A few years ago I was in a great seminar where the leader was offering us more opportunities for creativity than I'd experienced in years.  I also happened to be part of the back channel which had some of the wittiest people I'd encountered.   Pretty soon two conversations developed, one live conversation that was intense and serious and exciting, and then the back channel that was hilarious, silent, and also snarky.  People were doing a lot of "lol" but, in fact, no one in the room itself was Laughing Out Loud.  

I was unsettled not  by the back channel wit but but the front channel silence.  A few people would laugh but most people were so intent on getting the first back channel funny comment out that it almost seemed as if the front channel was becoming a kind of "straight man" for the back channel.  I found it deeply unsettling and unsatisfying in the end, as if  both conversations were deprived by the parallel conversations, what in pre-verbal children is called "parallel play" (simultaneous fun activity without much actual interaction).

Tonight I happened to be reading the chapter on laughter in Steven Johnson's Mind Wide Open (2004).  I like his Emergence quite a lot and I'm also enjoying a lot in this book on the neuroscience of everyday life.  I don't buy all of his evolutionary psychology--it's too far-fetched and non-evidential for my taste (as is much of the field)--but I'm often in tune with his thoughtful readings of classic psychology experiments.   What caught my eye tonight was his account of a retreat of about twenty software communications designers where part of the conversation happened in f2f (face-to-face) and part on a back channel.   The same pattern that evolved at my seminar happened among the software designers.  

What Johnson notes, though, is that in some ways the lol silent wit on the back channel, in neurological terms, robbed the front channel meeting of social bonding (one function among primates of laughter is not response to funniness but lubrication of a social situation) as well as the kind of modification of brain chemistry that happens with group laughter and serves to calm hostility and aid communication.  There were more jokes per minute because of the back channel but Johnson's room--like the seminar room I was in a few years ago--was so eerily silent that people intuited the mood as hostile even when it wasn't supposed to be.  Speakers tell jokes to lower hostility.  If the people speaking aren't laughing, everyone gets tense--even when they are telling more jokes than ever online.  Johnson notes that, at the end of the gathering, when they turned off all the electronics, people returned to laughing together and the retreat was instantly more cohesive and collegial.   He makes the point that the back channel was funnier, if measured in witticisms, but the room was happier when the back channel was turned off and the lol was actual, acoustical belly laughing. 

I've posted information about the recent Games for Health conference, inluding a link to my pre-conference presentation slides, on the TechPsych blog.  My talk focused on game accessibility for games and applications in K-12 settings.  (The two pre-conference strands were Virtual Worlds and Game Accessibility.)

You can listen to an on-line tele-newscast of interviews of with Ben Sawyer, the co-director of the Games for Health project, and Chinwe Onyekere, program officer of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's Pioneer Portfolio.

Spending a month at a scholar and artists' residency like the inimitable and incomparable Bogliasco Foundation in Liguria not only changes your work . . . it changes you! One reason is rather Zen. You spend all year preparing for this month and the preparation itself is the journey. Another reason is the beauty. Five windows looking out at the Riviera from my bedroom, three high high high windows in my studio. You never, ever get used to the sea, the rocks, the sky.

But the real reason is the people.

You can't spend breakfast, lunch, and dinner in multilingual exchange and multiscale laughter with brilliant creative people without rethinking your thoughts. Today's example: I use art, artistic creation, artistic inspiration, and artistic experience to interrogate a lot of the too-narrow paradigms of "intelligence" that one finds in studies of cognition and I'm also using the way artists work together as a different paradigm to contribute to this rich, collaborative idea we are all working on together, participatory learning. These days, to meditate on what it means to learn from birth to rejuvenation, I spend a lot of my time reading articles and books in neuroscience, evolutionary biology and psychology, social psychology, anthropology, philosophy, and other fields. When I even try to talk about these things, about theories of mind, with composers, poets, artists, a frequent response is: "How the mind works? I don't want to know!"

I am listening to this comment. Because it is coming from artists who are serious and thoughtful. They are dedicated to their art in a way that fills me with admiration. And, when I talk about mind and knowing, I hear almost fear and definitely skepticism. I am jolted from my world, where the arguments are with others who share a basic theory of intelligence, a basic faith in "science" even when it is bad science. The rigor of these artists matches anything you will find in a lab. So I listen:

I am listening to them talk about how they work, what they do. I listen to the way they talk about work and not-work, about pausing and gathering, and about the importance of not measuring. Not calibrating the imagination. I am intrigued at how often the method they use resembles the one I've written about here several times, what in an earlier post I called  "Thinking on Leave" (http://www.hastac.org/node/1080). Part of the method is appreciating the importance for looking of not knowing what you are looking for. Every great scientist from Newton to Einstein has understood that but, in our grant-driven world, who can afford not to know one's conclusions before one enters the lab?

What I hear among my artist friends is the importance of attention and the importance of diversion, the importance of focus and the importance of walking away, the importance of discipline and the importance of being disciplined enough to know when to be undisciplined. None of this has to do with the amygdalla or the prefrontal cortex . . . it has to do almost with a rhythm, a harmony of one's moods and one's hands and one's eyes and one's work, inner and outer, impression and expression, feeling the thinking, or, borrowing from King Lear, "I think feelingly."

"How does the mind work?" The answer "I don't want to know" turns out to be not so much a refusal as a method of knowing. Like thinking on leave, in the company of artists, in the luxurious sublime of a beauty that refuses time and makes it.