January 2, 2014 • 36 mins
Cluttered Desks, Cluttered Minds and Toddler Hands: Toddlers might not seem like scientists when they mash up a banana or throws noodles at the wall, but research reveals that messy hands often indicate a hungry mind.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
I describe your desk here at work for us, Well,
today it's a little messy. I have some stacks of paper,
I have a tiger, I have clu waca av my
(00:25):
sign uh, and I don't know, just a bunch of
other myrriad objects there. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a beautiful leaf, uh,
photos uh, Kinsey knife yeah yeah, you um well, minds
a lot neater now, Like we we moved to locations
shortly after my son arrived, so for the longest my
(00:48):
desk was pretty messed up because it's just like a
pile of art that I wanted to somehow stick to
our art resistant surfaces around our desk area, like the wall.
It's not really cubicle, but just I'm lucky enough to
have to surfaces like the wall in front of me,
the wall beside me. But it's it's it's made in
a way to where you can't it's really difficult to
stick things to and uh and the only way you
(01:08):
can really do it is like this, this sort of
complex system where you use uh, pins and um and
tape at the same time and kind of like sow
your art into the wall and it takes forever. So that, yeah,
it's really the only way to do it. So for
the longest, my desk was just like piles of notes
for podcast book screen about a monitor that I didn't
(01:29):
have hooked up yet. Um and you know, it's just
just awful. I saw it as a fortress of papers
and books, like you were walling everybody out. I know
it probably looked pretty bad with the monitor because the
monitor was was not hooked up, and it was like
between me and Jonathan Strickland as if I was never
going to hook up this monitor and I was gonna
use it slowly as a divider and uh and so
(01:49):
I'm glad to have that hooked up so people can see, Oh,
he's not just a defensive clutter. Yeah he was. He
was going to get there, go somewhere with that at
some point. So yeah, well, and we are going to
talk to you about spaces, orderly spaces, chaotic spaces, how
do they affect us? And I will say that I
do like a nice orderly space, but when I'm working
on a project, things spirals sort of everywhere, and that
(02:12):
makes sense to me because I'm referencing a lot of
different things. But I might be an order muppet an order. Okay,
this is the idea that, of course we have casks
in order. The two great movements in life, right, A
movement towards order, a movement away from order. Of course,
to quote while Stevens the poet, a violent order is
a disorder, and a great disorder is an order, and
(02:34):
these two things are one. So it's a complicated topic.
There's a lot of back and forth, but a simplified
way is too. Indeed, look at Jim Hinson's The Muppets
and divide them into agents of order and agents of chaos.
That's right. Dahlia Lithwick, writing for Slate, talked about this,
this idea that you either fall into one of two
categories chaos muppet, which are out of control, emotional, volatile.
(02:57):
They tend towards this is for saying this. They tend
towards the blue and fuzzy. They make their way through
life in a swirling maelstrom of food crumbs, small flaming objects,
and the letter C. We're talking about Cookie Monster, Ernie Grover, Guns,
Dr Bunsen, Honeydew Animal, and she says, Zelda Fitzgerald, here's
here's a historical figure who was a chaos Muppet. Okay,
(03:20):
But on the other side, you've got your order Muppet.
And she says she's thinking about Bert Scooter Sam the
Eagle Kermit of course, right, and the blue guy who
is perennially harassed by Grover at restaurants. She says, the
order Muppet, every Man, that blue Guy. They tend to
be neurotic, highly regimented, averse to surprises, and they sport
monstrously large eyebrows. She said. They represent the responsibility of
(03:43):
running the world and they feel weighed down by it,
but they secretly revel the knowledge that they keep things afloat. Okay, Yeah,
which are you? Well, we were talking about this earlier
and I'm still struggling to come with an answer because
I'm definitely not the guy who threw the sword fish.
Like that's like to me, like he and uh An
(04:07):
Animal are right up there like the extremes of chaos
mupet Gonzo too. Really, they're they're right up there at
the threshold of of of utter chaos. And then of
course on the other end, you have uh, Sam the Eagle,
I guess would be like the most orderly Muppet because
Kermit will wave his arms around a bit. But but
Sam is a rock and he's gonna stick to it,
uh no matter what. And I feel like I'm maybe
(04:28):
a little more towards the middle. So it's hard to
hard to I mean, maybe some of the members of
the band were a little more balanced and laid back,
but I don't think I'm a doctor, both because I
had to have seen you as a chaos muppet when
you're working and you're in the middle of something. But
I have also seen you as the order muppet who
every six months goes around the office and says, why
(04:48):
is all this chalk around and clings things up and
you get rid of all the jars of urine and
whatnot hanging around. Well, maybe I'm maybe I'm kind of
like the Count, because the Count is there's yes, the
Count one, two, three, Uh, he's because he's orderly in
a very and he's all about the numbers. But this
his obsession with the numbers tends to disrupt everything else
(05:11):
in his life. So I feel I feel like, maybe
I'm not saying that it's a one to one comparison,
but I feel like I'm kind of that kind of
mixed where they're they're parts of me that are very orderly,
but sometimes those get in the way of other stuff
and causes disorder over here. I'm kind of in flux.
I guess well, I'm with Dhlia Lithwick. She says that
she is a faux chaos muppet. Yeah, but at the
(05:32):
center is order. What about you? That's what I'm saying.
I'm with I'm with her, that your faux chaos muppet. Okay, yeah,
but it also depends on the situation and um my
environments and everybody's environment as well. Discuss But the thing is,
those chaos muppets, they always get a bad rap, right
because the surroundings they don't look so good, and people
(05:54):
perceive them as you know, just sort of lay about
who can't even be bothered to clean up their spaces.
In fact, it brings to mind the broken windows theory, right,
the idea that that the way that you ultimately combat
um social upheaval and problems of crime is that you
focus on all the little things you focus on. Say
that broken window or some graffiti because of the windows
(06:16):
are broken. If there's graffiti on the wall, it's sending
this message to everyone else that minor transgressions are okay,
and therefore we can extrapolate that that the less minor
and fractions are okay as well. And then it becomes
more and more chaotic. It builds up like kibble. Yeah,
like one broken window begets several broken windows, and then
all of a sudden you've got mayhem going on. And
(06:38):
I think about the Crag Street Tunnel in Atlanta as
an example of a graffiti ridden tunnel but also an
example of extreme creativity. In fact, on any given day
you can pass by this tunnel and see people getting
their photograph taken in front of it or making videos
in front of it, because ultimately it's this stand in
(07:00):
for an act of creativity. Yeah, it's a graffiti free zone.
And I think about this a lot every time I
go past it. I wonder about graffiti free zones and
to what extent, uh, basically, what affect they have on creativity,
because it's not it's it's a situation where suddenly it's
not just like a daring graffiti artist can go there
and tag. And it's not just you know, somebody throwing
(07:23):
up some sort of a gang tag either. It's everybody,
even people who would normally not even think about it. Well,
the crop tunnel does have a good amount of very
interesting art, and what I think it's interesting about it
is that it requires you to stop and take a
second look. And so that's sort of this idea that
we're going to look at when we talk about spaces,
in particular workspaces clutter versus order. Yes, all right, So
(07:46):
as luck would have it, we have a study that
looks at how um chaotic versus clean, neat and orderly
environments affect our productivity, affect our creativity, affect our sponse
to stimuli. Because again, to your point, we tend to
put it in a quick Felix and Oscar odd couple
scenario right where one is the slav and one is
(08:08):
the orderly individual, and and the slab is just he's
just a slab. All he's doing is contributing to the
comedic environment. But that's about it. Where it's it's this
is study reveals it's a lot more nuanced than that,
and it's actually a really good study for those of
us whose desk get a little bit um chaotic from
time to time. The title this study is physical order
(08:29):
produces healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, whereas disorder produces creativity.
It's a two thousand thirteen paper from the Carlson School
of Management at the University of Minnesota, and it's it.
It basically revolves around three different experiments involving an orderly
work environment and a disorderly work environment. Yeah, and let's
just read out the first line, because I think this
(08:51):
sets the tone. The first line is order and disorder
are prevalent in both nature and culture, which suggests that
each environ confers advance edges for different outcomes. So it's
not so black and white as the order and the
chaos muppets. Yeah, it's not a situation where all right,
we have the orderly muppets in the calf muppets are
just tearing down society. Like, both have survived, both have
(09:12):
are here due to an evolutionary process, so they must
both must both be important. Like I always come back
to the cuttlefish and about how you have these larger
cuttle fish that are mating and you have the masculine
cuttlefish who are all about brute strength and UH and
say and and just making sure they get their mate
that way. And then you have the sneakier, smaller cuttlefish
who disguised themselves as females. And the ultimate take home
(09:35):
there is that cuttlefish evolution UH has favored both styles,
both types of cuttlefish, and ultimately both types of cuttlefish
are necessary for the survival of the species. And so
we see a similar thing with disorder muppets and order
muppets in human society. And you see this in this study,
which is so interesting because, as you mentioned, there are
(09:55):
three experiments that Kathleen DeVos and the other re searchers conducted,
and in the first experiment, they randomly assigned a group
of college age students to spend time in adjacent office spaces.
One was tidy, the other was cluttered with papers and
other work related to try to us, and the students
spent their time filling out questionnaires that were unrelated to
(10:15):
the study, so the students didn't know really why they
were there. After ten minutes, they were told they could
leave and they were offered an apple or a chocolate bar. Okay,
So those students who sat in the orderly office were
twice as likely to choose the apple than those who
sat amid the chaotic mess of papers. In addition, when
(10:37):
the participants were presented with the opportunity to donate to
a charity, those placed in the orderly room donated more
of their own money. Interesting. Okay, so what's coming out
of this? The pro I guess you could say for
the orderly room here is that we were talking about
more civic minded behavior, more generous and conscientious at least
in terms of their diets. You know, their their minding,
(10:59):
their peas and cues. Now, what strikes me about this
experiment is it I inevitably draw back to our our
podcasts about symbols and the power of symbols, and the
idea too about clothed cognition, that our our clothing is
a kind of symbol that informs how we behave and
how we carry ourselves. And here we see a physical
environment that is a symbol for order, a symbol for
(11:19):
what is expected of us, uh, the symbol for cleanliness,
and that kind of translates into our mind in terms
of cleanliness of of ethics, cleanliness of of our of
our of our dietary habits and uh and and just
an interesting insight into how spaces control our behavior. So yeah,
back to the broken window theory. If you're in that
(11:40):
room that's cluttered, messy, apparently nobody has been paying attention.
You could eat that chocolate bar. You don't need to
give that much money to charity, right. Yeah. It also
reminds me of the Panopticon, you know, because because the
Panopticon is of course a structure of order. And if
you if things are disorderly, then you're you're thinking, well,
I guess nobody's watching. It doesn't it doesn't matter. But
if everything is lined up, if everything seems to be
(12:02):
in this heightened states state of order, then you also
feel like you're more responsible for your actions. Okay, so
if you out there are messy desk dwellers, you probably
wanted to get vindicated here and you will in the
next study. Yeah. So similar deal participants were put into
the messy room with disorder everywhere they put into the nice, clean,
(12:25):
or early room. But this time they're asked to come
up with new uses for ping pong balls and and
so and of course, which makes me wonder, how many
different uses can you find for ping pong balls. They're
pretty pretty specific and what you can do with them,
but I'll leave that to everyone's imagination. Uh. Anyway, the result, overall,
participants in the messy room came up with the same
(12:46):
number of ideas for new ways to use these ping
pong balls as the clean room counterparts, but their ideas
were rated as more interesting and creative when evaluated by
the judges. So dependent judges. The judges they were judging,
they just like a list of ideas, brainstormed ideas for
what you could do with a pair of ping ball
balls and anyway, So ultimately we're showing here that participants
(13:09):
in the disorderly room were more creative. They were able
to come up with more novel ideas for what to
do with those ping boonballs, which again a very limited
object to have to brainstorm around. Then they're clean room counterparts.
So making this case that creativity or the ability to
take a risk in your thought processes is also borne
(13:30):
out in their final experiment, in which they were given
the choice of adding a health boost to their lunch
time smoothie that was labeled either new or classic. Guests
who chose the classic, well, the classic is going to
be chosen by the clean room people because they want
to stick with something that is proven, that is established.
They're not going to take any risk on some sort
of new fangled smoothie editive, that's right. But those in
(13:53):
the messy room, they were like, bringing on, want the
new formula. Let's go crazy with this smoothie. Just put
everything in it. I don't care, wood chips, ping pong balls. Yeah,
the ping pong ball smoothie was born of this experiment,
I bet. Yeah. So that messy environment can actually cause
people to feel inspired to break free of tradition, right
(14:13):
to say, Okay, that window is broken, let's let's do
something with that. Let's make some artwork out of it.
You know. I feel like at times it even it
even helps to have like a disorder avatar to turn to,
you know, like like a figure like an animal or
a hunter s Thompson, where you could you you sort
of think around them, you sort of you sort of
(14:35):
live vicariously through them for a few moments, and it
has an overall creative benefit to you, sort of like
a spirit animal. Yeah, like you know, you have a
spirit animal is animal you can sort of draw from
that and uh and yeah, and at least for for
for a little bit. As you you you sort of
bath in his glow, you're able to feel a little
more liberated, a little bit more daring in your ideas.
(14:58):
All right, let's take a quick break, and when come back,
we are going to try to get at the bottom
of why this creativity, in this sort of inspiration and
perhaps even learning are linked to messy environments. All right,
(15:19):
we're back, and you know it just real quick, you know,
talking about working in disorderly environments, chaotic environments. And I
think to coffee shops again, a place where both of
you and I working coffee shops a lot, and there's
a lot of really interesting history about the coffee shops
roll in uh in creative thought in Western culture, and
that is a chaotic environment. And in the best of situations,
(15:41):
because you have people ordering different drinks, you have all
sorts of weird sounds of the espresso. You know, God
knows what kind of music we're gonna play. People from
an in and out, and if you're lucky, it's a
variety of people. So it's you know, it's beautiful people,
ugly people. People you know, from from the top of
the ivory tower, people who sleep under the tower, all
coming into the same space, and it I for one,
(16:03):
feel that creative energy rolling off of it. Yeah. I
mean you talked about the periody of enlightenment and this
convergence of coffee houses, people turning away from from the liquor,
from the alcohol and going towards coffee as a stimulant
and as a result, sharing more of their ideas in
this community centered, uh sort of area, And the same
(16:24):
thing today is going on. Although a lot of us
are wearing headphones, you do get exposure to everyone, and
so it does make sense to me that the chaos
of all of that might create these associations that would
help you kind of ping pong around until you get
these novel associations, these novel ideas. In fact um, it
really helps when you're studying a topic. And most people think, oh,
(16:47):
when I go to study, it should be in a quiet,
orderly room. But there is a New York Times article
called Forget what You Know about good study habits, and
it says in a classic nine experiments, psychologist found that
college students who study need a list of forty vocabulary
words in two different rooms, one window lists and cluttered
and the other modern with a view of the courtyard
(17:07):
did far better on a test than students who studied
the words twice in the same room, And later studies
have confirmed the confirmed the finding for a variety of topics.
So the idea here is that the outside context is varied,
the information is enriched, and this slows down the forgetting
process because the more layers of chaos, I guess you
(17:27):
could say here, um, the more sort of patterns and
things that you have to take in data, the more
points of association your brain makes to whatever it is
that you are concentrating on at that very moment, and
so it becomes a stickier memory for people. Yeah, and
it lines up kind of well with what Wall Steven
says about the more chaos you have, the chaos kind
of becomes an order, and the more order you have,
(17:49):
it kind of comes comes more and more chaotic. Now,
in talking about learning and chaos, one has to visit
the world of the child, of the todd of the baby,
because for one thing is we've touched on many times before.
Humans are natural born scientists, even the very little wee ones,
their their their brains are open to the world. There
(18:11):
they have this lamp like view of things. They're bringing
in all this data, but at the same time, they
often seem to be agents of chaos. They seem to
revel in making a mess. They seem to know no
other way of life than to smear it on the
wall on their face, to eat noddles with their hands,
(18:32):
and then and then rub their their pesto covered fingers
through their hair. I mean, never was there a better
chaos muppet than any child, particularly the age of two. Yeah,
they are all animal uh and with maybe a little
Gonza or the swordfish dude thrown in for for that
whole period of time. I actually had a professor in
(18:52):
college who said that the reason why children love animals
and stories is that they tend to really um mine
with them and be like and see themselves as animals,
unpredictable and crazy and running around until they get more
of their humanness under their belts. But in this case,
there is a study that shoes up this idea that
(19:14):
this uh animal like behavior is helpful in learning things. Yes,
researches at the University of Iowa study how sixteen month
old children learn words for non solid objects. So we're
talking about stuff like oatmeal, glue, peace peas, uh, you know, mucus. Uh,
all the various non solid objects that they be coming
(19:35):
out or going into your child. There's a lot of
traffic there. Uh. Now, previous researches coming out for sure,
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, out the nose that it just happens. Now,
the previous research on this topic had shown that Toddler's
learn more readily about solid objects because they can easily
identify them due to their unchanging size and shape. So
(19:56):
an apple is always shaped like an apple, whereas apple sauce,
you know, is shaped like whatever the container is. That's
basic physics and they get it and their brain is
processing that data. So but but but the previous data said, yeah,
as far as the oozy stuff, the running stuff, the
apple sauce, the snot the pas, but what have you,
They were that they're maybe not as good about identifying
that stuff. Now, what this study did. The researchers decided
(20:20):
to test this. They said, is this really the case?
Is it's just you know, our bias on this particular situation.
So they exposed sixth sixteen month olds to fourteen non
solid objects. Mostly it was food and drink stuff like
you know, apple sauce and pudding and soup. And then
they presented the items and gave them made up words.
So like some of the examples though, we're like Dax
(20:41):
and Kiv, nonwords used to uh to identify these various
gooey foods. So that this is this idea that they're
to be purity here, there's no associations because other words
that they might have learned in relation to this exactly,
just to test what the sort of information they would
retain by interaction with this food exactly. And then a
minute passes and they asked the children to identify the
(21:03):
same foods in different sizes or shapes uh, so you know,
again different containers, different visual presentation of this non solid doctor.
And then so this required the answers to go beyond
relying simply on shape and size and to explore what
the substances were made off to make the identification. So
you can see where this is going in terms of
(21:24):
how toddlers behave with with dewey foods and UH, and
how you might interact with them. So of course they
started prodding it and probing it and pushing it up
in their fingers and smearing it out on their bodies,
throwing it at the walls, watching the noodles worm their
way down right, and rubbing it into their heads. Just
just just this ecstasy of of of handling the non
(21:46):
solid stuffs and this tactile experience actually allow this toddlers
to learn to better learn the names of foods when
they got to play with them. Yeah, which I love
this idea because all of a sudden, everything in that
world makes sense. As a parent, when when your kid
is lobbying this this disgusting liquefied peace at your face. Yeah,
(22:11):
you think, ah, yes, you're learning, my love. They transforms
this moment where they're playing with with pricey organic apple
sauce or something, you know, and you're just like, are
you're wasting your food? You're playing with it, why don't
you eat it? And it turns that into this fabulous
moment of oh, you were discovering the universe. You are,
you were learning, you're using your your tactile senses to
(22:33):
better identify non fluid objects. It's uh, it's it's the
kind of study that makes makes parenting a little easier.
It really does. And you sent uh some pictures of children,
toddlers who were just covered in various kinds of pasta,
including spaghetti that I think, I don't know how you're
(22:55):
going to feel about. This made me want to jump
in there with them. Really yeah, oh, we'll see. This
is if you do a search, do like a Google
image search for pasta party or toddler pasta party, baby
pasta party, you have to play around with a little bit.
You will see images of this where generally it'll consist
of like a very small child swimming pool filled with
(23:16):
pasta noodles, cooked pasta noodles, and then there'll be some
like naked or maybe diapered or swimsuited babies in there
just lounging around with handfuls, just fistfuls of spaghetti, some
of it in their mouth, you know, fist in it
right into their mouth, smearing it on their bodies, noodles
hanging off of them, and uh, it can be a
bit frightening, especially since U some of the photography is
(23:39):
good and some of it is a little sketchy looking.
Well you see, you sent that to me, and I'm
a really tuckedile person and my first impulse was like, yeah,
I want to feel that. I want to feel those
spirals of pasta in my hands and I want to
squish them. I actually started to grip my cheek. Well,
I tell you, I first discovered this phenomenon, uh, prior
(24:02):
to having a son, and at the time I was like,
this is this is grim. This looks like something out
of a horror movie. I want no part of this. Now,
I have to say that my my thinking on it is, well,
if I knew for certain that it would distract him
for thirty minutes, I would totally fill that tub up
with with noodles. Uh. So you're your perspective on these changes,
and certainly, knowing what we know now from the study,
(24:24):
I definitely see the value in it. Now you could
go to go a little overboard. You could decide that
you're you need to throw a party for every non
fluid object or slightly squishy your gooey thing, uh, and
then you're just just just gonna eat your food budget up.
I'm not a fan of the world peas in a
kiddie pool. I'm going to stick to the pasta myself.
But it does give you this idea that you have
(24:46):
this uh, this access to this rich patina of associations.
If you're trying to figure out the world. If you're
trying to explore it, name it. Then the more you
can add to that database, including tactile things. But that
would allow you to know that this noodle is squishy,
or this noodle is spiral, this noodle is super long
and thin. The more you can really get a bead
(25:07):
on what this whole kind of human existence thing is. Yeah,
and and and certainly educators are onto this. You know,
you go to a you go to a museum that
really has a robust children's area or or a children's
museum a hands on learning center. I mean, that's the
kind of stuff they're gonna they're gonna really push. It's
not just look at the alligator. Here's a section of
of of an alligator's hide or a representation of it.
(25:29):
You can actually touch. Here is some It's one thing
to look at some sea life in the in the
aquarium behind glass, but let's actually have a touchdank where
you can reach in and actually have that tactile experience.
And uh and and all of that, uh, you know,
makes just so much more sense once you once you
really dive into the data here, I think it's adult
swe shild erasist as well before we're learning new things.
(25:51):
Perhaps not everybody would like to see us squishing pasta
or other types of adventures, but you know, well, I'm
I'm writing something for the upside about chemical weapons right now.
I'm probably not going to try and saren or or
mustard gas or or clorine gas on my own just
to have that pacto experience, because those are certainly um
non solid objects. I'm glad that you've made that decision
(26:14):
not to do that. All right. Well, on that note,
let's call the robot over and catch up on some
listener mail. All right, This one comes to us from Jerry,
who's responding to our Panopticon episode. He says, Hello, Julian Robert,
I just finished listening to your episode on the Panopticon,
which I found both interesting and informative. I am in
the business of information security, and one aspect of the
(26:36):
Panopticon as life concept that may not be obvious to
all is that it isn't always a deterrent against antisocial behavior.
In fact, it can have quite the opposite effect by
inciting a segment of society into antisocial behavior. A great
example of that is the hacktivist Anonymous movement of the
past few years. Now. Those movements are all over the
map in terms of motivations, but a common focal point
(26:58):
is on the loss of privacy, liberties and so on.
As an observer, it's particularly interesting to watch as the
establishments they are rebellion against use the very rebellion to
justify additional laws which further erode those things that the
activists are fighting for in the first place. I also
think that a key element of the movement is for
participants to stay out of the eye of the panopticon
as they carry out protests by using various means of obstucation,
(27:21):
hence the name anonymous. To carry on the analogy, the
movement uses the gaps in the panopticon's vision to hide
their antisocial behavior, at least what those involved believed to
be gaps, as recent prosecutions would lead one to realize
the shadows are not as dark as they might see.
I think that is an important faucet because I strongly
suspect that the desire to rebel would be far smaller,
(27:43):
if not non existent, if those involved were carrying out
their activities in the public eye. Like social disobedience of
days gone by in respect, the panopticon both drives them
to rebel and drives them to do so only from
the perceived blind spots of the watchful eye. Anyhow, I
thought it was an interesting active. They didn't come up
on the show, Jerry. I think that Jerry gives us
(28:03):
so much to think about here because mostly and I'm
going to play a lot of Devil's advocate here, but
I think mostly that when we think about anonymous or hacktivists,
we tend to think of it more as them bringing
transparency to previously hidden information. But what he is saying
is very interesting in the fact that they're not out
there front and center actually allows them, people who are
(28:28):
not necessarily trying to bring things to transparency, to be
a little bit more devious and that they should be
out there front and center to actually enact justice. But
the question is do you think that they could. Do
you think that the anonymous activists, the people who are
you know, on the side of social justice? I should say,
do you think that if they were there for us
(28:51):
to see that they could accomplish the same amount of
information as the question? Yeah, I don't know. I have
my I have my doubts on that too. It seems like,
you know, to his point, the days of like pure
social disobedience, Um, I mean, you still see examples of it,
but it's hard to imagine large masses of people engaging
in it without mass these days. Of course, he's coming
(29:11):
at it from a security perspective, and so it's just
really interesting to to bring that to light. So yeah,
if anybody has any thoughts, and I'd love to know,
because this is a very rich argument pro and con,
and Jerry makes some really good points. All right, Well,
here's another bit of listener maile related to the Panopticon episode.
Um Hi, guys Sean from Saskatoon here with the with
(29:35):
the least to contribute to a conversation that I've ever
had in so far as my primary idea of boils
down to nothing. Sounds good, Do go on? He says,
I believe that the normalization associated with having an all
seeing I on seven does not necessarily lead to a
perpetual state of stress of paranoia. We're not equipped to
handle something like that, and those who do do so
(29:55):
not because of an external situation but a chemical imbalance.
It's the very basis for realization. I'm thinking primarily of
a study examining driving habits in the real world, where
cameras were mounted in hundreds of people's cars for years
to study how distracted or careful drivers were. They all
knew they were under observation and got paid to be
in the study every year in case they needed a
reminder that they were being watched. Uh. They soon behaved
(30:18):
as though they were quite alone, covorting with ladies in
the night. In some cases, we're leaving themselves while driving,
juggling multiple phones and a cigarette. Some behavior may be
curb due to cameras, as they are correlated with a
decline and crime, but by and large they are ignored
and don't cause significant grief that There are obvious residents
of London and New York to cite two examples of
(30:38):
cities almost entirely under CCTV observation who feel that their
rights are being violated and who rail against the intrusion.
But uh, and I could be wrong here. There are
probably people who would be railing against other government intrusion
or civil rights violations where there are no cameras at all. Uh.
This is a complicated issue, and I'm not a state
security apologist, but the mere presence of cameras everywhere, or
(31:00):
the omnificence of government about all internet traffic doesn't really
bug me nearly as much as their ability to act
without a warrant. Keep up the great work. I look
forward as always to your next philosophical, psychological, biological, and
technological musics. All right, very good point. Here are we
equipped to even deal with this idea that we're constantly
being surveiled and perhaps under uh, this construct that we
(31:23):
are not we just fold into it as the people
who were being watched on these security cameras and their
camera became normalized to the whole situation. So I think
that's a good question. But I also wonder if it
is part and parcel of the idea that's ingrained in
all of us that when we get in the car,
no matter if there's a camera watching us, we are
(31:44):
in a private space. Hence all the news pickers on
the highway. Yes, yeah, it's always kind of better than
that is when you see somebody really dancing out to music, though, yeah,
I always like that. Well, you know, here's a here's
a little bit of listener mail comes in in response
to our Cubicle Doom episode. Which has some crossover into
the Panopticon area. Um this one, Louis writes and says, Hey, guys,
(32:07):
I'm catching up on old episodes, and I thought I'd
tossed in my two cents about pink noise. Years ago,
I worked at a startup web company and we, unbeknowns
to the workers, had a pink noise generator in the building.
This all came to light in the summer when the
temperatures were really hot and the electric company was asking
larger office buildings to shut down non essential electrical devices.
The pink noisemakers were deemed to be such devices. I
(32:27):
worked in a cubicle farm, and the change was instant
and dramatic. While the pink noise was on, you couldn't
hear a phone conversation for more than about a cubicle away.
When the pink noise was off, you could clearly hear
the same conversation from five cubes over. UH. To this point,
everyone assumed that we were always hearing the air handling system,
until our maintenance person pointed out that the tiny one
demeter one diameter speakers in the ceiling space about seventy
(32:50):
to ten feet apart. Thank you for all the great content.
Out of about thirty different podcast series I listened to
on a regular basis, you are my favorite. Thank you again, Louis.
Thanks Louis. So that's nice because that angle is a
benevolent panopticon that was looking out for them, piping in
some pink noise and in our new office space. I
really wish that we had the same scenario. It would
(33:12):
be kind of cool. Yeah, certainly an example here though,
where they didn't necessarily believe in God until God stopped
believing in them. If you think of God as a
pink noise machine. All right, um, here we have a
quick bit of a listener mail from Eric. Eric writes
in in response to a cute episode The Science of Cute,
because I wonder how many people react to too much
(33:33):
cute or attempts at cute that fail. In Harry Potter,
Dolores Umbridge has has described as a hard person to
display many cute kittens in her rooms. The pictures were
called horrid in the books not cute, and Umbridge herself
tries to sound and dress cute, but was grossly overweight
and looked like a toad in the book I wish
you had talked about what happens when people go for
(33:53):
cute and end up in the opposite direction. Well, I
think that's whole, that whole caricature thing, right, when someone
takes something to an extreme than it becomes the uncontny
valley or horrific. And I think about that when I
think about clowns, no offensive clowns out there, or even
um dragon performance, because sometimes it is such a performance
(34:14):
of the female model that it looks um what is
the word that I'm going for, ghoulish, foolish? Yeah, maybe
part of it is just our ability to you know,
to see those patterns and to realize something is not right. This,
this individual or this thing the cute is trying way
too hard, and therefore it must cover up some sort
of malign uh instinct at the heart of it. That's
(34:37):
not really that's not really a cute cartoon character. There
must be some sort of horrible monster inside of It's
gonna eat me, you know. I was thinking about that
in the context of staring, because we talked about this
um inability to look away when we should. It is
just our mind trying to square what it's seeing, because
it's saying this is this is outside of what I
normally see. I can't stop looking. I need more data exactly. Yeah.
(35:01):
It all comes back comes down to our processing of
the world around us and trying to realize what's a
risk to us, what's not really a risk, and how
we should react. So can cute be awful? Yes? Oh yes,
all right, So there you have some interesting listener mail
to cap off what I think is a really interesting
uh insight into our our orderly and disorderly lives. Yeah,
(35:21):
and a comforting aspect of why a child is making
an incredible mess for you to clean up and peas
are splattering on your walls. Yeah. And the next time
you're walking around at work and you notice, like I do,
that some people have cubes that look like they've barely
been moved into and other people look like they have
lived there for centuries. Understand that we need both types.
(35:42):
We need we need the creative energy of the chaos,
we need the we need the the the refining order
of that neat space as well. All of it comes
together and it's it has survived evolution for a reason, right,
and we should flip between those spaces that we have
a nice balance perspective. There you go alrighty, all right?
You wanna check out our blog posts. You want to
(36:03):
check out all these podcast episodes that we're talking about,
including ones that you will not find on iTunes, You
need to go to stuff blow your Mind dot com.
That's our mothership, that's our main homepage. You will find
again the blogs, the videos, the podcast uh, all sorts
of new content, as well as links out to all
of our social media sites. You can find us on Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter,
Google Plus. We're on YouTube is mind stuff show Uh.
(36:25):
There's a soundcount cloud account if you're into that. You
can find episodes there. Just have at it yep. And
if you strongly identify with muppet, let us know which
muppet that is, and you can do so below the
mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is that how Stuff Works dot
com
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and I'm Julie Douglas. Julie,
I describe your desk here at work for us, Well,
today it's a little messy. I have some stacks of paper,
I have a tiger, I have clu waca av my
(00:25):
sign uh, and I don't know, just a bunch of
other myrriad objects there. Yeah. Yeah, I've got a beautiful leaf, uh,
photos uh, Kinsey knife yeah yeah, you um well, minds
a lot neater now, Like we we moved to locations
shortly after my son arrived, so for the longest my
(00:48):
desk was pretty messed up because it's just like a
pile of art that I wanted to somehow stick to
our art resistant surfaces around our desk area, like the wall.
It's not really cubicle, but just I'm lucky enough to
have to surfaces like the wall in front of me,
the wall beside me. But it's it's it's made in
a way to where you can't it's really difficult to
stick things to and uh and the only way you
(01:08):
can really do it is like this, this sort of
complex system where you use uh, pins and um and
tape at the same time and kind of like sow
your art into the wall and it takes forever. So that, yeah,
it's really the only way to do it. So for
the longest, my desk was just like piles of notes
for podcast book screen about a monitor that I didn't
(01:29):
have hooked up yet. Um and you know, it's just
just awful. I saw it as a fortress of papers
and books, like you were walling everybody out. I know
it probably looked pretty bad with the monitor because the
monitor was was not hooked up, and it was like
between me and Jonathan Strickland as if I was never
going to hook up this monitor and I was gonna
use it slowly as a divider and uh and so
(01:49):
I'm glad to have that hooked up so people can see, Oh,
he's not just a defensive clutter. Yeah he was. He
was going to get there, go somewhere with that at
some point. So yeah, well, and we are going to
talk to you about spaces, orderly spaces, chaotic spaces, how
do they affect us? And I will say that I
do like a nice orderly space, but when I'm working
on a project, things spirals sort of everywhere, and that
(02:12):
makes sense to me because I'm referencing a lot of
different things. But I might be an order muppet an order. Okay,
this is the idea that, of course we have casks
in order. The two great movements in life, right, A
movement towards order, a movement away from order. Of course,
to quote while Stevens the poet, a violent order is
a disorder, and a great disorder is an order, and
(02:34):
these two things are one. So it's a complicated topic.
There's a lot of back and forth, but a simplified
way is too. Indeed, look at Jim Hinson's The Muppets
and divide them into agents of order and agents of chaos.
That's right. Dahlia Lithwick, writing for Slate, talked about this,
this idea that you either fall into one of two
categories chaos muppet, which are out of control, emotional, volatile.
(02:57):
They tend towards this is for saying this. They tend
towards the blue and fuzzy. They make their way through
life in a swirling maelstrom of food crumbs, small flaming objects,
and the letter C. We're talking about Cookie Monster, Ernie Grover, Guns,
Dr Bunsen, Honeydew Animal, and she says, Zelda Fitzgerald, here's
here's a historical figure who was a chaos Muppet. Okay,
(03:20):
But on the other side, you've got your order Muppet.
And she says she's thinking about Bert Scooter Sam the
Eagle Kermit of course, right, and the blue guy who
is perennially harassed by Grover at restaurants. She says, the
order Muppet, every Man, that blue Guy. They tend to
be neurotic, highly regimented, averse to surprises, and they sport
monstrously large eyebrows. She said. They represent the responsibility of
(03:43):
running the world and they feel weighed down by it,
but they secretly revel the knowledge that they keep things afloat. Okay, Yeah,
which are you? Well, we were talking about this earlier
and I'm still struggling to come with an answer because
I'm definitely not the guy who threw the sword fish.
Like that's like to me, like he and uh An
(04:07):
Animal are right up there like the extremes of chaos
mupet Gonzo too. Really, they're they're right up there at
the threshold of of of utter chaos. And then of
course on the other end, you have uh, Sam the Eagle,
I guess would be like the most orderly Muppet because
Kermit will wave his arms around a bit. But but
Sam is a rock and he's gonna stick to it,
uh no matter what. And I feel like I'm maybe
(04:28):
a little more towards the middle. So it's hard to
hard to I mean, maybe some of the members of
the band were a little more balanced and laid back,
but I don't think I'm a doctor, both because I
had to have seen you as a chaos muppet when
you're working and you're in the middle of something. But
I have also seen you as the order muppet who
every six months goes around the office and says, why
(04:48):
is all this chalk around and clings things up and
you get rid of all the jars of urine and
whatnot hanging around. Well, maybe I'm maybe I'm kind of
like the Count, because the Count is there's yes, the
Count one, two, three, Uh, he's because he's orderly in
a very and he's all about the numbers. But this
his obsession with the numbers tends to disrupt everything else
(05:11):
in his life. So I feel I feel like, maybe
I'm not saying that it's a one to one comparison,
but I feel like I'm kind of that kind of
mixed where they're they're parts of me that are very orderly,
but sometimes those get in the way of other stuff
and causes disorder over here. I'm kind of in flux.
I guess well, I'm with Dhlia Lithwick. She says that
she is a faux chaos muppet. Yeah, but at the
(05:32):
center is order. What about you? That's what I'm saying.
I'm with I'm with her, that your faux chaos muppet. Okay, yeah,
but it also depends on the situation and um my
environments and everybody's environment as well. Discuss But the thing is,
those chaos muppets, they always get a bad rap, right
because the surroundings they don't look so good, and people
(05:54):
perceive them as you know, just sort of lay about
who can't even be bothered to clean up their spaces.
In fact, it brings to mind the broken windows theory, right,
the idea that that the way that you ultimately combat
um social upheaval and problems of crime is that you
focus on all the little things you focus on. Say
that broken window or some graffiti because of the windows
(06:16):
are broken. If there's graffiti on the wall, it's sending
this message to everyone else that minor transgressions are okay,
and therefore we can extrapolate that that the less minor
and fractions are okay as well. And then it becomes
more and more chaotic. It builds up like kibble. Yeah,
like one broken window begets several broken windows, and then
all of a sudden you've got mayhem going on. And
(06:38):
I think about the Crag Street Tunnel in Atlanta as
an example of a graffiti ridden tunnel but also an
example of extreme creativity. In fact, on any given day
you can pass by this tunnel and see people getting
their photograph taken in front of it or making videos
in front of it, because ultimately it's this stand in
(07:00):
for an act of creativity. Yeah, it's a graffiti free zone.
And I think about this a lot every time I
go past it. I wonder about graffiti free zones and
to what extent, uh, basically, what affect they have on creativity,
because it's not it's it's a situation where suddenly it's
not just like a daring graffiti artist can go there
and tag. And it's not just you know, somebody throwing
(07:23):
up some sort of a gang tag either. It's everybody,
even people who would normally not even think about it. Well,
the crop tunnel does have a good amount of very
interesting art, and what I think it's interesting about it
is that it requires you to stop and take a
second look. And so that's sort of this idea that
we're going to look at when we talk about spaces,
in particular workspaces clutter versus order. Yes, all right, So
(07:46):
as luck would have it, we have a study that
looks at how um chaotic versus clean, neat and orderly
environments affect our productivity, affect our creativity, affect our sponse
to stimuli. Because again, to your point, we tend to
put it in a quick Felix and Oscar odd couple
scenario right where one is the slav and one is
(08:08):
the orderly individual, and and the slab is just he's
just a slab. All he's doing is contributing to the
comedic environment. But that's about it. Where it's it's this
is study reveals it's a lot more nuanced than that,
and it's actually a really good study for those of
us whose desk get a little bit um chaotic from
time to time. The title this study is physical order
(08:29):
produces healthy choices, generosity, and conventionality, whereas disorder produces creativity.
It's a two thousand thirteen paper from the Carlson School
of Management at the University of Minnesota, and it's it.
It basically revolves around three different experiments involving an orderly
work environment and a disorderly work environment. Yeah, and let's
just read out the first line, because I think this
(08:51):
sets the tone. The first line is order and disorder
are prevalent in both nature and culture, which suggests that
each environ confers advance edges for different outcomes. So it's
not so black and white as the order and the
chaos muppets. Yeah, it's not a situation where all right,
we have the orderly muppets in the calf muppets are
just tearing down society. Like, both have survived, both have
(09:12):
are here due to an evolutionary process, so they must
both must both be important. Like I always come back
to the cuttlefish and about how you have these larger
cuttle fish that are mating and you have the masculine
cuttlefish who are all about brute strength and UH and
say and and just making sure they get their mate
that way. And then you have the sneakier, smaller cuttlefish
who disguised themselves as females. And the ultimate take home
(09:35):
there is that cuttlefish evolution UH has favored both styles,
both types of cuttlefish, and ultimately both types of cuttlefish
are necessary for the survival of the species. And so
we see a similar thing with disorder muppets and order
muppets in human society. And you see this in this study,
which is so interesting because, as you mentioned, there are
(09:55):
three experiments that Kathleen DeVos and the other re searchers conducted,
and in the first experiment, they randomly assigned a group
of college age students to spend time in adjacent office spaces.
One was tidy, the other was cluttered with papers and
other work related to try to us, and the students
spent their time filling out questionnaires that were unrelated to
(10:15):
the study, so the students didn't know really why they
were there. After ten minutes, they were told they could
leave and they were offered an apple or a chocolate bar. Okay,
So those students who sat in the orderly office were
twice as likely to choose the apple than those who
sat amid the chaotic mess of papers. In addition, when
(10:37):
the participants were presented with the opportunity to donate to
a charity, those placed in the orderly room donated more
of their own money. Interesting. Okay, so what's coming out
of this? The pro I guess you could say for
the orderly room here is that we were talking about
more civic minded behavior, more generous and conscientious at least
in terms of their diets. You know, their their minding,
(10:59):
their peas and cues. Now, what strikes me about this
experiment is it I inevitably draw back to our our
podcasts about symbols and the power of symbols, and the
idea too about clothed cognition, that our our clothing is
a kind of symbol that informs how we behave and
how we carry ourselves. And here we see a physical
environment that is a symbol for order, a symbol for
(11:19):
what is expected of us, uh, the symbol for cleanliness,
and that kind of translates into our mind in terms
of cleanliness of of ethics, cleanliness of of our of
our of our dietary habits and uh and and just
an interesting insight into how spaces control our behavior. So yeah,
back to the broken window theory. If you're in that
(11:40):
room that's cluttered, messy, apparently nobody has been paying attention.
You could eat that chocolate bar. You don't need to
give that much money to charity, right. Yeah. It also
reminds me of the Panopticon, you know, because because the
Panopticon is of course a structure of order. And if
you if things are disorderly, then you're you're thinking, well,
I guess nobody's watching. It doesn't it doesn't matter. But
if everything is lined up, if everything seems to be
(12:02):
in this heightened states state of order, then you also
feel like you're more responsible for your actions. Okay, so
if you out there are messy desk dwellers, you probably
wanted to get vindicated here and you will in the
next study. Yeah. So similar deal participants were put into
the messy room with disorder everywhere they put into the nice, clean,
(12:25):
or early room. But this time they're asked to come
up with new uses for ping pong balls and and
so and of course, which makes me wonder, how many
different uses can you find for ping pong balls. They're
pretty pretty specific and what you can do with them,
but I'll leave that to everyone's imagination. Uh. Anyway, the result, overall,
participants in the messy room came up with the same
(12:46):
number of ideas for new ways to use these ping
pong balls as the clean room counterparts, but their ideas
were rated as more interesting and creative when evaluated by
the judges. So dependent judges. The judges they were judging,
they just like a list of ideas, brainstormed ideas for
what you could do with a pair of ping ball
balls and anyway, So ultimately we're showing here that participants
(13:09):
in the disorderly room were more creative. They were able
to come up with more novel ideas for what to
do with those ping boonballs, which again a very limited
object to have to brainstorm around. Then they're clean room counterparts.
So making this case that creativity or the ability to
take a risk in your thought processes is also borne
(13:30):
out in their final experiment, in which they were given
the choice of adding a health boost to their lunch
time smoothie that was labeled either new or classic. Guests
who chose the classic, well, the classic is going to
be chosen by the clean room people because they want
to stick with something that is proven, that is established.
They're not going to take any risk on some sort
of new fangled smoothie editive, that's right. But those in
(13:53):
the messy room, they were like, bringing on, want the
new formula. Let's go crazy with this smoothie. Just put
everything in it. I don't care, wood chips, ping pong balls. Yeah,
the ping pong ball smoothie was born of this experiment,
I bet. Yeah. So that messy environment can actually cause
people to feel inspired to break free of tradition, right
(14:13):
to say, Okay, that window is broken, let's let's do
something with that. Let's make some artwork out of it.
You know. I feel like at times it even it
even helps to have like a disorder avatar to turn to,
you know, like like a figure like an animal or
a hunter s Thompson, where you could you you sort
of think around them, you sort of you sort of
(14:35):
live vicariously through them for a few moments, and it
has an overall creative benefit to you, sort of like
a spirit animal. Yeah, like you know, you have a
spirit animal is animal you can sort of draw from
that and uh and yeah, and at least for for
for a little bit. As you you you sort of
bath in his glow, you're able to feel a little
more liberated, a little bit more daring in your ideas.
(14:58):
All right, let's take a quick break, and when come back,
we are going to try to get at the bottom
of why this creativity, in this sort of inspiration and
perhaps even learning are linked to messy environments. All right,
(15:19):
we're back, and you know it just real quick, you know,
talking about working in disorderly environments, chaotic environments. And I
think to coffee shops again, a place where both of
you and I working coffee shops a lot, and there's
a lot of really interesting history about the coffee shops
roll in uh in creative thought in Western culture, and
that is a chaotic environment. And in the best of situations,
(15:41):
because you have people ordering different drinks, you have all
sorts of weird sounds of the espresso. You know, God
knows what kind of music we're gonna play. People from
an in and out, and if you're lucky, it's a
variety of people. So it's you know, it's beautiful people,
ugly people. People you know, from from the top of
the ivory tower, people who sleep under the tower, all
coming into the same space, and it I for one,
(16:03):
feel that creative energy rolling off of it. Yeah. I
mean you talked about the periody of enlightenment and this
convergence of coffee houses, people turning away from from the liquor,
from the alcohol and going towards coffee as a stimulant
and as a result, sharing more of their ideas in
this community centered, uh sort of area, And the same
(16:24):
thing today is going on. Although a lot of us
are wearing headphones, you do get exposure to everyone, and
so it does make sense to me that the chaos
of all of that might create these associations that would
help you kind of ping pong around until you get
these novel associations, these novel ideas. In fact um, it
really helps when you're studying a topic. And most people think, oh,
(16:47):
when I go to study, it should be in a quiet,
orderly room. But there is a New York Times article
called Forget what You Know about good study habits, and
it says in a classic nine experiments, psychologist found that
college students who study need a list of forty vocabulary
words in two different rooms, one window lists and cluttered
and the other modern with a view of the courtyard
(17:07):
did far better on a test than students who studied
the words twice in the same room, And later studies
have confirmed the confirmed the finding for a variety of topics.
So the idea here is that the outside context is varied,
the information is enriched, and this slows down the forgetting
process because the more layers of chaos, I guess you
(17:27):
could say here, um, the more sort of patterns and
things that you have to take in data, the more
points of association your brain makes to whatever it is
that you are concentrating on at that very moment, and
so it becomes a stickier memory for people. Yeah, and
it lines up kind of well with what Wall Steven
says about the more chaos you have, the chaos kind
of becomes an order, and the more order you have,
(17:49):
it kind of comes comes more and more chaotic. Now,
in talking about learning and chaos, one has to visit
the world of the child, of the todd of the baby,
because for one thing is we've touched on many times before.
Humans are natural born scientists, even the very little wee ones,
their their their brains are open to the world. There
(18:11):
they have this lamp like view of things. They're bringing
in all this data, but at the same time, they
often seem to be agents of chaos. They seem to
revel in making a mess. They seem to know no
other way of life than to smear it on the
wall on their face, to eat noddles with their hands,
(18:32):
and then and then rub their their pesto covered fingers
through their hair. I mean, never was there a better
chaos muppet than any child, particularly the age of two. Yeah,
they are all animal uh and with maybe a little
Gonza or the swordfish dude thrown in for for that
whole period of time. I actually had a professor in
(18:52):
college who said that the reason why children love animals
and stories is that they tend to really um mine
with them and be like and see themselves as animals,
unpredictable and crazy and running around until they get more
of their humanness under their belts. But in this case,
there is a study that shoes up this idea that
(19:14):
this uh animal like behavior is helpful in learning things. Yes,
researches at the University of Iowa study how sixteen month
old children learn words for non solid objects. So we're
talking about stuff like oatmeal, glue, peace peas, uh, you know, mucus. Uh,
all the various non solid objects that they be coming
(19:35):
out or going into your child. There's a lot of
traffic there. Uh. Now, previous researches coming out for sure,
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, out the nose that it just happens. Now,
the previous research on this topic had shown that Toddler's
learn more readily about solid objects because they can easily
identify them due to their unchanging size and shape. So
(19:56):
an apple is always shaped like an apple, whereas apple sauce,
you know, is shaped like whatever the container is. That's
basic physics and they get it and their brain is
processing that data. So but but but the previous data said, yeah,
as far as the oozy stuff, the running stuff, the
apple sauce, the snot the pas, but what have you,
They were that they're maybe not as good about identifying
that stuff. Now, what this study did. The researchers decided
(20:20):
to test this. They said, is this really the case?
Is it's just you know, our bias on this particular situation.
So they exposed sixth sixteen month olds to fourteen non
solid objects. Mostly it was food and drink stuff like
you know, apple sauce and pudding and soup. And then
they presented the items and gave them made up words.
So like some of the examples though, we're like Dax
(20:41):
and Kiv, nonwords used to uh to identify these various
gooey foods. So that this is this idea that they're
to be purity here, there's no associations because other words
that they might have learned in relation to this exactly,
just to test what the sort of information they would
retain by interaction with this food exactly. And then a
minute passes and they asked the children to identify the
(21:03):
same foods in different sizes or shapes uh, so you know,
again different containers, different visual presentation of this non solid doctor.
And then so this required the answers to go beyond
relying simply on shape and size and to explore what
the substances were made off to make the identification. So
you can see where this is going in terms of
(21:24):
how toddlers behave with with dewey foods and UH, and
how you might interact with them. So of course they
started prodding it and probing it and pushing it up
in their fingers and smearing it out on their bodies,
throwing it at the walls, watching the noodles worm their
way down right, and rubbing it into their heads. Just
just just this ecstasy of of of handling the non
(21:46):
solid stuffs and this tactile experience actually allow this toddlers
to learn to better learn the names of foods when
they got to play with them. Yeah, which I love
this idea because all of a sudden, everything in that
world makes sense. As a parent, when when your kid
is lobbying this this disgusting liquefied peace at your face. Yeah,
(22:11):
you think, ah, yes, you're learning, my love. They transforms
this moment where they're playing with with pricey organic apple
sauce or something, you know, and you're just like, are
you're wasting your food? You're playing with it, why don't
you eat it? And it turns that into this fabulous
moment of oh, you were discovering the universe. You are,
you were learning, you're using your your tactile senses to
(22:33):
better identify non fluid objects. It's uh, it's it's the
kind of study that makes makes parenting a little easier.
It really does. And you sent uh some pictures of children,
toddlers who were just covered in various kinds of pasta,
including spaghetti that I think, I don't know how you're
(22:55):
going to feel about. This made me want to jump
in there with them. Really yeah, oh, we'll see. This
is if you do a search, do like a Google
image search for pasta party or toddler pasta party, baby
pasta party, you have to play around with a little bit.
You will see images of this where generally it'll consist
of like a very small child swimming pool filled with
(23:16):
pasta noodles, cooked pasta noodles, and then there'll be some
like naked or maybe diapered or swimsuited babies in there
just lounging around with handfuls, just fistfuls of spaghetti, some
of it in their mouth, you know, fist in it
right into their mouth, smearing it on their bodies, noodles
hanging off of them, and uh, it can be a
bit frightening, especially since U some of the photography is
(23:39):
good and some of it is a little sketchy looking.
Well you see, you sent that to me, and I'm
a really tuckedile person and my first impulse was like, yeah,
I want to feel that. I want to feel those
spirals of pasta in my hands and I want to
squish them. I actually started to grip my cheek. Well,
I tell you, I first discovered this phenomenon, uh, prior
(24:02):
to having a son, and at the time I was like,
this is this is grim. This looks like something out
of a horror movie. I want no part of this. Now,
I have to say that my my thinking on it is, well,
if I knew for certain that it would distract him
for thirty minutes, I would totally fill that tub up
with with noodles. Uh. So you're your perspective on these changes,
and certainly, knowing what we know now from the study,
(24:24):
I definitely see the value in it. Now you could
go to go a little overboard. You could decide that
you're you need to throw a party for every non
fluid object or slightly squishy your gooey thing, uh, and
then you're just just just gonna eat your food budget up.
I'm not a fan of the world peas in a
kiddie pool. I'm going to stick to the pasta myself.
But it does give you this idea that you have
(24:46):
this uh, this access to this rich patina of associations.
If you're trying to figure out the world. If you're
trying to explore it, name it. Then the more you
can add to that database, including tactile things. But that
would allow you to know that this noodle is squishy,
or this noodle is spiral, this noodle is super long
and thin. The more you can really get a bead
(25:07):
on what this whole kind of human existence thing is. Yeah,
and and and certainly educators are onto this. You know,
you go to a you go to a museum that
really has a robust children's area or or a children's
museum a hands on learning center. I mean, that's the
kind of stuff they're gonna they're gonna really push. It's
not just look at the alligator. Here's a section of
of of an alligator's hide or a representation of it.
(25:29):
You can actually touch. Here is some It's one thing
to look at some sea life in the in the
aquarium behind glass, but let's actually have a touchdank where
you can reach in and actually have that tactile experience.
And uh and and all of that, uh, you know,
makes just so much more sense once you once you
really dive into the data here, I think it's adult
swe shild erasist as well before we're learning new things.
(25:51):
Perhaps not everybody would like to see us squishing pasta
or other types of adventures, but you know, well, I'm
I'm writing something for the upside about chemical weapons right now.
I'm probably not going to try and saren or or
mustard gas or or clorine gas on my own just
to have that pacto experience, because those are certainly um
non solid objects. I'm glad that you've made that decision
(26:14):
not to do that. All right. Well, on that note,
let's call the robot over and catch up on some
listener mail. All right, This one comes to us from Jerry,
who's responding to our Panopticon episode. He says, Hello, Julian Robert,
I just finished listening to your episode on the Panopticon,
which I found both interesting and informative. I am in
the business of information security, and one aspect of the
(26:36):
Panopticon as life concept that may not be obvious to
all is that it isn't always a deterrent against antisocial behavior.
In fact, it can have quite the opposite effect by
inciting a segment of society into antisocial behavior. A great
example of that is the hacktivist Anonymous movement of the
past few years. Now. Those movements are all over the
map in terms of motivations, but a common focal point
(26:58):
is on the loss of privacy, liberties and so on.
As an observer, it's particularly interesting to watch as the
establishments they are rebellion against use the very rebellion to
justify additional laws which further erode those things that the
activists are fighting for in the first place. I also
think that a key element of the movement is for
participants to stay out of the eye of the panopticon
as they carry out protests by using various means of obstucation,
(27:21):
hence the name anonymous. To carry on the analogy, the
movement uses the gaps in the panopticon's vision to hide
their antisocial behavior, at least what those involved believed to
be gaps, as recent prosecutions would lead one to realize
the shadows are not as dark as they might see.
I think that is an important faucet because I strongly
suspect that the desire to rebel would be far smaller,
(27:43):
if not non existent, if those involved were carrying out
their activities in the public eye. Like social disobedience of
days gone by in respect, the panopticon both drives them
to rebel and drives them to do so only from
the perceived blind spots of the watchful eye. Anyhow, I
thought it was an interesting active. They didn't come up
on the show, Jerry. I think that Jerry gives us
(28:03):
so much to think about here because mostly and I'm
going to play a lot of Devil's advocate here, but
I think mostly that when we think about anonymous or hacktivists,
we tend to think of it more as them bringing
transparency to previously hidden information. But what he is saying
is very interesting in the fact that they're not out
there front and center actually allows them, people who are
(28:28):
not necessarily trying to bring things to transparency, to be
a little bit more devious and that they should be
out there front and center to actually enact justice. But
the question is do you think that they could. Do
you think that the anonymous activists, the people who are
you know, on the side of social justice? I should say,
do you think that if they were there for us
(28:51):
to see that they could accomplish the same amount of
information as the question? Yeah, I don't know. I have
my I have my doubts on that too. It seems like,
you know, to his point, the days of like pure
social disobedience, Um, I mean, you still see examples of it,
but it's hard to imagine large masses of people engaging
in it without mass these days. Of course, he's coming
(29:11):
at it from a security perspective, and so it's just
really interesting to to bring that to light. So yeah,
if anybody has any thoughts, and I'd love to know,
because this is a very rich argument pro and con,
and Jerry makes some really good points. All right, Well,
here's another bit of listener maile related to the Panopticon episode.
Um Hi, guys Sean from Saskatoon here with the with
(29:35):
the least to contribute to a conversation that I've ever
had in so far as my primary idea of boils
down to nothing. Sounds good, Do go on? He says,
I believe that the normalization associated with having an all
seeing I on seven does not necessarily lead to a
perpetual state of stress of paranoia. We're not equipped to
handle something like that, and those who do do so
(29:55):
not because of an external situation but a chemical imbalance.
It's the very basis for realization. I'm thinking primarily of
a study examining driving habits in the real world, where
cameras were mounted in hundreds of people's cars for years
to study how distracted or careful drivers were. They all
knew they were under observation and got paid to be
in the study every year in case they needed a
reminder that they were being watched. Uh. They soon behaved
(30:18):
as though they were quite alone, covorting with ladies in
the night. In some cases, we're leaving themselves while driving,
juggling multiple phones and a cigarette. Some behavior may be
curb due to cameras, as they are correlated with a
decline and crime, but by and large they are ignored
and don't cause significant grief that There are obvious residents
of London and New York to cite two examples of
(30:38):
cities almost entirely under CCTV observation who feel that their
rights are being violated and who rail against the intrusion.
But uh, and I could be wrong here. There are
probably people who would be railing against other government intrusion
or civil rights violations where there are no cameras at all. Uh.
This is a complicated issue, and I'm not a state
security apologist, but the mere presence of cameras everywhere, or
(31:00):
the omnificence of government about all internet traffic doesn't really
bug me nearly as much as their ability to act
without a warrant. Keep up the great work. I look
forward as always to your next philosophical, psychological, biological, and
technological musics. All right, very good point. Here are we
equipped to even deal with this idea that we're constantly
being surveiled and perhaps under uh, this construct that we
(31:23):
are not we just fold into it as the people
who were being watched on these security cameras and their
camera became normalized to the whole situation. So I think
that's a good question. But I also wonder if it
is part and parcel of the idea that's ingrained in
all of us that when we get in the car,
no matter if there's a camera watching us, we are
(31:44):
in a private space. Hence all the news pickers on
the highway. Yes, yeah, it's always kind of better than
that is when you see somebody really dancing out to music, though, yeah,
I always like that. Well, you know, here's a here's
a little bit of listener mail comes in in response
to our Cubicle Doom episode. Which has some crossover into
the Panopticon area. Um this one, Louis writes and says, Hey, guys,
(32:07):
I'm catching up on old episodes, and I thought I'd
tossed in my two cents about pink noise. Years ago,
I worked at a startup web company and we, unbeknowns
to the workers, had a pink noise generator in the building.
This all came to light in the summer when the
temperatures were really hot and the electric company was asking
larger office buildings to shut down non essential electrical devices.
The pink noisemakers were deemed to be such devices. I
(32:27):
worked in a cubicle farm, and the change was instant
and dramatic. While the pink noise was on, you couldn't
hear a phone conversation for more than about a cubicle away.
When the pink noise was off, you could clearly hear
the same conversation from five cubes over. UH. To this point,
everyone assumed that we were always hearing the air handling system,
until our maintenance person pointed out that the tiny one
demeter one diameter speakers in the ceiling space about seventy
(32:50):
to ten feet apart. Thank you for all the great content.
Out of about thirty different podcast series I listened to
on a regular basis, you are my favorite. Thank you again, Louis.
Thanks Louis. So that's nice because that angle is a
benevolent panopticon that was looking out for them, piping in
some pink noise and in our new office space. I
really wish that we had the same scenario. It would
(33:12):
be kind of cool. Yeah, certainly an example here though,
where they didn't necessarily believe in God until God stopped
believing in them. If you think of God as a
pink noise machine. All right, um, here we have a
quick bit of a listener mail from Eric. Eric writes
in in response to a cute episode The Science of Cute,
because I wonder how many people react to too much
(33:33):
cute or attempts at cute that fail. In Harry Potter,
Dolores Umbridge has has described as a hard person to
display many cute kittens in her rooms. The pictures were
called horrid in the books not cute, and Umbridge herself
tries to sound and dress cute, but was grossly overweight
and looked like a toad in the book I wish
you had talked about what happens when people go for
(33:53):
cute and end up in the opposite direction. Well, I
think that's whole, that whole caricature thing, right, when someone
takes something to an extreme than it becomes the uncontny
valley or horrific. And I think about that when I
think about clowns, no offensive clowns out there, or even
um dragon performance, because sometimes it is such a performance
(34:14):
of the female model that it looks um what is
the word that I'm going for, ghoulish, foolish? Yeah, maybe
part of it is just our ability to you know,
to see those patterns and to realize something is not right. This,
this individual or this thing the cute is trying way
too hard, and therefore it must cover up some sort
of malign uh instinct at the heart of it. That's
(34:37):
not really that's not really a cute cartoon character. There
must be some sort of horrible monster inside of It's
gonna eat me, you know. I was thinking about that
in the context of staring, because we talked about this
um inability to look away when we should. It is
just our mind trying to square what it's seeing, because
it's saying this is this is outside of what I
normally see. I can't stop looking. I need more data exactly. Yeah.
(35:01):
It all comes back comes down to our processing of
the world around us and trying to realize what's a
risk to us, what's not really a risk, and how
we should react. So can cute be awful? Yes? Oh yes,
all right, So there you have some interesting listener mail
to cap off what I think is a really interesting
uh insight into our our orderly and disorderly lives. Yeah,
(35:21):
and a comforting aspect of why a child is making
an incredible mess for you to clean up and peas
are splattering on your walls. Yeah. And the next time
you're walking around at work and you notice, like I do,
that some people have cubes that look like they've barely
been moved into and other people look like they have
lived there for centuries. Understand that we need both types.
(35:42):
We need we need the creative energy of the chaos,
we need the we need the the the refining order
of that neat space as well. All of it comes
together and it's it has survived evolution for a reason, right,
and we should flip between those spaces that we have
a nice balance perspective. There you go alrighty, all right?
You wanna check out our blog posts. You want to
(36:03):
check out all these podcast episodes that we're talking about,
including ones that you will not find on iTunes, You
need to go to stuff blow your Mind dot com.
That's our mothership, that's our main homepage. You will find
again the blogs, the videos, the podcast uh, all sorts
of new content, as well as links out to all
of our social media sites. You can find us on Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter,
Google Plus. We're on YouTube is mind stuff show Uh.
(36:25):
There's a soundcount cloud account if you're into that. You
can find episodes there. Just have at it yep. And
if you strongly identify with muppet, let us know which
muppet that is, and you can do so below the
mind at discovery dot com. For more on this and
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