Epiphenomina or in the Image of God

Dr. Warren Brown speaks to dynamical systems and the physical underpinnings of immortality.

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In the meantime listen to the podcast.

Happy New Year!

The doctor tells Homer Simpson he has a rare disease and is going to die -- in a week! Homer resolves to live every moment he has left with gusto. On his last night he stays up to see the dawn while listening to Larry King read the Bible on tape. But he doesn't die and the doctor says it was all a big mistake!

As the credits rolls we see Homer on the couch eating pork rinds and drinking Duff while staring blankly at Celebrity Wive's Makeover Smack Down. Homer is a hot mess and can't seem to change.

Just before the holidays someone posted a classic question on a training and development group discussion page on LinkedIn -- 'What book has changed YOUR life?' Generally, I've been amazed at how worthless these discussion pages are. They almost always attract vapid comments about how smart the author is and why you should hire them.

But this one was different.

First of all, there were more than a hundred posts -- more than I've ever seen. Second, they were quite thoughtful and unselfconscious. The posts listed the Bible and The Power of Positive Thinking; Dale Carnegie and Anthony Robbins; Seven Habits... and 'The Fifth Discipline...'. I particularly loved an impassioned post that praised the transformative power of the Qur'an at great length and eloquence; and then, said, 'And I also liked the One Minute Manager.

Amid all the 'Best of' lists and reflections on the year as it flickers out, the 'Book' question is a pretty standard one. But it highlights a question that has burned in me for years and I hope will yield meaningful action in the new year -- How do we remake ourselves to do what needs to be done in a changing world?

I'm excited to find out!  But for now, back to the couch.

Beauty, Desire and Sales

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Laughter -- Universal Prosody and the Protoconversation

There was a massive wave of laughter as I walked back to my seat. The play was Sheer Madness at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and they were laughing at a particularly broad joke at the top of the second act.

'On man that's cheap,' I thought as I continued to the back of the house. The show was already one of the longest running shows in the United States and that was 15 years ago -- and it's still running! I had seen it maybe six times because my then girlfriend (now wife) was playing the ditzy hairdresser role for the last year.

I was not in the mood to see it again. But as I trudged up the bleachers I stopped listening to the play and focused on the laughter. The audience had completely lost it and by the time I got back to my seat I had too.

In his outrageously insightful book on Social Intelligence, Daniel Goleman says, 'Nature loves good timing. The sciences find synchronies throughout the natural world, whenever one natural process entrains or oscillates in rhythm with another. When waves are out of synch, they cancel each other; when they synchronize, they amplify. In the natural world, pacing occurs with everything from ocean waves to heartbeats; in the interpersonal realm, our emotional rhythms entrain.'

He notes that our bodies are way ahead of our minds when it comes to this kind of thing and that the rhythm or prosody of speech can align us with another before the meaning of the words sinks in. This protoconversation, as he calls it, has the power to either connect or disconnect us depending on if we're in the groove or not.

That's all nice to know but the laugh's the thing!

Never Tell Me the Odds

I totally shanked statistics class in business school. I didn't get it. (Naturally my first job was developing financial simulations for Fannie Mae, which oozed statistics.) But over the years I've become fascinated with figuring the odds and the last few weeks have set that part of my brain on fire!

I spent the last week working with ideas entrepreneurial thanks to the Kauffman Foundation's FastTrac program. This particular incarnation takes place at the Levin Institute -- love them! It was a blast to meet so many wonderful, optimistic people!

In November I attended Entrepreneurs' Week at Colombia University. Just about every session started with someone or other describing how tough the odds are for achieving success. And yet the place was bustling.

It seems Americans in particular keep venturing despite the odds. Someone told me this week that the United States is like Mecca for entrepreneurs. I hope that's true; it made me proud.