First, the movie.  Bradley Cooper was funny in The Hangover, or rather the movie was funny around him.  He just did his pretty-boy thang, but at least he was prepared to send himself up a little.  Then comes The A-Team, with more pretty-boy antics, too much Cooper and not enough Sharlto Copley, and the sweet cologne of typecasting lingering in every frame.

In Limitless, Copper raises his game.  Apparently, he can act after all.  The transformations between him without the pill and on the pill are impressive, backed up by sharp dialogue and the mere presence of Bobby De Niro on set.  More fundamentally, I can’t think of a film that shares a similar premise (except possibly The Lawnmower Man).  I deeply appreciate this fact – most of the movies I’ve seen recently seem ripoffs or hybrids of other movies ’til I want to scream.

Next, the idea.  Is it possible to radically increase your brainpower in the way the film shows?

Apart from dubious ‘brain training’ type activities, there are three advanced ways to enhance human nature: genetic engineering, neural implants, or performance enhancing drugs.  The drugs aren’t just limited to the physical realm.  When applied to mental capacities – like memory, motivation, and attention – they are known as nootropics.
The net is already alive with debate about whether Limitless provides a glimpse of our future.  Some pharmaceutical companies seem to be using the film to raise awareness of products they already have on offer.  While some offer ethical or scientific objections to this scenario, my questions are practical.

OK, so suppose you can boost some dude’s IQ from average to genius.  Fact – that won’t make him successful.

As Malcolm Gladwell shows in Outliers, someone – Chris Langan to be exact – can possess an IQ off the charts but still not have the breaks/and or inter-personal skills to climb the greasy ladder of success.  EQ trumps IQ as a success factor every time, once IQ has reached a mildly-above-average 120.  And EQ can be raised; IQ is stagnant.

Again, suppose you can give a dude a ‘photographic memory’.  Is that an advantage?

Again, not really.  Properly called ‘eidetic memory‘, a photographic memory may be linked to conditions like autism and synesthesia.  Famous sufferers – like Solomon Shereshevsky – have found it more of a curse than a blessing.  It might help you pass fact-based exams or remember people’s names; it will not help you interpret those facts or get on well with those people.

So the drugs don’t work, even if they did exist.  If you want to become limitless, to really grow your mind, to increase the synaptic connections within your brain, here are my suggestions:

Become a dedicated and deliberate lifelong learner.

Open yourself to new ideas, place yourself in new situations, learn new skills, meet new people, attend new courses, read new books.   You get the idea.

Speaking of books, if you really want to expand your mind, join a book club, or try reading:

• Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
• Mindfulness by Ellen Langer
• Mindset by Carol Dweck
• A Whole New Mind by Dan Pink
• Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

And no, you can’t borrow mine.  Get your own stash.

Image credit: kroszka.

On the 8th of this month we had our first BookCamp event.  BookCamp is a business book-club designed to aid skills development, idea generation and networking among local entrepreneurs, professionals and businesspeople.  We studied Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, and enjoyed some different perspectives on its usefulness and impact.  Take a look at my Amazon review (duplicated below) entitled, “Very pretty. But, can it fight?”

Next book: Switch: How to Change When Change is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. Get reading now!

Register for April’s BookCamp here.

Perhaps the main problem with the book is its use of the word ‘outliers’ to refer to exceptional people, individuals who achieve so much more than others. It should instead refer to the exceptional circumstances that allowed them their meteoric rise to success. These factors – such as year and era of birth, family background, race and place of education – contain the quirks of fate that allow the merely talented to achieve the successes that lie so far outside the norm. This is Gladwell’s major thesis.

Gladwell’s target is the traditional American story of success: rugged individuals, by dint of hard work and raw talent – perspiration and inspiration – achieve those magnificent success levels that elude others. Instead, Gladwell wants to show the place of circumstances and situation in this story. He wants to give success a context beyond that of one man and his willpower. Fair enough.

In order to do this, Gladwell tells some stories of his own. Lots of them, in fact.

The book is one, big collection of counter-cultural stories about the nature of specifically American success. (By ‘counter-cultural’ I mean contrary to the ‘rugged individual’ myth described above.) This story-method is Gladwell’s greatest strength or weakness, depending of what you’re looking for. Me, I wanted to read something fascinating, provocative, and launch-pad like. That’s exactly what I got.

Most of Gladwell’s detractors find his method of extreme induction – “Here’s one case so that means there’s a pattern” – infuriating. I find in fun. When I read a Gladwell book, I’m not on the lookout for rigorous sampling methods or objective self-criticism. Let’s leave that to university textbooks, can’t we? Gladwell does pop journalism with ideas and trends. He’s a beginning, a warm-up guy, a threshold-guardian of atypical info. You don’t need to take him more seriously than that.

That said, my lingering sense after finishing the book was one of anticlimax. OK, so now we know that as well as talent and effort, success also requires of us a massive amount of good fortune and opportunity. So what exactly can I do about it? Beyond vague pleas for someone – Big government? The education system? – to take this wider context into account, there’s not much we as individuals can do about it.

Or maybe there there is. Throughout the book Gladwell does flag up a couple of possibilities. He just doesn’t do too much with them, that’s all. That’s what frustrated me the most with the book.

For instance, Gladwell spends some time taking the IQ industry to task. He points out some examples of people with incredibly high IQ levels who haven’t made been successful. So far, so trite. Gladwell sexes up this observation by juicy piece of compare and contrast (chapter 4). In one corner, entre Chris Langan, in IQ terms a genius, but in success terms a flop. In the other corner, there’s J Robert Oppenheimer, theoretical physicist and director of the Manhattan Project. The difference? Oppenheimer had charm, excellent communication skills, and `social knowledge’. And where did this come from? His comfortable, suburban, upper-middle class background.

It’s here that I want to scream. My mind is shouting, “Write about emotional intelligence!

Tell them that social skills and communication can be learned! Mention Howard Gardner, or at least Daniel Goleman at least!” But no. Instead, we get one footnote, two sentences, about the work of Robert Sternberg (p. 290). Way to go, Malcolm. Not. Here’s a prime chance to sow the seeds of personal development, but instead you pour on the cement of social conditioning and class consciousness. Again, nothing for us to do.

Another example is Gladwell’s handling of the 10,000 hour rule (chapter 2), formulated by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson. According to this rule, 10,000 hours is the amount of practise required before a human being can lay claim to mastery or expertise in an activity. Even if you’re a genius like Mozart, you still have to pump in those hours. Gladwell illustrates this rule with the Beatles (performing together) and Bill Gates (programming).

Only problem is, he then goes on to describe how a very specific and unique set of circumstances allowed them to notch up those hours, factors that Joe Bloggs public – that’s you and me, folks – just couldn’t contrive. Still, it made me wonder whether I’ve chalked up anything near 10,000 hours honing a particular skill. The best I could come up with was reading. Does that count?

Anyway, I give the book three out of five stars for entertainment value, quality of journalism, mental stimulation, and idea-gathering. For my taste, there’s a little too much, ‘me, me, me’ in Outliers; Gladwell needs to untangle his brain from his own hype. But his main problem is that the book is discouraging, leavening us little to do beyond wonder if we were born on the wrong time and place to achieve a level of success that lies outside the mean.

Outliers is a book of pretty analysis, that’s for sure. I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it. And for a book about success, that’s a pretty tragic flaw.

OK, first for the film.  Jaden Smith, a little too young but believable enough in the part.  Jackie Chan, the performance of his life, massive respect for his athleticism and range of achievements, minimal respect for Rush Hour 3 (the only movie I’ve ever vacated midway).

The pacing dragged by about 12 minutes.  The love interest subplot seemed forced, even mildly disturbing.  The insertion of Mr Han’s tragic background was superfluous.  Awesome cinematography, sinister political big-brother type images.  Relatively realistic fight scenes (considering Chan’s previous form).  Dramatic tension remained high despite the inevitability of the outcome.  For me, the kung-fu temple bit constituted the highlight  of the film, with verbal chop-suey kept to a minimum.  Overall, different enough from the original to constitute an authentic remake – 7.5 out of 10.

Now for the deep and meaningful bit.

At the heart of the film lies one word – mentoring.  It is not a film about martial arts or teenage love or moving home.  It is about the relationship between an expert and a student.  It is about the passing of knowledge between the two.  It is about the art of teaching and the act of learning.  Learning a skill.  Learning about life.  And – dare I say it – learning about manhood.

Ah, I could write a blog on each on these.  In fact, in some cases, I already have.  All I want to do is to raise the question of whether mentoring is a teaching form whose time has come.  Mentoring seems to me to hold significant advantages over those other kinds of teaching – instructions and coaching.  Training-room instruction often lacks personal application; coaching can collapse into motivation minus content.  Mentoring conceives learning as a personal relationship in which skill-modelling and interactivity form the substance, not the extra.  Such teaching can only be applied, tested and fit for purpose.

This version of The Karate Kid famously focuses on kung-fu rather than karate.  Did you know that the term ‘kung-fu’ literally means “human achievement” in any area of life?  That’s why Mr Han says in the movie that “everything is kung-fu”.

Spoken like a true sensei!

Image credit: irina slutsky.

Literally.  Thinkers throughout history have tried to draw a link between the structure of the mind and the structure of the world. Why? If there is no link, then we can’t prove that what goes on in our heads bears any resemblance to how things really are out there.

A contemporary example of this is Tony Buzan’s concept of radiant thinking. Radiant thinking is the idea that our thoughts can branch out from a central concept in dozens of directions, emulating patterns found in nature. This is the basis of his famous ‘mind map’ technique. Many don’t realize that Buzan claims mind maps are not just a useful learning devise; according to him, they work because they reflect the structure of reality.

More recently, scientists have found that the brain works more like the internet than ‘top down’ company. The traditional view of the brain was that there were higher and lower functions that former a hierarchy. The higher functions acted like a boss giving direct orders to individual lower functions from a position of central authority.

Now findings indicate that there are “loops between differing regions, feeding back to and directly linking regions that were not known to communicate with one another. This is a better fit with the model of vast networks such as the internet.” It seems our brains work in loops, not lines!

It interests me that this research is the analogy between brains and business structures. I’ve blogged before about how the new view of business relationships – both between and within organisations – is one of networks over hierarchy. Now neuroscience follows suit. Which came first? Likewise, with the parallel between a brain and a computer network. Did the technology cause the analogy, or is it an effect of it?

Anyway, if you want to find out more about this topic, read ‘Hypothesis-driven structural connectivity analysis supports network over hierarchical model of brain architecture’. Or speak to Dawn about the practical benefits of social media and business networking.

On second thoughts, just speak to Dawn.

Image credit: Marc_Smith.

The title for this blog comes from the mouth of one of my favourite stand-up comedians, Rich Hall.  (See him say those words live at the Apollo on YouTube from 6:31 to 7:40).  They came to my mind as I read an article about how creative minds ‘mimic schizophrenia’.  Apparently, high levels of creativity can be associated with mental illness and lead to it.

I’ve blogged before how I admire comedians as a creative type, and on the link between depression and humour.  This is not a vague association.  According to creativity expert Edward de Bono, there is a definite relationship between creative insight and humour.

“There is often an alternative way to arrange information. This means there can be a switchover to another arrangement. Usually the switch is sudden. If the switch is temporary it gives rise to humour. If the switch is permanent it gives rise to insight.”

But as we know, a disproportionately high percentage of comedians seem to suffer from depression.  Add to this the stereotypes of the mad scientist and the tortured artist, and we’ve got a pattern.

In the 1990′s, Apple Computers encouraged us to Think Different.  Many large groups within humanity already do.  Among those groups who see the world differently from each other are:

• Westerners and Easterners
• Left-handers and Right-handers
• Introverts and Extroverts
• Religious and Secular
• Men and Women

I think a creative person is someone who narrows down this range of shared perspective on the world even further until they find themselves in a group of one.  They see past the limits imposed by their upbringing, their environment, their education, and even their genes.  They don’t just take up an opposing view, but shift their perspective to a different place entirely.  Such a change requires herculean effort and leads to isolation.  The structure of their brain is literally changed by it.

So see the world differently if you will.  See the world differently if you can pay the price!

As Nietzsche said, “How much truth can a spirit bear, how much truth can a spirit dare?”

And he should know.

Image credit: pasukaru76.