- by Clay Cotton


So Why Aren't You Rich?

For years now we've pondered why some entrepreneurs succeed where others flounder.  And the questions keep coming back, over and over again, "Do you need better tools, better ideas, better strategies, tactics and procedures?".

Of course you do...

So what do you do to correct this?  You do all that you can to spot and acquire the skills and resources that can power your success and ease your load.  But somehow, things often don't come together in a way that creates bottom-line results.

And then the internal questions get more personal.  "Well, you've got  access to superior tools and great ideas, so why aren't you rich?  Where's the problem?  What's WRONG with you?" 

It's so easy to blame the tools, systems and strategies, but sooner or later, ya gotta admit that part of it might be a personal problem, like maybe you are a little "A.D.D.", Attention Deficit Disorder.  D'ya think?

Attention Deficit?

Fact is, in today's world, we're ALL a bit A.D.D., aren't we?  Science tells us that the human brain receives an input of over 4 billion sensory data bits a second, 875,000,000 of these bits from the eyes alone. That's each and every SECOND. Just from the senses...

The brain does an amazing job of filtering out the clutter so we can pay attention to what matters.  But it's getting harder every day. 

So far, in its evolutionary path, the human brain has never had such a load.  And today, not only do we overload our senses with visual, auditory, kinesthetic, gustatory and olfactory input, but nowadays the CONCEPTUAL onslaught is unrelenting.

TV, radio, movies, printed text, ipods, videos, dvds, cds, podcasts, ebooks, websites, blogs, feeds, voip chats, forums, social media, instant messages, teleconferences, cell phones, gps - OMFG, this infoglut is overwhelming!  Too MUCH access to too MANY concepts.

JEEZ, if you ain't scattered, then you ain't livin'.  Look at Las Vegas, where the "action" is - America's "black hole" of attention.  And we love it.  With every sense on overload, we let go and flow with the chaos, because sometimes that's all ya CAN do.  It's a orgy of distraction, for sure.

Focus: Running Your Own Brain

The problem with virtually unlimited access to stimulation is that today's world demands new and extraordinary focus on how we run our own brains and how we affect other brains.  I maintain that in an info economy, the new "currency" is precious human attention, and we must be highly aware of attention patterns...  Hence attentionomics: The study of human attention and interest.

For our purposes here, we can look at attention from two angles:  Personal Attention and Target-Visitor Attention

1. Personal Attention -  How do you manage the attention patterns in your own mind?   Methinx, we had better be more aware of attention, especially our own attention, so as to better allocate, save, protect and invest it with poise, power and precision.

2.  Target-Visitor Attention - How do you best capture, sustain and direct target-visitor attention?  First, we must offer clear benefits (or potential benefits) at every "choice point" in a visitor's interaction.  In an age of skepticism, we must hook them with an irresistible, yet believable appeal, and we must deliver value worthy of devotion.  We must function as clear and stable beacons in a sea of chaos, frustration, confusuion, overwhelming info-glut, clutter, fear and uncertainty.

In this exploratory series of Clay's Attentionomics articles, we'll spotlight the roots of distraction and focus, of chaos and clarity, of wastage and utilization, all with an eye to improving our own, internal attentionomics and with an additional goal of better understanding and crafting the mindset and online  experience of website visitors, precious our target-market, message recipients.


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Clay Cotton, "the pianoman who refused to sleep with Janis Joplin", offers free, wildass piano tracks at http://www.cdbaby.com/claycotton and at http://www.claycotton.com. 
Clay's blog: http://claycotton.mywebtop.com/post/app/blog/
Clay's charitable work: http://alterabilities.com
Join Content Desk:  http://www.claycotton.com/1-cd-krewe

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October 21, 2006

This piece by Jack to too visionary to keep under wraps, so I'm  reprinting here for y'all.  See more at http://www.claycotton.com/cd-krewe

/clay

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The Future of Internet Publishing Is… Different

Internet Publishing: The process of producing and delivering content around a niche, small or large, in order to carve out a loyal readership who reward you with clicks, affiliate sales, product sales, or any number of other monetization methods.

A time is coming when people will look back at the early years of the web as "the wild west" for more reasons than simply an abundance of opportunity.

The way sites are published and marketed is changing radically.

How it Works Today…

    * Everyone is an independent publisher in the extreme sense
    * Most people now learn and do their own SEO
    * Most site owners are responsible for keeping up on myriad, complicated marketing tactics
    * Most site owners are responsible for manually adding good content regularly
    * Site owners have to keep up with site building technology to stay current
    * Most sites are still in static html
    * Most sites do not run from a central database on a template driven system
    * Site owners have to be "jacks of all trades" to succeed online - not just content providers

On the new web an ideal is taking shape that is going to radically change the way people build online businesses, market them, and profit from them.

Here is the Future…

    * Sites will become, more and more, hosted publishing systems
    * The hosts will keep up on SEO and marketing technology and keep the system we publish on working at optimal levels for search engine placement
    * Some smart SEO firms will become hosting companies as well in order to optimize the technical backend of the publishing systems that get the best results in the engines
    * The rest of the SEO industry will fade into obscurity since there won't be enough demand for SEO work for independent sites
    * People will be publishing on technology that is too complicated and too proprietary to give to individual site owners to work with
    * But the technology will work so well that people will more and more give up the Wild West do-it-yourself days for better search engine placement and a much more professional presence
    * Books and courses that teach "How to get a top 10 ranking in Google" will be obsolete for anyone publishing on a supported network where that training is included and much of the work in this area is done by the publishing system itself and not website owners
    * Writers, experts, bloggers, coaches, and product/service marketers will be able to simply focus on content, and post and rank for their content
    * Design will be handled by designers on a hosted system, not by site owners who cannot design their way out of a paper bag, thus design and navigation of sites will improve drastically across the web
    * Web designers and programmers will begin doing the bulk of their work THROUGH the hosts of these publishing systems rather than individual web site owners
    * Hosting companies will pick up on the trend toward "optimized publishing systems" and start including competing products in their service
    * Site owners will become content providers, period, with the time to master the art of creating content that drives traffic rather than being responsible for everything else it takes to make a good publishing machine run optimally

People with something important to say and/or sell will simply be able to log on, say it, sell it, and not worry about SEO, design, html, layout, hours of keeping up on techie things each week just to stay current, programming, hiring programmers, and everything else that goes with The Wild West internet today.

The Market

There are far more people in the world with good ideas for sites and products than there are people who understand how to best build and optimize those sites.

People do not want to know HOW fuel injection works on the car they are purchasing. They want to know that it improves performance. They don't care about the science behind braking systems. They just want the vehicle to stop properly.

Online, most people glaze over when the geeks start talking about RSS, syndication technology, autodiscovery, feeds, plugins, search engine algorithms, Google updates, meta tags, html, shtml, php, java, flash and the hundreds of other components of a successful publishing system.

They simply want to know that the platform they are publishing on works better than anything else for their purposes. The biggest gift anyone could give the average website owner would be the gift of taking all the technical barriers down and putting them on equal footing with established competitors.

People want a system where they "just add content." They want to post and rank. They don't want to install anything, program anything, optimize anything, or pay high fees to have those things done for them outside their hosting company.

People want a marketing system that is also optimized. Lead generation, followup, community building and everything else that goes with an optimized on-site marketing system should be plug and play.

What else is going the way of the Dodo?
Geeks will stop trying to sell people on technology and start creating systems where the technology works, but stays out of the way of the publisher.

Geeks will start consulting with each other more rather than trying to teach the world how "cool" their technology is and how it works.

People don't care how their instant messenger program WORKS. They just WANT it because of what it DOES.

No one cares how Skype does what it does. They just want to make internet phone calls and connect with family and friends.

We on the cutting-edge of technology have to stop trying to force people to learn what we know. People want to build an online business not become expert script installers. People want to know they will be in the search engines for their content, not how they got there or what it will take to get there again.

If people can stop spending thousands, even tens of thousands per year on courses, services, programming, and scripts, they will have enough money to try paid advertising and other marketing that tends to get pushed aside when people follow the old system of "know it all" publishing.

If you have something to say, something to sell, or anything to offer the world on the web, there should be no barriers preventing you from letting the world know.

Will your ideas or products and services make you rich or successful? That's up to the market. But the market has to be tested and it cannot be properly tested if you are constantly working on every facet of publishing just to get a site up and your content published.

If we take away the barriers to getting on the web and becoming successful in a niche, by creating a powerful publishing "vehicle" for them to drive, far more people will get into web publishing.

This will make for a more diverse and exciting internet experience for everyone when the geeks and highly motivated, over-worked, stressed out do it yourselfers have to compete with great ideas rather than their competition's search engine optimization skills.

If you want to check out the leader in hosted publishing solutions, you should take a look at what Content Desk is doing to make the ideas expressed here a reality.

===========

Here's one idea you can use for monetization:  Recruit writers word of mouth and set them up with their own WPM on a subdomain, and let them go to town. Share the revenue generated on their blogs, and watch how it goes.  - -  If you get good writers, you will get good traffic. Good meaning they post regularly and they post content that gets visitors from the engines and that gets them interacting and loyal.  - -  There are far more small networks of blogs doing this than the "goliaths", but going through the process this way will enable you to take it slow, and watch for the right opportunity to automate brand new blog creation a bit more if you want to open up to the masses.

The Content Desk platform can easily power new biz models like this, because it makes it so easy to spawn and publish.

Message me with your questions, OK?

/clay

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What's so important here is to appreciate the infinite capacity of human adaptability.  When one is dealt a tough hand (or in this case, NO hands...), then it's time to rise above the challenges with alternative strategies and tactics, allowing us to demonstrate our resilience, our heightened power, our focus, our spirit and our value to the world to which we contribute.

We don't simply compensate.  We transcend.  And it can be amazing to be a part of...

This is the thrust of the not-for-profit initiative at our Alterabilities Unlimited Project, where I trust you can help us expand the possibilities for those living with obvious challenges and limitations.

We're gathering case studies and resources for self-empowerment and internet entrepreneurship, and it's a fascinating quest, for sure, as you can clearly see...

The alter-abled among us deserve your interest and unbridled support, so visit and opt-in right now, please...

Just go check it out http://alterabilities.com

You'll dig it :):)

/brother clay  

CD Krewe Clay - Come with Us // WildAss Pianoman Clay // Gimp with Attitude Clay // A HAND: For your natural well-being

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More Consumers Are Watching TV Online
Consumer Internet Barometer™ Tracks Who's Doing What on the Internet

October 25, 2006

One out of every ten online consumers watches television broadcasts online, according to the latest Consumer Internet Barometer, released today. The Barometer, produced by The Conference Board and TNS, the world's largest custom research company, covers 10,000 households across the country.

Online viewers say personal convenience and avoiding commercials are the top reasons for watching TV broadcasts online. Only a small percentage of consumers claim that their traditional television viewing has decreased, while three out of every four online viewers report no change in their viewing habits.

Many Consumers Use the Internet for Entertainment on a Daily Basis

Today, more than two-thirds of online consumers log on daily for entertainment purposes and an additional 16 percent log on for entertainment several times a week. One in ten online consumers are watching TV broadcasts via the Internet, and about one-third of these households consist of multiple viewers.

Says Lynn Franco, Director of The Conference Board Consumer Research Center: "Although online television viewing is not a widespread phenomenon, the proportion of users is likely to increase over time given consumers' penchant for entertainment."

"As we have learned through our ongoing research, those content providers who communicate the value, context and capabilities of online programming will be positioned to grab the greatest share of the growing market for online entertainment," says Edye Twer, a TNS Senior Vice President specializing in the Media and Entertainment sector. "Additionally, this is representative of a larger trend toward, 'anytime, anywhere' viewing that includes the use of digital video recorders, video on demand and portable video players, such as the iPod."

News is the Most Widely Viewed TV Content Online

More than three out of five online TV viewers cite personal convenience as the major reason for watching TV broadcasts online. Another reason for viewing online is the ability to avoid commercials. Other reasons are portability and a preference for computer viewing.

Online viewers tend to watch news broadcasts more often than other types of broadcasts, with more than 62 percent logging on for news content. Close to 50 percent go online for entertainment viewing. Catching up on missed content, previews, sports, and watching entire episodes of shows are also among the top draws cited by more than a quarter of viewers.

Few Consumers Willing to Pay for Online Television Downloads

The most popular methods for viewing TV broadcasts online are streaming and free download, cited by 53 percent and 49 percent of viewers, respectively. Very few consumers are willing to pay per download or enroll in subscription services.

====================================

One out of every ten online consumers now chooses to catch news or TV highlights while surfing the web. Given the convenience of Internet broadcasts, it’s no surprise. Consumers can now have their entertainment delivered TiVo style, on demand and relatively commercial-free.

Another perk of Internet TV viewing is its universal accessibility. I can view my favorite programs at the office, in my bedroom, or an Internet café in San Paolo. It’s much easier for me find out who was eliminated from this week’s Bachelor in a 60 second clip (while I check my MySpace account at work) than it is for me to sit through 15 minutes worth of commercials to view the hour-long program in its entirety. Although many shows offered on the Web come with a commercial or two inserted before the broadcast, ads that interrupt the continuity of traditional television viewing are a thing of the past.

Although one in ten hardly constitutes a rampant phenomenon, more than two-thirds of online consumers use the Web daily for entertainment purposes, proving that the Internet is increasingly becoming a one-stop-shop for all forms of news and entertainment. Does this mean the days of traditional TVs are numbered? The Internet and iPod-like devices have led consumers to expect -- even demand -- their entertainment anytime, anywhere. Let’s face it: TV just doesn’t cut it when it comes to portability and live 24 hour requests for media variety.

Most online viewers maintain that they’re still watching just as much traditional television as before, but I can’t say I agree with that. I’ve found that I get more news and entertainment on my computer at work than I do on my television at home. What are your personal findings? Are you the one in ten who gets most of your entertainment from the Web, or is traditional TV still your favorite medium? Furthermore, what should we call Internet Television? I-TV? NetVision? This new phenomenon needs a name!

===================

intersting developments, eh?

Toodles,

/brother clay  

CD Krewe Clay - Come with Us // WildAss Pianoman Clay // Gimp with Attitude Clay // A HAND: For your natural well-being

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i've gobbled michael's stuff since 2000 - ha!  i'm a dino  !!

but he give us a coupla pdf lists here that are new to me - helps expand the thinking a tad...

:):)

So, have you seen Michael Cambell's give-away stuff yet?

He's giving away two of his ebooks, free but for just an email.
Good basics if you're into affiliate money.

Again, I've been gobbling up Michael's stuff 4 years... Check it out:
http://homepage.mac.com/dmcorp/C175230984/index.html

Toodles,

/brother clay  

CD Krewe Clay - Come with Us // WildAss Pianoman Clay // Gimp with Attitude Clay // Health Warriors Unite

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As we become more aware of mass thinking, memetics has gotta play a part.  The piece below sparks a few thoughts, eh?

/brother clay  

CD Krewe Clay - Come with Us // WildAss Pianoman Clay // Gimp with Attitude Clay // Health Warriors Unite

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The Power of Memes
By Susan Blackmore

Human beings are strange animals. Although evolutionary theory has brilliantly accounted for the features we share with other creatures, from the genetic code that directs the construction of our bodies to the details of how our muscles and neurons work, we still stand out in countless ways. Our brains are exceptionally large, we alone have truly grammatical language, and we alone compose symphonies, drive cars, eat spaghetti with a fork and wonder about the origins of the universe.

The problem is that these abilities seem surplus to requirements, going well beyond what we need to survive. As Steven Pinker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology points out in How the Mind Works, "As far as biological cause and effect are concerned, music is useless." We might say the same of art, chess and pure mathematics.

Classical (Darwinian) evolutionary theory, which focuses on inheritable traits of organisms, cannot directly justify such riches. Expressed in modern terms, this theory holds that genes control the traits of organisms; over the course of many generations, genes that give their bearers a survival advantage and that favor production of many offspring (who will inherit the genes) tend to proliferate at the expense of others. The genes, then, essentially compete against one another, and those that are most proficient at being passed to the next generation gradually prosper.

Few scientists would want to abandon Darwinian theory. But if it does not clarify why we humans have come to apportion so much of our resources to so many abilities that are superfluous to the central biological task of further propagating our genes, where else can we look?

The answer, I suggest, lies in memes. Memes are stories, songs, habits, skills, inventions and ways of doing things that we copy from person to person by imitation. Human nature can be explained by evolutionary theory, but only when we consider evolving memes as well as genes.

It is tempting to consider memes as simply "ideas," but more properly memes are a form of information. (Genes, too, are information: instructions, written in DNA, for building proteins.) Thus, the meme for, say, the first eight notes of the Twilight Zone theme can be recorded not only in the neurons of a person (who will recognize the notes when she hears them) but also in magnetic patterns on a videocassette or in ink markings on a page of sheet music.

The Birth of Memes
The notion that memes exist and evolve has been around for almost 25 years, but only recently has it gained attention as a powerful force in human evolution. Richard Dawkins of the University of Oxford coined the word in 1976, in his best-selling book The Selfish Gene. There he described the basic principle of Darwinian evolution in terms of three general processes, when information is copied again and again, with variations and with selection of some variants over others, you must get evolution. That is, over many iterations of this cycle, the population of surviving copies will gradually acquire new properties that tend to make them better suited to succeeding in the ongoing competition to produce progeny. Although the cycle is mindless, it generates design out of chaos.

Dawkins called the information that gets copied the "replicator" and pointed out that the most familiar replicator is the gene. But he wanted to emphasize that evolution can be based on any replicator, and so, as an example, he invented the idea of the meme. The copying of memes from one person to another is imperfect, just as the copying of genes from parent to child is sometimes inaccurate. We may embellish a story, forget a word of the song, adapt an old technology or concoct a new theory out of old ideas. Of all these variations, some go on to be copied many times, whereas others die out. Memes are thus true replicators, possessing all three properties, replication, variation, selection, needed to spawn a new Darwinian evolutionary process.

Dawkins says that he had modest intentions for his new term, to prevent his readers from thinking that the gene was the "be-all and end-all of evolution, the fundamental unit of selection", but in fact his idea is dynamite. If memes are replicators, then they, like genes, compete to get copied for their own sake. This conclusion contradicts the assumption, held by most evolutionary psychologists, that the ultimate function of human culture is to serve the genes by aiding their survival. The founder of sociobiology, E. O. Wilson, famously said that the genes hold culture on a leash. Culture might temporarily develop in some direction that is counterproductive to spreading the genes, but in the long run it is brought back in line by gene-based natural selection, like a straying dog curbed by its owner. In this view, memes would be slaves to the genes that built the brains that copy them, prospering only by helping those genes to proliferate. But if Dawkins is right and memes are replicators, then memes serve their own selfish ends, replicating whenever they can. They sculpt our minds and cultures as they go, whatever their effect on the genes.

The most obvious examples of this phenomenon are "viral" memes. Chain letters (both hard-copy and e-mail) consist of little bits of written information, including a "copy-me" instruction backed up with threats (if you break the chain you will suffer bad luck) or promises (youíll receive money and you can help your friends). It does not matter that the threats and promises are empty and your effort in copying the letters is wasted. These memes have an internal structure that ensures their own propagation.

The same can be said, Dawkins argues, of the great religions of the world. Of all the myriad small cults with charismatic leaders that have sprung up in human history, only a few had what it took to survive, copy-me instructions backed up with threats and promises. In religions the threats are of death or eternal damnation, and the promises are of everlasting bliss. The costs are a proportion of oneís income, a lifetime devoted to propagating the word, or resources spent on building magnificent mosques and cathedrals that further promote the memes. The genes may even suffer directly at the hands of the memes, as occurs with a celibate priesthood.

Of course, not every cult (or chain letter) with the appropriate viral structure will actually succeed. Some threats and promises are more effective, or virulent, than others, and all compete for the limited resource of human attention in the face of experience and skepticism (which, in the viral metaphor, act as a kind of immune system).

Arguably, religions are not entirely viral; for example, they provide comfort and a sense of belonging. In any case, we must not make the mistake of thinking that all memes are viruses. The vast majority make up the very stuff of our lives, including languages, political systems, financial institutions, education, science and technology. All these are memes (or conglomerations of memes), because they are copied from person to person and vie for survival in the limited space of human memories and culture.

Thinking memetically gives rise to a new vision of the world, one that, when you "get" it, transforms everything. From the memeís-eye view, every human is a machine for making more memes, a vehicle for propagation, an opportunity for replication and a resource to compete for. We are neither the slaves of our genes nor rational free agents creating culture, art, science and technology for our own happiness. Instead we are part of a vast evolutionary process in which memes are the evolving replicators and we are the meme machines.

This new vision is stunning and scary: stunning because now one simple theory encompasses all of human culture and creativity as well as biological evolution; scary because it seems to reduce great swathes of our humanity, of our activities and our intellectual lives, to a mindless phenomenon. But is this vision true? Can memetics help us to understand ourselves? Can it lead to testable predictions or do any real scientific work? If it cannot, memetics is worthless.

I believe that the idea of the meme as replicator is what has been missing from our theories of human evolution and that memetics will prove immensely useful for explaining our unique attributes and the rise of our elaborate cultures and societies. We are different from all other animals because we alone, at some time in our far past, became capable of widespread generalized imitation. This let loose new replicators, memes, which then began to propagate, using us as their copying machinery much as genes use the copying machinery inside cells. From then on, this one species has been designed by two replicators, not one. This is why we are different from the millions of other species on the planet. This is how we got our big brains, our language and all our other peculiar "surplus" abilities.

Big Brains for Memes
Memetics neatly resolves the mystery of the human brainís vastness. The human brain is about as big as the genes can make it, three times bigger, relative to body weight, than the brains of our closest relatives, the great apes. It is expensive to build and maintain, and many mothers and babies die through childbirth complications caused by the size of the head. Why has evolution allowed the brain to grow so hazardously large? Traditional theories look to genetic advantage, in improved hunting or foraging skills or the ability to sustain larger cooperating groups with complex social skills. Memetics provides a completely different explanation.

The critical transition for hominids was the dawn of imitation, perhaps two and a half million years ago, before the advent of stone tools and expanding brains. True imitation means copying a novel behavior or skill from another animal. It is difficult to do, requires a lot of brainpower and is correspondingly rare in the animal kingdom. Although many birds copy songs, and whales and dolphins can imitate sounds and actions, most species cannot. Often animal "imitation," such as learning to respond to a new predator, involves merely the use of an innate behavior in a new situation.

Even chimpanzeesí imitation is limited to a small range of behaviors, such as methods of fishing for termites. In contrast, generalized imitation of almost any activity seen, as seems to come naturally to humans, is a much more difficult and correspondingly more valuable trick, letting the imitator reap the benefits of someone elseís learning or ingenuity as often as possible. For example, in experiments conducted in 1995 at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center in Georgia, when the same problems were presented to orangutans and human children, only the humans readily used imitation to solve the problems.

It is easy to imagine that our early ancestors imitated useful new skills in making fire, hunting, and carrying and preparing food. As these early memes spread, the ability to acquire them became increasingly important for survival. In short, people who were better at imitation thrived, and the genes that gave them the bigger brains required for it consequently spread in the gene pool. Everyone got better at imitation, intensifying the pressure to enlarge the brain still further in a kind of cerebral arms race.

Once everyone started imitating, the second replicator was let loose on the world, changing human evolution forever. The memes started to take control. Alongside useful skills, such as building fires, people copied less useful ones like fancy body decoration and downright costly ones such as energetic but futile rain dances. The genes faced a problem: how to ensure that their carriers copied only the useful behaviors. Newly arisen memes can spread through a population by imitation in a single generation, faster than genetic evolution can respond. By the time the genes could evolve a hardwired predilection for making fires and an aversion to performing rain dances, completely different fads could arise and hold sway. The genes can develop only broad, long-term strategies to try to make their bearers more discriminating about what they imitate.

A useful general heuristic that the genes could bestow might be a predisposition to copy the best imitators, the people most likely to have accurate versions of currently useful memes. (More familiar terms for "the best imitators" in modern life may be "trendsetters" or "role models.") In addition to their bag of useful tricks for survival, the best imitators would thereby acquire higher social status, further improving their survival chances and helping to propagate the genes that made them talented imitators, the genes that gave them big brains specialized at accurate generalized imitation.

The genes would continue to respond with improvements in peopleís innate preferences about what to imitate, but the genesí response, requiring generations of people to act on, would always lag far behind the memetic developments. I call the process by which memes control gene selection "memetic drive": memes compete among themselves and evolve rapidly in some direction, and genes must respond by improving selective imitation, increasing brain size and power along the way. Successful memes thus begin dictating which genes will be most successful. The memes take hold of the leash.

In a final twist, it would pay for people to mate with the most proficient imitators, because by and large, good imitators have the best survival skills. Through this effect, sexual selection, guided by memes, could have played _a role in creating our big brains. By choosing the best imitator for a mate, women help propagate the genes needed to copy religious rituals, colorful clothes, singing, dancing, painting and so on. By this process, the legacy of past memetic evolution becomes embedded in the structures of our brains and we become musical, artistic and religious creatures. Our big brains are selective imitation devices built by and for the memes as much as for the genes.

Origin of Language
Language could have been another exquisite creation of this same process of meme-gene coevolution. Questions about the origins and function of language have been so contentious that in 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris banned any more speculation on the issue. Even today scientists have reached no general consensus, but the most popular theories appeal to genetic advantage. For example, evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar of the University of Liverpool argues that language is a substitute for grooming in keeping large social groups together. Evolutionary anthropologist and neuroscientist Terrence Deacon of Boston University proposes that language made symbolic communication possible, which in turn allowed improved hunting skills, tighter social bonds and group defense.

In contrast, the theory of memetic drive explains language by its conferring survival advantages on memes. To understand how this works, we must ask which kinds of memes would have survived best and proliferated in the emerging meme pool of our early ancestors. The general answer for any replicator is those with high fecundity, fidelity and longevity: ones that make many accurate and long-lived copies of themselves.

Sounds are more fecund than gestures, particularly sounds analogous to "hey!" or "look out!" Everyone within earshot can hear a shout, whether they happen to be looking at the speaker or not. Fidelity of spoken memes is higher for those built from discrete units of sound (phonemes) and divided into words, a kind of digitization that reduces errors in copying. As different actions and vocalizations competed in the prehistoric meme pool, such spoken words would prosper and displace less well adapted memes of communication. Then, stringing words together in different orders, and adding prefixes and inflections, would provide fertile niches for new, more sophisticated vocal memes. In sum, the highest-quality replicable sounds would crowd out the poorer ones.

Now consider the effect of this on the genes. Once again the best imitators (the most articulate individuals) would acquire higher status, the best mates and the most offspring. In consequence, genes for the ability to imitate the winning sounds would increase in the gene pool. I suggest that by this process the successful sounds, the foundations of spoken language, gradually drove the genes into creating a brain that was not merely big but especially adept at copying those particular articulations. The result was the remarkable human capacity for language. It was designed by memetic competition and meme-gene coevolution.

The process of memetic driving is an example of replicators (memes) evolving concurrently with their copying machinery (brains). The appearance of memes is not the first time such concurrent evolution has occurred: something similar must have taken place in the earliest stages of life on earth, when the first replicating molecules developed in the primeval soup and evolved into DNA and all its associated cellular replication machinery.

As with the evolution of that sophisticated gene-copying apparatus, we might expect better meme-copying machinery to have appeared, and it has. Written language provided a vast leap forward in longevity and fidelity; the printing press enhanced fecundity. From the telegraph to the cell phone, from "snail" mail to e-mail, from phonographs to DVDs and from computers to the Internet, copying machinery has been improving, spreading a growing multitude of memes farther and faster. Todayís information explosion is just what we should expect of memetic evolution.

This memetic theory depends on a number of conjectures that can be tested, especially the assumption that imitation requires a lot of brainpower, even though it comes so easily to us. Brain-scan studies might compare people carrying out actions with others copying them. Contrary to common sense, this theory postulates that imitation is the harder part, and also that the evolutionarily newer parts of the brain should be especially implicated in carrying it out. In addition, within any group of related animal species, those with the most ability at imitation should have the largest brains. The scarcity of imitation in animals limits the amount of data available, but species of birds, whales and dolphins could be analyzed and compared with this prediction.

Experimental Tests
If language developed in humans as a result of meme-gene coevolution, linguists should find signs that grammar is optimized for transmitting memes with high fecundity, fidelity and longevity, rather than for conveying information on specific topics such as hunting or for forming social contracts. Social psychology experiments should show that people preferentially copy more articulate people and find them more sexually attractive than less eloquent people.

Other predictions can be tested by mathematical modeling and computer simulations, which many researchers have used to model evolutionary processes. The addition of a second, faster replicator to a system should introduce a dramatic change, analogous to the appearance of memes and the human brainís expansion. The second replicator should also be able to control, and even stop, the evolution of the first. Such models might then be used to understand in greater detail the coevolution of memes and genes. In addition, the idea that language could spontaneously emerge in a population of imitating creatures could be tested with simulations of noisy imitating robots.

Memetics is a new science, struggling to find its place and with many critics. Some of these critics have simply failed to grasp the idea of a replicator. We need to remember that memes, like genes, are merely bits of information that either succeed in getting copied or do not. In this sense, but no other, memes can be said to be "selfish" and to have replicator power. Memes are not magical entities or free-floating Platonic ideals but information lodged in specific human memories, actions and artifacts. Nor are all mental contents memes, because not all of them were copied from someone else. If all your memes were removed, you would still have many perceptions, emotions, imaginings and learned skills that are yours alone, that you did not acquire from anyone else and that you can never share with another.

A common objection is that memes are very different from genes. And so they are. They suffer (or benefit) from much greater mutation rates, and they are not locked into a system as rigidly prescribed as DNA replication and protein synthesis. Memes are best thought about not by analogy with genes but as new replicators, with their own ways of surviving and getting copied. Memes can be copied all over the place, from speech to paper to book to computer, and to another person.

Yet many more potential criticisms remain, and much work is still to be done. In the end, memetics deserves to succeed only if it provides better explanations than rival theories and offers valid and testable predictions. Unlike religions, the great meme-complex of science includes methods for throwing out ideas that are vacuous, nonsensical or plain wrong. It is against these criteria that memetics, quite rightly, will be judged.

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as we strive for vision and innovative insight, creativity is the new currency, isn't it? 

so tools like these will come in handy, methinx...


/brother clay  

CD Krewe Clay - Come with Us // WildAss Pianoman Clay // Gimp with Attitude Clay // A HAND: For your natural well-being

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Tools for Genius: Eight strategies used by the super creative, from Aristotle and Leonardo to Einstein and Edison



Even if you're not a genius, you can use the same strategies as Aristotle and Einstein to harness the power of your creative mind and better manage your future.

How do geniuses come up with ideas? What is common to the thinking style that produced "Mona Lisa," as well as the one that spawned the theory of relativity? What characterizes the thinking strategies of the Einsteins, Edisons, da Vincis, Darwins, Picassos, Michelangelos, Galileos, Freuds, and Mozarts of history? What can we learn from them?

For years, scholars and researchers tried to study genius by analyzing statistics, as if piles of data somehow illuminate genius. In his 1904 study of genius, Havelock Ellis noted that most geniuses are fathered by men older than 30, had mothers younger than 25, and usually were sickly as children. Other scholars reported that many were celibate (Descartes), others were fatherless (Dickens) or motherless (Darwin). In the end, the piles of data illuminated nothing.

Academics also tried to measure the links between intelligence and genius. But intelligence is not enough. Run-of-the mill physicists have IQs much higher than Nobel Prize-winner Richard Feynman, widely acclaimed for his extraordinary genius, whose IQ was a merely respectable 122.
Genius is not about scoring 1600 on the Scholastic Assessment Test, mastering 14 languages at the age of seven, finishing Mensa exercises in record time, having an extraordinarily high IQ, or even being smart.

After considerable debate initiated in the 1960s by psychologist Joy P. Guilford, who called for a scientific focus on creativity, psychologists concluded that creativity is not the same as intelligence. An individual can be far more creative than intelligent, or far more intelligent than creative.

Most people of average intelligence can figure out the expected conventional response to a given problem. For example, when asked "What is one-half of 13?" most of us immediately answer six and one-half. You probably reached the answer in a few seconds and then turned your attention back to the text.

Productive vs. Reproductive Thinking

Typically, we think reproductively -that is, on the basis of similar problems encountered in the past. When confronted with problems, we fixate on something in our past that has worked before. We ask, "What have I been taught in life, education, or work on how to solve the problem?" Then we analytically select the most promising approach based on I past experiences, excluding all other approaches, and work within a clearly defined direction toward the solution of the problem. Because of the soundness of the steps based on past experiences, we become arrogantly certain of the correctness of our conclusion.

In contrast, geniuses think productively, not reproductively. When confronted with a problem, they ask "How many different ways can I look at it?," "How can I rethink the way I see it?," and "How many different ways can I solve it?" instead of "What have I been taught by someone else on how to solve this?" They tend to come up with many different responses, some of which are unconventional and possibly unique. A productive thinker would say that many different ways exist to express "thirteen" and many different ways to halve something, such as:

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As you can see, by expressing 13 in different ways and halving it in different ways, one could say one-half of thirteen is 6.5, or 1 and 3, or 4, or 11 and 2, or 8, and so on.

With productive thinking, one generates as many alternative approaches as one can. You consider the least obvious as well as the most likely approaches. It is the willingness to explore all methods that is important, even after one has found a promising one. Einstein was once asked what the difference was between him and the average person. He said that if you asked the average person to find a needle in a haystack, the person would stop when he or she found a needle. He, on the other hand, would tear through the entire haystack looking for all possible needles.

Whenever Feynman was stuck on a problem, he would invent new thinking strategies. He felt the secret to his genius was his ability to disregard how past thinkers thought about problems and, instead, invent new ways to think. He was so "unstuck" that if something didn't work he would look at it several different ways until he found a way that moved his imagination. He was wonderfully productive.

Feynman proposed that schools teach productive thinking instead of reproductive thinking. He believed that the successful user of mathematics is an inventor of new ways of thinking in given situations. He believed that, even if the old ways are well known, it is usually better to invent your own way or a new way than it is to look it up.

The problem "29 + 3 = ?" for example, is considered appropriate for children no earlier than the third grade, because it requires the advanced technique of carrying; yet Feynman pointed out that a first grader could handle it by thinking: 30, 31, 32. A child could also mark numbers on a line and count off the spaces-a method that becomes useful in understanding measurements and fractions. One can write larger numbers in columns and carry sums larger than 10. Or use fingers or algebra (2 times what plus 3 is 7?). Feynman encouraged teaching people to figure out how to think about problems in many different ways using trial and error.

Skewed by the Prism Of Past Experience

The point is that reproductive thinking fosters rigidity of thought. This is why we so often fail when confronted with a new problem that is superficially similar to past experiences, but different from previously encountered problems in its deep structure. Interpreting such a problem through the prism of past experience will, by definition, lead the thinker astray. Reproductive thinking leads us to the usual ideas and not to original ones. If you always think the way you've always thought, you'll always get what you've always gotten.

In 1968, the Swiss dominated the watch industry, as they had for centuries. It was the Swiss who invented the modern electronic watch movement at their research institute in Neufchatel, Switzerland. That year, however, when this new invention was introduced at the World Watch Congress, every Swiss watch manufacturer rejected it. Based on their past experiences in the industry, the manufacturers believed this couldn't possibly be the watch of the future. After all, it was battery powered, did not have bearings or a mainspring, and had almost no gears. But Seiko, a Japanese electronics company, took one look at this invention and proceeded to change the future of the world watch market.

In nature, a gene pool that is totally lacking in variation would be unable to adapt to changing circumstances. In time, the genetically encoded wisdom would convert to foolishness, with consequences that would be fatal to the species' survival. A comparable process operates within us as individuals. We all have a rich repertoire of ideas and concepts based on past experiences that enable us to survive and prosper. But without any provision for variation, our usual ideas become stagnant and lose their advantages. In the end, we are defeated in our competition with our rivals.

When Charles Darwin returned to England after visiting the Galapagos Islands, he distributed his finch specimens to professional zoologists to be properly identified. One of the most distinguished experts was John Gould. What was most revealing was not what happened to Darwin, but what did not happen to Gould.

Darwin's notes show Gould taking him through all the birds he had named. Gould kept going back and forth about the number of different species of finches: The information was there, but he didn't quite know what to make of it. He assumed that, since God made one set of birds when he created the world, the specimens from different locations would be identical. It never occurred to him to look for differences by location. Gould thought the birds were so different that they represented distinct species.

What is remarkable about the encounter is the completely different impact it had on the two men. Gould thought the way he had been conditioned to think, like an expert taxonomist, and didn't see the textbook case of evolution that unfolded right before him. Darwin didn't even know the birds were finches. The person with the intelligence, knowledge, and expertise failed to see something new, and the person with far less knowledge and expertise came up with an idea that would shape the way we think about the world.

Thinking Strategies Of Geniuses

Genius is analogous to biological evolution in that it requires the unpredictable generation of a rich diversity of alternatives and conjectures. From this assortment, the intellect retains the best ideas for further development and communication. An important aspect of this theory is that you need some means of producing variation in your ideas and that for this variation to be truly effective it must be "blind." Blind variation implies a departure from reproductive (retained) knowledge.

A growing number of scholars are striving to characterize the way geniuses think. By studying the notebooks, correspondence, conversations, and ideas of the world's greatest thinkers, these scholars have identified specific thinking strategies and styles of thought that enable geniuses to generate a prodigious variety of novel and original ideas.

Eight Strategies:

Following are thumbnail descriptions of strategies that are common to the thinking styles of creative geniuses in science, art, and industry throughout history.

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Geniuses look at problems in many different ways. Genius often comes from finding a new perspective that no one else has taken. Leonardo da Vinci believed that, to gain knowledge about the form of a problem, you begin by learning how to restructure it in many different ways. He felt that the first way he looked at a problem was too biased toward his usual way of seeing things. He would restructure his problem by looking at it from one perspective and move to another perspective and still another. With each move, his understanding would deepen and he would begin to understand the essence of the problem.

Einstein's theory of relativity is, in essence, a description of the interaction between different perspectives. Freud's analytical methods were designed to find details that did not fit with traditional perspectives in order to find a completely new point of view.

In order to solve a problem creatively, the thinker must abandon the initial approach, which stems from past experience, and reconceptualize the problem. By not settling for one perspective, geniuses do not merely solve existing problems, such as inventing an environment-friendly fuel. They identify new ones.

Geniuses make their thought visible. The explosion of creativity in the Renaissance was intimately tied to the recording and conveying of vast knowledge in drawings, graphs, and diagrams, as in the renowned diagrams of da Vinci and Galileo. Galileo revolutionized science by making his thought graphically visible while his contemporaries used only conventional mathematical and verbal approaches.

Once geniuses obtain a certain minimal verbal facility, they seem to develop a skill in visual and spatial abilities that gives them the flexibility to display information in different ways. When Einstein had thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate his subject in as many different ways as possible, including using diagrams. He had a very visual mind; he thought in terms of visual and spatial forms, rather than thinking along purely mathematical or verbal lines of reasoning. In fact, Einstein believed that words and numbers, as they are written or spoken, did not play a significant role in his thinking process.

Geniuses produce. A distinguishing characteristic of genius is immense productivity. Thomas Edison held 1,093 patents, still the record. He guaranteed productivity by giving himself and his assistants idea quotas. His own personal quota was one minor invention every 10 days and a major invention every six months.

Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted. Mozart produced more than 600 pieces of music. Einstein is best known for his paper on relativity, but he published 248 other papers. T. S. Eliot's numerous drafts of The Waste Land constitute a jumble of good and bad passages that eventually was turned into a masterpiece.

In a study of 2,036 scientists throughout history, Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California at Davis found that the most respected scientists produced not only great works, but also more "bad" ones. Out of their massive quantity of work came quality.

Geniuses make novel combinations. In his 1989 book Scientific Genius, Simonton suggests that geniuses form more novel combinations than do the merely talented. Like the highly playful child with a bucket of building blocks, a genius is constantly combining and recombining ideas, images, and thoughts into different combinations in their conscious and subconscious minds.

Consider Einstein's equation, E=mc2. Einstein did not invent the concepts of energy, mass, or speed of light. Rather, by combining these concepts in a novel way, he was able to look at the same world as everyone else and see something different. The laws of heredity on which the modern science of genetics is based came from the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel, who combined mathematics and biology to create a new science.

Geniuses force relationships. If one particular style of thought stands out about creative genius, it is the ability to make juxtapositions between dissimilar subjects. This facility to connect the unconnected enables them to see things others do not.

Da Vinci forced a relationship between the sound of a bell and a stone hitting water. This enabled him to make the connection that sound travels in waves. In 1865, F. A. Kekule intuited the shape of the ring-like benzene molecule by dreaming of a snake biting its tail. Samuel Morse was stumped trying to figure out how to produce a telegraphic signal strong enough to transmit coast to coast. One day he saw tied horses being exchanged at a relay station and forced a connection between relay stations for horses and strong signals. The solution was to give the traveling signal periodic boosts of power.

Geniuses think in opposites. Physicist and philosopher David Bohm believed geniuses were able to think different thoughts because they could tolerate ambivalence between opposites or two incompatible subjects. Albert Rothenberg, a noted researcher on the creative process, identified this ability in a wide variety of geniuses-including Einstein, Mozart, Edison, Pasteur, Conrad, and Picasso-in his 1990 book The Emerging Goddess: The Creative Process in Art, Science, and Other Fields.

Physicist Niels Bohr believed, that if you held opposites together, then you suspend your thought and your mind moves to a new level. The suspension of thought allows an intelligence beyond thought to act and create a new form. The swirling of opposites creates the conditions for a new point of view to bubble freely from your mind. Bohr's ability to imagine light as both a particle and a wave led to his conception of the principle of complementarity.

Thomas Edison's invention of a practical system of lighting involved combining wiring in parallel circuits with high resistance filaments in his bulbs- two things that were not considered possible by conventional thinkers (in fact, were not considered at all because of an assumed incompatibility). Because Edison could tolerate the ambivalence between two incompatible things, he could see the relationship that led to his breakthrough.

Geniuses think metaphorically. Aristotle considered metaphor a sign of genius, believing that the individual who had the capacity to perceive resemblances between two separate areas of existence and link them together was a person of special gifts. If unlike things are really alike in some ways, perhaps they are so in others.

Alexander Graham Bell compared the inner workings of the ear to a stout piece of membrane moving steel-and conceived the telephone. Einstein derived and explained many of his abstract principles by drawing analogies with everyday occurrences such as rowing a boat or standing on a platform while a train passed by.

Geniuses prepare themselves for chance. Whenever we attempt to do something and fail, we end up doing something else. That is the first principle of creative accident. We may ask ourselves why we have failed to do what we intended, which is a reasonable question. But the creative accident provokes a different question: What have we done? Answering that question in a novel, unexpected way is the essential creative act. It is not luck, but creative insight of the highest order.

Alexander Fleming was not the first physician studying deadly bacteria to notice that mold formed on an exposed culture. A less gifted physician would have trashed this seemingly irrelevant event, but Fleming noted it as "interesting" and wondered if it had potential. This "interesting" observation led to penicillin.

Edison, while pondering how to make a carbon filament, was mindlessly toying with a piece of putty, turning and twisting it in his fingers, when he looked down at his hands and the answer hit him between the eyes: Twist the carbon like rope. B.F. Skinner emphasized a first principle of scientific methodologists: When you find something interesting, drop everything else and study it. Too many fail to answer opportunity's knock at the door because they have to finish some preconceived plan. Creative geniuses do not wait for the gifts of chance; instead, they actively seek the accidental discovery.


TEST YOUR GENIUS THINKING


Most people see the pattern above as alternate rows of squares and circles. It cannot be easily seen as columns of alternate circles and squares.
Once it's pointed out that it can also be viewed as columns of alternate squares and circles, we, of course, see it. This is because we nave become habituated to passively organize similar items together in our minds. Geniuses, on the other hand, subvert habituation; by actively seeking alternative ways to look at things and alternative ways to think about them.

Applying These Strategies Yourself

Creative geniuses know how to use these thinking strategies-and teach others to use them. Sociologist Harriet Zuckerman discovered that six of Enrico Fermi's students won the Nobel Prize, just as he had. Ernest Lawrence and Niels Bohr each had four winning students. J. J. Thomson and Ernest Rutherford between them trained 17 winners. These Nobel laureates were not only creative in their own right, but were also able to teach others how to think creatively. Zuckerman's subjects testified that their most influential masters taught them different thinking styles and strategies rather than what to think. So, clearly, genius strategies can be learned.

Recognizing and applying the common thinking strategies of creative geniuses could help make you more creative in your work and personal life.
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I hope you find this useful...

/brother clay  

CD Krewe Clay - Come with Me // WildAss Pianoman Clay // Gimp with Attitude Clay // Health Warriors Unite

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