Jacob Braude

“Greenwashing” is a term that caught on around the time that those little green signs started appearing in hotel rooms asking you to reuse your towels so that the companies could do their part to help preserve water. What they neglect to mention on their cards is that you are also helping them save money, which critics were quick to point out.

Thus the term greenwashing was born, and, according to this recent article in the LA Times, since those little signs first appeared, the trend of companies capitalizing on our desire to buy stuff without hurting the planet has exploded. The article cites a number of companies and products that seem more intent on riding the wave than on doing anything of any real good. My favorite example is the Barbie doll whose accessories are made out of recycled plastic. Way to go eco-conscious Barbie.

The article’s general point seems to be that this is not just despicable, but also dangerous, because consumers aren’t super educated, and if it’s got a green leaf on the packaging they figure it must be good.

What’s left out of the article, however, is why people buy green products. It isn’t always about helping the planet. In a brilliant series of experiments, a team out of the University of Toronto recently demonstrated how buying green products works on our unconscious.

We all have a sort of mental scale somewhere in our brains - scientists call it a global sense of morality - that weighs how many good things we’ve done against how many bad things. Doing something good gives us license to do something a little bad. If you’ve ever  ordered dessert because you were “good today” – like eating a salad for lunch somehow negates the 1,000 calorie cheesecake – then you know what I’m talking about.

The team at U of T showed that buying green products can work just like that salad you had for lunch - only without you knowing that it is happening. To demonstrate this they did two experiments.

In the first experiment, they had 156 college students come into the lab one at a time. The kids were sat down at a computer and told to spend $25 doing some e-shopping on household products. Half of them shopped at a “green” store where most of the products were eco-friendly. The other half shopped at a conventional store. Afterwards, they all played an anonymous dictator game where they had been told that they were paired with a stranger in another room. They had been given $6, and they had to decide how much of it they would share with the stranger. Whatever they didn’t share, they would get to keep.

Afterwards, the researchers went back and looked at the results. The folks who had shopped conventional shared on average $2.18. But the people who shopped green felt differently. They shared only $1.76. Buying green - even when it wasn’t for real - somehow gave them license to cheat the stranger (by the way, there was no stranger - there never is) of a little cash.

In a second experiment, they had 90 undergraduates come in one at a time and go through the same shopping exercise - half from the green store and half conventional. This time they followed it with a game that they rigged to make it easy for people to cheat if they wanted to. The game involved real money, so there was an incentive to cheat. If you played the game straight, you would earn $2.07 - which is, on average, what the people who had shopped at the conventional store earned. However, our responsible green shoppers scammed the system for an additional $0.36.

We think of people who buy green as being more cooperative, altruistic and ethical. Just the act - even when the act is fake - activates these ideas. And because of our mental scale, that deposit in the “good” column gives us a little bit of ethical wiggle room.

Maybe this is why we think that paying a little extra (or a lot extra if you’re at Whole Foods) to buy green products is worth it. Or maybe we just want to save the planet.

Either way, before we go around accusing Barbie of greenwashing, we should at least be honest that the washing of green goes both ways.

Advertising agencies are at heart service organizations. Our shops are stuffed with wicked smart and creative people, with people who love solving puzzles and working out what makes others tick. But ultimately the ideas and work developed at advertising agencies are for naught if they aren’t funded by a client in the service of selling their product.

So the relationship between the folks who have the products – and the money – and the creative teams who are hired to sell those products becomes a big part of whether or not we get great work into the marketplace. A brilliant idea that isn’t embraced by the client is a useless idea, and a creative team that pursues their own agenda and loses sight of their job to sell product is just as worthless.

Which makes a recent experiment by Eli J. Finkel and Paul W. Eastwick super interesting to anyone working in the advertising industry – and I would guess anyone in a service industry.

The researchers were out to test the commonly accepted idea that men were less selective than women when it came to choosing someone to date <insert your favorite gender-stereotype joke here>. Their hypothesis was that this lower standard actually had nothing to do with whether you were a man or a woman, it had to do with who was the approacher and who was the approachee.

So they set up two different approaches to speed dating. In some of the sessions, the men rotated while the women kept their seats. In the other sessions, roles were reversed with the men holding their spots and the women doing all the moving. Immediately after each “date,” they measured participants’ romantic desire for the person they had just interacted with.

You’ve probably guessed by now, but I’ll go ahead and confirm that the researchers proved out their hypothesis. It didn’t matter whether you were a man or a woman, if you were the one doing the approaching, you tended to be significantly less selective and to find the person you were approaching more attractive. However, if you were the one being approached you tended to me much more…judgmental.

All of this happens unconsciously without us even knowing that it is happening. But now that you do know that it happens, whether you are the approacher or the approachee, you can take some steps to disarm it.

What I like to do to neutralize this unconscious bias is to make myself at home. I hang my coat in the closet instead of bringing it into the meeting room. I put my bag out of sight. And for those of you who know me, yes, I take my shoes off (don’t worry; I’m wearing a nice clean pair of socks).

These might seem like little things, but they make a big difference in setting the right tone for collaboration that allows great work to flourish. Remember, it’s not just how good your idea is, it’s whether or not everyone can get behind it to make it happen. Removing the approacher bias is a good step in the right direction.

Have you ever had this experience: you are busy at work all day, and by closing time you’re wrung out and ready to head home, but you realize that – despite all the energy you put out – you didn’t actually get much of anything done.

It happens to me all the time, and I don’t think I’m alone in this. It makes me mad. I like my job, but I hate days when I go home feeling like I just blew nine hours I could have been spending with my kids, and I didn’t even get any good work done.

So I was thrilled when I stumbled on Jason Fried’s talk at TED. Fried is the cofounder of 37signals, and he’s spent years thinking about why it is that we don’t get work done when we are actually at work.

Fried says work is like sleep. When you sleep, you actually progress through three different stages of sleep. It’s the last stage of really deep sleep when all of the healing and recovery happens that gives you energy for the next day. If your sleep is interrupted before you get to that last stage, then you have to start all over from the beginning. People with infants will tell you that short bursts of sleep here and there, even if it adds up to 6 or 7 hours, will not refresh you.

Work is the same way. We progress through stages of focus, and it’s only in that last deep stage when you are in the “flow” that you get your best work done. If you get interrupted, you have to start over from the beginning.

Which makes the modern office pretty much the worst place ever to get work done. Between people wanting to chat, your boss checking in on you, and the endless meetings, solid blocks of uninterrupted time to get work done are few and far between.

It’s a Godin-like insight: so simple and obvious once you hear it, but invisible to the millions of us who struggle every day to be productive.

Since watching his talk, I stated paying attention to how many times people wander into my office while I’m in the middle of trying to get something done. It happens a lot. And half the time it doesn’t even have anything to do with work. A ten minute talk about your weekend here, fifteen minutes to talk about something cute your kids did there, and before I know it the time I had staked out to get something done has evaporated.

Fried has some pretty out there suggestions to fix the problem – my favorite one is that every Thursday afternoon no one is allowed to talk to anyone else.

I took a simpler approach: I close my door. I have to say, it’s awesome. Sure, sometimes people will knock, but I can choose to answer, or to keep working. It has been so satisfying to go home everyday knowing I produced something that I find myself closing the door more and more.

If you’re like me, and you get pleasure and a sense of self worth from actually making stuff, I urge you to try the door. If you don’t have a door, then leave. Go to a coffee shop, put your ear buds in, and just focus for 90 minutes. It is a fantastic feeling.

Now if I can just get rid of those dang meetings.

The Harvard Business School recently released the results from a new study on generosity (HT @ryandrumwright). As they put it in their press release:

“This research provides the first support for a possible psychological universal: human beings around the world derive emotional benefits from using their financial resources to help others (prosocial spending). Analyzing survey data from 136 countries, we show that prosocial spending is consistently associated with greater happiness.”

In other words, humans are wired to feel happy when we help others. It’s a bit of a foreign idea to old-school economic thought, which has at its core the assumption that everything we do is motivated by rational self interest. Since the meltdown of the markets and the emergence of behavioral economics (if you haven’t read it yet, be sure to check out Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely), we have all begun to clue in to the fact that a good number of the things people do are not the result of logical thought, but instead are the result of a messy collision of different evolutionary impulses that we have amassed over the millions of years that life has spent developing all of the systems that make human beings possible.

As Robert Sapolsky puts it in a recent column in the NY Times, “evolution is a tinkerer, not an inventor.” We are not the result of a quantum biological leap that is unique in the animal kingdom. Rather, the faculties that make us human have been built on the foundation of other capabilities. The part of your brain that you use to detect that a piece of food is disgusting is also the part that activates when you read about some morally disgusting act (like the banks just rubber-stamping foreclosures).

In one study Dr. Sapolsky talks about in his column, “Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes.”

The scientist Dan Batson applies this thinking to generosity and empathy. In a recent column he wrote for On The Human, he discusses the evidence for the theory that our empathy for others is just an offshoot of the much older evolutionary quality of caring for our children. The same part of our brain that rewards us for nurturing our kids (even when all we want is for them to be quiet and leave us alone – don’t pretend like you don’t know what I’m talking about), is the part that rewards us for being kind, generous and helpful to strangers.

I think Dr. Batson states the implications of this idea perfectly, so I’ll let his words close for me:

“When we feel empathic concern, we can care for the welfare of others (altruism) and not simply for “the dear love of our own selves” (egoism). Indeed, the human motivational repertoire may be broader than egoism and altruism combined. We may also care for the welfare of a group or collective (collectivism), and we may be motivated to uphold moral principles such as justice or fairness (principlism). One implication of this broadened motivational repertoire is that we cannot justify our callousness by an appeal to human nature; we are capable of more. Another implication is that we have more motivational resources than self-interest in our attempts to address important social problems. We are no longer limited to the carrots and sticks of egoism.”

A while ago I picked up a little book with a big premise. It was called “Wired for Thought” by Jeffrey Stibel, and in it he proposed that that the structure and needs of the human brain is driving the evolution of the Internet. He wrote the book with the idea that if you know about the brain, you can anticipate trends that will shape the future of the Internet, and as a business person you will be able to cash in on that vision.

I have to admit, the details of the book didn’t leave much of an impression on me. But the analogy between the Internet and the brain has stuck. And I’m beginning to think there’s something to it – but with one modification. I’m going to argue that the social Internet is a brain, and a rapidly evolving one at that.

Now, maybe I’ve made an unnecessary distinction. One could make the case that social technology and the Internet have become the same thing. I have a hard time thinking of a single Internet-based activity that doesn’t have a social component.

But for the sake of my argument, let’s just assume there’s a distinction between the Internet and social technologies.

Since the dawn of cognitive science in the 70s – and especially since fMRI began to be widely used to actually see what parts of brains are working when we do different things – our understanding of how cognition works has taken leaps and bounds.

Out of all of this research, new models for how our brains work have emerged. The one I’m most taken with right now is Gerald Edelman’s “Neural Darwinism,” so for this post I’m going to use his model to make my point about the Social Internet Brain. Neural Darwinism is exactly what it sounds like: applying Darwin’s evolutionary framework to the development of the brain. There are three main aspects:

1.       Developmental Selection: This is the idea that, while genes lay out the basic structure of our brains, while we are developing the final groupings of neurons is heavily influenced by the environment. Even with identical twins, there will be variations in their brain structure due to the differing environmental influences. One of my favorite quotes from Edelman on this subject: “It’s very likely that your brain is unique in the history of the universe.”

The analogue to this in the Social Internet Brain is how the “environment” of different social platforms influences the types of connections we make and who we make them with. How people connect, group and fire together is shaped by the type of connection facilitated by each platform. YouTube connections are different from Twitter connections are different from Chat Roulette connections. Each social environment causes groupings and behaviors of people unique to that environment.

2.       Experiential Selection: Much the way the environment shapes the connections and groupings of the billions of neurons in our brains, the data fed back to our brain by our senses and our muscles continues to shape those connections and groupings throughout life. For example, trained musicians use completely different parts of their brains to listen to music than non-musicians. And it takes surprisingly little musical instruction for that change to begin to take place. In other words, we don’t come pre-wired with a spot in our brain that processes music. The part of our brain we use depends on our experience.

Another example is conflation – which I’ve written about before.

In the Social Internet Brain, people are the input devices that “sense” the world. Experiential selection is rampant in the Social Internet Brain. The most common grouping happens around shared experience. Whether it is people with the same disease, people buying the same product or people in the same generation, groups constantly self-organize around these shared experiences. It is the fuel that powers social technologies.

Look at these two infographics. One is a mapping of the different functional groups in the brain, and the other is a mapping of the functional anatomy of social technologies.

3.       Reentry: This is a fancy name for the idea that groups can talk to each other. Group A can send signals to Group B, and vice versa. This principle allows the different functional groups in our brains to work together. When we process speech, the auditory center can work together with the visual cortex to interpret not just what people are saying, but their posture and expression, to create a nuanced understanding of the communication.

Likewise, we are seeing more and more reentry happening between social technologies. My de.l.icious posts automatically to my Twitter feed. My flavors.me page effortlessly integrates my Tumblr and my LinkedIn. The functional areas of the Social Internet Brain are getting better at working together, which – if it follows the cognitive model – should enable more sophisticated behaviors to emerge.

According to Edelman, these three qualities are required for a base level of awareness – what Edelman calls “primary consciousness.” The brains of animals also exhibit these qualities – just as they exhibit a basic awareness of their environment.

The evolution from a basic animal brain into a human brain required us to evolve (among other things) an executive function that gave us the gift of planning. Edelman gives us a great example of the difference in this interview with Discover.

“If you kick a dog, the next time he sees you he may bite you or run away, but he doesn’t sit around in the interim plotting to remove your appendage, does he? He can have long-term memory, and he can remember you and run away, but in the interim he’s not figuring out, ‘How do I get Kruglinski?’”

Likewise, I expect that the Social Internet Brain is evolving an executive function that will enable the power of the millions of networked people to be focused on executing long-term plans.

The example that comes to mind is the phenomenon that was Barrack Obama’s social platform during the race for the democratic ticket – MyBO.org. A great piece published a couple of years ago in Technology Review laid out how the Obama campaign used a loosely coordinated but massively connected social platform to mobilize people on a scale that had previously been unheard of. They were able to effectively build an executive function to direct the Social Internet Brain.

I know there must be other examples out there that I’m not aware of – and I think that if the Social Internet Brain hypothesis is right, we will see the emergence of more and more sophisticated executive functions that allow hundreds of thousands – or even millions – of people to work together to enact a long-term plan on a scale and at a frequency we have never seen before.

A little while ago, I came across this study by Michael Morris and Daniel Ames that described the impact of metaphor use by economic pundits on trader behavior in the stock market. They identify two dominant metaphors used by commentators: 1) the agent metaphor (“the Dow fought its way upward”) and 2) the object metaphor (“the NASDAQ dropped like a stone”). In their study, they demonstrated that agent metaphors were typically used when the market was improving, and that these metaphors tended to make traders think that the trend would continue, as it would likely do if the Dow was a sentient creature following a path to a goal. Likewise, use of object metaphors during downward trends led people to think that it was a one-shot deal, and not an ongoing trend, as it would be if the NASDAQ were an actual falling stone. In the metaphor, once a stone hits bottom it is all done. In the stock market, there is always room to drop further down.

This is a terrific example of how metaphors can powerfully shape the way we think and act. The power of metaphors arises from something first articulated by Christopher Johnson which he calls conflation. It’s a fancy word for a simple idea: when we are children first learning about the world, subjective qualities and physical experiences are the same thing. For example, a common universal metaphor is Affection is Warmth, as in “He greeted me warmly.”

This metaphor arises from the joining of the physical experience of our parents’ body heat at the same time as receiving their affection. The part of our brains that measures temperature and the part that records affection get used to firing at the same time, and eventually the bonds between those two parts strengthen and become permanent.

Let’s look at another one that gets used all the time in the stock market: More is Up. “The Dow rose,” “Prices are high,” etc. As children, we have all had the experience of adding more liquid to a container and seeing it rise. Or of stacking blocks atop one another. This creates a permanent neural relationship between the physical experience of up, and the mental concept of more.

There are hundreds of these metaphors wired into our brains as we experience the world during childhood, and they form the foundation for our ability to understand and communicate abstract ideas. They are another building block in the Experiential Language lexicon. The more you use these pre-verbal, sensorimotor-based metaphors to communicate, the better and faster people will understand your ideas.

And don’t assume this is just about your verbal communication. If anything, it is more about visual literacy. Communicating visually allows you to show actual physical relationships. It gets you much closer to the experiences that underlie your ideas.

A recent article in Psychology Today highlights this truth. It is famously difficult to tell a lie from the truth in a verbal conversation. Researchers have recently demonstrated that the difficulty nearly disappears when people are asked to draw. Forcing them to visually express the experience at the core of their deception led to some shocking results:

“No significant differences in level of detail were found between verbal and drawn statements, but the plausibility of truthful drawings was somewhat higher than deceptive drawings. A similar difference in plausibility was not evident between truthful and deceptive verbal statements.

More interestingly, significantly more truth tellers included the “agent” (other person in the situation) in their drawings than did liars (80% vs. 13%). In addition, significantly more truth tellers drew from a shoulder-camera view than liars, who by and large drew from an overhead view (53% vs. 19%). In verbal statements, more truth tellers also mentioned the agent than liars (53% vs. 19%).

Using the “sketching the agent” result alone, it was possible to identify 80% of the truth tellers and 87% of the liars—results superior to most traditional interview techniques.”

There exists available to all of us a language that is more potent and powerful than the one most of us use every day. When it is used properly, it is immediately understood by everyone, carries within it a rich and relevant subtext and is internalized by listeners in a way that they can act on and explain it.

I have iterated towards this language intuitively, and as I’ve gotten better at using it, I’ve seen it work to brings out a sort of wonder in listeners, because that kind of authentic and effective communication is not something we see often. I have been trying for a while to articulate what this language is, but so far I’ve done a crappy job.

A big piece fell into place a few days ago as I was reading (and continue to read – it’s a long book) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Philosophy in the Flesh. In the book they discuss the nature of human categorization, and the role of what they call “basic-level categories.”

Categorizing things is a universal human behavior for making sense of and interacting with the world around us. Beginning with our first adventures exploring the world through our senses, and communicating about it through language, we group and label the things in our world. I’m reliving this through my daughter right now (her favorite phrase, “What’s this?”).

The way humans categorize, there are different levels within a category. A classic example – ripped off from Lakoff and Johnson – goes like this: consider the category of Vehicle – Car – Sports Car.  Car, which is in the middle of the category, has a rich and nearly-universal experiential data set attached to it. Everyone can picture a car. Most people in this country know what it feels like to be inside one, how it operates, what it smells like. We know what it is like to drive it, where to ,move our hands and feet, and how those movements influence the motion of the car.

That’s a lot of different neuron clusters that are connected to this one word.

Sports car on the other hand is a relatively much smaller data set confined to the much smaller group of people who have experience with a sports car. Most of us can picture one, but many of us have no direct experience with one. We don’t know what it feels like to drive one, smell one or buy one.

It’s much worse with the word vehicle. You cannot picture a vehicle. You don’t know what a vehicle feels or smells like, or what muscle movements you use with a vehicle. It is an abstract concept and not a concept rooted in experiential data. As a result, vehicle is a relatively neuron-poor concept.

Basic-level categories – things like car, chair, swimming, arguing, family, etc – have an immediate, powerful and associatively-rich impact because they are connected to so many real experiences. These are the building blocks of what I’m calling Experiential Language.

“Bioavailability” is a term used in pharmacology and nutrition that refers to how much of what you put in your body (drugs or food, etc) is actually usable by your body. Experiential Language is the most cognitively-available form of communication, because it uses these experience-rich basic-level categories. Using basic-level categories when you are trying to communicate (whether it be to a boss, a group a spouse or a child) has a dramatic impact on the ability of people to comprehend, internalize and act on what you are saying.

So I’ve been harping for a bit now on experience being the foundation of consciousness, and some of the potential ramifications of that idea. This article in the Times, tells us about Dr. Giulio Tononi’s hypothesis that consciousness arises out of “integrated information.”

He proposes (I think) that consciousness arises out of a massively parallel and integrated system that allows for literally trillions of potential states. The example they give is a diode that has two basic states: 1) there is light shining on it, or 2) there isn’t. Each of our neurons are basically like that diode. They can turn on or off. But because they are integrated with billions of other neurons which can also turn on or off, there are trillions of potential states our brain can be in.

I also think this is connected to some of the work Gerald Edelman has done to establish his idea of Neural Darwinism.

All of this is just me trying to understand how we process experiences and what that means for the emotions and ideas that drive our behaviors and attitudes.

In 1990, Rodney Brooks published a paper with the above title (the first one – the second one is mine). For those of you who haven’t heard of him, he is currently a professor of robotics at MIT and the Chief Technical Officer of iRobot.

Prior to his paper, A.I. work had been focused on writing computer programs that could solve problems by manipulating sophisticated symbolic systems (say that five times fast). Some of their early victories included computers that could solve word problems and math theorems or speak English. But despite these impressive digital feats, a true intelligence that was capable of learning, evolving and communicating never emerged

Then, twenty years ago, Professor Brooks published his paper arguing that A.I. researchers were chasing the wrong rabbit. Rather than look to logic as a model for intelligence, he looked to behavior. As he put it:

“The traditional methodology bases its decomposition of intelligence into functional information processing modules whose combinations provide overall system behavior. The new methodology bases its decomposition of intelligence into individual behavior generating modules, whose coexistence and co-operation let more complex behaviors emerge.”

Basically, he thought we should be building computer brains that could interact with the physical world. His theory was that intelligence arose out of life’s ability to sense, react and adapt to its environment.

Since then, developing embodied computer brains has become the dominant paradigm in A.I., but it has also dovetailed into work that has been done in the areas of science and philosophy that concern themselves with human consciousness.

The underlying concept uniting these different disciplines is this: experience is the basis for emotions and for ideas – even abstract intellectual constructs. As an example of how that can happen, on his way to articulating the Special Theory of Relativity, Einstein imagined himself standing in front of a mirror while he and the mirror were both traveling at the speed of light, and asked himself whether he would be able to see his reflection or not. This generated math too complex for most of us to understand, but it derived from considering an experience that any one of us could imagine.

This leads me to two key thoughts that have a fairly profound effect on the way I do things:

1. Experience is required for understanding - which is a literal and not a figurative thought. We have clichés that capture this (“walk a mile in my shoes”) but we regularly mistake listening or watching as a portal to understanding. If experience really is the foundation of our ideas, then you literally cannot understand what someone else is going through unless you give yourself the experience. You can project and assume and try to construct a mental model from potentially analogous experiences, but that leaves huge room for error.
   
   Remember this picture from 2004? Clearly Kerry has never had a typical American hunting experience, and one glance at this shot told the millions of people who have had that experience that Kerry was alien (which is basically the worst thing a “representative of the people” can be during an election).
   
   If you’re making something for other people, whether it be an app or an ad, your foundation has to be authentic experience, or you’re likely to pull a Kerry.
   
   
2. Communicating ideas should be done with the language of experience. Metaphor is an obvious example of this kind of “experiential language.” We use metaphors broadly every day, maybe because they are so experiential. For example, when we say someone “runs quickly” we think of the concept of speed. If we are runners, we might even tap into stored experiences of times when we ran quickly. People who aren’t runners have only an intellectual connection to the loose concept of “quickly.” But, when we say they “run like the wind” we’re accessing a universal experience with rich sensory data – the feeling of wind on our skin, the smell in our nose, the grass or trees rippling under the rushing pressure – and all of this sensory information is folded into our understanding of what we are being told, making the concept powerful, meaningful, immediate and personal.

I think people in the communications business are beginning to drift towards this experience-centric model as they are shoved along by empowered consumers united across social technologies. But for me, Brooks’s landmark paper from two decades ago was a key piece in understanding why this framework is becoming central to what we do.

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time, and I’ve decided to start using this space to explore my thoughts more formally.

The basic idea that’s been rolling around in my head over the last few years is this: experience is the heart of our attitudes, our behaviors and our communication. Maybe this sounds obvious, but I don’t think that it is.

I think most people are operating under the assumption that communication is about ideas (or maybe emotion). Ideas are an intellectual construct. They’re developed in the frontal lobe, the youngest part of our brain from an evolutionary standpoint, and are at the tail end of the thought process.

Emotions are an experiential construct. As far as we can tell, they are a chemical response to experiential data, and are the middle-child of the thought process.

Experience, on the other hand, is the founding act of the thought process. Experience is the bundle of sensory data

“Experience Theory” (and I put it in quotation marks because I’m not super happy with the name - and I don’t have a better one) posits that ideas and emotions are byproducts of the real content of any communication: experience.

This is the basic idea that’s been occupying me, and I’m going top publish some of the things connected to it in the hope that it will help me get a better grasp on what I’m saying.

A couple of years ago I saw the above TED video of Martin Seligman talking about the three kinds of a happy life. As he saw it, there was the pleasurable life (consuming as many pleasures as possible – think celebrities), the good life (doing something you are exceedingly good at) and the meaningful life (think Mother Theresa).

It has stuck with me because, though I’m living the good life now, I have often wanted the meaningful life. Since I can remember I have had a morbid, but not uncommon (I think), habit of looking at the present from the vantage point of my death bed. From that perspective, the day-by-day work-related happiness I derive from being good at what I do feels hollow and self serving. I cannot imagine a contented death if I continue measuring happiness by the quality of my action, and not by the results.

This has been an ongoing thing stretching over nearly a decade. But I still haven’t made the switch.

And then the other day I was listening to an NPR piece on a vanguard school in Africa, founded on the resources of private and corporate donors, to create a new generation of ethical and effective leaders. In the story, they interviewed two representative members of the graduating class. Both told stories of personal hardship by way of explaining what they were doing there, and why they felt possessed to take what they had learned and throw their energy against improving the world they came from.

This is the missing ingredient.

I’ve never been poor, starving, beaten, raped, neglected, the target of prejudice or mortally ill. I’ve rarely even encountered those things in thirty three years of life. I know they are wrong – but I can’t feel their wrongness.

I say this to my shame.

I’m becoming convinced that, like muscles, the moral center needs to be shocked by hardship in order to grow strong enough to overcome the pull of the good life.

Otherwise you just end up with rooms full of people like me – people who want their lives to matter in the broader context, but who are plagued by a paralyzing causelessness.

Cross posted on my work blog at: http://saatchiwellness.blogspot.com/

I read a piece in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago about a former chief technology officer for Microsoft named Nathan Myhrvold who recently unveiled a new piece of technology he has designed to help deal with mosquitoes that left me awe struck. He and his group somehow figured out how to design a machine that shoots down mosquitoes with lasers. So already we’re in “Minority Report” level coolness - but it gets better.

The entire machine was built with components that they purchased off of eBay. Technology that guides laser printers was coupled with image-detecting devices from digital cameras and image processing software. Their prototype machine could shoot down anywhere from 50-100 mosquitoes per second and if it made it to production they speculate that it could cost as little as $50.

The coolest part, however, is that it is so precise it only targets female mosquitoes. Apparently, the females are the ones who suck our blood (no comment), and it’s more efficient to leave the males alone. If you want to see a video of the laser at work, check it out here (it almost makes you feel sorry for the little suckers).

Advertising very seldom creates anything. As mentioned in a previous post, it is about “perceived value.” Given the role of mosquitoes in the spread of life-threatening disease (not to mention sanity-threatening itchiness), this seemed like a rare opportunity to highlight someone who has created real value that may someday benefit all of us. Except for the mosquitoes of course.

I can’t tell if it’s genius or not, but here’s the evidence so far:

• Last night I saw this spot for the first time. I rewound it and made my wife come into the room to watch it. Twice.
• When I came into work today the woman in the office next to mine was dragging people into her office to watch it. I then heard the signature Old Spice whistle emerge from two other cubes.
• On You Tube it’s over a million views and going strong.

Advertising today reminds me of a game I used to play as a kid. It didn’t have a name, but here’s how it went: my parents would sit in the living room watching television. I would slowly sneak into the  room - often attempting to hide behind objects what were far too small to conceal me - and they would pretend they didn’t notice me.

Most of today’s commercials remind me of the kid trying to hide behind a floor lamp. Consumers are on to us. They’re well versed in most of our tricks, and they know that everything we do is because we’re trying to sell them something. And yet we still act as though our techniques are opaque.

What I love about the Old Spice spot - besides its obvious hilarity - is that it treats the viewer as someone who’s in on the joke. And the joke is us. It makes no attempt to hide its manipulation of the viewer - quite the opposite. The manipulation is the central part of the spot, and for that reason my barriers came down and I just participated.

Cross posted on my work blog at: http://saatchiwellness.blogspot.com/

In September 2009 Dan Buettner gave a talk at TED where he detailed the findings of research he has done on what he calls “Blue Zones” – areas where people live to be really old. And not just old – vital. They’re still physically active. They maintain a sharp wit and a discerning mind.

Somehow these people have figured it out.

My first reaction was – boy I’d love to take a swim in their gene pool. But according to Mr. Buettner, only 10% of their longevity is determined by genetics — the other 90% is lifestyle.

Wellness means many things, but for most of us one of the key components to wellness is how long we live. We quit smoking, go on diets, stuff ourselves with expensive vitamins and supplements all in the name of being healthier with the expectation that we will live better and also longer.

Mr. Buettner offers “nine commandments” for living a long life – things which all of the super-seniors had in common:

1. Move Naturally: Incorporate regular, non-stressful physical activity into your daily life.

2. Downshift: Slow down & de-stress. Stress ignistes an inflammatory response that can lead to a number of health issues.

3. Purpose Now: Take time every day to remind yourself why you’re doing what it is you do.

4. Wine @5: Drink a little bit every day (whoohoo!)

5. Plant Slant: Eat more plants than anything else

6. 80% Rule: Stop eating when you’re 80% full

7. Loved Ones First: Maintain close contact with extended family. It may feel like it’s killing you, but it turns out to be healthy (I added that part)

8. Belong: People with a large social network of close friends live longer

9. Right Tribe: If the people around you have unhealthy habits, it’s likely that you will too.

Just out of curiosity and I checked off which of the nine I am currently doing – being generous with myself I’m at 4 out of 9.

He doesn’t tell how many extra years that buys me, but I’m hoping for a few.

If a tree falls in the woods, and there’s no one there to hear it, did it fall? My wife and I always argue over this one. She says, of course it did. For her reality is reality. I come down on the side of perception as king. Which is how I ended up in advertising I guess.

Perception versus reality are on my mind because of Rory Sutherland’s talk at TED about how advertising creates what he calls “intangible value” (I call it bullshit, but whatever). The point he makes in a really entertaining 15 minutes is that while silly people like engineers deal with reality, advertisers deal with perceptions.

And for about ten minutes after that talk I felt great about my profession. We’re not trying to manipulate people - we’re creating “intangible value.”

But then I started thinking (never a good thing I know). Perception and reality are different because ultimately people are just a big computer attached to some sensory equipment (leaving out for the moment the disputable existence of a soul). We don’t live in reality - more accurately we do our best to interpret reality through the data fed into our brain by our sensory equipment.

And as advanced as our equipment is, it can still be fooled. Even the way our brains track something as immutable as time can be fooled. One of my favorite experiments comes from an article entitled “Brain Time” by David M. Eagleman. He writes about how the data from our different senses actually arrive in our brain at slightly different speeds. For example, it takes longer for visual data from your eyes to reach your brain than it does for aural data.

As a result our brains have evolved to have a very slight delay that allows all of the sensory data from a single event to sync up. And this delay can be screwed with. In one experiment researchers had a subject push a button which would light a bulb. They then introduced a very small delay in between the pushing and the lighting. Then, after the brain had re-calibrated, they removed the delay. The result: people thought they saw the light before they pushed the button.

And here’s where people get suspicious. As Mr. Sutherland so entertainingly put it, advertising is about understanding and manipulating peoples’ perceptions - often without them even being aware that it is happening. This puts people (consumers?) into a position of vulnerability - and advertisers into one of power.

Which brings us - as all things do - back to Spiderman. “With great power comes great responsibility.”

Unfortunately we more often than not abuse that responsibility - and validate peoples’ suspicions.

But that’s a blog for another day.

I just read a long, somewhat confusing post from Valeria Maltoni reporting from SxSWi (I know - I’m a month behind on my Reader) on how thinking about how our brains work can make us better presenters / communicators.

She comes at it a number of different ways, but for me it all came back to something I’ve been thinking about for a while now: visceral memory.

Her point (I think) was that communication that is able to convey an experience - something that is input into the brain as physical data rather than as symbolic constructs - has a much greater impact and likelihood of sticking.

Remember the “we only use 10% of our brain” myth? Here’s what I think: this myth perpetuates even today because the majority of our gray matter is used to compute and store sensory data. The part we use to deal with symbols, intellectual constructs, etc, is relatively small. That’s why working memory is 3-4 chunks of information, but you can recount in excruciating detail the 5 days you spent with your in-laws. One is symbolic memory and the other is visceral memory.

It also goes back to the idea that first we emote and then we rationalize.

I think first we experience, then we emote, then we rationalize.

Not sure where this is going, but I think it will be interesting getting there.

P.S. I’ll be first in line when technology figures out how to let you literally have someone else’s experiences.

NOTE: This is now about a month old, but what the heck: push it out anyway.

Recently I discovered fmylife.com, a site where the digital world gathers to share their stories of humiliation. Awkward sexual situations, embarrassing social mistakes, blindly insensitive family members, it’s all there in uniformly pithy chunks.

I can’t stop reading them, and I can’t stop sharing them.

And in the midst of binging on the multitudinous misfortune of others, it occurred to me that in advertising this is what we spend so much time seeking - this visceral, addictive connection that leaves such a lasting impression.

So why does it take so many of us well-paid, seasoned professionals months to do what a teenager with a keyboard can do in five minutes?

The simple answer is: they were there. They had the experience, and all the rich data built into that memory.

“Txt your revelation If I could get a few of my twitter statuses on a coffee cup, I’d be a happy man. Txt cup to 30241 to share your revelation. The future implications here are huge. The opportunity to interact with a brand like green mountain while doing something as simple as drinking your morning coffee. My revelation. “I need to get back to my work”.”

Hat tip to Ballista Blog for turning me on to Green Mountain’s use of the long tail to bring to life the jolt of clarity you get from a good, strong cup of coffee. They successfuly connected the universal experience of epiphany with their brand through the pithy - and sometimes profound - “realizations” of people who drink their coffee.

Kicks the @ss out of Burger King’s approach of bringing “Have It Your Way” to life by writing little second-person manifestos on the side of their cups. Which is a shame, because having things your way is another nice unviersal waiting to be tapped.

Bring people - and their experiences - inside your work. Bring them into your strategy meetings and your brainstorms. Bring them into your ads and your events.

Because they own the experience - nothing is more compelling than someone who has been there.

I’ve imagined a manifesto in this space - a passionate, articulate rant that sets the north star for all of the things I want to explore here.

But I can’t escape the feeling that it would be boring to read.

So, here’s how I feel about starting this blog:

Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sarah_mccans/3138903932/