Get Your Blue Mind On (as seen on Huffington Post)

(Link to Huffington Post http://huff.to/sTemOQ)

By Wallace J. Nichols and Sarah Kornfeld

Our brains have an amazing ability to do something: hide a world of truth from us. We’re able to tune out the blinking lights and honking horns, the stress of work, the underwater mortgage, and those inappropriate clothes and music our kids prefer. Meanwhile, people around the world survive war, abuse, hunger, chronic disease and floods. Our brains excel at rationalization and self-deception helping us handle the grit of living.

Billions of feelings, tactile senses, memories, sounds, smells and a barrage of voices are all around us. Most of the time our brain insulates and protects us from the rest of the abundant information in the universe that isn’t in our direct focus. But that thick padding comes with a cost. It means we really have no idea — most of the time — why and how we do what we do.

This concept might deeply challenge the idea of our lives happening because things are “meant to be”, or that we have a “higher calling” or we can “will things happen”. We certainly have brilliant insights, accurate intuitions and strokes of genius. It’s seems that our subconscious leads us to make decisions that feel like they come from someplace else, yet really happening inside us.

It’s tough because we’ve been working hard for a long time to understand why we do what we do. We have therapy, religion, hallucinagens and many other practices that we use to try to understand who we are. Yet new information about the brain need not rule out all the tools we’ve been using. Instead it could be a “power tool”. The way the brain processes (and hides) information is one of the great scientific insights of our era. And though seemingly heretical when looked at through more traditional lenses, it’s an amazing, mysterious and transcendent ecosystem of new ideas.

These ideas have led the cognitive scientist David Eagleman to coin the term “Possibillian” to describe the confident state of unknowningness. A Possibilian takes into account that we may have a deep connection both to the unknown, what some may call mysticism, as well as the great scientific discoveries of neuroscience and astrophysics. A Possibilian encourages us to stay open to all the far out possibilities unfolding with regard to our mind and the universe.

But, let’s back up. Way, way, way up.

Who are we?

We are people who live on a very small, apparently unique, blue planet. Our planet came about within the context of an unfathomably ancient universe in constant change filled mostly with invisible dark matter. Our planet is apparently surrounded by an infinitely shifting cosmos, gasses and suns in every direction, which we know something about, but really almost nothing. Our lives are a minuscule, temporary flash by comparison to the vastness of the universe. Yet we often feel invincible. We see ourselves as masters of the whole shooting match.

Our small planet is blue because of water. From a million-or even a billion-miles away, Earth appears blue.

Our ancestors came out of the water, evolved from swimming to crawling to walking. They developed remarkably complex brains, as well, necessary to move successfully through nature encountering constant unexpected challenges.

We started small on this blue planet-and we are descendants from, relatives of and subsidiary to the ocean.

This is not a biology or an astronomy lesson, rather it might be an amazing clue to how we can alter how we treat the planet. We literally have “blue minds”.

And we’re literally seated here now, virtually connected, pondering our evolutionary state with our future on the line.

Over the past year an open source community called BLUEMiND has taken up the task of exploring the human mind-ocean connection. Some of the finest thinkers in cognitive neuroscience, ocean exploration, media and art have gathered at the California Academy of Sciences, the Bioneers conference, and with leaders at the Environmental Defense Fund. Now the idea of exploring the intersection of conservation with how our brains process empathy, gratitude, fear and protection is starting to travel the world. It’s the beginning of a new field, and it all points to our brains’ critical need for the ocean: our planet’s largest, most-dominant system.

After a screening of his film “Transcendent Man”, famed futurist and author Ray Kurzweil was asked why he loves the ocean. The most poignant scene in the movie depicts Kurzweil quietly contemplating the sea and himself. He replied that: “It’s a metaphor for the way the brain is organized.”

The grand duchess of the environmental movement, Frances Moore Lappé (author of “Diet for a Small Planet” and the new book “EcoMind: Changing the Way We Think, to Create the World We Want”) stated,”The first step is getting people to realize that the current metaphors aren’t working … we have to think about these issues differently.” She continues, “There’s nothing inexorable” about the environmental problems at hand. “It’s a matter of how we perceive them …” (Santa Cruz Weekly, 9/11/11)

It’s said that those who control the frame, control the contest. We must reclaim the framework with which we see the world: we must engage with our minds to help us achieve this goal.

Here’s what we’ve learned about our blue minds:

- Our brains sit in saline and craves a connection to the planet’s ocean on a deeply primal level tied to our evolution.

- Doing “one small thing” for the planet does not mean you will stick to doing good -our brains heal and change with our complex relationships to people and nature experienced outdoors.

- The ocean isn’t just pretty, it stimulates our health-both psychologically and physically. We might be staring at a new approach to public health based on the ocean, one now being taken seriously by doctors and scientists.

So, this huge body of water, our one world ocean, impacts our remarkably powerful brains in ways we’ve always felt but are only beginning to know. Together, we occupy this planet, and together our minds and the sea have an interdependency beyond the fish, whales and sea turtles, ecosystems and biodiversity, or economic benefits. The water and our neurons need each other to live.

How can your blue mind help change the world?

To get healthy, get near, in, on or under the ocean more often. The ocean can literally suck the stress from you.
Demand that polluters don’t destroy the very thing our brains need to evolve.

Learn all you can about your brain, and teach it to the kids. Especially as it intersects with nature.

Or, as we like to say, LIVEBLUE and swim in the possibilities of your blue mind.

 

Faces of Chelonia: Art, Turtles and Two Guys with a Camera

This is an interview that is typically techno: Neil Ever Osborne and I did it email via email, and Wallace J Nichols and I over a beer with little wi-fi. It was great fun to interview my ocean brothers, and bioneers on this amazing adventure they are having called, “Faces of Chelonia”.

Both Neil and J are scientists, but they are artists, media makers and are making a profound impact on turtle health, and the use of art/imagery to explore the planet, and beauty.

** All images by Neil Ever Osborne

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SK: Ok, you first Neil. How did you find photography? Did looking at pictures influence you, or did a camera find you?
NEO: I have just a simple answer. Before I was a photographer, I was a biologist. When I realized I could communicate with more diverse and larger audiences through images, it was easy to swap research-measuring tools for the camera!

SK: Once you had a camera what were the topics, or subjects that interested you most?

NEO: I guess you can say I’ve remained intrigued by the scientific and natural world, so my assignments and personal work are almost exclusively centered on an environmental topic or issue. It takes me to some fascinating places!

 

 

 

 

 

 

SK: J, how did you find Turtles, or how did they find you?

WJN: I’ve been a bit of a turtle and math geek since I was a kid. We used to catch snapping turtles and paint numbers on their shells and use simple algebra to estimate the size of the population based on recaptures. Turtles have been a steady obsession ever since. I just like them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SK: J, you’re a biologist, but you also have a degree in economics, oh, and you are also a media maker. How did this mish-mash come together, and why?

WJN: I was always interested in problem solving more than any particular academic discipline. So I’ve just learned about the tools that I think are needed, often by hanging around the people I know are best at those things, be they photographers, designers or neuroscientists.

SK: So, Neil, when did the blending of science and art/art and science come into your consciousness?

NEO: I’m still learning the power of this convergence. But, it is clear to me this is the direction conservation needs to head. Conservation communications should not be a novel term, but in many conversations it still is. As these worlds collide, I think we’ll see more work coming from the emerging genre of conservation photography, and other communication platforms. Our next step is to start quantifying the role each can play with the other.

SK: Same question for you J. When did the blending of science and art/art and science come into your consciousness?
WJN: In high school I liked science, but was singled out by faculty for my writing. I told the head of the English Department that I was going to be a biologist who could write. He wanted it the other way around. It was then that I realized that I liked the blend of art and science, or science and art, as the case may be. The two strands wind around each other so easily.

I’ve sold a couple of images to National Geographic, so I’m now retired as a photographer ; )

SK: Neil, do you think photography can change the world? Or, people’s attitude towards place?

NEO: More and more I find myself saying that photography and imagery might not change the world, but it could be the factor that changes the mind of someone who can.

 

SK: J, what about you. Do you believe in “changing the world” Or images being  a part of that?

WJN: Anything or anyone can potentially change anyone or anything. Especially in this era of speed-of-light communication. Why limit the opportunities?

 

 

 

 

SK: Neil, What is your most recent project, it has to do with turtles….ya?

NEO: In the latest chapter of my Faces of Chelonia project, which depicts sea turtle conservation stories from around the world, J. and I are returning to the Baja California Sur coastline to bring back one of the most positive conservation tales around. We’ll introduce the public to a movement that started more than a decade ago with some very unlikely characters. It will be a novel contribution to the media where we are constantly informed about what is going wrong in the world. If this excites you, you can support our project here:

PLEASE LINK BELOW FOR A WONDERFUL VIDEO AND A PLACE TO DONATE:

Emphas.is: http://bit.ly/qagRa2

SK: Do you feel that photography of nature is left out of the “canon” of museums? Or, does that not really matter?

NEO: These days, I’m spending most of my time trying to find outlets for my work and other photographers’ projects that align with audiences who might be influential in making decisions that affect the conservation issue. So, I’m more interested in the novel deliverables that get images into the face of the right people. More often this is the public who can persuade policy makers, but I’m looking to target specific audiences as well.

 

 

 

 

 

 

SK: Finally, J, what’s it like for you to work with Neil? Is there a different kind of collaboration or process you experience, as opposed to those in the labs you help run, or the projects you do on land?

WJN: Beyond the theory and rhetoric, Neil and I work well together. He’s easy to travel and camp with and we like the same kind of beer. I think people say, “those guys who love turtles are kind of crazy, fun to work with and polite.” So we build rapport, friendships and get invited back. And that’s much more important to the conservation process than you may think.

A Story of Toxic Art

By Wallace J. Nichols, Sarah Kornfeld and Andy Myers (as seen in The Huffington Post)

The stuff of war is the stuff of art.  Some of the earliest cave drawings depict tribal strife.  Since before history, the material and materiel of war has served as a vast palette for artists to explore and explain the times in which they live.

Eighteen-year-old Lovetta Conto designs jewelry—some is made of fine metal, but others are shaped from bullet casings pulled from the soil of her native Liberia, a nation rent by civil war.  Lovetta crafts beauty from bullets, finding meaning in the things that have ripped her homeland apart.  No daisies, no meadows, no fairy tales for Lovetta.  She’s a child who escaped civil war, suffering and violence to look upon the world with the eyes of an artist.

(Image left – “see food” sculpture by artist Karissa Vasil)

Today, we are in the midst of a new sort of invasion, not of foreign armies but one that is often invisible and insidious.  In this occupation, we are willing if unwitting participants in our own oppression.  The materiel of this occupation is not hand grenades and bullets, it drifts in the ocean and washes up on our shores.  The material of this invasion is plastic.
Our oceans are fringed with this toxic residue.  The ground is layered with plastic straws and bottle caps.  Rivers carry minute colorful fragments. The wildest most isolated animals on our planet have our trash in their stomachs.  The chemicals from these materials occupy our bodies and will be passed to the next generation.

Each day scientists churn out new data on the total volume of plastic entering the biosphere, the hundreds of species harmed by plastic pollution, and the health threats related to plastic.  Economists have documented the staggering costs to society of this misguided invasion, the most devastating of which will be pushed off on those without voices: the disenfranchised, the unborn, and the endangered members of our animal kingdom.

Like Lovetta and her necklaces made of bullets, artists and designers are using the stuff of their occupying force—plastic—to create meaning for the world.

Photographer Chris Jordan has been traveling to Midway Island, one of the most remote places in the world, over the past year to document albatross carcasses whose guts are filled with plastic.  The birds eat plastic from the sea and feed it to their babies.  Jordan photographs the contents of the dead birds intact to show the reality of the plastic inside them.  His work has made him aware that he is both artist and subject—the one taking the picture and the one in the picture, though perhaps not literally.  In the plastic, Jordan sees himself—a citizen of a consumption-dominated world trying hard not to contribute to the problem he is documenting. http://bit.ly/bQZh63

“Standing over the dead bodies of these magnificent creatures filled with our plastic garbage is like looking into a macabre mirror,” the photographer told us.  “The tiny brain of an albatross is unable to distinguish between what is nourishing and what is harmful; and yet with all of our advanced intelligence, we humans suffer from this same lack of discernment.”

Lila Roo welds costumes out of plastic pollution and performs elaborate interpretive dances.  Recently at the TEDx conference in Santa Monica she appeared as a raptor in plastic made from truck-stop waste gathered from across America. She wears toxic things as a cry for action—and to call upon the traditions of theater and visual imagery to shock the viewer into seeing the world anew. http://bit.ly/fYsfEw

(Opposite: Lila Roo “Oil and Water”)

Dianna Cohen works with plastic to create sculptures, clothing and artifacts   http://bit.ly/fLuT0H.  When she was making her work initially she believed that there must be a way to lift the plastic out of the world, to “hoover” it up and transport it somewhere in one fell swoop.  As she learned that this was impossible, that mere removal or recycling is not possible as a total solution, she was filled with despair.  So, Cohen turned her despair into more art, and then went on to co-found the Plastic Pollution Coalition to address the issue head on.

Plastic is not a benign occupier, it is toxic.  Nothing about it—from its genesis as petroleum, to the manufacturing plant, to your life, to its recycled resurrection—is clean.  Plastic is toxic through and through and it never breaks down or disappears.  It just wears down, it fragments and it gets smaller.

At some point it gets so small that fish begin to think it’s plankton.  The smaller it gets the deeper it buries itself in our soils and sands, beside our food and our water.  Plastic becomes so small it is virtually invisible in our daily lives, but it never, ever goes away.  We have created it and it is ours, forever.

It is only natural that artists would use plastic: because plastics are pervasive, because they are strong and malleable, because they are colorful.  Artists see the plastics all about them and they see ideas.  They see meaning.  They see beauty.

This is nothing new.  For ages, artists have used what is around them to tell the story of their time.  These days, some are choosing shell casings and plastic pollution the way their predecessors chose wood or marble.  For Lovetta, Chris, Lila and Dianna the materials they work with are the materials of life and death.  They are committed to using art to
educate and to create beauty from the profane, working with the very materials they would like to dispel from the planet.  They are documenting a global crisis of consumption.

There is a risk that their art may transform the medium too well and make plastic pollution look too beautiful, masking the true nature of the invasion.  It is this paradox—the juxtaposition of the beautiful and the ugly, the sacred and the profane, the life-affirming and the deadly—that makes their work so powerful and filled with meaning.  It is a fine line to walk for those deeply gifted at creating beauty.  Art can and should create discomfort—even when it looks beautiful.

As Jordan has cautioned, “by dwelling on the awfulness of these tragedies—and the smorgasbord of others we survey in the news every day—we may lose our already tenuous connection with life’s beauty, mystery, humor and joy.”

As we make art from death and waste, we ought to keep in mind its role in shaping the future.

Sun Tzu famously stated “all warfare is based on deception.”  The same might be said of art.  When artists turn deadly things into beautiful things they are deceiving us to win the war of ideas.  Art that deceives also enlightens, enrages, shocks and provokes.  And, it leads to change.  The choice is ours.  We can heed the artists and the scientists and force out these occupying toxic armies, changing the future of our planet for the better.  Or, we can do nothing and succumb to the plastic invasion.

“Even something as ugly as a bullet that was fired in a war can be made beautiful,” Lovetta Conto wrote, “if you are willing to work to change it into something else.”