My friend Kurt sent me this fascinating video from Jeremy Rifkin on the idea of evolutionary empathy.

A powerful must-watch idea.

My friend Jason playing his beautiful new 18 string harp guitar with Vietnamese folk singer Huong Thanh. Recorded in Paris.

Moving from individualistic consumption to collaborative consumption.

HT Mark Beam

Last night we watched a movie called “21″ – about a group of MIT math students who made a fortune in Las Vegas by “counting cards” at the Blackjack tables. The movie was so-so, but one scene reminded me of an old mathematical nemesis — the Monty Hall problem. In the scene, a math professor (Kevin Spacey) tells the student there is a car behind one of the three chalkboards, 1, 2, or 3. He asks the student to guess which chalkboard hides the car. Student picks board #1.

At this point, professor reveals that behind door #3 there is no car. So now we know that the car is behind either board #1 or board #2. Professor then asks student if he wants to change his guess. Student says “yes” and changes his guess to board #2, telling professor “I have a 66% chance behind board #2, but only a 33% chance behind board #1.”

This is unintuitive to me. When one choice becomes eliminated, my intuition tells me that the probability of the car behind either remaining door is 50:50, regardless if I had previously made a choice, or not.

So I created a test with my son. We did 40 trials. He guessed 1 of the 3 options, then randomly said “keep” or “change” without even knowing the choice I had eliminated. Indeed, when he changed his original choice, he was right roughly 2/3 of the time. When he did not change his choice, he was right only 1/3 of the time. (for those still puzzled, a good analysis can be found here).

Does this reveal a larger metaphor? More times in life than I care to admit, I have found myself holding on to a form of certainty that was later found to be totally unfounded. Even when presented with unassailable evidence, we often refuse to acknowledge the clarity set before us – favoring deeply ingrained “religious” certainties. And some of you are still saying “no, there are two remaining doors – it’s plainly obvious to anyone that the odds are 50/50.”

Just received the new Natalie Merchant CD in the TED book club quarterly*. It’s a beautiful package of 19th and early 20th century children’s poems set to music, inspired by “long conversation I’ve had with my daughter during the first six years of her life.”

She writes, “poets are keepers of sacred language that describes our holy places… the poet’s work is putting silence around everything worth remembering. Poetry on the page can be difficult to penetrate; sometimes it needs to be heard. I used music to enter these poems, and once inside I was able to understand how they were constructed with layers of feeling and meaning.”

Over 100 musicians collaborated with Merchant on this remarkable project, taking over five years to research, write, and record. There are two disks, packaged with an archival-grade book that spans nearly 100 pages. At the end of disk one  is a poem-song inspired by American poet John Godfrey Saxe (d.1887) called The Blind Men and the Elephant. It’s a retelling of the Jain-Hindu story, further retold by the Buddha, Sikhs, Sufis, and others.

I love this story for it illustrates the nature of partial truth and our inability to comprehend the vastness and completeness of reality. Instead, we’re often like the blind men examining the elephant, each with his own experience and interpretation. And lest we think this just for children, Saxe ends his poem with a reminder of why the story was often told in a religious context,

So oft in theologic wars,

The disputants, I ween,

Rail on in utter ignorance,

Of what each other mean,

And prat about an Elephant,

Not one of them has seen.

*which this quarter included (1) The Elements, (2) Council of Dads, and (3) Immortal Cells

A new study shows that the areas of the brain responsible for skepticism and vigilance become less active when under the spell of a charismatic person or group.  Effectively, the part of the brain most important in identifying psychological or religious manipulation can shut down just when it is most needed.  Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), Danish researchers scanned the brains of 20 Pentecostalists and 20 non-believers while playing them recorded prayers. The volunteers were told that six of the prayers were read by a non-Christian, six by an ordinary Christian and six by a healer. In fact, all were read by ordinary Christians.

Only in the devout volunteers did the brain activity monitored by the researchers change in response to the prayers. Parts of the pre-frontal and anterior cingulate cortices, which play key roles in vigilance and skepticism when judging the truth and importance of what people say, were effectively deactivated when the subjects listened to a supposed healer. Activity diminished to a lesser extent when the speaker was supposedly a normal Christian (Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience ).

Personally, I’m thrilled to see basic science like this used to better understand human motivations, though a 40-person sampling is near insignificant. Would like to see more experiments of this type spanning the effects of true believers in religion, politics, environmental, corporatism, even the hard sciences. This experiment suggests to me that a healthy mind is always seeking a generative, dynamic balance between skepticism and confidence, always open to new information (both cognitive and meta-cognitive) that might inform and change one’s perceptions.

Brings to mind Peter’s documentary on the Iraq war in which he says, “You see what you want to see. You see it the way you want to see it. You see what you can bear to see.”

“Give me one wild word, and I promise I will follow. The word the Sea rolled back to me was “mosaic.” I began to see through acts of witnessing, that the extermination of a species and the extermination of a people are predicated on the same impulses: prejudice, cruelty, ignorance and arrogance, all circling around issues of power and justice.

The world is broken. We are broken, whether it is through our distractive, fragmented lives or war. Taking that which is broken and creating something whole is an act of healing and restoration. Call it reconstruction. Mosaic: an art form, a form of integration.

Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find. It is more than the act of assemblage, it is the act of daring contemplation that leads us to action. To bear witness is not a passive act. To be present with a piece of art, with a prairie community, with a Rwandan mother who is telling you a story of what happened to her children during the war, is to be moved to a different point of view. Empathy is the word that comes to mind. Through acts of witnessing our consciousness shifts and as a result, we can choose to act differently.

Pete Seeger says, “Participation is the key to rescuing the human race.” I believe him. I certainly do not have any recipe for engagement, I can only share three things that have made a difference for me. Trust your heart, follow your passion and share it with others. Become biologically literate — learn the names of the plants, birds, and animals where you live, extending your notion of community to include all life. Become part of that community with all the rights and responsibilities that it offers, both human and wild.

We can improvise. We can create without a map. And we don’t have to live in isolation. The gift of an attentive life is the ability to recognize patterns, and find our way towards a unity built on empathy. Empathy becomes the path that leads us from the margins to the center of concern. The pattern is the thing. The beauty made belongs to everyone.

Finding beauty in a broken world becomes more than the art of assemblage. It is the work of daring contemplation that inspires action. Create something beautiful.”

- Terry Tempest Williams

The TED Community is going mainstream. At TED2008, I remember talking with the director of a California public TV station about the possibility of airing TEDTalks. Now it’s a reality. The Open TV Project brings TED conference talks to television stations worldwide, at no cost. TED’s Media Producer June Cohen says, “…in particular, TV is a very effective way to reach the developing world, where low internet penetration and slow connections make online video impractical. But most important, the Open TV Project continues TED’s guiding philosophy of radical openness.”

On a related note, just this week TED celebrated 250,000,000 video views. In honor of this remarkable achievement, allow me to present the most popular TEDTalk of all time. Jill’s talk has now been translated by the TED Community into 37 languages. The first time I put this video on my blog, two years ago, it generated over 300 comments. Apparently, my post went viral on Stumble Upon.

Some people will be chosen
for the job, the Wednesday night poker game

for the limited number of spaces
available in heaven. Only so many

spoons fit in one drawer your mother
would say

and the same is true for clothes
and closets

shelves and cans and let’s be honest
hearts and loves.

I cannot love you because I love another
is a problem

that sometimes gets admitted
over wine

in a restaurant
filled with people choosing

this dish over that meat
choosing something that will fill

the middle of their beings
or leave them slavering like a cheetah

who missed and pass that
would you? and let’s be friends. Yes

let’s drink to being friends
and then we can all go on our way

remembering the best part
about being chosen is that

you do not have to stop
for anyone along the way.

- Betsy Johnson-Mille