Transcript:
https://www.indiebound.org/search/book?keys=author%3AAgel%2C%20Jeromehttps://app.podscribe.ai/episode/52781683Speaker 0 (0s): <inaudible> Welcome
Speaker 1 (16s): Wednesday. Hello with your buddy. How are you feeling out there? Did you wake up this morning and look in the mirror and say something like, man, you're a good looking. You're a good looking son of a gun. Did you ever do you wake up and you're looking to a mirror in your life, your hands know your handsome, you know, your hands. And I know you're a handsome, ah, I like to do this sometimes. Is that weird? Probably, but you know what? I love it. You should try it.
It's awesome for the ladies' you might want to go with beautiful because you know, you can be handsome, but I prefer my women. Beautiful. Well, I hope that you guys are having a great day. I thought I start off today with a little bit of a story. Once upon a time, a daughter complained to her father that her life was miserable and that she didn't know how she was going to make it. She was tired of fighting and struggling all the time. It seemed just as one problem was solved.
Another one soon followed her father. A chef took her into the kitchen. He filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire. Once the three pots began to boil, he plays potatoes and one in the second and ground coffee beans in the third, he then let them sit and boil without saying a word to his daughter, the daughter moaned and impatiently waited.
Wondering what the heck she was doing. After 20 minutes, he turned off the burners. He took the potatoes out of the pot, placed them in a bowl. He pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. He then ladled the coffee out and placed it in a cup, turning to his daughter. He asked daughter, what do you see? The daughter replied, potatoes, eggs and coffee for a hastily look closer.
He said and touch the potatoes she did and noted that they were soft. He then asked her to take an egg and break it. After pulling off the shell, she observed be hard boiled egg. Finally, he asked her to sip the coffee. It's rich aroma brought a smile on her face. Father. What, what does this all mean? She asked, he then explained that the potatoes, the eggs and coffee beans had each faced the same adversity, the boiling water.
However, each one reacted differently. The potato went in strong, hard and unrelenting, but in boiling water, it became soft and weak. The egg was fragile with the thin outer shell protecting its liquid interior until it was put in the boiling water. Then the inside of the egg became hard. However, the ground coffee beans, where unique after they were exposed to the boiling water, they changed the water and created something new.
Which one are you? He asked his daughter pretty interesting, right? When adversity knocks on your door, how do you respond? Or are you a potato and EG or a coffee bean? You think the moral of this story is that in life things happen around us. Things happen to us. But the only thing that truly matters is how you choose to react to it. And what you make out of it, life is all about learning, adopting, and converting all the struggles that we experience into something positive to some of the best advice I ever got was that in life you can not control what happens to you, but you and you alone gets to control the meaning of that event.
So think about that for a moment. I think it can change the way you are processing information. And I think it has the ability if you remember that story. And if you remember that last piece I just gave you when you get in a tight spot, I do remember that you can't control what happens, but you can control the meeting of it and it can fundamentally shift the way you feel about your day. Try it. If you get a chance, let us now jump into, excuse me.
Let's just jump back in is a Marshall McLuhan. Hear, you know, he's going to get into the way we process information. He is going to be talking about the transformation of our society. The way the mediums have changed us. And by a medium, I mean, we've gone from reading and listening to watching. I said, previously the documentaries or the new books, we talked a little bit briefly about how that particular, medium, powerful medium of video.
It kind of just leapfrogs the critical thinking. And it goes right into your head, right, right. Through the eyes. So the ocular nerves, and there you go, there's your idea. Nice, neat, and package for you. So you don't even have to think about it. And we know that certain people, other people, different groups of people, they like different things. We know that when, when we look at advertising, where do they have target demographics?
So the people putting out the message, you know, exactly which group is going to consume their message, that they can tailor, make a message for each group strictly to sell something, strictly targeting specific groups in order to make more money from those groups. Most of the time, not even caring about the behavioral change that's going to come about in that group.
As long as the people are making money, using target demographics, behavior, be damned. They don't care. Why is that important to George? How is this even relevant to Marshall McLuhan? Well, like I said, he's talking about the different mediums. It's also, when we're talking about how the different mediums change your behavior, change your view. We are also talking about how it's processed in the brain.
And according to Marshall McLuhan, he's done quite a bit of research on left brain versus right brain, how the information is processed. And there was another great book by Ian McGill crest, it's called the master and his Emissary. And he talks about in that particular book. And I won't go too deep into it here, but I'll give you a bit of background on it.
And that book, he talks about the left brain being the Emissary and the right brain, being the King. And over time, the left brain, the way in with your crush described, it was that the left brain, the analytical, the, the language, the speaking part of the brain would relay the message from the King the right side of the brain, the right side, dealing in concepts, the left side, dealing in linguistics.
And the way Ian talked about it, he spoke in a way that the left side of the brain, as the Emissary began thinking, Hey, this King over, you can even talk on the right side of the brain. Maybe I should just a, you know, a good metaphor. It would be to think of a, like a greedy prime minister that wants to take over control. And so he just relays some sort of information out there. He gets a message out. They may not be exactly what the King said. It might be kind of undermining the King.
Maybe he thinks of the King's a little to emotional. So we used to go out and spin it a little bit. Maybe a good metaphor might be a press secretary. And so at times it's an interesting metaphor because you can understand how the brain is working against itself at times. And that would explain why me you, in lots of other people seem irrational and working against our own best interest at sometime. We have one side dealing in concept's one side dealing in emotions, another side, dealing in language and analytics and logical individualism, and that, okay, this is what we're going to get in today from Marshall McLuhan's point of view, the East meets West and he breaks down some very interesting points talking about the Eastern philosophies and the Western philosophies, also the right hemisphere versus the left hemisphere.
And isn't it odd? Isn't that odd how those to kind of go together. Let's get into it a little bit here in the West electronic technology, displaces visual space and retrieves acoustic space in a new form as the ground now includes the detritus of alphabetic civilizations to the effect in the East is quite different to the degree that Asian cultures put on Western close of a phonetic, alphabet and hardware, the alphabet becomes there means of transformation from group.
Think to individualism, Harold Innes examine the process whereby through a shift in the media of writing temple bureaucracies were displaced by military bureaucracies and expansion or conquest programs began a few years ago, I ran was reeling under the impact of the electronic media. And it was turning back from a military to a temple control government under the Moola was spearheading a retrieval movement to archaic traditional Moore's law that are more latent.
And many of Iran's neighbors such as Iraq, the recent war with Iraq was a further acting out of that return to tribal value facilitated by the acoustic properties of electric media radio, loudspeakers, audio cassettes brought the Mulas cry to the force of a Thunderclap on a regional scale. You see what's going on. There is equating the methodologies of media to the actions and behaviors of those nations.
Let's do let's jump on with another clip here, right? The degree of confusion that exists in many fields of study with regard to the visual and the acoustic is a parent in Ferdinand. They saucers course in general linguistics with his division of language. The beach for saucer language has a total inclusive world have simultaneous structures that is right brain and acoustic. Whereas as speech, which is sequential is a relatively superficial and left brain form being visual with these divisions of language and speech saucer associated the diachronic and the synchronic, but to indicate more clearly the opposition and crossing of the two orders of phenomenon that relate to the same object.
I prefer to speak of synchronic and diachronic linguistics. Everything that relates to the static side of our science is synchronic. Everything that has to do with evolution is diachronic similarly synchrony and Diane Skrany designate respectively, a language state and an evolutionary phase. I just want to preface it right there. Some of it is some of what I'm reading is it's pretty in depth.
So don't worry if your not completely in tune with all the definitions, I'm going to tie it together. However, I think some of this is good background to have inner duality and the history of linguistics. The first thing that strikes us when we study the facts of language is that their succession and time does not exist in so far as the speaker is concerned, he is confronted with a state. That is why the linguist who wishes to understand the state must discard all knowledge of everything that produced it and ignore dioxin.
If he can't enter the mind of speakers only by completely suppressing the past, the intervention of history can only falsify his judgment in this study of human communication. Non-linear stated the ultimate goal of science is to explain by means of a set of theories events that are observed. The McLuhan Tetrad is designed to do just that.
And it's not based on a theory or a set of concepts, but rather it relies on observation and experience and percepts while empirical it provides a basis for prediction. We have indicated earlier that all human artifacts are extensions of man, outer rings or uttering have the human body or psyche, private, or corporate as utterances. They are speech translations from one form into another form, be it hardware or software metaphors.
Of course, all words in every language are metaphors structurally speaking. A metaphor is a technique of presenting one situation in terms of another situation that is to say it is a technique of awareness of perception, the right hemisphere not have concepts, the left hemisphere. So as to situations are involved, there are two sets of figure ground relations in opposition though, the grounds may or may not be stated just all metaphors have four components in analogical ratio.
Thus cats are the crab grass of life presents Cass art to my life as crabgrass is to an otherwise beautiful lawn, or she sailed into the room, presents her motion entering the room in terms of a ship's Swift, perhaps graceful motion under safe to say that metaphore has for terms, which our discontinuous yet in ratio two, one another is to say that the basic mode of metaphor is resonance and interval.
The audio tactile, this discontinue, it was pointed out by Aristotle. It follows that the soul is analogous to the hand for as the hand, as a tool of tools. So the mind is the form of forms. And since the form of sensible things, I propose the four part structure, which relates to all human artifacts, verbal and nonverbal, their existence is certainly not deliberate or intentional.
Rather. They are a testimony to the fact that the mind of man is structurally active and all human artifacts and hypothesis, whether these oppositional ratios are also present in the structure of the natural world, raises an entirely separate question. It is perhaps relevant to point out that the Greeks made no intelligence or observations of the effects of manmade technology, but only for what they consider the objects have the natural world.
The usual approach to metaphor is purely verbal rather than operational or a structural that is in the left hemisphere terms. Have the figures only minus that the grounds plus the metaphor is discussed as a form of sort or have a category mistake or have misnaming for example, however, are appropriate. In one sense, a good metaphor may be in another sense, there is something inappropriate about it.
This inappropriateness results from the use of a sign, in a sense different from the usual, which use I shall call sort crossing, such sort crossing is the first defining feature of a metaphor. And according to Aristotle its genus metaphor consist and giving the thing, a name that belongs to something else, the transference being either from genus to species for on the grounds of analogy.
All right, I know that can be a lot of word that may be a lot of words. You have to look up there. However, there's one great nugget at the end that I think you can pull away. That's somewhat of a interesting concept in the more you think about it, the more valuable it we'll be. And that is in this last section. When we talked about S sort crossing, which is giving the thing, a name that belongs to something else, the transference, you know what I mean by that?
When you say she sailed into the room right now, you can actually picture that girl is sailing into the room or that cats are too my life as crab grass is to otherwise beautiful lawn. You see the power of the metaphor even similes is that you are speaking to both sides of the brain when you use metaphors and you should try to use them more.
It's something that we can all be better at when you speak that way. When you can make a point and then use a metaphor to hammer at home, you're speaking to someone else's whole brain, not just the analytical side, not just the creative side or the side, that deals with concepts, but both sides. And that's why we find people that use metaphors to be incredibly charming when we find them attractive.
Or that's why you find people who are a great speakers in the very top of wherever their profession is, they found a way to speak to the whole brain. And you can use this in your life. This is something that we should all be practicing. I'm going to try to work on it more. And I hope that you do as well. It's a better way to speak. And this is also the foundation of what is going today.
It's gone wrong in the past. And according to Marshall McLuhan, which this book was written, you know, in the late was published in 80 for however, I figure it was written before that I'll put a link in the show notes down there, however it, depending on what side of the brain you focus more on, depending on what side of the brain you analyze the world with depends on your world view.
And just like the advertiser's know, the target demographics of people they want to market to. According to the product, they are also are beginning to truly understand which target demographics use, which side of the brain. We think about that for a minute. If we know that a certain gender or a certain race tends to like this product more than another group, advertisers will target that group.
If you look at say Nike shoes or Louis Vuitton handbags, or iPhones, or, you know, whatever the product is, a lot of them are targeted to certain demographics and demographics. It's just another word for a race or gender. It's a man. I can't even begin to tell you how dangerous it is to begin targeting people based on their brain chemistry, based on their worldview.
However, that's, what's happening every day and social media now, but it gets worse because not only are we focusing on selling things to people based on their worldview, but now we're beginning to train them, to see things in a certain way. The education system is beginning to focus on a type of learning that is better for one side of the brain.
Then the other, according to Marshall McLuhan were moving away from the analytical side, the individual side into a more tribal side. The D evolution of thought is we're moving backwards. Our view of the world is regressing instead of progressing. And there are certain education system in certain parts of the world that use different parts of the brain.
We're going to get those. I promise you, it's going to be awesome. You know why it's going to be awesome because your awesome thank you for spend a little bit of time with me.
Speaker 2 (23m 55s): So let's
Speaker 1 (23m 56s): Jump right into it. Here. East meets West in the hemispheres ordering facility have the left brain is quantitative diachronic reading, writing, naming within a parameter have significant hierarchy or the right brain is the area of qualitative synchronic, wellspring of the spacial tactile the musical on the acoustic. When these hemispheric functions are in true balanced, which is rare, comprehensive, comprehensive awareness is the result.
True consciousness has always had a diachronic and synchronic character. The Corpus callosum. That's the part of the brain that runs in between the two that helps them communicate just FYI, the Corpus callosum and the brain potentially promotes a healthy interchange of labeling and imaging between the hemispheres, the Western world, especially Europe and the Americas emphasizes left brain thinking over right brain cognition.
We should be aware that cultures exist. Like the Inuits were, the reverse is true. And our desire to aluminate the differences between visual and acoustic space. We have undoubtedly given a false impression, and that is the normal brain and it's everyday functioning. It cannot reconcile the apparently contradictory perceptions of both sides of the mind. There is we know from experience a unified field of the mind, we learn a piano piece by working through the lines of individual musical notes, but the music does not spring to life for us until we synced it's overall harmonic structure.
There are countless examples in art, science and technology of visual and acoustic space working together to fabricate more or less a melded and consistent idea of the outside world. One of the most influential, at least for linguists is Ferdinand de saucers hypothesis of language development. He wanted to find a way of expressing a method for separating individual speech from the established language. He contended that a language existed only in terms of how it was spoken by a large group of people in a definitive geographical area.
People spoke as they felt and reinforced each other's use of the mother tongue by pure pressure yet in exoneree, over a period of years, the language would change. As new appeared, Henson had a propensity to intrinsically form itself through use a synchronic structure. And at the same time, it also responded to a movement through time it's diachronic nature. The diachronic always took an opposite or axial relationship to the synchronic.
The key to our future development as a species will depend on how well we understand the relationship between the left side and right side of our associates, associative cortex and the utility of those millions of nerve fibers connecting the two sides called the Corpus callosum. We must teach ourselves to abandon the tendency to view the environment at a high of a hierarchical and totally connective way to center ourselves.
Instead in the arena of interplay between the two modes of perception and analysis, which is comprehensive awareness. Let me read that again. Just what makes more sense to you? And to me, we must teach ourselves to abandon the tendency, to view the environment in a hierarchical and totally connective way to central ourselves. Instead in the arena of interplay between the two modes of perception in analysis, which is a comprehensive awareness Linus Pauling shake the foundations of classical physics by reminding his fellow scientists that nothing in the material universe connects the same thing can be set up the mind, all its elements interface.
What do you think about that? Try and use that in your daily understanding of life, trying to reshape the way you look at the world, and it will change your view of how your life, how the life you live is working out. Does that kinda make sense is not that everything is connected, it's that it is it interfaces a connected is not the right word, it interfaces with each other.
And if you think about that for a little bit, if you just take some time at a quiet place to just ponder that sentence, I think that will help. I, I often find myself doing a mental exercise wear and I got to get better at it. I think all of us have this thing where we could be better listeners. A lot of the times were not even waiting our turn to speak. We're trying to interrupt the other person to get our thoughts out.
And that is a problem. Or a lot of the people I see that I admire who were a good speakers are very patient. They're very kind, and there are actually utilizing an active listening strategy. One thing I think can help achieve that in the mind exercise that I do is that before you speak, I try and think about the words you're going to say in this way are the words I'm going to say.
The very, an accurate description of the concept I'm holding in my mind. I think that is a good way to utilize the whole brain language system are the words you are going to say, describing the concept of what you're thinking. Do you see sometimes as we have this thing, we do what we just spit out a bunch of gobbly goop. Instead of that, take time to think about what it is.
You want to tell someone what it is going on inside your head. What does the picture that you C of the situation, your in, and then use that picture to formulate the word you want to use it, I'll do a couple of things. One, it will stop you from just rattling off a bunch of nonsense, and it will help you come up with a better picture of what you're thinking.
What's your feeling, and hopefully create a better relationship for you. It's pretty powerful. And I'm looking forward to getting into way more. This is one is a little bit shorter today. However, I think there's a lot of information in there that you may need to replay again and go over. And I know there's some awesome thinking exercises in there because that's what I've been doing. So for today on Wednesday, think about the metaphors you can use in your life.
Think about describing the mental picture as you hold in your head. When speaking to other people and know this, I love you guys like a child, loves their mother. I want to leave you with that one. You should try to think of some awesome metaphors and use them today in your life and see how it changes your life. I love you guys all Aloha.