Good Life Project - The Power of Rhyme. What Your Eyes WANT To See (no, not that).

Episode Date: September 28, 2017

Poetry as a tactical device, from a slacker non-poet. And the myth of shiny object syndrome. That's what we're talking about on today's Good Life Update.Good Life Riff: Poetry. Seriously? Yeah, poetry. What if was the secret sauce for sharing ideas in a way that bypassed defenses and made a beeline to the heart? What if information could be "packaged" in writing that awakened your inner slam poet and moved others to receive you, to feel and see and understand you differently? That's what we're talking about in today's GLP Riff. AND, wait for it...there will also be a live-reading of an original piece by JF (aka Mellow-J, reading in his usual Zen-slam style, lol). It's called The Window, and you can find the original text here.Good Life Science: And, in our Good Life Science segment, we're diving into some fascinating new research on visual attention. For years, the prevailing theory on what got our visual attention (translation, what made ya look) was something called the "salience" theory. In a sea of visual noise, we "see" only the things that stand out and are different. But new research reveals there may be something much bigger going on. Hint: it's a meaning thing! We dive into that research in today's Good Life Science Update. And, as always, for those want to go to the source, here's a link to the full study.Rockstar Sponsors: RXBAR Kids is a snack bar made with high-quality, real ingredients designed specifically for kids. It contains 7 grams of protein and has zero added sugar and no gluten, soy or dairy. Find at Target stores OR for 25% off your first order, visit RXBAR.com/goodlife.Are you hiring? Do you know where to post your job to find the best candidates? Unlike other job sites, ZipRecruiter doesn’t depend on candidates finding you; it finds them. And right now, GLP listeners can post jobs on ZipRecruiter for FREE, That’s right. FREE! Just go to ZipRecruiter.com/good.MVMT Watches (pronounced Movement) was founded on the belief that style shouldn’t break the bank. Classic design, quality construction and styled minimalism. Get 15% off today —WITH FREE SHIPPING and FREE RETURNS—by going to MVMT.com/good.Support for this podcast comes from abc, presenting the new drama “The Good Doctor” from the creator of House, Mondays at 10/9 Central on abc. Also new on abc is “Kevin Probably Saves the World”, a drama that will change the way you feel…about the Universe. New episodes every Tuesday at 10/9 Central. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, everybody. It's Jonathan Fields here with this week's Good Life Project update, our second of the week episode that we always complement our full length, long form conversations with a couple of different segments. Today, I've got two things that I want to share with you. One is the power of experimenting with different types of language to say something and have it land differently, kind of have it bypass the normal defenses. What I want to talk about today, and I'm actually going to read you something I wrote, is poetry, which I confess to know absolutely nothing about. But I still want to share something with you. And on the science side, our Good Life Science update, we're talking about some really cool new research that actually shows that our attention is not in fact drawn by what people and

researchers have thought for years, the equivalent of whatever the shiny object in the room is, but by something very different, and we'll dive into what that is. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot if we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So in today's riff, what I want to talk about is the way we use language and also the way we sometimes fall into a rut and maybe an invitation to explore using language a little bit differently. So I podcast, I produce audio. And at the same time,

I'm a writer. If you actually asked me, what do you consider your sort of primary creative medium, I probably would still tell you that first, I'm a writer, then I love producing audio, and then painting and all sorts of other things. But I've been writing for a while now. I've been working on books in some form for about 10 years and have something like 800 plus articles, posts and stuff like that across the intertubes. But there's something, there's a form of written expression that I've always been kind of fascinated by and utterly intimidated by. And I know almost nothing about. What is that? It's poetry. Poetry. Never studied it. I've actually never really formally studied writing in any form, in any shape, other than just reading

a ton and deconstructing. Actually actually with the exception of copywriting, which is a very different beast. But I've always been fascinated by poetry and fascinated by rhythm, pace, cadence, the ability to use language in a way, to craft language in a way, and then share it in a way where you can say what you want to say. You can tell the story that you want to tell. You can offer invitations and ideas in a way that kind of bypasses the standard defenses and

do it so that it's not just the meaning, it's not just the content or the intent, it's not just the informational value of what you're sharing that really lands and moves somebody, but it's the actual sort of artistic experience. It's the aesthetic receipt of words said in a certain way, in a certain form, at a certain pace, with a certain voice, that somehow allows you to experience those words in a very different way and leaves you moved. Beyond learning, beyond knowing more,

you feel in some way touched, emotionally moved. And I've been fascinated by that. And I have many friends who have spent years studying and creating poetry. And yet I've never done that. So a couple of years ago, I started playing with it. And unlike most people who would try and study for them or take classes or learn from somebody, I just started writing. And there's a weird thing that happens in my head when I write. I actually hear it as spoken word. So when I'm writing, one of the things that people have said to me over the years is that

your writing sounds a lot like you're speaking to me. And probably one of the reasons is because when I write, I actually, I'm one of those people who does a lot of the editing while I write. I don't just sort of, you know, like, quote, vomit words onto a page and then come back. That is one approach, but it's not mine. And the primary way that I edit is not for grammatical accuracy and not for, you know, like, removing all this stuff and splitting infinitives and all these other things. I know Strunk and White and Chicago of Manual Style well, but the primary way that I edit is for how it feels as spoken word.

And the reason I do that is because I think when we read, many of us still sublingualize. We actually are reading it quietly in our heads, and we hear it as much as we read it. And for me, there's something really powerful about the spoken rhythm of anything that you write. So my approach to poetry is not following any standard form. It's not, I don't know anything about traditional forms or structures, literally nothing. What I do is I imagine if I was standing in front of a group of people and speaking this, how would it feel? How would it land? How would I feel delivering this to a room or an audience of people? So it's not just about the words, it's about rhythm and pace and cadence and impact and intonation and volume.

And I play with that, funny enough, as I write. And what's interesting is the very few poems that I've written have really brought home to me that that is my process. And I wrote something a little while back that I wanted to share with you because one of my goals is to start to actually get back to that a bit and also to step into a place of vulnerability around this form, which I really don't know at all, yet something is speaking through me that is saying, play with this and share it.

Because I feel like poetry is written not just to be written or read, but to be shared through voice. So I'm going to get a little vulnerable with you, and I am going to read you something that I wrote, and it's called The Window. You speak about it as if it were a portal to your potential. What lies through it you see, O God, you see, yet you cannot touch or breathe or be.

Waiting and wondering, when will someone come to lift the pain, the pain? Till you wake, should you wake to the window's truth. There is no savior, pushed up sleeves, no unsung hero, only you. Still you deny, who am I to set myself free? It's been so long, painted over, nailed down, prematurely bound. Yet in the stillness before the pain, you come to believe, there is no path to freedom that does not go through me. So you come to the frame, feeling, groping, raging into time-worn sutures, shaking, heaving,

teasing, kneading, bathed with efforts due. Flesh on wood, slowly it yields. Yawning open, you breathe shallow, testing sips, then deeper, deeper, inhaling possibility, potential, once obscured, now revealed, exhaling the well of loneliness and futility, a complacent disconnection. You pause, lean in, and look no longer a part, yet not yet a part, of that world out there. And then it happens. Reality tumbles softly over the sill, into the reservoir of your crossed legs conspiring into the soul. To what use, asks its voice, will you put this portal? Will you simply sit and gaze, flirting with the scent of a life that calls, illuminated yet still sedated, a denizen of breath and sight, subsisting on wisps of essence, yet never taking your seat with friends to feast, to weave, to span the chasm from what if to this shall be.

Or will you in some way, your way, traverse the frame To set ablaze a world that only you can claim And then you notice a deeper truth The window, it seems, is not an end, but an invitation A passage to invention It was never about the window, but the will to step through it. And then you wonder, how can I? And then you realize, how can I not?

So that was the window. That was the poem. That was me thinking about how do I tell the story of somebody who stares at a window and sees on the other side of it a future of possibility but cannot figure out how to open it and is waiting for somebody to come and open it for them, and then realizes that someone is them. And as I sit here and think about that poem, I actually wrote it a few years ago, and it's still as fresh and as real for me as it was then, and I'm still as uncomfortable reading it and sharing it with you as I was when I wrote it and shared it for the first time in print.

And yet I feel like I'm at a place where I can't not. Because, right, it's that last line, it was never about the window, but the will to step through it. And then you wonder, how can I? And then you realize, how can I not? And maybe that's my invitation today, is to look at your world. Look at the pane of the glass that you're looking through that window and seeing possibility on the other side and wondering to yourself, how can I? And then reframing that and asking yourself instead, how can I not? And then imagining what would it look like to open the window and take the first step through. So that's what I'm thinking about today. And maybe play with a little bit of poetry

in your life. Maybe explore sharing not just ideas and information, but sharing it in a way that lands differently, that moves people differently. I have no idea if that happened in any way, shape, or form with my poem, The Window. But if it did, let me know. Let me know how it landed for you. You can find me, as always, all over at Jonathan Fields, pretty much everywhere on social. And we're heading into our Good Life our good life science update for a really cool conversation on some new research on attention and why we really focus it somewhere else. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations,

iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. So on today's Good Life Science update, we're talking about attention. Some really interesting new research on attention.

I'm a little bit obsessed with attention, how we develop it, how we focus it, how we harness it these days, where we direct it, because increasingly, I believe, attention is life. And I'm going to be sharing a lot more about that hypothesis with you in the not-too-distant future. I've started researching more around it and speaking more about it. There's some really interesting, eye-opening things that I've been discovering. But this is one thing that popped onto my radar. And it's a bit of

science that kind of turns one of the major assumptions about how our attention is sort of automatically or unconsciously directed. It turns that on its head. So for years, if you like the conventional wisdom on what's called visual attention, which means where do we look? If we look at a scene or if we look at a room, if we look at a group of people or a photograph or a movie, there's been wisdom about where our visual attention or like easier said, where do our eyes go? Where do they automatically go? Not when you're like, okay, I'm going to deliberately focus on this one thing. But if you look at a scene, if you look at the world, where do your eyes automatically go? Where does your visual attention automatically go?

What draws it? What makes you kind of like pulls you in and rivets your eyes? And then through the vehicle of your eyes, the visual cortex in your brain and then your brain. So for a long time, the answer to this question has been something called salience, the salience theory. And what does that translate to in sort of like human regular everyday speak, probably pretty close to, you know, kind of like saying the shiny object theory. And the theory is that, you know, the things that appear as salient, the objects that appear as salient stand out to your eyes and to your brain. And those things, if you scan a picture or a scene or a room full of people, you know, if you have somebody in a bright red dress with a, with a, you know, like a giant pink headdress, or if you have something

that is, you know, like shiny and glowing and in a room, which is sort of like less shiny and glowing, that even if you don't intend to, those are the things that your eyes will immediately go to. And that holds the focus of your attention. And if your visual attention is constantly drawn to these quote, shiny objects in your life, then and a large amount of the way that we experience life is through the sense of our eyes, then that has a pretty major effect on the things that we build our lives around the things that we see the things that we build our lives around, the things that we see, the things that we create thoughts around, the things that we feel emotions in response to,

and the things that we formulate responses to, and then build around and take action around. It turns out, though, that that theory may in fact not be true. So a recent study that was just published in the journal Nature Human Behavior that was done at the Center for Mind and Brain at UC Davis, which is out in California, shows that there may be actually something else going on in this particular scenario. That in fact, where our eyes automatically go is not to the shiny object, but to the thing that we experience as creating meaning. So kind of interesting.

The lead researcher in the study, Professor John Henderson, actually realized that people are, the visual attention is more guided by how meaningful any particular thing or area within your sort of field of vision actually is in your brain, which is not actually an easy thing to test. It's a lot easier to sort of test, okay, what is the thing that visually stands out? It's kind of agreed upon and you can pretty much see it pretty quickly. But how do you actually test what our brain perceives as the most meaningful spots or areas within our field of vision? Well, the way they actually went about this was they took a whole bunch of different images. They actually used a whole bunch of people to kind of crowdsource this,

which is a really neat way to do it. They use the mechanical Turk service to send those images out to a ton of different people. And through that service had, you know, a lot of different people look at these images and rate different parts in different places for meaning. What's interesting is you cannot actually give everybody a universal definition of meaning and say, if it meets this, then select that part of the picture.

And this is one of the actual longstanding challenges in all the research around meaning, because meaning is different for everyone. We all experience something as meaningful in a different way. But they sent these pictures out to many, many people and they got enough sort of coherence in the results where when they got the pictures back, people said this particular area or this region is meaningful to me. There's a certain sense of meaning, of understanding. It explains something that's relevant to me, whatever their definition of meaning was. So they were able to code these images, not just for salience or what popped out visually, but for what was experienced as meaningful. And what they discovered through eye tracking, they're actually programmed in software and stuff like that that will watch every little movement of your eye.

As these people who were coding the images looked at the scene was that eyes were actually visual attention was much more attracted naturally to the parts of the maps, the images that were expressing some form of meaning rather than just the shiny objects, the salience elements of these. And that was a big surprise because it kind of controverted a lot of the theories that came before it. Mayday, mayday, we've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results will vary. So what does this really tell you in the end? It tells you that our brains are kind of wired through the vehicle of our eyes so that when we look out into the world, when we look at people, when we look at environments, when we look at scenes, and within those scenes there are a bazillion possible data points for us to take in.

Our brain can't do that, so we have to. Our brain has to direct our eyes to a very thin slice of whatever is there. That the theory that we automatically seek for something that stands out actually may not be the thing that really attracts our attention. It seems like the alternative theory here is that the brain is actually seeking meaning. And through the vehicle of our eyes, it directs our attention to things that in some way are meaningful, rather than things that just pop and stand out, and somehow, you know, are the shiny objects in the room, which to me is kind of actually

a cool thing. Because we're constantly trying to figure out how do we stand out? You know, how do we stand out as individuals? How do we stand out in relationships, at work, in life? And a lot of times when you see us trying to sell ourselves or market ourselves, you know, as part of our human existence so that we can get what we want to get and achieve what we want to achieve and, you know, quote, succeed, we think about the packaging, the wrapping. We think about, like, what is it that we can wrap around ourselves to make ourselves stand out? And what this is kind of suggesting is that the brain is actually much more attuned to meaning than it is attuned to slick stuff that stands out visually. And even when it's just sort of like going through the vehicle of the eyes, let alone, you know alone all the other senses, that creating something or cultivating

an experience, leading with conversation, leading with something visual that you create that in some way provokes your brain to experience it as not just cool, not just interesting, not just shiny or attractive, but meaningful, that that is where our brain yearns to go. And that maybe it reinforces our ability to create something deeper as we look at what we're going to contribute to the world and how we're going to build everything from conversation to contribution and impact and work and art and all those different things, that underlying it, our brains from the most basic sensory control centers are seeking meaning. To me, that's a pretty cool thing. So that's what I'm thinking about. As always, for fellow science geeks, we will link to the actual study report for those of you who want to go deeper into the methodology.

And that is it for today's Good Life Project update. And as we wrap up, I want to go deeper into the methodology. And that is it for today's Good Life Project update. And as we wrap up, I want to give a final shout out to our awesome sponsors and supporters. Zip Recruiter, RX Bar Kids, Movement Watches. Hey, thanks so much for listening. Be sure to click on the subscribe button in whatever listening app you use so you'll never miss an episode. You can also help us continue to grow and bring more people into the conversation

by visiting our amazing sponsors who help make what we do possible. Most important, if something has really resonated, don't just spin it around in your head. Share it with others. Turn it into a conversation. When ideas become conversations that lead to action, that's when real change takes hold. I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum.

Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.