Sensemaking
It’s both a blessing and a curse to be an artist: while artists give life to their emotions, it can also be a very isolating place to feel deeply, including sensitivity to judgments.
... See more“If you see tremendous beauty or tremendous pain where other people see little or nothing at all, you’re confronted with big feelings all the time. These emotions can
To make great work, we need to be submerged in great work to tell apart the great from the good. We can train our sensitivity towards quality stimulus by levelling up our taste - because there’s infinite amount of data and that not everything deserves our time & energy.
... See more“The objective is not to learn to mimic greatness, but to calibrate our internal
- YouTube
youtu.beWe need to find those in-between moments to let our brain breathe, contemplate, and make sense of the information that we just take in, in order to form connections with the world and understand it better. Journalling is a good practice to actively engage our memory - not only for recall, for as a point of taking time to sit and reflect those memory, so that we can build a sense of “self”.
Consumer culture, with its compulsion for novelty and perpetual stimulation, likewise erodes the bonds of shared experience that engender meaningful narratives. The fire around which human beings would once have gathered to hear stories has been displaced by the digital screen, ‘which separates people as individual consumers.’ Time, love, art,... See more
Oliver Balch • Thought-tinkering – the Korean German philosopher Byung-Chul Han | Aeon Essays
erfahrung: accumulated experience
erlebnis: incidental, lived experience (instance)
The default mode network (DMN) tends to activate when we’re not fully engaged in the present moment. The DMN is a collection of interconnected brain regions that drift through memories, simulate possible futures, and maintain our ongoing sense of self. This allows us to plan, imagine, and reflect, but it also pulls us out of direct experience. In... See more
yana yuhai • how to find magic in the ordinary (the neuroscience of whimsy)
DMN is activated by default, when we’re not putting attention into the front of our minds - i.e. the state of drifting.
Children, especially younger ones, spend far less time in this state because both the DMN and the prefrontal cortex that helps regulate it are still developing. These systems support self-reflection, long-term planning, and abstract thinking.In other words, kids are naturally more anchored in real-time sensory experience.
yana yuhai • how to find magic in the ordinary (the neuroscience of whimsy)
Children have no choice but to be present, and hence, look through the eyes of the innocent and everything feels new.
find novelty through attention, not newness. you don’t need new experiences to feel wonder. novelty is created when attention is deep and precise. bring fresh awareness to what you already do every day, and the brain responds as if it’s encountering something new.
yana yuhai • how to find magic in the ordinary (the neuroscience of whimsy)
“Experience provides wisdom to draw from, but it tempers the power of naïveté.” (P.121)
[ Takeaway: p.121, Beginner’s Mind - The Creative Act: Rick Rubin ]
Presence isn’t something we find, it’s something we return to. And when you return to presence, you return to yourself.