Dana Rock - Awe

In this episode we speak to Dana Rock, director of experience design at Pickle Jar Communications about awe; what experiences induce it and what it means for us going forward. We get into the notion of building a web that highlights sharing experiences over sharing opinions, how WEIRD our notions of self are, and the very nature of consciousness itself.

Recommended content from this episode:

Books
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect by Matthew D. Lieberman
Why Buddhism Is True by Robert Wright
The User Illusion by Tor Nørretranders
Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed
The WEIRDist People in the World by Joseph Henrich
Speaking and Being by Kübra Gümüsay

Our intro and outro music is "Humbug" by Crowander

Transcript

(Transcript courtesy Louise Boydon)

David Dylan Thomas

Welcome, everybody, to ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’. I'm your host, David Dylan Thomas, and I am in Edinburgh, Scotland and I am here with a special guest, Dana Rock. Dana, I'm going to let you tell the good folks here what it is you get up to.

Dana Rock

Hi Dave! I'm Dana and I'm currently the Director of Experience Design at Pickle Jar Communications, we are in Edinburgh at the moment because we were about to have ContentEd, which is a big content conference that takes place in the UK. I get up to a lot of experience designing, as well as content designing, particularly for the education sector. 

I suppose in my spare time I'm a millennial cliché. I like to make a lot of sourdough bread and then smear some avocado over it and then otherwise my great passion in life is actually white-water kayaking. Absolutely love white-water kayaking. So that's a great experience for me.

David Dylan Thomas

I have to ask about the sourdough. Did this begin before or after covid lockdown?

Dana Rock

It obviously started in lockdown. My brother gave me some starter and I just got completely addicted. I actually had a bad head injury during lockdown. It was really rubbish because we had gone into the first lockdown in the UK, so, you know, you weren't allowed to meet other people and I actually lived alone at the time. I lived alone in Nottingham, and I'd only moved to Nottingham the year before lockdown and I didn't really know anyone. So, it was a pretty isolating experience. I mean, I know it was isolating for a lot of people, but living alone in a city that you're pretty new to was pretty rubbish.

And then just as we were coming out of the first lockdown in the UK and we were allowed to see people again, I had a bad accident, which was a kayaking accident. Doesn't often happen, but I smacked my head on some concrete. I was very lucky to not pass out because otherwise, I wouldn't be on your podcast. So, I had really, really bad concussion. I went to hospital and their advice was don't stay home alone and don't look at a screen, which given the circumstances of a global pandemic, was pretty difficult.

I did visit my brother at that time and he gave me some sourdough starter. And because I couldn't look at screens, there were a lot of restrictions still in place in the UK, then making bread became kind of an obsession because it was something that I could do that still was following the Covid guidelines, but also was okay for my rather poorly brain as well.

David Dylan Thomas

That’s…well, I won't say that's fantastic because that's not fantastic, but I will say it is great that you're able to find that. I can't imagine. I mean, this is my techno-self. I can't imagine getting doctor's orders saying you can't look at screens. I'm like, what? How am I gonna live?

So Dana, let me ask you the million pound question. What have you been thinking about lately?

Dana Rock

So, I think this is a bit obvious because I am an experienced designer, but I have been thinking about how we experience the world. And actually, one thing that I've been thinking about is earlier this year I was lucky to have an amazing trip, a trip of a lifetime you could say, which was I kayaked down the Grand Canyon. I spent two weeks white-water kayaking, there were rafts who were carrying all the stuff. So, it was me and my little kayak with a group of people paddling down the Grand Canyon. Now, I don’t know if you've been to the Grand Canyon, but it is truly awe-inspiring.

I think we overuse the word awesome to describe everything from cheesecake to, you know, whatever. But it was truly awe-inspiring.

My great memory of this trip, we are on the river, we're floating down there were some big rapids, but mostly it's just kind of fast flowing water for a lot of it. So, there's me floating down in my kayak and you've got these amazing walls of rock, which you’ve probably all seen images on the internet. These walls of rock, which are almost like steps that go further and further around. I don’t know if you know what parallax is, but parallax is when like one thing is moving against another thing. The rock in the foreground is moving at one speed and then the rock behind it is moving at a different speed, the rock behind it is moving another speed. Of course, it’s me that's moving, it's me that's floating in my kayak. But it was just this amazing sense of awe of like looking at the majesty of the world and being like, wow, this is amazing!

After a couple of years of staying home alone, making sourdough, which was nice, but not awe inspiring, then it's really woken me up to the awe that exists in the world and that feeling that we experience when we experience awe.

David Dylan Thomas

That’s interesting because I’ve been in Edinburgh for a couple days now and a little bit in a Glasgow as well, and one of the things you see here a lot is churches and this very old medieval church architecture – there’s kind of one behind us now. I know that a lot of church architecture, the whole point was to inspire awe and to inspire awe of God, but even if you don't believe in God, you can look at some of these buildings and have that feeling of I am in the presence of something bigger than me, more complex than me. But I had not been used to experiencing that during lockdown either. 

One of the nice things about this year is I've been able to travel a lot more. I went to Berlin for the first time. I'm here in Edinburgh for the first time. That sense of just being out of the ordinary, seeing things that other people take for granted maybe, but I have not experienced or I'm not used to experiencing. That alone is jarring, but in a good way.  So what I sacrifice in comfort is more than making up for in terms of novelty, but beyond novelty. Kind of what you're describing here. 

Tell me what about that trip? Has it got you thinking about how we experience the world?

Dana Rock

Yeah, it has and actually while I was there, I read a really fantastic book called How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. It’s a fantastic book, I would highly recommend. Actually, it connects a little bit with what you were saying there about churches and about how we inspire awe because this feeling of awe creates a kind of a small self actually. And there's been some research, a really kind of interesting research of people taking selfies. People who take selfies, the longer that they are immersed in awe-inspiring nature, the smaller that they get in the selfie – so if you imagine a kind of egocentric self, you are the front of the frame. You are the kind of the big grin in the middle of the image and the background is just a background. But as people become immersed and they experience this sense of awe, they experience this sense of smallness. 

I think that that's what's happening when floating there on the Grand Canyon or when somebody is standing in a church. That sense of like, God, for many people that is the sense of how small and insignificant they are because they're part of God's great universe type of thing. I think it's really interesting because that also plays out in the size of face that we have in selfies.

David Dylan Thomas

That fascinates me. I'm going to jump right into the bicameral mind. There's a concept – I don’t remember exactly who came up with it, but it's this concept that at a certain point in time, go way, way, way back…do you hear your thoughts?

Dana Rock

Yes I do, I do hear my thoughts.

David Dylan Thomas

There was an interesting meme going around of just people asking about that, because not everyone does, not everyone has that experience of thinking. Some people have it more visual, whatever, but a lot of people like hear their thoughts.

The idea goes that if you go far enough back when people are hearing their thoughts, what they experience is that that's actually God or a God or one of the gods, giving them instructions on what to do. There is no idea of ‘the self’.  The idea of ‘the self’ is a relatively recent phenomenon or the idea of consciousness, like the conscious self.

Their interpretation of this thing that is not them becomes God or a God or some something outside of themselves, but that they're hearing inside of themselves. Long story short, you get to a point in history where people are starting to become more conscious and basically make decisions, like the notion of free will. Again, relatively recent. 

What's interesting to me about that in terms of the selfies is – I hadn't made this connection before – but part of that with the church, the awe, the God, it's recapturing a bit of bicameral minds. There is no me, in the face of all this, there might as well not be. I am so small as to be relevant or not the main character here. That this is reminding me or moving me towards the notion of being a cog, not the wheel.

Dana Rock

Yeah, that's really interesting and actually it reminds me of something, during lockdown when, again, head injury, sourdough, I couldn't look at screens, but I started reading a lot of books and because I was so desperately lonely, I got absolutely fascinated by the idea of human connection. And in the absence of it, I read as many books as possible about it. One of the amazing books that I read, which is one of the best books I've ever read, actually, was a book called Social by Matthew Leiberman, who I believe is a neuroscientist.

It's a book about the science of how we connect and it talks about this idea of how the self is a kind of a Trojan horse, a Trojan horse that we connect with, that smuggles through the walls of our minds to allow us to connect with other people. So, you might be familiar with the default neural network?

In your kind of relaxed thinking state, when your mind is wandering off, you're not focused on a particular past, you're just kind of maybe thinking, reminiscing on something that happened, you're thinking about what you're going to eat for lunch. Your mind is wandering off. That's the kind of default state. If you stick people in MRI scanner, for example, to look at brain activity, then you would expect that if somebody is highly focused, trying to solve complex maths puzzles, then that would be the active state and the kind of your brain wandering off is the unactive state. But actually, this default mode is highly, highly active.

It's in this state where the self exists. It's where we have those voices in our heads where we have narration. Actually, I suppose for anybody who's ever experienced something like anxiety or depression where it's the negative voice in your head that is kind of gnawing away at you and making you feel so negative, you can get relief from your depression by, let's say, doing complex maths puzzles because you are shifting the mode that your mind is in.

It's the interesting thing about where the self then comes in, because the self kind of exists in this default mode of mind wandering and it's there that we begin to think about other people.

And this book, which I highly recommend reading because I can't do justice to all of the complexity that it explains, but broadly is that when we are in these states that we are thinking about ourselves, we are actually thinking of others. The activity that's going on in our mind where we think about others is kind of the same as what we are thinking about in ourselves.

There's another book – I have to say I do read a lot – so there's probably going to be a lot of book recommendations, but everyone wants a good book recommendation! Here's another one, which is called Why Buddhism is True. It's a book written by an evolutionary psychologist and it kind of poses the idea that the self has evolved to connect us with other people. We know that we are a social animal. Humans are social animals, and this whole idea of the self and the construction of the self creates a kind of coherence that allows us to connect with other people.

David Dylan Thomas

So much to dig into there, but one of the things I kind of want to grapple with a bit, so I'll make a book recommendation, which I think I've talked to you about before, is The User Illusion by Tor Nørretranders. It’s where some of this bicameral mind stuff comes in. 

The closest I can get to a TLDR for the relevant part here is that we experience the world not in real time. I'm not like looking at you and seeing you. What's actually happening is my sensors, my body is covered in sensors, visual cells, the cells that allow me to hear, the cells that allow me to touch and feel, whatever. It's taking in all the data of everything in this room, parsing what's important, and then presenting what is essentially a simulation to my “conscious self.” So what I experience in consciousness is basically a simulation, a dumbed down, just what you need to know to survive the next five minutes version of the “real world”.

What Tor talks about is research that kind of indicates that the body as it were – and I think if I'm getting the terms correct, he's referring to that as like it's either the ‘me’ or the ‘I. I think it's the ‘I is like the actual sensory apparatus, the actual body experiencing these things, the me, the self that I think is sort of the viewer.

So, the term ‘user illusion’ comes from word processing software where it's like, I press the letter T, I see a T on the screen. What's actually happening is way more complex than that, but I don’t care. I have the illusion that it is simple as me pressing a T and seeing a T. Same thing with consciousness. There's a whole lot of stuff happening, between me looking at you and having this image in my head of seeing you. I don't care about all that. That's going to slow me down. I have this illusion. But even though there is the illusion, there's still this sense of there's more. This creeping sense. And throughout human history, we've interpreted that as it's God, it's nature. We name the I different things.

All of which to say like the self, as I've come to understand it, seems like this much more insular thing, so it's really interesting to me to hear you say that well, research indicates that actually the self is a means of doing this thing that feels totally opposite. To say no, that exists to connect rather than to kind of like isolate and be safe.

Dana Rock

Yeah, so much to unpack! It is this thing where the self creates a kind of coherence that perhaps we don't have. So, you talked about the fact that in the world there's all this kind of raw sensory data that is input and we ignore most of it and try and focus on those salient points. We could probably talk a bit about how experience over time informs us what we should focus our conscious attentions on and things like the lighting or what's going on in the background, we don't pay attention to, we are focused here on the conversation that we are having. 

What you said there about the self I think is really interesting because again, there's some bits of research which show how we create that coherence. So, this is mentioned in this book, the Why Buddhism is True book. Some studies that were done on somebody who had essentially a separation between different parts of their brain. What was separated was between the part of their brain that would operate particular actions and those that controlled essentially kind of language and expressing the meanings of things. Obviously, our brains are connected to our eyes. So, the researchers kind of trigger for this person to see with one eye and then go over towards the fridge because they'd seen something in one eye and then they would create with the other part of the brain that wasn't connected, a meaning for why they were going to

So actually what they're doing is they're creating an action and then later they're explaining it with a part of the brain that isn't even talking to that, so they can't possibly have communicated with each other, which I find absolutely fascinating.

There's another really, really wonderful piece of research, which I love to quote. And actually, as somebody who works with organizations to understand audiences, to understand the users that they're designing for, I think it's really, really interesting and this is research that shows how we lack introspection into what drives our decision making.

An example here was where they had a study looking at suncream, so people's reactions to some adverts on suncream. So there were like options, A, B, or C. This was done in the US I believe, either California, I think it was California, somewhere very sunny, where wearing sunscreen is a very good idea.

So participants were shown one of these three different adverts for suncream, and then asked which they thought was the most effective and how likely they were to change their behavior based on watching the advert. People would give a response. They would say, ‘oh, I think advert B is the best.’

Interestingly what people said in terms of, ‘yes, that was a good advert and I'm going to change my attitude towards wearing suncream’ didn't correlate with what they later did. But if you shove them into a brain scanning machine, then their neural activity and how engaged they were at the point of looking at that advert did correlate with their later activity.

So, they didn't have introspection into what drove their own decision making. They thought advert B was the best. The brain scan showed that it was advert C and it was actually advert C that led to the greatest change. Interesting, huh?

David Dylan Thomas

Oh yeah. My wife is a pediatric neuropsychologist, so I hear about a lot of these kinds of experiments, especially ones where there's been like what they call a hemispherectomy, so you're separating parts of the brain. Things that should be able to talk to each other don’t. Often what you find are situations where someone will make a decision that should have been motivated by something they saw, but they could not have seen it. Or the part of their mind that's retrieving the ‘why’ didn't actually have access. So they saw the thing, but they didn't know they saw the thing and then they made a decision based on the thing. 

Similarly, their mind is reaching for the most available reason for why they did the thing – even though that's not why they did the thing. To the point where I start to wonder, does it matter? 

Does it matter from a, I need to move around in the world and do things standpoint, versus a, I need to justify my actions to someone. That's when, because if no one ever asked you why you did anything, would you care? Would you a have a reason to ask yourself why you did the thing? Because that's a fairly understood phenomenon in psychology and cognitive psychology is that we're terrible, utterly terrible, at understanding why we do things, which is so frustrating for someone like me who's super intellectual and always asking why, and it's like, you can know why, just not about yourself.

Dana Rock

That's a great question. Does it matter? Does it matter that we are telling stories that aren't necessarily the reality of why this is something that drove our decision making? I think that's a really good question, and I think there's a couple of ways to look at that.

One for me is about the fact that for me personally, understanding that the kind of story that I tell about the world is not the complex truth of all the kind of variables. It allows me to kind of take myself a little bit less seriously for one thing. I don't know, you asked me a question like, oh, why are you interested in experience design? The honest answer is I don’t know. I can say, oh, because I paddled down the Grand Canyon and I had an amazing experience, it made me curious, but those are just stories. The stories that I tell about myself, why I got interested in the science of human connection because I was learning during the pandemic.

It's a coherent story and we know from Daniel Kahneman that we are more likely to be confident in something that has a coherent narrative rather than worry about the comprehensiveness of the data. So I've just told you a story that makes sense in your mind and so you're believing it, even though there's a whole load of variables that we don't possibly know, that even, I don't know, I don't have introspection into. 

But the question of why does it matter, I suppose, is when we perhaps get the story wrong. If we think about perhaps we go back to mental illness, but even just things like self-doubt, like, I can't do this, I'm not good enough. Those are stories that we're telling ourselves and they are perhaps stopping us remember doing certain things. That's where I think it can be helpful to perhaps not take ourselves so seriously and not listen too much to the voice in our own head.

David Dylan Thomas

It’s like self-doubt about your self-doubt. It's sort of saying, okay, I'm hearing this story, it's a coherent story, I suck at this, but should I believe that story? Should I trust that story? I think I kind of want to bring it back to social connection because the other thing I think about in terms of if I were a philosopher, I would call it epistemic responsibility, right? Why do you believe what you believe is important. I think about like anti-vaxxers. That is a question of epistemic responsibility because you believing that there's some reason for you not to get vaccinated can harm other people. That's when it starts to become important.

Even then, it is not why you believe it that is necessarily important. Why you believe that isn't what's causing harm. It's the action you take as a result of what we don't even know. That's the thing. You are taking an action that is harmful.

I am assuming that you are taking that action of not getting vaccinated or not having your children vaccinated because of some story you’re telling yourself about vaccination. But the real reason? We don't know. It might take others. That's why I'm going to kind of relate to this notion of like the self and the social because I feel like that is a useful pattern. To sort of say, okay, I may not have a story that is accurate to my own motivations, but I do have one that's coherent, but maybe you do? You know what I mean? Maybe we need each other to understand each other?

Dana Rock

Maybe we need each other to understand each other? Yeah, I think we do, and I think we also need to do more to share the experiences that inform our opinions.

So you talked there, gave the example of an anti-vaxxer. There might be some people who feel very angrily against anti-vaxxers and people who feel very passionately anti-vax. There are two sides of that argument, we know how increasingly polarized conversations are having, whether they're on social media or in the media or whatever it is, and I find opinions less interesting than experience. I note that that is an opinion, okay! You've got an opinion of pro or anti-vaccination. Then what you've just described there is that there is some kind of experience, which we may or may not be consciously aware of, that informs that opinion.

I think the, the worry when you're writing short tweets or something about your position is that you state the opinion, but we don't understand the experience behind that. It's probably the experience that's going to allow us to connect with other people and to break down that polarization and to have a more meaningful dialogue.

Let’s not have a battle of ideas, let's have a sharing of experiences. 

David Dylan Thomas

As you mentioned that, like I too am a recovering content designer. I immediately started thinking about what would be the content model for that kind of conversation? Because the content model for a tweet is the tweet, that's it, we're done. Maybe I have the option for an image or all text or whatever, but the actual content model is 240 characters or whatever, we're done. There's your model. What if it were, okay, here’s the tweet and there’s another field for why you think that.  

What’s interesting to me actually now that I think about it is language is its own content model. I think about evidentiality and languages like Turkish where different verb tenses will indicate how you know what you know.

So, if I say ‘Bob went to the store’, there is one verb tense for, ‘I personally saw Bob go to the store.’ There's another verb tense for ‘someone told me that Bob went to the store’ and so on. But I can't tell you that Bob went to the store without also telling you how I know. So the idea that the language itself could force you to reckon with why you believe – even if you don't really know why you believe what you believe, but to acknowledge that there is a reason, there's a story you're telling yourself. There's an experience behind the opinion you're giving. I like the idea of being forced to confront that.

Dana Rock

I love that. I think you've just created the content, which is that we should just turn Twitter, so it's only available in Turkish and we all need to become well acquainted with Turkish grammar in order to more accurately portray our experiences of the world or indeed a little box that pops up after your tweet of opinions saying, ‘we noticed this is an opinion. Do you want to share the experience that informs this opinion?’ I love that idea! Absolutely love that idea. 

For me, I suppose I'd think about it in terms of the space that we have. I mean the limitation on characters means that you are kind of forced to just kind of create a bit of a sound bite so you don't have time to have that story.

I would say that the space we want to create is the space where we’ve got time to sit down together and have a dialogue. To share peoples experiences and to understand other peoples perspectives. Give time, give space to understanding. 

A great story that I think illustrates this – it comes from a book – Rebel Ideas by Matthew Syed, I believe. It’s the story of somebody, his name was Derek Black and he was essentially a white supremacist who lived in the US. His parents were not just white supremacists but the organizers of it. They were organizing the white supremacists annual conference or something. 

Derek grew up in this way and his parents didn't stop him from interacting with opposing ideas, but he was kind of firmly of the view right of white supremacy. Then he goes off to college and he goes to a small college and has to interact with lots of people. He knows enough to know that his views aren't going to be kind of widely appreciated by the other students. So he kind of keeps himself, he keeps his views private. 

But then what happens is he goes off for a year abroad as part of his studies. He goes to Germany and in the time that he's away, people find out about his views and the fact that he is the son of these white supremacists and many of the students on his campus ostracize him and don't want to engage. But there's this one student, believe his name is Matthew, and he's a Jewish student who met Derek.

One thing that Matthew did is he would always have lunchtimes, a lunch where he invites fellow students around to just kind of have conversations around the table. In the time when everybody else was ostracizing Derek, this student, this Jewish student who let's face it, is not going to be in the fave books of most white supremacists, continues to Derek.

Some other students say, well, I'm not going to go to dinner if he's there, which is a perfectly acceptable reaction. You don't want to put yourself in the firing line of hate. What Matthew did is what we consider fairly exceptional. What he created is a space where eventually students did start to come having dinner, and they sat down together and they talked about the things that they had in common. They talked about their experiences and they went beyond the opinion and the headline to understand what's going on behind this and that. The end of the story is that Derek Black is now an anti-racist and his Twitter handle is something like, ‘a surprising anti-racist’, because he was born one way, but through connection, through dialogue with somebody who, let's face it, really kind of put themselves out there, it has created that dialogue that's created a change of mind.

I worry that we often are trying to change people's opinions because we're stuck in our own. We want to just kind of impose that on the other ways. But I also think it's quite remarkable to think about what happens when people do change their minds, and when somebody who has grown up with such strong beliefs is able to change that and then fight against those.

David Dylan Thomas

First I want to acknowledge that it was a white supremacist named Derek Black – I love that so much. But, I mean, it’s funny, as you were telling the story, I'm sort of like I want the end of the story to be that became an anti-racist, but I have no right to expect that because that's missing the point.

Social connection as a conversion technique is kind of the thing that we consider gross. That's what we hate about social media. You didn't invite me to Facebook because you want me to connect with my friends. You invited me to Facebook because you want to sell me shit. That’s why you have me on Twitter, that's why you're creating these spaces to connect. 

The irony is like, I agree. I love the idea of creating…social connection is always good as a bit strong, but is its own reward, there is virtue in it. At the same time, I think of that, I also think of the mission statement of Facebook or any of these platforms, which ostensibly is to create this connected world. Yet, we get what we get a world that is actually more hateful. 

Basically, I start to think, and this is something I've been working on for a while, the reason those platforms are not creating social connection or are having social connection result in hate or harm is because they were never truly intended.  It is not designed for connection. It is designed to sell, and it makes me wonder, okay, if you really were designing them to connect, how would they be different?

Dana Rock

Yeah, I think that's a really interesting thing. I feel like we are redesigning Twitter, Facebook, other social media channels. We’ve got it in Turkish now. We’ve got the book saying what informs your opinion and I think we're also looking for the ways in which we we're redesigning for connection because this is very kind of superficial. I'm going to give out my opinion, but I'm not there to understand. I feel like there's probably more of seeking to understand. I like to think of it as the slow cooking of understanding rather than just a kind of fast food of opinion.

Having those dialogues, and I don't think it necessarily has to be over dinner face-to-face, but I think there probably is something about shared experience and how we can create that even across a distance.

For example, the pandemic was a shared experience for many people. It separated people a lot in terms of who had access to green space, who didn't, who was a key worker, who was working from home, those kinds of things. So, it separated it, but also, I think built some connection.

In the UK there was a clap for the NHS, which is our National Health Service. So a particular moment of the week where everybody would come outside and clap and there's something I think quite powerful about the fact that people across a country are doing something, the same thing at the same time.

I mean, there's a lot to be said about how about we just fund the National Health Service better on a side note, but it creates a common connection, and I think that even across distances, how do we create connection? One of my favorite memories of the pandemic was, as I mentioned, I live alone, or I lived alone at the time. I live about 200 miles away from my parents and over the Easter Bank Holiday, which we have in the UK Easter vacation, usually I would go camping, but obviously I couldn't go away camping during the pandemic. 

Now I was lucky enough to have a flat that had like a really small square of grass outside that was just big enough to pitch a tent. So, what I did is I pitched my tent in my small back garden and I arranged with my Mom who was going to actually camp in her back garden. 

We both had fireballs. I bought a new fireball. It was just ahead of the curve to before they sold out during the pandemic. So, I bought a fireball and we cooked the same meal at the same time over our fireballs 200 miles away and we were both ready to go and camp in our tents. It was April. It was pretty chilly outside, but we had the fire to keep us warm. The sun had gone down, the night stars were coming out and then my dad who was on the call with my mom, because we sat there chatting on the phone, as we ate dinner and my dad said, hey, can you see the International Space Station?  I looked up and at like 2:00pm from the first star that had come out in the night sky, I could see the blinking light of the International Space Station. And even though we were 200 miles away, I'd never felt so close to my parents.

David Dylan Thomas

That is amazing and yeah, I agree, there is something magical about sharing an experience. Fireball, is that like a fire pit? For my American listeners who were guessing what that was. There is something incredible about that. And by the way, if you're complaining about like, not funding the NHS, I can only imagine how much catching up we have to do in the States. We did the same thing in the States. We're like, ‘yay essential workers, blah, blah, blah. Pay you? What? No, I clapped. Isn't that enough?’

I’ll kind of bring this back to awe because one of the things I'm thinking a lot about now, so there's a whole other element to this whole cell thing that I haven't even broached yet, which is the idea of the mirror. So the mirror gets invented and at first I thought this was a myth, but I keep finding multiple sources that are like, no, seriously, the mirror fucked us up. 

At a certain point in history, if you want to see yourself, see what you look like, you have to basically look into like a still body of water or polished metal or that happens to be just right. But to reliably wake up every morning and look in the mirror and see what you two like, to wake up every morning and know what you look like and know what you look like to others, all of a sudden you also get an uptake when that happens. It's like in the 1500’s, I think, no, 15th century. When that happens, you also see an uptake in novels that are from first perspective, self-portraits, and apparently standing armies. 

This idea of not only do I know what I look like now, I know what I look like to other people, introduces all this stuff about the self and the individual that again, it's interesting to me that that is somehow has at its root, neurologically some kind of connection to others. But operationally we end up finding ways to distance ourselves. 

Again, in this book, User Illusion, Tor Nørretranders is writing this in 2000 and he's already way ahead of the curve. He's basically like, oh yeah, the internet is one big mirror. It only became more so because if I go to the internet today, I cannot get away from myself. It's hard for me to find any website that doesn't have a login option, a personalization option. So that the version that I see is not the version that you see. 

This is one of the amazing things that's different about reading a physical book. The physical book does not personalize itself. I mean, you can dog ear it but it is its own thing. The copy that you read is the copy that I read and all of the same stuff.

I can see you're already like itching to jump in here, so I'm going to let you, but that is the beginning of a really interesting thread for me.

Dana Rock

I did not know that about the mirror and I am fascinated, and I'm going to go away and read about it because I think that's really, really interesting. The idea that seeing our own reflection and thinking about cameras, thinking about the fact you can now see the back of your head. You never previously would've been able to see your own bum, that would've been a pretty difficult, even with a still lake going on. I think that's really interesting and how that creates a greater ego, which is the antithesis of the awe that we experienced in the Grand Canyon and experienced in the church, that small self. Even looking at yourself in the reflection of the water, you're still only a small part of the environment and the setting that you are in at that moment. 

I think that's really interesting how that creates a greater ego and a more individualistic mindset. One thing that I'm interested in thinking about is how that is actually culturally specific. This is probably going to be my final book recommendation, but this is, this is a good one! It’s written by an anthropologist called Joseph Henrich – I hope I've pronounced that right. It's called WEIRD and how the West is psychologically peculiar. Are you familiar with this?

So WEIRD stands for Western Educated Industrialized Riched Democratic. Most of the psychology research that's happened globally has happened on American undergraduates, or certainly it's happened on Western subjects who, if you plot it on a graph, have a particularly weird psychology because they are highly individualistic. 

So I think, I mean, first of all, read this book because it talks about how the church actually was fundamental and how the medieval church in Europe, by dismantling kinship structures and familial ties actually created the path that allowed us to have a much more individualistic mindset.

In other cultures, which are in contrast and most of human history and most cultures over time have had much more relational selves. So, one way in which we can think about this is how you might describe yourself. Like an answer to the question ‘I am’. So, anyone listening to this podcast, if you say, ‘tell me, complete the sentence I am…’

Now, you might say something like, ‘I'm American, I'm a content designer. I like cats, I like sewing. I like long distance running.’ All of those things, if you answered it in any of those ways, you are typical of an individualistic self who was talking about yourself in terms of your personal attributes.

Now talking about that from a kind of global, historical, cultural perspective, you are weird because most of human history would've talked about things in a relational context in terms of your relation to other people. And here we are back where we started when we were talking about the connection that the self is the bit, that's the Trojan Horse that's come into us to enable us to connect with ourselves.

Western people, we’re really weird because we take ourselves seriously and we think of ourselves as individuals, but most of human history has had a much more relation of self where you think of yourself as a son, a parent, a relation, you have a status within the community. You have a role to play.

David Dylan Thomas

It's interesting what you say about even the prompt question of, ‘I am…’ There's something peculiar about English. So if I were to say, ‘what's your name?’; My answer would be, ‘oh, my name is David’ or, ‘I'm David.’  The same phrase, ‘I'm David’ in French is ‘Je m’appelle David’, which technically is ‘I am called David’, which is by its nature, a relational way of answering that question.

I don't really have my identity, an ontological fixed point. I am David. No, I am called David, but I am not David. There's something almost Buddhist about it. My identity is not bound to my name. The name is simply what others call me and without the other person my name in a weird way, I don't exist.

Dana Rock

I love that and it actually relates to what you said about Turkish grammar. I've got another book recommendation. This one’s called Speaking and Being by Kübra Gümüşay. This is a book that's all about how language constructs our perception. You’ve just given a great example, how they call me, ‘Je m’appelle’ and the way that language constructs our perception of the world.

So I feel like, again, when we're thinking about how we would redesign platforms to create a lesser self, let's not ask people like your name and your personalized login, let's say, ‘what do people call you? What do other people think your job is like?’ Because if I ask members of my family what I do, they're not coming up with Director of Experience Design. They don't know what that means. They don't know what I do. They're like, oh, I think they sort of tap into a laptop and my partner describes what I do as stating the obvious confidently. So, that's my new job title because that's how I'm described relationally.

David Dylan Thomas

I would love to do that with my job because I'm a speaker and I talk about inclusive design and all sounds very fancy. Then my son, who's 13, who just cannot believe that I get paid as much as I do to go and talk to people, he did in impersonation of me that was basically…this is me giving a talk. “Racism is bad, give me thousands of dollars!” And I'm like, that’s kind of accurate, actually. That should be my Twitter handle, racism is bad. Give me thousands of dollars. 

But I do love that. The reason I want to bring it back to awe because it is very cool and yet doesn't really surprise me that as we get closer to nature, the self gets smaller, because that, to me, one of the things I've learned, because another thing I'm super interested in now is indigenous ways of thinking, indigenous design. To use the term broadly, indigeneity covers pretty much every opinion you can think of. The ones that we kind of highlight are these ones that are sort of more about assuming the self is already good, as opposed to these sorts of more puritan, oh, you're born evil and you've got to spend your whole life getting good. 

There are certain indigenous properties and philosophies that are like, no, you are already what the West we call self-actualized. You're fine. That affects so many different things. That as a concept of something, this is interesting because this changes everything. It changes web design; it changes all society. But the little piece of that, the next episode, the coming soon part that I hadn't totally got my head around is like how important a connection is. A connection to the land is as a core part of that understanding. That is also core to indigenous design practices. Understanding the Land. 

Sadie Redwing talks about starting design projects by thinking about what is native to this, what flowers grow in this part and not on any other part, what materials are available here that's not available anywhere else. Something no designer ever asks when they're about to build a website. But no, these are actually critical questions and how does that inform design?

So, to me, when you're talking about being in the Grand Canyon and having this sense of awe, I feel like one of the things we lose when we talk about Twitter, when we design for the web, we design in a way that doesn't care where we are, doesn't care about nature. We try to make these things, the web, tries to make time and space irrelevant, which has all these interesting practical applications, but is having, I think, these outsized underestimated psychological effects. Again, every website reminds me of myself. None of them remind me of how small I am. None of them remind me that I am connected to the land. The world we've built is a world that has made me completely independent of what is the weather like outside? Do I live in an arid climate or not? All of that is meant to be made irrelevant.

Whereas to your point about how we lived for thousands of years, we lived in a way where we were very dependent on whether or not it was raining today, whether it was raining this season. All of the world we lived in was very important and it feels like we've strived to get away from that, maybe too much? Maybe we did that a little too much?

Dana Rock

Yeah, I would agree there’s a little bit too much because what we've had is a kind of a dislocation where if you are on your smartphone, you can be anywhere. It’s kind of making time and space irrelevant. You can fast forward things, you can rewind things and you can connect with things that are miles and miles away. Whereas for most of human history, our experience has been embodied and situated in particular time and space, which is the world that we inhabit, and therefore our environment becomes particularly important.

So, I suppose the obvious takeaway is thinking about the climate crisis that we're currently in. How do we reconnect with our environment and understand that I don't necessarily want my consciousness to just be uploaded and floated off to space, although maybe that's an option and maybe Elon Musk is working on it. I don't want to know. 

I want to think about how we can be situated within the world and look around and feel small, recognize the awe and the magnificence of the world, and look at how we can better connect with it and protect it.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, and that’s bit. Even if we want to create a world where we are separate from it and we don't rely on it, or its current state has nothing to do with our current state. It’s funny because we're talking about this boardroom that is, I don't know, it's not exactly a trailer, but it's its own separate enclosure, almost like a very, very fancy tent overlooking Edinburgh and it is windy. I don't know if you can hear it on the mic. It is windy as hell and I'm waiting for this thing to just blow off. But the place we're in is built to take advantage of nature because you built it here clearly for the beautiful view, but to be separate from it, t doesn't matter how windy it is, we will keep it warm. We have heaters in here and all of that stuff. So we can be as comfortable as we want to be with zero reliance on the way the world is. Most of the technology in this room is built to make the outside world irrelevant and what's funny about that and funny in the very tragic, sad clown kind of way is that eventually nature catches up. 

We pride ourselves on nature being irrelevant to how we live our daily lives, that the world aside, but nature catches up and says, oh, you think I don't matter? Here's a hurricane, here's a drought. Here are wildfires. Are you sure the outside world is something that you don't have to deal with? No, nature, nature always wins. I don't mean to make it competitive, but we made it competitive. We made it competitive by saying, we are going to cut ourselves off from you. We don't need you. We'll take your fruits and vegetables, we'll take that, but we don't need you. We don't need to give back anything. We can take all we want. We don't have to give back anything. And nature's like, okay, well let's see how that works out for you.

Dana Rock

I love that. I think that feeling of awe is reminding us whether we're sat in a kayak, whether we're stood in a church, it reminds us that we’re small and nature is always going to win and I think it'd be quite useful for us to have that dose of awe to remind us of that fact at this particular point in time.

David Dylan Thomas

Yeah, I'm going to say thank you because we could talk about this all day. The things I'm going to be carrying with me from this conversation are around this idea. I definitely want to read that book and get more into this notion of the selfless Trojan horse. I found that fascinating.

How do we design in a way and I'm framing it in terms of design because we're designers, but how do we design, how do we live in a way, how we move around the world in a way, how do we build in a way that rather than fighting nature, and fighting each other is allowing that in and making ourselves smaller?

To get back to what we were saying before about those voices in our heads, not in a, you are insignificant and your only value is in your work or whatever, but in a, you are in harmony with this thing that's bigger than you. You are a wonderful, beautiful part of it, and it is a wonderful and beautiful thing that you are a part of. That includes nature, that includes other people. How do we get there?

Dana rock

That is a very good question. I think I would need a little bit of time to think about the answer to that, but I think you're onto something in terms of thinking about how we design better for connection.

I think in a lot of this discussion we've talked about the fact that these platforms that were set up to connect us are doing so at a superficial level because they're trying to connect oneself with another self. But the whole idea is that I can't kind of bottle you down and there's a kind of an essential essence of Dave that I could sell as a perfume. There is no essential essence to us. We are there, we are a kind of mirage almost that's there on the horizon to connect us and bring other people into our sphere and allow us to exist as social animals.

I think there is a bit there to think about how we redesign that, how we can redesign experiences to allow us to connect with others and to see the connection that we have with the world and with nature.

David Dylan Thomas

That's a perfect note to end on. Dana, thank you so much.

For ‘Lately, I've been thinking about…’, I'm David Dylan Thomas, and we will see you next time.