Manish Jain lives in Udaipur, Rajasthan, in North India. He works with a movement called Shikshantar, ‘The Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development’. He has been working for the last 20 years, initiating many projects around unlearning, sustainable living, and Gift Culture. He is also co-founder of Swaraj University – India’s first university dedicated to localization. You can read more about his work here. He very kindly spent a fascinating hour chatting to me via Skype…
Dr Larry Rosen is a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at California State University. He has been a teacher for 45 years and has been studying the impact of technology for 33 years, and has written 7 books on the subject. He does a lot of research which explores the psychological impact of technology. He is co-author, with Adam Gazzaley (who we will also interview soon), of the brilliant ‘Distracted Mind: Ancient Brains in a High-Tech World’.
We talked by Skype, and I started by asking him how we would assess the initial results from the 20 year digital ‘experiment’. How are we doing? Where do we find ourselves? Fundamentally, I asked him, do you think we’ll look back and think it was all worth it?
On Friday night I was in Bristol to see Gecko Theatre’s brilliant new production ‘The Wedding’ at the Old Vic studio. It was amazing. It now goes on tour to Watford, Nottingham, Derby, Liverpool, Doncaster, Oxford and Nuffield. It is a truly remarkable piece of physical theatre, in which all the actors speak different languages. It touches deep into questions about our relationship to power, to systems, to each other, and into what it would feel like if we were able to break loose from being “wedded” to the current paradigm. I loved it. I was also asked to write a short article for the programme, given that as the show tours, it is connecting to Transition, or other similar groups in each place it visits. Here is a short video taste of the show, and the piece I wrote. Go see it!
My friend Lara just showed me this wonderful TED talk by Theaster Gates about the power of imagination, and how, when let loose in the world, it can create remarkable things. Do you self a favour, and put aside 17 minutes of your time. You’ll be glad you did.
One of the reasons I think our imaginations are in such a poor state in 2018 is that we spend so much time looking down. Look around you. On the bus, on the train, in the street. Our eyes are locked down to our screens, our attention elsewhere. So I want to share with me something that I find really helps.
It’s not just that this faculty of taking hold of the world in a steady way through imagination is waning, but our whole essential status as independent individuals is changing. We’re not becoming robots but we’re becoming much more subjected to vast systems. We live out most of our waking day in some way interacting within some larger system, whether it’s economic or otherwise, and this depletes us. It makes it harder to register reality in ways that people might have done formerly. So yeah, that’s one way it manifests. We live a more distracted, interconnected and sort of shallow daily-ness.
What happens in the brain when we’re being imaginative? Neuroscientists are moving away from the idea of what’s called ‘localisationism’ (the idea that each capacity of the brain is linked to a particular ‘area’ of the brain) towards the idea that what’s more important is to identify the networks that fire in order to enable particular activities or insights. Alex Schlegel is a cognitive neuroscientist, which he describes as being about “trying to understand how the structure and function of the brain creates the mind and the consciousness we experience and everything that makes us human, like imagination”.
As regular readers will know, I have been working, since March, on the research for a new book about imagination. In the spirit of sharing my research as I go along, I have been posting here the interviews I’ve been doing which I really hope you’ve enjoyed. More to come next year. Before I put robhopkins.net to bed for 2017, I thought I would share with you the list of books I’ve read over the year. I’ve read lots of other stuff too, papers, articles and so on, but I was inspired by Shane Parish over at the Farnham Street blog who compiled a list of all the books he read in 2016 .
So personally I feel like we have never been in a time of more imagination. I see children inventing, creating and also having a place to broadcast, because the more validation you get for your imagination, the more likely you’ll put some more stuff out.
This is an incredible time for imagination in the way people can connect. People can put their ideas out there. Say climate change, it doesn’t cost anything for a company to build a website that people can write their ideas in. You could set them problems and there are always a certain amount of people on the internet who are looking to come up with creative problems.
While the media is full of the story of the declaration of independence of Catalonia and the subsequent response by the Spanish national government, what is not being told so much is the very real, and remarkable, story of the municipalist approach that has risen there, and elsewhere in Spain. I recently visited the city, and spoke to Felix Beltran, a freelance editor, proof reader, festival organiser and municipal activist, who takes part in what is happening in the city.
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