rainbows and unicorns. Those images and thoughts are now deep into your subconscious and will play themselves out in ways you never intended. If athletes and business people are using positive visualization – creating sustained images of what they want to achieve, then wouldn’t watching images of what you don’t want, have the opposite effect (unless, you are looking to experience anger, sadness, disease, etc).

The same logic of positive versus negative imagery applies of course to other media content besides news. Movies, TV shows, Video Games, Music, Books, Newspapers, Magazines, Blogs, Podcasts, etc.

What to do?

Change your media diet.

Easier said than done, you say. I agree. A main reason why we keep tuning into the same old same old, is that it’s easy – turn on the TV – it’s simple. Pop on the radio in the car, its easy. We don’t need to work too hard. It’s there, it keeps us company, and some times we even think we’re learning something useful (which we certainly do from time to time). So, like any major change initiative, we need to replace what’s easy in a way that is also relatively easy, or at least not too difficult. Only then can new habits be born.

There are a number of different drivers for why we consumer various forms of media:

To be informed
To be entertained
To occupy our time

In each category, if we are currently ingesting low quality media, we can exchange those for higher quality fare more easily if we identify alternative sources and means for getting the good stuff.

Technology

Let’s first start with technology. The television / couch ensemble is still our most favored set up to ingest a lot of our media. It’s easy and comfortable. Many people have large flat screen televisions and some also have good audio systems connected as well. Traditionally, what gets played through this set up is still driven mainly by the major networks and cable channels. But we now have the technology at our disposal to turn the equation around.

If you are an Apple user, Apple’s Airplay feature allows you to stream content via your WiFi network directly from your phone or tablet to a small set to box device called Apple TV ($99), which is in turn connected to your television. Your iPad or iPhone then becomes a hand held media controller and any content on the internet or from an app can be easily watched on the big screen. (You can also stream directly from your MAC laptop or desktop). You now no longer need to be limited to what’s on at any given time or what the major media outlets want to serve you. If you are an Android user, you can essentially do the same thing with your Android phone or tablet (or from a Chrome browser on a Windows or MAC PC). In this case, you’ll use a device you plug into your TV called Chromecast that is made by Google ($35).

This small technology investment in Apple TV or Chromecast will be a dramatic step in giving you the proactive control to take your media consumption into a more positive territory. Why this is so powerful is that most of the media outlets have put their shows and other content into app format for various mobile platforms. Consuming their content through the apps gives you much more control over what and when to watch or listen. As an example, shows are often broken down into individual segments and you can choose to watch the more positive and nutritious segments and skip the rest.

The second piece of must have technology is a Digital Video Recorder (DVR’s). If you want to control the flow of information and images into your mind, then a key place to start is to remove the advertisements from your mental diet. DVR’s of course also allow you to time shift your viewing (record and watch whenever is convenient for you) and provide a key tool to replace other forms of low-calorie media content with higher quality fare. For instance, instead of watching your traditional morning or evening news program, since you’ll have shows and programs recorded on your DVR, you can watch one of them instead. Meal replacement becomes media replacement! As for DVR technology, Tivo’s software and user interface far surpasses what is available from the cable companies. You will find it easier to use and be more likely to get the most out of using DVR as part of your media diet.

Lastly, for those times in the car, find a way to connect your smartphone into your car’s audio system. The latest vehicles allow you to do this via your bluetooth connection. Otherwise, if you have an audio-in jack in the car, you can connect to that via your phone’s headphone jack.

So, now that we’ve got the technology pieces covered – Tablet, Smartphone, Apple TV / Chromecast, and DVR. Let’s move on to the actual list of 21 Ways  of how We Can Improve Our Media Diet.

Use the full power off YouTube. YouTube is thought of by many people as a place for short funny home made video clips, how-to videos, and comedy shorts. Which it is. But the reality is that YouTube is also the home to a vast array of meaningful and educational content – lectures, webinars, conference talks, documentaries, movies, and a lot more. To harness the power of Youtube to access higher quality media content- use the following approach with their website or IOS or Android App. When you find something to watch – if it’s a channel, then subscribe to it. If it’s an individual video save it to the “Watch Later” menu. If after you’ve watched something you really like and want easy access to it, save it then to the “Favorites” menu (and remove it from the Watch Later menu). Now, instead of watching what the mass media outlets want to feed you, you’ll have built up a library of specific content that you are interested in and can access easily on your PC, Tablet, or beam via Airplay or Chromecast to your Television. *On Apple TV, there is also a built in YouTube app so you can access it directly from there if you like. One tech note – the YouTube site is much improved of late, but their tablet / smart phone app (and especially the apple tv app) doesn’t seem to have all the functionality of the main site. If you find some limitations, try the free 3rd party YouTube app from Jasmine. It’s excellent.
Go to School in your Living Room with MOOCs (Massively Open Online Courses). You’ve probably heard of the company Coursera and Udacity – early pioneers of bringing courses from various colleges via the internet to people all over the world and free of charge. It’s an amazing opportunity to learn from the same professors who teach the course live at those schools. The format is composed of recorded video lectures, some off line reading, and online forums for students to collaborate, ask questions, and learn from each other. You can participate 100% and do all the viewing, reading, participating, and test taking, or just pick and choose what you want to do and don’t take any tests. It’s up to you. You can access the material any time you want. For our purposes here, what’s interesting is to work the videos of these courses into our media consumption diet. Using the technology platform described above, you could access a Coursera class for example on your tablet, and via Airplay or Chromecast view it on your TV. Instead of watching some low calore content while you’re getting ready in the morning or preparing dinner, pop on a lecture instead from a Harvard professor (most are 15 to 30 minutes in length). There are many universities now offering courses directly and there are a number of other platforms besides Coursera and Udacity. A good resource is MOOC Advisor – http://www.mooc.student.advisor.com. You can also find the listing of over 800 free online courses from universities at OpenCulture.com – http://www.openculture.com/freeonline.... MOOC platforms:  http://www.coursera.org; http://www.udacity.com; http://www.edx.org; http://futurelearn.com; http://open2study.com
Use Apps of major news shows instead of watching broadcast versions. PBS, CBS, ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and many more have apps that will allow you to pick and choose which shows to watch (and even segments within shows sometimes) and when. Though as we discussed, much of what’s on the major news networks is less than healthy for us, these stations also carry some interesting and useful content. These apps allow us to find those morsels more easily.
Substitute music in place of other media. “Music gives a soul to the universe, wings to the mind, flight to the imagination and life to everything.” Plato said that. Deep stuff. Music that elevates your mood and increases your energy is priceless. We are of course very fortunate to have almost an endless supply now at our fingertips. If you like live concert videos try Qello. You can view on your PC or MAC, tablet or phone, or there is a built in app on Apple TV. Of course, the usual music streaming services get better daily – Spotify, Pandora, iTunes Radio, Rdio, Songza, and more. If you implement Apple TV with your stereo / TV system you could of course stream content directly from one of these apps to your main system. Apple TV also has a built in app for internet radio stations which is excellent. Other apps to capture the power of radio on the internet include: Radio Paradise;  Calm Radio;  NPR Music App;  Jazz Radio; Public Radio App; Tunes Apps
Save interesting articles and other web content to Pocket for reading and viewing at a later time. The amount of content available is endless and when we first encounter something we want to read, we usually don’t have the time right then to do it. The Pocket app (formerly read it later) solves that problem – it’s a parking space for all your online content. It also formats it for you in a very clean and easy to read fashion. See my previous post on Pocket – http://www.thinksmarterworld.com/2013...
Watch less. Read more books. The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) released a study in 2007 titled – “To Read or Not To Read – A Question of National Consequence.” The study found the following: “All of the data suggest how powerfully reading transforms the lives of individuals—whatever their social circumstances. Regular reading not only boosts the likelihood of an individual’s academic and economic success—facts that are not especially surprising—but it also seems to awaken a person’s social and civic sense. Reading correlates with almost every measurement of positive personal and social behavior surveyed. It is reassuring, though hardly amazing, that readers attend more concerts and theater than non-readers, but it is surprising that they exercise more and play more sports—no matter what their educational level. The cold statistics confirm something that most readers know but have mostly been reluctant to declare as fact— books change lives for the better.” With e-books becoming ubiquitous and tablets making it easy to carry all of your new and old books with you anywhere you go, there is no excuse to read more.
Use Netflix or Amazon instant video. They both have Interesting new shows (House of Cards, etc), but don’t forget the old classics – some were just much funnier and more positive than what we have today. Frazier re-runs anyone? Portlandia and Lillehammer are worth watching for a fresh approach to comedy and drama – both on Netflix.
Go off the beaten path – The Flipboard and Zite apps make it easier to harness web content. Both of these apps bring you curated content from a wide variety of sources allowing you to essentially create your own custom magazine. Flipboard also allows you to link your Twitter and Facebook accounts and create a visually stunning display of tweets and FB posts and the associated content people have posted. One of the more interesting uses of Twitter is to tap into the content shared by fellow users who have similar (or not so similar) interests. Flipboard makes viewing these shared links more accessible and inviting.
Rediscover long-form journalism and other more in-depth, higher quality writing. Our overly stressed and multitasked brains have gotten used to in information in small chunks – from the minuscule 140 characters of Twitter to the blog post “golden rule” of 500 words. But to really understand a topic, there really isn’t any way around it, you need to consume more in-depth writing. A large number of magazines have excelled at it over the years. A few definitely worth considering include The New Yorker, The Atlantic Magazine, and The Economist. There is also a renewal underway at the The New Republic. For a shortcut, try a site called Longform – http://www.longform.com, that curates the best of long form writing from magazines and websites across the globe. In addition, there is a new site called Medium, that has was founded last year by ex-Twitter founders to promote long-form writing.
Do an audit on your current newspaper. Having travelled to over 30 countries and 40 U.S. states, I’ve had the chance to read a lot of different newspapers. There is certainly strong writing going on in a lot of different places. But for overall depth and consistency, the New York Times takes the prize. Here’s a recent piece on why NYT is so good – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/blake-f.... The Times also has an excellent tablet app that makes reading the paper a pleasure.
Explore ITunes University – Though MOOC’s are getting all the attention now, don’t forget ITunes U. They have content that MOOC’s don’t, so it’s worthwhile to check in with them. http://www.apple.com/education/ipad/i...
Visit The Internet Archive – The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of “universal access to all knowledge.”  Wow. Books, music, videos, and a lot more. This is an amazing resource. https://archive.org
Tap into the Khan Academy – with over 5,000 video tutorials covering an enormous array of topics, Sal Khan’s contribution to the advancement of knowledge for everyone cannot be overstated. Using our tech savvy content consumption method discussed earlier, we can certainly gain a lot of from including the Khan Academy in our media diets. https://www.khanacademy.org
Tune into Silence – With our abundance of ways to be entertained and educated, one thing we’ve forgotten to cherish is the benefit of silence. When we’re quiet, we can achieve greater calmness and focus, as well as generate the link to our true spiritual selves and the Universal Consciousness. With the various multimedia devices at our side nonstop, our ability to achieve stillness and silence has dwindled, and along with it the insight that comes in these moments. The good news is that we can get it back quickly; all we have to do is turn those devices off for a while, breathe deeply, be still, and listen.
Be surprised – StumbleUpon – The web is vast and we manage to interact only with a minuscule piece of it in our online travels. The site StumbleUpon helps remedy this and introduces serendipity into our web surfing. You tell SU what you like, and it will then introduce you to amazing web pages, videos, photos and more that you wouldn’t have found on your own. http://www.stumbleupon.com
Build your own media library. If we build our own collection of media, it can help us to side-step the negative fare that may happen to be on at any given time. We can then become proactive instead of reactive to our media environment. You can create a healthy collection of books, audiobooks, videos, movies, music, podcasts, and magazines that you can access easily from your multimedia devices. With so many cloud based apps, this becomes even easier and most apps allow you to create folders and playlists to keep things organized and easy to find.
Step up into Higher Consciousness with Gaiam TV.  Gaiam TV streams inspirational movies, documentaries, and educational videos on six different on-line channels. http://www.gaiamtv.com. You can also try Spiritual Cinema Circle, which is a sister site to Gaiam TV. Spiritual Cinema Circle sends 4 actual DVD’s to you per month (which you keep) and also includes a subscription to Gaiam TV as part of their offering. http://www.spiritualcinemacircle.com
Read these magazines to keep your mind focused on the positive and the possible – The Intelligent Optimist, Mindful Magazine, Yes! Magazine, Good Magazine, Utne Reader
Read these websites and blogs to feed your mind and soul healthy, insightful, and nutritious fare: Open Culture, Farnam Street Blog, Truth Dig, Big Think, Brain Pickings, Asian Efficiency Blog, Conscious Life News, The Daily Good. There is a big, positive, beautiful world out there that the mainstream media doesn’t want to cover. These resources, and many others, will show it to you.
Turn off all your devices take a 20-minute meditation break instead. Meditation, the practice of calming your mind by slowing down and eliminating random thoughts, is perhaps the best stress reduction technique available to us. Scientists and Physicians are even finding it useful for treating depression, as consistent meditation is being shown in functional MRI scans to positively alter the areas of the brain that are used in emotional response, memory capability, and even our ability to learn. For an outstanding resource to view explanatory videos on meditation, visit: http://www.how-to-meditate.org/videos
Get inspired by TED talks and tap into the cutting edge of thinking in 18 minute portions. TED is a nonprofit devoted to spreading ideas, usually in the form of short, powerful talks (18 minutes or less). TED began in 1984 as a conference where Technology, Entertainment and Design converged, and today covers almost all topics — from science to business to global issues. A newly designed website is coming soon and will have links and additional content to explore with each of the videos.  https://www.ted.com

I hope you’ll try some (or many) of the 21 ideas. I am confident they will make a very positive impact on your life. For now, I’ll leave you a brief paragraph from Reiki teacher Ted Murray on Starting and Ending your day well:

End your day well, start your day well

~Ted Murray

What is the last thing you fill your mind with before going to bed and the first thing you begin your day with in the morning? This time is very critical, as it will determine what your subconscious brain focuses on during sleep and what sets your mood for the day. Watching TV or scary movies may help cause disturbed sleep or dreams, whereas jumping immediately into the problems of the world by reading the newspaper may not lead to a great frame of mind either.

Why not try developing a habit of reading something uplifting just before dozing off to sleep and immediately upon awakening? If this becomes your habit you will be reinforcing the positive changes you wish to experience. Your mind processes what is being input into it. If you continually input empowering statements and inspiring thoughts about the pure source energy of the universe you will naturally increase that presence in your life. Why not put one of your favorite books as your bedside inspirational reading and begin to develop that habit today?

Notes

“String theory (within Quantum Physics) holds that everything in the universe is composed of tiny vibrating strings of energy. In this view, every particle in your body, every speck of light that lets you read these words, and every force of gravity that pushes you into your chair is just a variant of this one fundamental entity. The denser something is, the lower its vibration, and the smaller its footprint. On our world, humans interpret a stone as being denser than a tree, and vibrating at a slower frequency. A tree is denser than a human. After nothingness, a thought is the least dense thing in our experience. Therefore, its first intriguing property is that it has the highest energy of anything we can conceptualize. It can kill or cure, invent a nuclear weapon or a romantic moment.” Futhermore, “The Law of Conservation of Energy is a law of physics that states the total amount of energy in an isolated system (such as a thought) remains constant over time. It cannot be destroyed, and it does not deplete if we simply forget we had it. Einstein’s theory of relativity shows that mass is energy, and the two are interchangeable. Energy becomes mass and vice versa. A thought has no other role than to try to become its physical equivalent (mass). Therefore, because their energy remains conserved, the reality of your life experience today is the result of the thoughts you emitted in your life up to now, regardless of whether you remember having them” Excerpt From: Trevor Blake. “Three Simple Steps.” iBooks. https://itun.es/us/bRmaC.l

Resources

“How Fast is the Speed of a Thought?” – Martin J. Tovee, Psychology Department, Newcastle University, UK – https://www.science.smith.edu/departm...
“Bad News Revised: The Portrayal of Violence, Confllict, and Suffering on Television News” by Roger N. Johnson of Ramapo Collegehttp://arapaho.nsuok.edu/~scottd/body...
“Why we love bad news”, Psychology Today, http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/w...
“To Read or Not To Read – A Question of National Consequence.” – http://arts.gov/sites/default/files/T...

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2014: Moving Beyond Tribalism

In the West, we routinely look down upon cultures we consider “Tribal” in nature.  We associate the term with people who are too narrowly focused within a limited circle of trust and are unable to interact and collaborate with people outside their core group.  In America over the last ten years, we have been perplexed as to how to deal with the culture of people we are in armed conflict with in various parts of the world, who are strongly tribal in their mindset.  Ironically, as that has been playing out, we have escalated and amplified our own home-grown American Tribalism to record heights.  At its most basic level, American Tribalism manifests itself in many different ways on a daily basis:

The 1% vs. the 99%
Blue States vs. Red States
Our “Partners and Allies” and Everyone Else
Climate Change Believers, and Climate Change Deniers
Gun Control Supporters, and Anti Gun Control Advocates
Our Daily Obsession with Winners and Losers in All Most Everything We Do

The distinguished humanist, Dr. Pat Duffy Hutcheon has written eloquently on tribalism and defined it this way:

Tribalism is simply the deeply ingrained human habit of identifying oneself in terms of the group; of viewing one’s own in-group as somehow special and superior to others; and of discouraging social intercourse (or any other type of intercourse) with members of the out-group . In many ways we are all prone to tribalism. It is deeply rooted in our evolutionary history and biological heritage. It stems from the kin selection that evolved in response to the ever-present dangers to self and family in primitive times: a process resulting in the encouragement of adult members of the clan to sacrifice themselves, if necessary, for the survival of their own offspring and those of their siblings. Because of the way evolution works, this pattern of behavior had the consequence of preserving the genes of those individuals who behaved in a tribalistic way, while eliminating the others… It is easy to see how, in the early stages of the development of the human species, these essentially tribal drives served to sustain and protect the group. Groups that did not respond to outsiders in this way failed to survive to reproduce their kind. This is why tribal feelings make us feel good in the deepest recesses of our being.

In 2014 in much of the developed world, we do not need to fear from the physical attack of opposing tribes.  Yet, we continue to behave as if our very lives are in danger during the the normal course of the day – at work, while watching a sporting event, while driving, and certainly in our political choices.

At its core, this Tribalism stems from our belief in the separateness of ourselves from others.  If those others think, act, and look like us, then the distance in that separation narrows.  If not, then we revert to our primitive survival instinct.  The Other is not Us, we must prosper, and the Other must not.  Many of the world’s spiritual traditions – Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, and more -  for the last five thousand years have been telling us how the separation between people is an illusion, that we are in fact the same, one, and interconnected. Quantum Physics is also showing us at the subatomic level, everything and everyone is one big, connected energy field.  We do not exist in isolation from each other, we are highly interconnected.  This implies that what we do to others is essentially doing it to ourselves.  Based on this logic, societies with deep regard for social cohesion and the success, safety, and dignity of all individuals would achieve more peace and happiness than those that do not appreciate those values.

We are connected to the Earth as well – all aspects of our material world are part of the same energy field.  Actions we take to enhance the world’s energy field result in good things, what we do to lower the energy field, causes disastrous effects.  We therefore have a responsibility to each other and the planet we live on.  When we don’t respect the earth, that low dose energy we deposit into the environment has consequences.

If we believed all this to be true, how would our individual behavior look differently from what we are doing now?  For one, winning and losing would lose its importance.  Certainly, we would want to do well at meaningful goals we set out to accomplish, but winning at some one else’s expense (or the Earth) would show itself to be counterproductive.  Why beat ourselves?  Instead, we would seek more to collaborate and co-create.

Our definition of who’s on our team would also dramatically expand.  For some people, their team is limited to their actual blood relations, their direct family, or the particular temporary team they are part of (job, sports, etc).  For others it may be people affiliated with their religious faith, or their political party.  Going a bit larger, some may expand their circle of inclusion all the way up to their country and then from there, people of the same race.  But to truly move beyond tribalism, we would realize the circle envelopes the whole human race.  Everyone is on the same team.  And what we do that affects others on the planet, would be the same as affecting ourselves.

With this mindset, could we look at things such as climate change, energy policy, and efforts to combat poverty in the same way?  Unfortunately, at this moment, we have too many people on the planet operating on a limited team mindset – what’s good for their particular team, regardless of its effects on others is their primary concern.  The crisis that we have now entered is that most of the really big issues we face require cooperation across nations, and within sharply divided groups within nations (climate change, persistent poverty, financial system regulation, managing the effects of rapid technological progress, shortage of global energy and food supplies, clean water issues, etc).  It is very difficult to live as an Island in the 21st century.  The small tribe mentality won’t be enough to conquer these challenges.  Only the realization that we are all One, One Team, One Unified Whole, can get us to where we need to go.

But what can each of us do in our daily lives?

Operate in the world, as if everyone we meet is a potential friend or co-creator.
Search for the goodness inherent in everyone and embrace the mutual commonality.  It’s there.  The external form (how someone looks, their ethnicity, where they came from, etc) is a mere temporary covering of the soul and someone’s beliefs are transitory states of their mind and their ego.
Move from win-lose to win-win.  Celebrate the effort and accomplishments of others just as you do your own.  The more we embrace the success of others, the more we attract success into our own lives.
Support organizations, businesses, and people that promote inclusion and avoid those that create and feed divisiveness into our society.
Help elevate societal consciousness and especially that of our children. As an example, in the 21st century, do we need to continue playing and supporting sports that are based on physical violence?
Realize that the Earth is a living organism (see the interesting article referenced below on the emerging field of plant neurobiology).  It is not a static rock.  What actions we take against the planet have physical repercussions.  Civilizations who were close to nature intimately understood this fact.  Align your purchasing, consumption, and voting decisions accordingly.

Resources for further exploration:

Dr. Pat Duffy Hutcheon – “Can Humanism Stem the Rising Tide of Tribalism?” – http://patduffyhutcheon.com/tribalism.htm
David Ropeik, “Tribalism:  Making a Risky World, Even More Dangerous” – http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-ropeik/tribalism-making-a-risky-_b_1518957.html
Michael Pollan, “How Smart are Plants?”, The New Yorker Magazine – http://nyr.kr/18CbzQ1
G.W. McGee – “Eco-Moral Tribalism as a New-World Ethic” – http://www.wakingtimes.com/2012/05/27/eco-moral-tribalism-as-a-new-world-ethic/
Jay Kshatri – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World – Chapter 9 – “How Science and Spirituality Converge to Reveal the Oneness of our Reality” – http://www.thinksmarterworld.com/inside-book-think-smarter-digitally-enabled-world/

By Jay Kshatri, Think Smarter World

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Meet the Technology that Wants Your Job

Photo Courtesy of CompFight

The continued rate of high unemployment around the world has many causes.  But one trend in particular has the capability to truly replace us all – Robotics.

Nowhere is robotics taken more seriously than in Japan.  The nation’s scientists have embraced robotics more than any other nation and estimates are that Japan has over 30% of the world’s deployed robots.  Most of these are of course used in manufacturing, but Japanese researchers are hard at work to invent robot technology that can be used in day to day society.

A NY Times article from a few of weeks ago – “Computers Jump  to the Head of the Class” – reported on a project started by a University of Tokyo math professor, Noriko Arai called “Can a Computer Enter Tokyo University?”.  The essence of the project is to create a computer with the ability to pass the entrance exam for Tokyo University by 2021.  TU is Japan’s top university and by far the most difficult to get into.  Even after years of preparation only a very small percentage of applicants are able to pass the grueling test.  The idea is that that if a computer can pass the TU entrance exam, then it theoretically should be able to perform most jobs done by university graduates.

How’s it going so far? Ms. Arai states “With the development of artificial intelligence, computers are starting to crack human skills like information summarization and language processing.  Given the exponential growth in computing power and advances in artificial intelligence, or AI programs, the TU robot’s task, though daunting, is feasible”.  She goes on to say that “so far, her protege is excelling in math and history but needs more effort in reading comprehension.”

Robots have already made huge inroads into the manufacturing world and the pictures of a large manufacturing floor turning out cars or electronics with very little human intervention is a sight to behold.  But “white collar” thought based work is something completely different.  We’ve always thought that “human judgement and creativity” would be safe for many years from the advancements of robotics and artificial intelligence.  But that assumption no longer holds.

Professor Arai herself recognizes the looming problem: “There is significant danger, Ms. Arai says, that the widespread adoption of artificial intelligence, if not well managed, could lead to a radical restructuring of economic activity and the job market, outpacing the ability of social and education systems to adjust.”  Chilling, no doubt.  You can visualize the bumper stickers that will appear:

“Keep Human jobs in Human Hands”
“A Robot Stole My Job and All I Got left is this Bumper Sticker”
“Robots Don’t have Hearts, Hire a Human”

In the case of Robotics, the changes it will impact on the nature of employment could be dramatic. Dr. Adai speculated on the implications:

Intelligent machines could be used to replace expensive human resources, potentially undermining the economic value of much vocational education.
High salary jobs would remain for those equipped with problem-solving skills, but many common tasks now done by college graduates may vanish.
We do not know in which areas human beings outperform machines.  That means we cannot prepare for the changes.  Even during the industrial revolution, change was a lot slower.
Over the next 10 to 20 years, ten percent to twenty percent pushed out of work by AI will be a catastrophe.  I can’t begin to think what 50 percent would mean – way beyond a catastrophe and such numbers can’t be ruled out if AI performs well in the future.”  *Dr. Arai’s concern is confirmed by a study published by Oxford University’s Program on the Impacts of Future Technology – which predicts that possibly half of all jobs in the U.S. could be replaced by AI based computers sometime in the next 20 years.

This problem of technological advance upending every aspect of our lives will be with us for a long time.  Sometimes the answer will be to work hard to stop a particular development from occurring as the costs far outweigh the societal gains, and in some cases the answer may be to use the particular technology development as a gateway to enable change in other parts of society for an overall net positive good.

An important book published this past year from economist Tyler Cowan – Average is Over:  Powering America Beyond the Age of the Great Stagnation – speaks eloquently and starkly about the impact of computerization on today’s workforce.  In the book he makes clear that those who succeed in the next decade will be those who have skills to work synergistically with computerized technology.  Examples of this would be those in the financial world using computer algorithms in conjunction with their financial trading expertise to increase their results.   Or, surgeons using robotic technology to perform difficult surgeries with more precision and higher probability of success.  So in essence, those jobs where a computer can’t (yet) replace a human, but can enhance his or her function, will become more valuable.  Those jobs where a computer can essentially do the whole task, will go away.  Mr. Cowan does point out that there will be some jobs where human interaction, decision making, and judgement will for a long time outpace the ability of computers – nursing or coaching are examples.

In both Mr. Cowan’s and Professor Adai’s comments, the truth remains that these are trends that are occurring and are not going away. The problem is that it’s not realistic to believe that large amounts of our workforce will easily be able to migrate to advanced skill level work.  Or, that there will be enough jobs for everyone in those areas even if they could.  Unless we expect to have most of our population in low-paying service sector jobs (one would have to believe robotics would affect those as well ultimately), then there must be another answer.

One possible solution is being explored by a number of European countries and Switzerland in particular.  Late in 2013, Switzerland announced that enough votes by its citizens was obtained (100,000) for its “Citizens’ Initiative for Unconditional Basic Income” to force a referendum vote on the measure sometime possibly in 2014.  The proposal’s aim is to provide a Basic Income Guarantee to each of its citizens over the voting age – a yearly stipend equivalent to $2,800 per month.

There aren’t many details available, but at its core the idea is to replace all other social welfare benefits and just provide everyone with the basic monthly payment. All the various forms of governmental aid could then be eliminated – no more housing assistance, foodstamps, welfare checks, head start, school lunches, etc.   There is now also a European Union wide initiative that is similar and has more details – (see resources below).   Other countries, including the U.S., have contemplated a similar scheme and with different variations.  Say, instead of a flat payment, people would be given extra income on top of what they are currently earning to get them to a minimum threshold.  For example, if you are earning the minimum wage and only making $12,000 a year, then perhaps you will receive another $12,000 to get you to a minimum living wage.

Corporate profits are at an all time high, income inequality in the U.S. is at an all time high, and robots and other computer based technologies continue to replace the need for humans doing the work.  Just as companies look for the lowest wage labor sources among countries, they are doing the same with technology substitutes for the labor itself.  Or, as Tyler Cowan points out, technology co-partners to humans.  Either way, more of what needs to get done in the world of work, will continue to be outsourced to machines.  In some ways, this is a good thing – what we’ve been waiting for all along.  The march to a society where humans can focus on their most creative aspects and leave the drudgery to the machines.

Could then an Unconditional Basic Income unleash a tsunami of human creativity, entrepreneurism, and cultural renaissance?  The impact of today’s situation of high poverty (one in five children in America live in poverty), one or both parents in low income households working two jobs, has a number of societal affects that impact all of us, not just those directly affected.  No one lives in a bubble (well, some do come close…).  We can all be affected by the individual circumstances of our fellow citizens – crime in general, class mates and co-workers experiencing mental health issues, overly stressed workers at businesses we frequent, and more.  In that regard, giving every citizen a basic floor of safety, where they can at least eat and live with some stability and positively affect their families (and society) in the process would seem to be a huge net positive for all of us.  Include health care and higher education into the mix and we could see a radically different and flourishing society.

Would people be disincentivized to work?  Perhaps some would, but the amounts being discussed (a plan for the U.S. was proposed at $1,700 per month), would hardly allow people to frequent fine dining establishments, purchase lavish vacations, and play golf every day.  There would still be plenty of incentives to earn higher incomes.   What it may do instead, is to give people a safety net to pursue their passions and take more career risks.  Would you take on a new job, perhaps even move your family in the process, if you knew there was a measure of safety in place for you?  Would more people try their hand at creating new businesses and ventures?  I think yes.  In this scenario, Capitalism doesn’t go away, it instead gets unleashed with more creativity (and yes, more safety for all citizens).

The interesting thing is that the Unconditional Basic Income (first proposed in 1972 in the U.S. by Senator George McGovern) has both liberal and conservative supporters.  In fact, Libertarian writer Matthew Feeney wrote an article last November titled, “Why Libertarians should embrace a guaranteed basic income”.  He outlined the benefits he sees the Guaranteed Basic Income bringing:

Whatever the outcome of the Swiss referendum, libertarians in the U.S. and elsewhere should support the idea of a basic income as a replacement for the current welfare systems on offer. The welfare system in the U.S. is an ineffective and expensive mess, but it is unlikely that the majority of the American public are going to be persuaded to support the outright abolition of the welfare state any time soon. Rather than make the principled argument against the redistribution of wealth, libertarians would do better if they were to argue for a welfare system that promotes personal responsibility, reduces the humiliations associated with the current system, and reduces administrative waste in government.

The interesting thing is that given the pace of technological change, we may have no choice but to radically re-envision how we take care of our citizens.  The figure in the University of Oxford report of 50% job replacement by robots in 2 decades – may be wildly off the mark.  But even 20% or 30% in that same time period would be devestating.  Are we prepared for that?  Perhaps the Swiss will make their proposal a reality and provide us a test case for the future.  The clock is ticking…those Robots are fast learners…

By Jay Kshatri

Resources

The Future of Employment:  How Susceptible are Jobs to Computerization?, by Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael A. Osborne both of Oxford University –  September 17, 2013 - http://www.oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf
“Computers Jump to the Head of the Class”, NY Times, by Michael Fitzpatrick - http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/30/world/asia/computers-jump-to-the-head-of-the-class.html?_r=0
The Second Machine Age , by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee – both professors at MIT
Exploring the Basic Income Guarantee , by Allan Sheahen
Daily Finance article on Swiss Basic Income Guarantee proposal:  http://www.dailyfinance.com/2013/11/27/switzerland-basic-income-guarantee-fight-poverty/
EU proposal for Basic Minimum Income - http://www.basicincome2013.eu/en/index.html#UBI
“Why Libertarians should support the guaranteed basic income.”, BusinessInsider.com, by Matthew Feeney –   http://www.businessinsider.com/a-libertarian-writer-shows-why-conservatives-should-support-a-guaranteed-minimum-income-2013-11#ixzz2sw2yPWr8

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Systems Thinking – the Missing Piece of the Puzzle

If I could have one wish granted for 2014, it would be for more people in the world to adopt a Systems Thinking mindset.  Here’s why:

Systems Thinking is essentially another way to say “Look at the complete picture.” Any given topic, issue, or event has multiple inputs and outputs that influence its outcome, so our ability to grasp the big picture of the many challenges we face in the world today is paramount for us to understand and deal with them in an effective manner.

I sometimes think too many of us look at various situations and current events as if we believe we can figure out the entire jigsaw puzzle by only looking at a couple of the pieces. I’m sure you can imagine how difficult that would be, if not impossible. But the more pieces you have, the better you can put the puzzle together and solve it, right? You can see different parts intersecting, and you can make the connections to the overall whole. That’s what systems thinking is: seeing the interconnection among the small pieces and then perceiving how they create the big picture.

When you don’t proactively seek to understand all the pieces of the puzzle and how they affect each other, in essence what you do is make a snap judgment based on one small part of the picture. You might pick up one piece of the puzzle and say, “Hmmm, this looks like a cat, and I don’t like cats! And, hey, this other fellow on the radio or TV says he saw that puzzle piece, and he doesn’t like cats either. I’m with him; we have to stick together, we cat haters!”

Doesn’t that sound silly?

The only way to avoid missing the big picture and to understand the complete story is to seek out all (or most) of the puzzle pieces, see how they fit together, and then get clear on what you’re really looking at.

Now, one word of caution: there will be people out there who will try to “supply” you with additional pieces that—wait for it—will make you think you still see a cat! What that means is that you must be vigilant in making sure you get high-quality, validated information to put your puzzle together. Otherwise … yup … cats everywhere.

We’re all living within systems of one sort or another, and we ourselves are a system (the human body). There are closed systems— those that don’t need any external input for their survival, and open systems—those that maintain their existence through external input.

All systems, however, maintain their existence through the mutual interaction of their parts. To manage the system optimally, it’s important to understand how its parts are connected, and how it interacts with other systems. When the parts stop interacting effectively, the entire system breaks down. We need only look around us to realize that many of our personal, civic, and corporate systems are in trouble.

Therefore, as systems thinking expert Linda Booth Sweeney has said in her excellent primer, systems thinking allows us to:

See the world around us in terms of wholes, rather than as single events, or “snapshots” of life
See and sense how the parts of systems work together, rather than just see the parts as a collection of unrelated pieces
See how the relationships between the elements in a system influence the patterns of behavior and events to which we react
Understand that life is always moving and changing, rather than static
Understand how one event can influence another, even if the second event occurs a long time after the first, and “far away” from the first
Know that what we see happening around us depends on where we are in the system

We, individuals, are part of a number of systems: our workplace, our community, our country, and our extended family.  For you to function effectively, you need to understand the components of those systems, how they interact, what inputs exist, and the desired outputs. When we start seeing the world we live in as dynamic networks with many moving parts, we stop looking at black and white answers to complex problems.

Systems thinker Michael Goodman has written that:

An inherent assumption of the systems thinking worldview is that problems are internally generated—that we often create our own “worst nightmares” … The systems thinking worldview dispels the “us versus them” mentality by expanding the boundary of our thinking. With the framework of systems thinking, “us” and “them” are part of the same system and thus responsible for both the problems and their solutions.

Nature is an example of a complex system that has many feedback mechanisms to maintain its balance. As with any system, however, if the self- regulating feedback mechanisms are subverted or ignored, then the system can become unstable or break down.

A superior illustration of this is the human body. It’s a marvel for its automatic feedback mechanisms that regulate the proper functioning of body processes, alerting us anytime something is wrong. If, for example, we don’t get sufficient sleep, don’t eat the right foods, or experience too much stress, our bodies let us know. It provides feedback either through disease, fatigue, or other symptoms of a problem in the system.

It’s our ability to understand these complex systems—their individual pieces, how they interact, the feedback loops, the inputs, and the desired outputs—that ultimately determines our mastery of the world around us. In any given endeavor we undertake—from our jobs to our hobbies, from our spirituality and religious practices to raising our families, and even in our roles as active and informed citizens within a democracy—our ability to execute these roles effectively is enhanced by our understanding of the systems we operate within and exert influence over.

If, for example, we only look at one or two pieces of the whole, we may choose actions that don’t work in the best interests of ourselves or the larger system. This is what can happen when our understanding of the news is through “sound bites” from various television or radio shows, or from brief, high-level articles in a newspaper. These will show you one part of the puzzle, but often it’s to fool you into thinking you’re looking at a cat.

By seeing the connectedness among us, we avoid the mistake of believing our actions exist in a vacuum that is isolated from the rest of society. We clearly see how we affect others and vice versa, which helps us make better decisions about how to operate in the world and how we need others to do so as well. Furthermore, we can see how the combination of the various parts of a system working together will effectively outperform the individual pieces working alone. This is what the concept of synergy is all about: 1+1=3. Great teams of all types thrive on getting the individual components to work well together to create above-and-beyond results for the team as a whole.

In fact, one organization—The Waters Foundation—is working to introduce systems thinking principles throughout grades K-12 in schools across the country. Their stated vision is “to deliver academic and lifetime benefits to students through the effective application of systems thinking concepts, habits and tools in classroom instruction, and school improvement.”  At a high level, they aim to teach children habits of a Systems Thinker and get kids started early in understanding the world in a more effective manner.

The Habits are:

Seeks to understand the big picture
Observes how elements within systems change over time, generating patterns and trends
Recognizes that a system’s structure generates its behavior b Identifies the circular nature of complex cause and effect relationships
Changes perspectives to increase understanding
Surfaces and tests assumptions
Considers an issue fully and resists the urge to come to a quick conclusion
Considers how mental models affect current reality and the future
Uses understanding of system structure to identify possible leverage actions
Considers both short- and long-term consequences of actions b Finds where unintended consequences emerge
Recognizes the impact of time delays when exploring cause and effect relationships
Checks results and changes actions if needed (”Successive Approximation”)

I think these are habits both the young and their elders around the world would do well to emulate.  Here’s hoping 2014 is the year more of us decide to embrace Systems Thinking in order to make the world a better place for all of us.

Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

*This post is based on an excerpt from Chapter 5 of my book – Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World.  

➨ If you liked this post, please share it with others on your various social networks.
Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World - is available for a Free Download on the site Story Cartel, till January 8th.  Here is the link - http://storycartel.com/books/529/thin...

Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World.   The book is about changing the world through mastering holistic systems thinking.  With massive technological change and globalization affecting almost every facet of our lives, the “Killer App” in the 21st century will be the ability to Continuously Learn and leverage our capability for Proactive Thought. With the Internet, we now have instantaneous access to the world’s collective knowledge – which grows exponentially every year.  Those who can access it, analyze it, make sense of it, organize it, and put it into action will deeply accelerate their personal and professional success.  It will require using a new set of thinking tools, fully harnessing our digital technologies and apps, understanding how to see the systemic interconnections in our daily lives, and learning to maximize the combination of our logical left brain and our intuitive, creative, and spiritual right brain.  The book gives the reader the tools, techniques, and strategies to accomplish this goal.

The post Systems Thinking – the Missing Piece of the Puzzle appeared first on Think Smarter World.

A Light Hearted Explanation of Social Media [Snippet]

A Light Hearted Explanation of Social Media
I thought I would start off 2014 in a light hearted fashion – hope you enjoy this tongue-in-cheek comparison of the various Social Media platforms.  Wishing you all much Success and Happiness in 2014!

Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

➨ If you liked this post, please share it with others on your various social networks.
My new book, Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World – is available for a Free Download on the site Story Cartel, till January 8th.  Here is the link - http://storycartel.com/books/529/thin...

Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World.   The book is about changing the world through mastering holistic systems thinking.  With massive technological change and globalization affecting almost every facet of our lives, the “Killer App” in the 21st century will be the ability to Continuously Learn and leverage our capability for Proactive Thought. With the Internet, we now have instantaneous access to the world’s collective knowledge – which grows exponentially every year.  Those who can access it, analyze it, make sense of it, organize it, and put it into action will deeply accelerate their personal and professional success.  It will require using a new set of thinking tools, fully harnessing our digital technologies and apps, understanding how to see the systemic interconnections in our daily lives, and learning to maximize the combination of our logical left brain and our intuitive, creative, and spiritual right brain.  The book gives the reader the tools, techniques, and strategies to accomplish this goal.

The post A Light Hearted Explanation of Social Media [Snippet] appeared first on Think Smarter World.

The 4 Steps to F-A-L-L (ing) well this Holiday Season

As I look back on this year, I come to realize that the best moments have been when I have FALL(en).  More precisely, when I have been able to Forgive, Accept, Love, and Laugh.

Photo – Jasmign Hormann

1.  Forgiveness – in a season focused on giving gifts, forgiveness may be the most special gift you can give to anyone.  It’s also the the most important gift you can give to yourself.  That’s because the act of forgiveness gives you emotional freedom:

“When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.” – Katherine Ponder

When someone or something has upset me, I will quietly say to myself – “forgive and forget”.  More often than not, the emotional link will dissolve and freedom will return.

2.   Acceptance – things are changing from moment to moment in our material world.  Yet, we feel great distress when something that is happening in the moment is not going our way.  But we forget that it is fleeting. It is not permanent.  I find the practice of acceptance opens up the beauty in the world.  Instead of my mind fighting what is happening it starts to enjoy the experience.  The two dimensional distinction between good and bad starts to dissolve and a richer multi-dimensional picture emerges. Gratitude and appreciation start to emerge and replace the fear and distress.

 “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” ― Lao Tzu

3.  Love - As December 25th nears, one has to remember that the key message of Christ was to love others as you love yourself.  Our society seems so far off from that at times.  Our media, our politics, our economics, and our entertainment routinely reinforces the ethic of Us versus Them, Winners and Losers, The Haves and Have Nots, and The 1% vs. the 99%.

My understanding of what Jesus was saying is that we are all One, the same, and all interconnected.  How and what we do to others is essentially the same as doing it to ourselves.  The world then is essentially a mirror of our actions, intentions, and emotions. Love others, and love flows back to you.  Hate, injure, insult, and cheat others, and that comes back to you as well.  Or as another saying said, “Give What You Seek to Receive“. If we all operated on this level of universal love for all, seeing that the “other” is an illusion, how would that change the world?

“If we are the same, if we are connected, then a good way to view others is that we are co-creators in this life we’re sharing.  In any situation you encounter, if you believe the others participating with you in that moment are co-creators who have come together and have the ability to collaborate and raise or lower the energy level of a situation, it can dramatically alter your approach to life.”  From Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World

4.  Laughter – Is there a better medicine?  Having a good laugh with my family cures all.  I forget this from time to time as my work or any of the million serious things happening in the world takes over my psyche.  Usually when I am not getting enough laughter, it is because I am not fully practicing steps 1-3 above.  I vow to change that right now and it will certainly be on my list of resolutions for the new year.

“Laughter is carbonated holiness.” ― Anne Lamott

So here’s wishing that you F-A-L-L often this holiday season and well into the New Year!

By Jay Kshatri

www.ThinkSmarterWorld.com

➨ If you liked this post, please share it with others on your various social networks.

If you want to gain more insight into the topics in this post, please see Think Smarter in a Digitally Enabled World: A 21st Century Life Manual for Amplifying Your Knowledge, Achieving Your Potential & Changing the World.   The book is about changing the world through mastering holistic systems thinking.  With massive technological change and globalization affecting almost every facet of our lives, the “Killer App” in the 21st century will be the ability to Continuously Learn and leverage our capability for Proactive Thought. With the Internet, we now have instantaneous access to the world’s collective knowledge – which grows exponentially every year.  Those who can access it, analyze it, make sense of it, organize it, and put it into action will deeply accelerate their personal and professional success.  It will require using a new set of thinking tools, fully harnessing our digital technologies and apps, understanding how to see the systemic interconnections in our daily lives, and learning to maximize the combination of our logical left brain and our intuitive, creative, and spiritual right brain.  The book gives the reader the tools, techniques, and strategies to accomplish this goal.

The post The 4 Steps to F-A-L-L (ing) well this Holiday Season appeared first on Think Smarter World.