Cities, Experiences and Social Innovation

Enough to Go Around

Passivity Kills Face-to-Face Meetings

Posted on 2013/03/052013/03/06 by Jason Hensel

I work in an industry that places a high value on face-to-face interactions, which made me more attuned to Amanda Palmer‘s recent TED talk, “The Art of Asking.” What struck me was the natural notion of making a human connection to receive and give.

“…through the very act of asking people, I’d connected with them, and when you connect with them, people want to help you” she said.

In the industry I’m in, this is most often accomplished through a format called an “un-conference.” Basically, people gather in small groups to discuss problems and search for solutions to challenges. As you can guess, it’s quite popular, primarily because it’s interactive and because of the face-to-face networking.

That networking is nothing, though, if you’re afraid to ask for help. I think that’s why smaller groups work so well. A large, lecture-style situation is intimidating, whereas, a small group gathering is comforting.

Technology is helping this process, Palmer says. Sure, we may be part of a large group, but the weird thing is that we can feel connected more than ever using the Internet. Maybe it’s just me; I feel like I have more of a chance of communication with a celebrity (use that term loosely) through social media than I do at a huge event.

“Celebrity is about a lot of people loving you from a distance, but the Internet and the content that we’re freely able to share on it are taking us back,” Palmer said. “It’s about a few people loving you up close and about those people being enough.”

Technology can only go so far. It’s a means to an end, and that destination is face-to-face interaction.

“Now, the online tools to make the exchange as easy and as instinctive as the street, they’re getting there,” Palmer said. “But the perfect tools aren’t going to help us if we can’t face each other and give and receive fearlessly, but more important, to ask without shame.”

This brings me to my main point: There’s no reason to meet face-to-face if we’re passive in our interactions. The days of lecture learning are waning. We’re not going to solve problems, find solutions, or change directions if we’re just sitting, nodding our heads and crossing our arms. To me, that’s Palmer’s main point. Even if she is focusing on music, the overall soul of her speech is about enacting change in giver and receiver. That can’t be accomplished by one party being passive. Both need to be active.

Please watch her TED talk, and let me know what you think about it in the comments below

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Hearing With Your Hands

Posted on 2012/10/292012/10/31 by Jason Hensel

There are people who can’t talk unless they’re gesturing. But maybe their hand movements are doing more than helping them speak. Perhaps they’re helping them hear.

According to researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center, what you hear may depend on what your hands are doing.

“Language is processed mainly in the left hemisphere, and some have suggested that this is because the left hemisphere specializes in analyzing very rapidly changing sounds,” said the study’s senior investigator, Peter E. Turkeltaub, M.D., PhD, a neurologist in the Center for Brain Plasticity and Recovery.

The researchers used a simple noise and indication test on 24 volunteers for the study. They had to press a button when they heard background sounds, which were quick or slow.

“We asked the subjects to respond to sounds hidden in background noise,” Turkeltaub said. “Each subject was told to use his or her right hand to respond during the first 20 sounds, then the left hand for the next 20 second, then right, then left, and so on.”

People who used their right hand heard the rapidly changing sounds more often than when using their left hand. It was vice versa for the slowly changing sounds.

“Since the left hemisphere controls the right hand and vice versa, these results demonstrate that the two hemispheres specialize in different kinds of sounds—the left hemisphere likes rapidly changing sounds, such as consonants, and the right hemisphere likes slowly changing sounds, such as syllables or intonation,” Turkeltaub said. “These results also demonstrate the interaction between motor systems and perception. It’s really pretty amazing. Imagine you’re waving an American flag while listening to one of the presidential candidates. The speech will actually sound slightly different to you depending on whether the flag is in your left hand or your right hand.”

I think this research is especially interesting for meeting designers and professional speakers. Imagine the ways you could control what your audience hears by simply having attendees hold something. It would be a fun experiment to present two exact sessions (word for word) to different audiences, one that holds something in the left hand and one in the right hand. Then let’s see if session comprehension and scores are different. Anyone willing to try it out?

(Story quotes from Georgetown University. Image via Flickr: Malthe Sigurdsson / Creative Commons)

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Are Your Meetings Making People Dumb?

Posted on 2012/10/142012/10/17 by Jason Hensel

A person’s decision-making performance indoors can be negatively affected by moderately high concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO₂), according to a recent study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

“The primary source of indoor CO₂ is humans,” wrote Julie Chao for the Berkeley Lab News Center. “While typical outdoor concentrations are around 380 ppm, indoor concentrations can go up to several thousand ppm. Higher indoor CO₂ concentrations relative to outdoors are due to low rates of ventilation, which are often driven by the need to reduce energy consumption. In the real world, CO₂concentrations in office buildings normally don’t exceed 1,000 ppm, except in meeting rooms, when groups of people gather for extended periods of time.”

Meetings, eh? I can already imagine the sensational headline I will write and use: “Are your meetings making people dumb?”

The researchers suggest that it’s too early, though, to make recommendations, as more tests have to be done, especially on a larger scale.

“Assuming it’s replicated, it has implications for the standards we set for minimum ventilation rates for buildings,” said Berkeley Lab scientist William Fisk, a co-author of the study, as reported by Chao. “People who are employers who want to get the most of their workforce would want to pay attention to this.”

Until then, let’s just have meetings outside when possible. Sound good?

(Image via Flickr: Patrick Lauke / Creative Commons)

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Books Read in 2011

Posted on 2011/12/272012/01/02 by Jason Hensel

Every year I post my annual list of which books I read, a list that helps me remember past events and feelings that I may have forgotten, like resting in my hammock on a nice summer day reading The Truth About Celia or the eagerness I felt flying to Italy while reading Poets in a Landscape. You could say that I remember things through the books I’ve read. I don’t think that’s such a bad way to live. Happy reading in 2012, everyone!

Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Tinkers by Paul Harding
Me, Myself & I by Edward Albee
Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
The Diviners by Jim Leonard Jr.
The Second Child by Deborah Garrison
The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick by Peter Handke
A Week at the Airport by Alain de Botton
Burn This by Lanford Wilson
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel H. Pink
The Sunset Limited by Cormac McCarthy
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them by Francine Prose
Four Seasons in Rome by Anthony Doerr
The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh
The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
The Mercy Seat by Neil LaBute
Augustus by John Williams
Poets in a Landscape by Gilbert Highet
Candyfreak: A Journey Through the Chocolate Underbelly of America by Steve Almond
Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet
The Truth About Celia by Kevin Brockmeier
A Happy Death by Albert Camus
The Commedia dell’Arte by Giacomo Oreglia
The Architect of Flowers by William Lychack
The Actor’s Art and Craft by William Esper and Damon DiMarco
Dying City by Christopher Shinn
Slowness by Milan Kundera
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Improvise: Scene From the Inside Out by Mick Napier
Book of My Nights by Li-Young Lee
The Sea Gull by Anton Chekhov
Craze: Gin and Debauchery in an Age of Reason by Jessica Warner
The Late American Novel: Writers on the Future of Books by Jeff Martin and C. Max Magee (editors)
Beautiful & Pointless: A Guide to Modern Poetry by David Orr
The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Jitney by August Wilson
The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing
Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honday Dynasty by Tony Hoagland
Travesties by Tom Stoppard
Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee
The Harvard Psychedelic Club by Don Lattin
The Wrecking Light by Robin Robertson
The Chairs are Where the People Go by Misha Glouberman with Sheila Heti
In a Forest, Dark and Deep by Neil LaBute
Whatever by Michel Houellebecq
Enormous Changes at the Last Minute by Grace Paley
The Night Season by Rebecca Lenkiewicz
A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
Seven Guitars by August Wilson
The Curfew by Jesse Ball
The Cripple of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh
The Jokers by Albert Cossery
Breaking Open the Head: A Psychedelic Journey Into the Heart of Contemporary Shamanism by Daniel Pinchbeck
Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer
Normal People Don’t Live Like This by Dylan Landis

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The Doors of Forgetting

Posted on 2011/11/03 by Jason Hensel

Imagine walking through a door and forgetting everything. It’s possible, and a new study in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology explains how. Abstract, you have the floor.

Previous research using virtual environments has revealed a location-updating effect in which there is a decline in memory when people move from one location to another. Here we assess whether this effect reflects the influence of the experienced context, in terms of the degree of immersion of a person in an environment, as suggested by some work in spatial cognition, or by a shift in context. In Experiment 1, the degree of immersion was reduced by using smaller displays. In comparison, in Experiment 2 an actual, rather than a virtual, environment was used, to maximize immersion. Location-updating effects were observed under both of these conditions. In Experiment 3, the original encoding context was reinstated by having a person return to the original room in which objects were first encoded. However, inconsistent with an encoding specificity account, memory did not improve by reinstating this context. Finally, we did a further analysis of the results of this and previous experiments to assess the differential influence of foregrounding and retrieval interference. Overall, these data are interpreted in terms of the event horizon model of event cognition and memory.

Still with me? Basically, what the researchers found is that new memory episodes (event models) form in our brains whenever we enter a new environment. As you move from place to place, you’re stacking memories on top of memories, making them harder to retrieve.

I imagine this knowledge could affect how educators, event planners, or anyone involved in learning and group collaboration structure their operations. If you know that moving people from room to room causes them to forget, wouldn’t it be better to keep everyone in one room all day? If that’s not technically feasible, then what can you do design-wise to mitigate the forgetting?

(Photo via Flickr: Istvan / Creative Commons)

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