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The shrink [psychotherapist Antonia Macaro] …

Any self-knowledge project is under threat from the large amount of psychology research telling us that most of our functioning is unconscious. Nothing is spared – feelings, attitudes, personality, motives. We think we are not angry or jealous when it is clear to everybody else that we are. We really believe we love someone before realising we really don’t. We take an instant dislike to a person with no awareness that it’s because they remind us of a horrible maths teacher, or we fail to realise it’s the smell of croissants that has moved us to give money to a beggar.

The case may well be overstated: having limited access to our inner workings isn’t the same as having no access at all. But even if the springs of actions are shrouded in mist, some insight is still possible. We just have to seek to supplement our internal perspective with a slightly more detached one, taking into consideration how other people see us, the role of the context we’re in and even what the research tells us about how little we know ourselves.

Making the implicit a little more explicit, throwing our world view into slightly sharper relief, can still help us to gain more control over our choices, which is, after all, what self-knowledge is all about.

The sage [philosopher Julian Baggini] …

Just as it is common to hear people say that you cannot love others unless you first learn to love yourself, Plato warned that you must know yourself before you can hope to understand less accessible aspects of reality. On this view, it is a neat linguistic accident that “metaphysics” starts with “me”.

Yet the cleverest philosophers, psychologists and artists are evidently not always blessed with pellucid self-awareness. And even if specialists in human understanding can’t see themselves truly, what hope is there for the rest of us?

More than we might think, if we can learn from the mistakes of lumbering intellectual giants whose fatal flaw is often complacency and over-confidence. Experiments have suggested that if people are primed to believe that they can make objective judgments about others, they actually become more likely to be swayed by prejudices and stereotypes. […]

The result can be a fixed and limited image of self that leaves out other elements, such as core values, cultural assumptions or unreflective impulses.

And that’s where hope lies for the rest of us. Perhaps what we most need to know ourselves is honesty and humility, which expertise tends to erode rather than strengthen. If that’s the case, then when it comes to self-knowledge, amateurs who are fully aware of their limitations might be better equipped to succeed than over-confident professionals.

Antonia Macaro and Julian Baggini’s book ‘The Shrink and The Sage’ is available in paperback.

The Act Of Creation (public library) — a seminal treatise on creativity, penned by Hungarian-British journalist and author Arthur Koestler in 1964. In this magnificent 700-page tome, Koestler itemizes the principles of creativity — “the conscious and unconscious processes underlying scientific discovery, artistic originality, and comic inspiration” — and sets out to outline a common pattern that can be trained and perfected.

Koestler argues, there is one necessary condition for this combinatorial creative fusion — which he terms “bisociation” — to take place. In this passage from the end of Chapter V, he describes that condition beautifully, articulating the backbone of creativity:

Concerning the psychology of the creative act itself, I have mentioned the following interrelated aspects of it: the displacement of attention to something not previously noted, which was irrelevant in the old and is relevant in the new context; the discovery of hidden analogies as a result of the former; the bringing into consciousness of tacit axioms and habits of thought which were implied in the code and taken for granted; the uncovering of what has always been there.

‘It is obvious,’ says Hadamard, ‘that invention or discovery, be it in mathematics or anywhere else, takes place by combining ideas… . The Latin verb cogito for ‘to think’ etymologically means ‘to shake together.’ St. Augustine had already noticed that and also observed that intelligo means ‘to select among.’

The ‘ripeness’ of a culture for a new synthesis is reflected in the recurrent phenomenon of multiple discovery, and in the emergence of similar forms of art, handicrafts, and social institutions in diverse cultures. But when the situation is ripe for a given type of discovery, it still needs the intuitive power of an exceptional mind, and sometimes a favorable chance event, to bring it from potential into actual existence. On the other hand, some discoveries represent striking tours de force by individuals who seem to be so far ahead of their time that their contemporaries are unable to understand them.

Thus at one end of the scale we have discoveries which seem to be due to more or less conscious, logical reasoning, and at the other end those due to sudden insights which emerge from the creative mind or the unconscious. The same polarity of logic and intuition will be found to prevail in the methods and techniques of artistic creation. It is summed up by two opposite pronouncements: Bernard Shaw’s ‘Ninety per cent perspiration, ten per cent inspiration’, on the one hand, Picasso’s ‘I do not seek — I find’ (je ne cherche pas, je trouve), on the other.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is, Joll writes, “stuffed full” of philosophical ideas and questions. “Why am I here? What’s my purpose in life? What do I mean by who I am?” asks the sperm whale which has been brought into existence – albeit briefly – by the Infinite Improbability Drive. For Amy Kind, the plight of Douglas Adams’s free-falling whale sparks a memorable meditation on the absurdity of existence both in the novels and in life. She agrees with Adams that the best way of dealing with the spectre of absurdity is “to find some way of ignoring it”, a pleasingly simple solution that may involve drinking a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster. Or even two. Among the other contributions to this very readable and mind-expanding collection are Jerry Goodenough on why robots in the future may turn out to be like Marvin the Paranoid Android (sorry Mr Spock: “pure reasoning without feeling” is a myth) and Barry Dainton’s disturbingly convincing essay on how the entire universe could be a computer simulation. I blame it on the white mice.

There are laws and then there are geeky laws. Read more about four geeky laws rule the world of technology and social media:

1. Amara’s Law: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run” […]

2. Brooks’ Law: “Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later” […]

3. Thackara’s Laws: “If you put smart technology into a pointless product, the result will be a stupid product” […]

4. Reed’s Law: “The Value of a Network Increases Dramatically When People Form Subgroups for Collaborations and Sharing” […]

In a similar vein, here are some more geeky laws for your consideration:

• Parkinson’s law: “Work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion.”
• Moore’s law: “The observation that over the history of computing hardware, the number of transistors on integrated circuitsdoubles approximately every two years.”
• Murphy’s law: “Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.”
• Godwin’s law: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.”
• Conway’s law: “Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.”
• Dilbert principle: “The most ineffective workers are systematically moved to the place where they can do the least damage: management.”
• Hofstadter’s law: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.”
• Linus’ law: “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”
• Peter principle: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
• Sturgeon’s law: “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”
• Wirth’s law: “Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.”

Many more here: List of eponymous laws (Wikipedia).

Here’s the list of films:

• L’avventura (1960)
• La Dolce Vita (1960)
• Blood and Black Lace aka Sei donne per l’assassino (1964)
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
• The Leopard (1963)
• Bicycle Thieves (1948)
• Divorce Italian Style (1961)
• The Conformist (1970)
• Caro diario (1993)
• 8½ (1963)

Maybe I’m biased, but arguably there are more than ten essential Italian films. Here are some of my picks to add:

• L’eclisse (1962)
• I Vitelloni (1953)
• Cinema Paradiso (1988)
• Malèna (2000)
• Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
• Rome, Open City (1945)
• Ossessione (1943)
• Umberto D. (1952)
• The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978)
• Life Is Beautiful (1997)

It seems to be the season for fascinating meditations on consciousness, exploring such questions as what happens while we sleep, how complex cognition evolved, and why the world exists. Joining them and prior explorations ofwhat it means to be human is The Ravenous Brain: How the New Science of Consciousness Explains Our Insatiable Search for Meaning (public library) by Cambridge neuroscientist Daniel Bor in which, among other things, he sheds light on how our species’ penchant for pattern-recognition is essential to consciousness and our entire experience of life.

What makes the difference, Bor argues, is a concept called chunking , which allows us to hack the limits of our working memory — a kind of cognitive compression mechanism wherein we parse information into chunks that are more memorable and easier to process than the seemingly random bits of which they’re composed. Bor explains:

In terms of grand purpose, chunking can be seen as a similar mechanism to attention: Both processes are concerned with compressing an unwieldy dataset into those small nuggets of meaning that are particularly salient. But while chunking is a marvelous complement to attention, chunking diverges from its counterpart in focusing on the compression of conscious data according to its inherent structure or the way it relates to our preexisting memories.

[C]hunking isn’t useful only in helping us excel at seemingly meaningless tasks — it is integral to what makes us human:

Although [chunking] can vastly increase the practical limits of working memory, it is not merely a faithful servant of working emory — instead it is the secret master of this online store, and the main purpose of consciousness.

[…]

Perhaps what most distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ravenous desire to find structure in the information we pick up in the world. We cannot help actively searching for patterns — any hook in the data that will aid our performance and understanding.

Bor points to a dark side of this hunger for patterns:

One problematic corollary of this passion for patterns is that we are the most advanced species in how elaborately and extensively we can get things wrong. We often jump to conclusions […]

Still, our capacity for pattern-recognition, Bor argues, is the very source of human creativity. In fact, chunking and pattern-recognition offer evidence for the combinatorial nature of creativity, affirm Steve Jobs’s famous words that “creativity is just connecting things”, Mark Twain’s contention that “all ideas are second-hand”, and Nina Paley’s clever demonstration of how everything builds on what came before.

What is true of creative skill, Bor argues, is also true of our highest intellectual contribution:

Some of our greatest insights can be gleaned from moving up another level and noticing that certain patterns relate to others, which on first blush may appear entirely unconnected — spotting patterns of patterns, say (which is what analogies essentially are).

Even the strongest among us get the blues: You can’t get out of bed, you don’t want to talk to a single other humanoid, and you just want to close the curtains and turn on the music. The songs you choose for those miseries have to be just right.

Adam Brent Houghtaling is something of a connoisseur of the melancholy moment. Perhaps to cheer himself up, he’s put that expertise to use by producing a kind of encyclopedia of the best soundtracks for lonely days and nights. It’s called This Will End in Tears: The Miserablist Guide to Music.

The book highlights the many components of a sad song — harmony, melody, tempo, lyrics and more. But Houghtaling says what’s most important is how those elements interact.

“I think it’s a number of factors, but none of those things necessarily by themselves create a sad song. There’s certainly lots of happy songs with lots of minor chords in them,” he says. “Certainly, lyrics play a big part. I think in narrative song, just like reading a novel, there’s an opportunity to plug your own experiences into the song. I think that really helps create a connection with sad music.”

Procrastinators have a reputation as loafers, laggards and lollygaggers. A bit harsh, believes University of California, Riverside philosopher John Perry, a self-described procrastinator who asserts that, unlike their reputation, most people who excel at postponing the inevitable actually lead productive lives by busying themselves with many tasks to avoid others deemed more onerous.

Perry calls it structured procrastination, a strategy of completing less-important tasks to avoid those higher on an individual’s priority list. He has written an entertaining, philosophical self-help book for procrastinators, “The Art of Procrastination, A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing,” which was published in August by Workman Publishing.

Structured procrastination can convert procrastinators into “effective human beings, respected and admired for all that they can accomplish and the good use they make of their time,” he says.

Procrastinating does not mean doing nothing, he explains. Nor is it the worst flaw a person can have.

Here are suggestions from Perry on becoming a successful structured procrastinator:

• Leave things until the last minute as a way of budgeting your time. […]

• Lots of tasks disappear if given a chance. […]

• Non-procrastinators are inevitably ignorant. […]

• Procrastination encourages productive subconscious thought. […]

• When it comes to email, procrastination is a powerful survival technique. […]

I must admit, sometimes I am a structured procrastinator (arguably right now by posting this article).