www.erowid.org/culture/characters/mckenna_terence/mckenna_terence_new_maps_hyperspace.pdf. Global Brain Institute. Tapping into the power of mindfulness. As business classes get underway at the Drucker School of Management at Claremont Graduate University, MBA students open their laptops and professors fire up PowerPoint presentations in many classrooms. In the Executive Mind class, however, professor Jeremy Hunter pulls out decidedly different tools: a brass singing bowl and leather-wrapped mallet. The chimes from three strikes on the bowl quiet the dozen or so students, who have put away smartphones and other devices. They close their eyes. Hunter leads them through a 15-minute meditation focused on body sensations, gently guiding them to rest their wandering attention on specific spots, such as the tips of their noses.
This might seem like an awfully touchy-feely way to train future corporate executives. That’s not easy in a world of multi-tasking, global supply chains, shorter product cycles and general information overload. “It’s like upgrading human ability,” said Hunter, an assistant professor of practice at Drucker. Tree Sitting. Clay Shirky observed at the Awl last week that he and I disagree over whether the trend toward MOOCs in higher education is reversible—he says no, and he says that I say yes—and I suppose he’s right, so far as that goes.
But I don’t think that goes very far.There were a few cheap shots about “teamsters in tweed” that were worth noting. A lazy trope that depends on the belief that unions are essentially illegitimate, selfish, and retrograde, it’s a sly dig that lets him insinuate without directly asserting that anti-MOOC academics are self-interested and conservative luddites, that we are somehow positioning our own self-interest in opposition to the deep public spirit of Silicon Valley. It also passes along the insinuation that academics are powerfully unionized, which is far from the truth; as Jonathan Rees points out, would that we were more like teamsters. So I want to shift the debate a bit. Shirky thinks in terms of “disruption” and what can come of it, in theory.
Brain Pickings. Eat, Smoke, Meditate: Why Your Brain Cares How You Cope.