The Ecstasy of Curiosity Ecstasy is when we connect the dots. Ecstasy is revelation. Beauty is truth, truth is beauty. Our goal is to create media, to create content, to create spaces that allow us to stay curious, to stay alive, to awaken the wonder junkie in all of us, to unleash the brave, reckless gods within us all. This is my biggest desire and belief in life. I am craving to know more, find patterns, connecting the dots, discovering the meaning, finding the beauty in any little thing, and #connect all. ~ So I came across this idea the other day, I think it was Aristotle who put it out there, but it was this notion that human beings dont care about spectacle. What they care about is ecstatic understanding. Understanding, comprehension. In other words, cognitive ecstasy defined as an exhilarating neuro storm of intense intellectual pleasure. The book The Ravenous Brain talks about this idea, that consciousness is obsessed with pattern. Pattern is structure, structure amidst the chaos, a signal in the noise. And when we find patterns, when we connect the dots, we experience this cognitive ecstasy, this exhilarating neuro storm. And we get children, theyre young, theyre learning all the time, theyre creating new synaptic connections. They experience this cognitive ecstasy, this curiosity. This insatiable drive to understand is on fire, is fervor, is feral in little kids. Imagine the first time you look at a microscope. You see that cosmos-- revealed for the first time-- of the microscopic. When you look through a telescope, and you all of a sudden see the cosmos of the macroscopic. Perhaps the best line was Ross Andersons description of the ontological awakening provided by the Hubble Space telescopes images of the deep field. He said, Through the sheer aesthetic force of its discoveries, the Hubble distilled the complex abstractions of astrophysics into singular expressions of color and light, vindicating Keats famous couplet, Beauty is truth, truth beauty. The sad part, as Sir Kenneth Robinson says, is that we lose this as we grow up. Our #educational institutions are failing us, theyre not providing the context for this curiosity to explode, to continue to emerge indefinitely. Instead we slowly die. And I think our goal is to create media, to create content, to create spaces that allow us to stay curious, to stay alive, to awaken the wonder junkie in all of us, to unleash the brave, reckless gods within us all. That is my goal. That is why we make Shots of Awe, that is why I love the TED conference, that is why were here, that is what we live for. Ahhhhh. Moves me every day. bit.ly/1swhr6k
Posted on: Thu, 18 Sep 2014 19:18:12 +0000
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