The WOW of science 1: Tim Wilson on the Pleasures of Uncertainty

Hi all
I haven't been around for a while, having been involved in a lot "construction work" on SF, trying to renovate my version of it. (or re-innovate, perhaps is a better word, since I think that SF should really not be seen as an innovate approach, but as a re-innovate approach - constantly growing, adapting and re-invent itself. Just as a human being does, or like like in general does)

During this time I've collected an enormous amount of cool resources on warm, hot, and scorching neurosciece from the net. Videos, papers, lectures, etc. Google can be seen as the greatest university ever, and it's all in your lap.

I've decided to post link to a video, or a site of particular interest to SF, every couple of weeks or so, in the brain group. And the first is a audio-with-live-powerpoint lecture by Tim Wilson. Wilson is a social psychologist interested in happiness and the uncounscious (not the Freudian kind, more the Ericksonian, adaptive kind).

This lecture is about stunningly subtle studies on how the feeling uncertainty changes both how we experience things. Uncertainty in a emotionally positive situation enhances (It is more pleasant to get a wrapped gift than an unwrapped one). Uncertainty in emotionally negative situation increases the negative feeeling, or stress. (Is you are afraid of spiders, it is better to that the spider is in its closed glass-box, rather than being out of the box, hiding out of site somewhere in the room)

It all seems rather trivial until you start to think about the relevance of emotion to the way the brain works (and the way we socially work). Affective science (started by Darwing, forgotten, and revived by Paul Ekman and others) points out that emotions are a "system-wide" tuning of the whole organism to be "in concert" with the environment. Positive emotions (roughly) sets up the brain, the nervous systems, and the rest of the body for approaching, exploration, proactivity, and savouring. Negative emotions sets us up for avoidance, fight/flight, spitting out, protection. Barbara Fredrickson has done some great studies on this.

So, in SF, the "wow", and the intense curiousity about what works, or what is positive, makes sense. We have a sense of suprise that injects uncertainty: look at how we can relish in the "same" question, spinning this sense of positive uncertainty: "how did you do that?" HOW did you do that?. how did you DO that? So.....HOOOW, did you dothat"

It also makes sense to normalize, acknowledge and move on, and not to increase uncertainty of the negative. Ohh, nooo, I've failed, what did I do wrong: ""I'm sorry to hear that, so what will you do differently the next time"

On the other hand: could problem-focus sometimes be useful, as to decrease the uncertainty about problems, failures, risks?

And, could we in SF sometimes makes the positive to certain, by overfocusing? To many details to turn down the attention of the client, perhaps? I think it could perhaps be a good idea to use more of the SFT interventions like coin-tossing, prediction tasks, etc to increase the positive uncertainty and thus help our clients tune to exploration and the tingling exciting curiousity of living a life.

Check the lecture here http://lecb.physics.lsa.umich.edu/wl/carma/2008/20081030-ISR-K-N/20...

(If it doesn't work, try updating realplayer and/or flash (ask you local friendly tech how to do it)

Michael
Confusion connaisseur and Science aficiando (or fanboy if you prefer)