Ummagumma

Your brain is always being shaped by something, and if you're not deliberately shaping it, something else already is. That's neurology. The same plasticity that shows up as a larger hippocampus in London cab drivers responds to demand in either direction. When the demand changes, the brain changes with it.  I met a version of this in person on a recent trip to New York, an Uber driver who told me he'd had to learn thousands of streets, avenues and boulevards to pass his own licensing exam. You must score at least an 80 or you fail. He's probably working with a larger hippo too. The organ doesn't consult you before it remodels. It just measures repetition. Whatever you repeat, you become. Whatever you neglect, you lose, usually with little fanfare. Norwegian conscription data shows IQ scores reversing since about 1975, reversing even between brothers raised in the same house, which strongly points away from genetics and toward environmental causes. MIT's study o...

I started my slow aging practice in the 1990s.  I did not call it a practice or really even think of it that way. The whole idea of cultivating your life by combining “practices” just wasn’t there holistically. Back then there was this rather nebulous idea that something called “ the Singularity” might happen about 4 decades in the future. 2032 was the year, supposedly . This Singularity was going to arises as a combination of different technologies and disciplines co-mingled into something larger. A kind of utopia was predicted by certain fringe scientists. Biotechnology and nanotechnology were converging into something that looked, from a distance, like it might rewrite what a human body could be. I had no evidence this would happen on any particular timeline, or at all. I was already in decent physical and mental shape in my mid-30’s. So the assumption was straightforward. Fine tune. Perpetuate. Back then there was a large school of thought that free radicals were the main cul...

In my books , I highlight research that indicates play is good for neuroplasticity. Your brain changes through use. Play is one of the more enjoyable ways to keep that change alive. No grim self-improvement face required. Play is strange because it looks like nothing serious is happening. Kids run around making up rules no adult can understand. Someone tells a joke. A family enjoys group games after dinner. People sit around a table playing cards, laughing, arguing over the rules, and pretending the stakes matter more than they do. Alex Hutchinson, writing in Big Think , discusses recent work in a piece called " Why Play Brings Us Pleasure ." The basic idea is simple enough and yet surprisingly deep. In the article's own phrasing, play lets us "create the uncertainty that we can then resolve." We invent a game, accept its restrictions, enter its little world of rules, and suddenly the outcome is unknown. That uncertainty is the point. Play is chosen uncertai...

When you combine practices — when you actually connect the things you do, the skills you've built, the interests you've cultivated — something additional appears. Not just the sum. Something beyond the sum. That's not a story you tell about your life. That's something happening in your life. I call it harmonious generation. Harmogenics for short. The word is new. The phenomenon is not. In fact, it is everywhere . It shows up in physics, in biology, in neuroscience, in psychology, in ecology, in aging research, in philosophy, in religion, in craft, in athletics, in ordinary kitchens and ordinary lives. It has been running in the background of human experience for as long as there have been humans combining practices. And nobody has named it as a single thing. Everybody keeps finding pieces of it and filing those pieces under different headings. Hydrogen is a flammable gas. Oxygen is a flammable gas. Combine them and you get something that puts out fires. Wetness belongs...

Something happened to you already. Before you noticed. Before anyone else noticed. Sovereignty — the old idea of a bounded, private self directing its own life from the inside out — is gone. Not eroding. Not under threat. Gone. It was gradually converted, during your lifetime while you were busy enjoying the convenience of buying what you want when you want it. Nobody directed this. There was no master plan. The Complex — the vast interlocking system of easy consumption and entertainment — doesn't have intentions any more than an asteroid does. It just does what it does. And what it does, systematically and without malice, is make you legible. Observable. Modelable. A pattern of behavior that can be targeted and predicted and nudged and engaged. It’s a world of Likes. Like. Like. Like. The history of lost privacy is the history of lost sovereignty. Not because privacy and sovereignty are the same thing — personal sovereignty was always larger than that — but because privacy was...

It was about this time last year I started writing what I thought would be one book entitled Harmogenics . That turned into three books with the last, Raucous Reckonings , completed in October. I was late in the “final” revision of the text when I came across Albert Camus and his remarkable affinity with what I have in mind by "cosmic indifference." Short version: don’t slit your wrists. I have known of Albert Camus's philosophy as long as I have known Jean-Paul Sartre. Decades. But while I read and studied Sartre at different times of my life, I never studied or read Camus. I just knew he originated, more or less, contemporary philosophy of the "absurd." Camus gets designated an "existentialist," which annoyed him while he was alive, and then reduced to a single slogan about Absurdity. That reduction misses the point in a very human way. Camus wasn't trying to depress anyone. He was trying to keep people honest without lying to themselves for c...

In Harmogenics:A Practical Guide To Constant Becoming , I state: "We are living through what is perhaps the most exciting period in human history. We are literally witnessing the transformation of human consciousness." This is something I truly perceive. Despite all the challenges we face, we have never had so much transformational potential within our grasp as a species. When I recently watched Peter Leyden's Big Think presentation “ The Great Inflection 2025 ,” I felt an immediate affinity with his vision. Here was someone describing, from a completely different angle, exactly what I'd been writing about. His argument is simple, sweeping, and surprisingly hopeful: that 2025 marks the beginning of a new 25-year period of reinvention—a period as transformative as the American founding, the post-Civil War industrial explosion, or the post-World War II boom. He calls it a world-historic inflection, driven by three simultaneous “tipping points”: artificial intelligenc...

  Omar Khayyam. I stumbled onto Omar Khayyam recently. I subscribe of YouTube channel that produces summaries of major philosophers and thinkers that last 3 or 4 hours. I listen to them at night sometimes and it helps make me drowsy. Their summary of Nietzsche’s philosophy, for example, is not completely objective but it is very well made and a splendid intermediate level introduction. I had listened to many of the channel's videos more contemporary philosophers Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, Marx, Hegel, and Kant when the YouTube algorithm threw me “The Complete Philosophy of Al-Ghazali” and I thought I would give it a try, Muslim philosophy being a weakness of mine. I made it through about one-third of it before I grew bored with him and, searching the channel page, I found Omar Khayyam. The video on him was released about three months ago as of my viewing. Now, I cannot get this guy out of my head. I cannot shake him. I had never heard of him before, which seems ridiculous ...