Selling Tomorrows

World Science Festival to Feature "Future of Internet" & Storytelling Seminars

Tickets for the World Science Festival have just gone on sale, and two events promise new insights on how we perceive the future.  

The first features Vinton Cerf and is called "Internet Everywhere: the Future of History's Most Disruptive Technology."  Hey, anytime we can compare technological revolutions, it's going to be a good day!  I'm hoping for some good historical parallels and (if we're lucky) points on how economic systems will be changed.  The intersection of a deep recession with the rise of social technologies has got to be one of the more unusual things to happen in the past 1,000 years. 

The second event is called "Why We Tell Stories, the Science of Narrative."  The panelists will address whether storytelling has an evolutionary advantage, and I bet there will be some interesting facets on why we come up with such richly detailed stories about tomorrow and why they follow utopic/dystopic patterns. 

I'll be live-tweeting at @davidhrosen, with summary reports to follow here. Drop me a line if you're going!

 

NYT/Kristof: Brains not Wired to Confront Future Threats

Why do we recoil from snakes but shrug at global warming?  Nicholas Kristof explores this phenomenon in a good column that finds the reason in our genes.

"The objects of our phobias, and the things that are actually dangerous to us, are almost unrelated in the modern world, but they were related in our ancient environment," says UVA's Professor Jonathan Haidt.

Threats we do react quickly to are:

1. Personalized and intentional
2. Disgusting or immoral
3. Imminent
4. Associated with instantaneous changes

Melting glaciers, heart disease and gradually higher energy prices don't press these buttons.  Only a bit of the prefrontal cortex lights up with these foresight-related threats, reports Kristof.

He concludes saying, "Still, all is not lost, particularly if we understand and acknowledge our neurological shortcomings - and try to compensate with rational analysis."

That's ridiculous.  These threats just need better marketing.

Book: "Secret Pulse of Time" Explains Biological Underpinnings of Concepts of Past, Present & Future

Who knew biology played such an important role in how people perceive time?  Exploring this aspect of "life's scarcest commodity" is "The Secret Pulse of Time" by Stefan Klein.

As someone who frequently uses "the future" to sell ideas, it's a bit shocking to learn that it's not until we're four years old that we understand what a "day" means, and not 'til we're 13 that we can easily use terms like "earlier" and "later." 

The degree to which our bodies keep time borderlines on freaky.  Whether you're reading this now or not, chances are you were born at 4am.  And that you'll die at 5am. (Hey, file your complaints with Stefan, not me.)  But as in tune with the universe as we are, our minds don't have access to the fine watch-like movements our cells follow. 

Ever notice how a trip to someplace new seems to take longer than the trip back?  Klein says it's because experiences that are dense with novelty and data and require a lot of focus feel like they take longer.  On the return trip you've already taken in much of the new information and your mind doesn't process the experience as lengthy.  "When the brain separates out an experience to store it, it registers places, colors, shapes, feelings, sounds, smells, and taste. But time is not coded," says Klein.   "Beautiful moments are fundamentally too brief, and unpleasant occasions never seem to end.."  Poetic.  Then he says caffeine also makes time feel like it's going by faster.

Other interesting finds in the book:

• Westerners think of the future as what's literally ahead of them, with the past pressing into their back.  But this isn't a hard wired intuition.  The Aymara tribe of the Andes think the future is behind them because it's impossible to see, and the past is in front of them because it has already been viewed.  Klein says that they tend not to speculate about the future because it can't be seen.
• On a moment-by-moment basis, people generally thinking about either the past or the future, not the present. 
• Thinking about the past changes one's memory about the past.  (That's right Heisenberg fans).  Klein says that memories can be reframed, which is why the "good old days" phenomenon exists.

Marketers and anyone curious about what literally makes us tick will find a lot to like in this book.

Seth Godin on Faith, Science and the Future

For a short book, Seth Godin's "TRIBES" covers a lot of territory. But while most of it has to do with leadership and social media, an incredibly insightful passage on faith, science and the future should not be overlooked:

"Faith goes back a long way. Faith leads to hope, and it overcomes fear. Faith gave our ancestors the resilience they needed to deal with the mysteries of the (pre-science) world. Faith is the dividing line between humans and most other species. We have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, faith that Newton's laws will continue to govern the way a ball travels, and faith that our time in med school will pay off twenty years from now because society is still going to need doctors."

I'm struck by how whether it's a vision of the future, which no one can objectively say is truth, or a scientific principal like the boiling point of water, what enables people to bet their dollars or even their lives is their faith that something will happen.  

If anyone knows of any psychological books/papers on this topic, drop me a line.

We're born scientists

Turns out that we're wired for science. Feist, in "The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind," explains that from our earliest days, people seek out patterns, classifying objects and events, looking for causes to effects. 

"Finding such regularities or patterns lay the foundation for expecting the world to behave in a certain way, which is the beginning of hypothesis formation as well as causal thought," he says. 

Certainly such thinking is an evolutionary advantage. If one of your cavemen buddies eats some berries and then gets sick, recognizing that it was probably the berries, and not the angry gods who caused the illness, helps ensure you don't make the same mistake. It provokes some interesting questions: Is the cause-effect approach to the world a neurological underpinning of conservatism? Not necessarily the formal, "big C" political type, but the skeptical, reticent type. Playing it safe keeps you, well safer than someone who doesn't. 

So if conservatism has evolutionary roots then that could explain why people fear change generally, and of disruptive technology (sudden and big change) especially. Are innovations that are framed as the newest form of something old better received than innovations presented as the "latest and greatest thing?"

New book explores the scientist archetype, evolution of humanity's understanding of science

 

If our species' concept of "tomorrow" is a puzzle, then Greg Feist's book, "The Psychology of Science and the Origins of the Scientific Mind," is one of the corner pieces.  While Feist doesn't set out with the goal of helping PR people, his work inevitably will in four ways. Each will be explored in-depth in posts this week, but here's the sneak peak.

1. We all recognize that the position of "scientist" has reached archetype status in our society. The public has expectations of how they think, behave, look like and view the world from a moral and religious perspective.  At the same time,  they typically serve as the main spokesperson when a radical breakthrough is made.  These two factors intersect when it comes to managing the PR for a holy cow type of announcement.  Feist takes what we intuitively and halfhazardly know about this archetype and breaks it down, well, scientifically.  It's invaluable fodder for PR pros to study.

2. In calling for the psychology of science to be formalized as a field of study, Feist examines the evolutionary and historical roots of the scientific mind.  (Read that sentence again, because it refers to two enourmous and little-studied concepts.) His conclusion?  We're innately scientific creatures. This means no audience, no matter how anti-science or highest level of science education achieved, is beyond the capacity to understand a breakthrough and establish an informed opinion.

3. Why and how an audience's birth order affects their openness to disruptive ideas

4. The more difficult communications challenges that "invisible" fields like quantum physics and materials science face compared to others

"Me Like Future" Reports Caveman

From throwing the bones and divining entrails to reading horoscopes and plotting weather maps, thinking about future plays a bigger role in our daily lives than most people realize. And as preoccupations go, it seems to be a healthy one. Some evolutionary psychologists believe that people who think more about tomorrow than others have a better chance of making it there. “At a very fundamental level future thinking plays an important role in survival. Human beings need to be able to foresee the future, at least have a hunch. Better prediction of danger is an evolutionary advantage,” says Dr. Wessel van Beek of the Symfora Group, a mental health institute in the Netherlands. So whether we’re plotting the direction of a spear or the Dow, at its core, thinking about the future is often closely linked to thinking about survival.