Be Nosey, Be Here Now!

Image Credit: Steve Jobs at Home in Cupertino California, December 15 1982.”

Dispatch from Dr. G., 01.23.2012…

If you’ve had the chance to read Walter Issacson’s bio of Steve Jobs this past holiday, you may have found yourself nodding knowingly at a developmental journey marked by familiar American Baby Boom motifs: 

1) Grow up in a surburn home designed by a mid century architect  — Eichler, Lloyd Wright, Neutra ( or by disciples who followed).

2) Discover the nature of consciousness by stepping onto an Asian path of meditation.

3) Begin to Question Authority.

In addition to these now classic Baby Boom and “outlier” patterns, we find, reading Isaacson, Job’s love for modernist Bauhaus design, the aesthetic best captured in the famous Mies Van Der Rohe quote “Less is More.”  (To which “post modern” architect Robert Venturi followed, “Less is a Bore.”)

Design snobbery aside, I found myself reflecting on my own not too uncanny parallels to Job’s life journey yet noticing a generational and possibly gendered difference: Where Jobs brought  questioning authority, design thinking and meditation into the digital revolution, there were those like myself who found opportunities to bring the three deconstructive practices into the arts, somatics and neuroscience revolution.

That this blog (and all GGI products) promote a triple bottom line protocol for whole-person growth — Brain Awareness, Design Thinking, Mindfulness Meditation — is no mistake.  A simple inspection of each practice reveals “inquiry,” best thought of here as “deconstructive navigation by means of curiosity,” creates the conditions for insight and awareness, whether you’re engaged in design strategies, inspecting the subtle movement of your attention, or looking at the ways in which nerve and glial cells interact to create best thinking! Yes, inquiry - the kind of experimental, “be nosey,” research attitude central to science and arts and key to open probe*, mindful meditation, offers great promise as the gold standard of what it means to engage in 21st century education, research and innovation.  Speaking with other educators, designers and neuroscientists, I know I’m not alone in putting forth this claim. 

So let’s start making room at the table for questions and dialogue,  experiments with lots of iterations and lots of failed attempts.  Let’s give applause for those in our classrooms and boardrooms who make courageous critical and creative inquiry — the researchers and the disrupters.  Let’s encourage the cautious ones to follow Alice down the rabbit hole so they can have the chance to stop and wonder, “Curiouser and curiouser!”

P.S. Putting the gold standard to work.  It’s not enough to say “We need more critical thinkers! We need more innovators!  We need more creative and compassionate change agents!”  Today neuroleaders across business, media, health and education need to inspire multiple methods of self-aware, deconstructive inquiry with robust pedagogic thinking for surely that will determine whether students or teams engage inquiry with novelty or nausea.

Yes it’s time to Be Nosey, the space to Be Here Now! 

(Source: bodiesinspace)