The inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness. Because these people struggled to filter the world, they ended up letting everything in. They couldn’t help but be open-minded.
Such lapses in attention turn out to be a crucial creative skill. When we’re faced with a difficult problem, the most obvious solution—that first idea we focus on—is probably wrong. At such moments, it often helps to consider far-fetched possibilities, to approach the task from an unconventional perspective. And this is why distraction is helpful: People unable to focus are more likely to consider information that might seem irrelevant but will later inspire the breakthrough. When we don’t know where to look, we need to look everywhere.
Even though I still get those old pangs of dread as I approach the dark basement, complete with its creaky door, they are something I can overcome with a little internal discourse that resolves itself before I reach out for the doorknob. It's an ongoing grudge match between rationality and neurosis.
One such dialogue might start with the simple argument that a door that creaks contains no more evil than a nice quiet one. This logic, I rebut, simply eliminates creakiness as a criteria for evil in a basement door and only results in a fear of all basement doors regardless of their creakiness—an uppercut to the chin of rationality.
Pulling itself off the mat after that blow and with time running out, rationality counters with a sucker punch of its own. Eschewing logic for sheer impact it goes for the old "Don’t be such a baby!" approach. TKO for rationality. The preposterousness of a grown man being afraid of his own basement is a compelling thing.
A rule like "Never tell a lie" seems attractive because it's unambiguous and easy to follow. But in my experience, unambiguous and easy-to-follow rules tend to fall apart as soon as you ask, "Wait, what should I really care about?" Reality is generally far too multidimensional and messy to admit such a cut-and-dry rule. Once we recognize that communication is what matters, we are forced to acknowledge that the corresponding rule, "Never communicate a falsity," is not followable! There are tradeoffs.
In this experiment, we paired two people and assigned them the roles of player 1 and player 2. We gave player 1 $10 and asked her to chose how much money to give to player 2. We also told both players that each dollar sent to player 2 would be tripled. For example, if player 1 gave away all $10, then player 2 would receive $30. Player 2 was then asked to choose how much money to send back to player 1 (but this time it was not tripled). So if player 2 received $30 and wanted to split it fifty-fifty, then he could send back $15 to player 1 and keep $15 for himself. Player 1 would earn an extra $5 as a result.
This game is called the trust game because the first player's decision indicates how much she trusts the second player to return some of the money she is giving away. By the same token, the second player's decision indicates how "trustworthy" he is.
On average, player 1 sent over $5 and roughly one third of the time player 2 reciprocated by sending back more than was originally sent even though the double-blind condition implied no one would know what player 2 really did.
Cloaca demonstrates that in modern art, cachet overshadows aesthetics.
One can believe that Cloaca lowers art, or one can believe that Cloaca elevates poop. Behold the machine: huge complex, unfathomable, with advanced computers required to monitor complicated chemical processes beyond the comprehension of the museum-goer watching the turtlehead emerge -- all this to recreate what happens in our gastrointestinal tract! How wonderfully mysterious and intricate is the human body! How remarkable that a process requiring so much equipment and electrical power and money and real estate happens so effortlessly inside our abdomens in an area the size of a basketball! Cloaca has pushed art, technology, and biology to their extreme, but the human body easily outpoops it.
So why shouldn't poop be in the museum? Art celebrates and criticizes humanity, after all, and what are humans but six-foot-tall pooping machines? Is anything more relevant to the human condition than the poop we all experience? Is anything a better representative of the species?
At both the individual and the population levels, it is more effective for you to lose weight with friends of friends than with friends. The problem is this: If you attempt to lose weight with your friends, you might succeed, but this tiny cluster of you and your friends is surrounded by a large group of people exerting pressure to gain weight again. In all likelihood, both you and your friends will thus regain weight.
Many of our social institutions -- and laws in particular -- implicitly assume that human actions are largely the product of conscious knowledge and intention, willpower and education.
It turns out that the most important aspect of being a law-abiding citizen is the ability to understand social rules. We don't avoid shoplifting merely because we consciously know it is wrong, or because it is against the law. Most of us don't shoplift because our unconscious brain tells us it is a violation of rules of social interaction. It is the fear of social opprobrium -- the contempt of store clerks and security officials and fellow customers if we should get caught, or the shame that would befall us if our friends and colleagues learned about our actions -- that keeps people honest, not all the laws in the world.
It doesn't feel that way, of course. It is only when we see patients with a disorder such as frontotemporal dementia that we realize that most of us can claim very little credit for our conscious notion of morality. Patients with frontotemporal dementia don't stop being able to tell right from wrong; they simply stop caring about shame and social opprobrium.
One study of sixteen patients with frontotemporal dementia found that among them, the group was guilty of "unsolicited sexual approach or touching," hit-and-run accidents, physical assaults, shoplifting, public urination, breaking into other people's homes, and even one case of pedophilia. The patients readily acknowledged their actions were wrong -- but showed no remorse. They knew they were breaking the law, but it didn't matter to them.
We have two systems of learning within our heads that develop more or less independently, and we pay almost no attention to one of them. Our society resolutely believes the conscious mind is all that matters, and so all our educational and legal efforts focus on it. We have schools with multicultural messages and rainbow flags. We have organizational experts who preach the importance of sensitivity and understanding. We have laws to punish hate crimes. Many of our interventions are based on the belief that prejudice involves conscious intention or hostility, that it is largely the result of ignorance, and that education is the best way to overcome it.
As you can see from Frances Aboud's work, each of these beliefs is wrong in a fundamental way. The children were not being taught by their teachers that whites were superior to blacks; all the efforts at the school were trying to communicate tolerance, not prejudice. Separate from what the children were learning consciously, however, they were unconsciously learning something else altogether.
In May 1961, Italian artist Piero Manzoni exhibited ninety cans of his poop in an art gallery in Albisola, Italy. This wasn't shit, it was art. Each can comprising Merda d'Artista ("Artist's Shit") was signed, numbered, and wrapped in a label like a can of tuna. On the label, printed in four languages, was: "Artist's Shit / Contents 30 grams net / Freshly preserved / Produced and tinned / in May 1961." Each can was on sale during its exhibition, priced by weight based on the current price of gold. From that base price (around $1.12 a gram in 1960) the value shot up; forty-one years later, the Tate Modern in London paid $34,100 to acquire Merda can #004. For what may be poop's first explicit manifestation in the history of art, this worked out to around $1,137 a gram -- an appreciation rate well above inflation.
Mera pits the productions society values most -- art -- against those it values least. An artist's product, society teaches us, represents truth, beauty, and technical mastery. Art is the artist's contribution to humanity's soul. Poop, on the other hand, is the one thing we're all capable of creating with equal skill; neither Duchamp nor Manzoni have any more aesthetic control over the sphincter than you or I. To claim his poop was unique simply because he was an artist was an a fortiori argument that pushed conceptual art to its absurd extreme.
Forty-five of the original ninety tins have reportedly exploded, spraying artist's shit (and the bacteria and gases that had been fermenting in it) all over the collectors' galleries.
The excrementitious palette enjoys infinite variety, from gray to green and from ochers to browns.
Perhaps it's the economists who can learn the most from poets about precision and efficiency, about objectivity and maximization—the virtues, in other words, of value-free science.
The most important example of economic rhetoric is metaphor. Economists call them "models". To say that markets can be represented by supply and demand "curves" is no less a metaphor than to say that the west wind is "the breath of autumn's being."
Beauty can be quantified by mathematical measurements and ratios. It can be defined as average distances between features.
Here we see the ethnic "standard" of good looks. And probably due to the averageness of it all, kind of boring. Give me an interesting tho not conventionally attractive face any day.
Smiling toddlers and fluffy clouds and teddy bears are darling, but few households are buying toilet paper because they think it's cute. Americans look to their toilets to choke down the burritos we eat and the beer we drink, but toilet manufacturers feign to think that each of us is an interior designer at heart, more concerned about color scheme than with colon scum.
Where is the Jeep of toilets, that mud-splattered workhorse that can send your man-sized crap to the brownest depths of hell? Where is the environmentally friendly flush toilet with the kind of holistic outlook that appeals to hybrid car owners? Where is the toilet for cool people who get laid?
They don't exist, because any attempt to position butt-related products in ways more relevant to the consumer experience would involve acknowledgement of poop, which would immediately alienate those who don't want to be seen as people who poop, much less consumers of poop-related products. Fecal denial is the aggregate reality of the marketplace. And its cost is a lack of segmentation -- an inefficient market too constrained by taboo to realize its profit potential.
