344 Illustrated Flowcharts to Find Answers to Life’s Big Questions

Flowcharting your way to happiness, or why you should be looking for people who intimidate you.

From ever-inventive designer Stefan G. Bucher of You Deserve a Medal and Daily Monster fame comes 344 Questions: The Creative Person’s Do-It-Yourself Guide to Insight, Survival, and Artistic Fulfillment — a delightful pocket-sized compendium of flowcharts and lists illustrated in Bucher’s unmistakable style to help you figure out life’s big answers, in the vein of today’s inadvertent running theme of self-help-books-that-aren’t-really-”self-help”-books.

Besides Bucher’s own questions, the tiny but potent handbook features contributions from 36 beloved cross-disciplinary creators, including Brain Pickings favorites Christoph Niemann, Stefan Sagmeister, Marian Bantjes, Doyald Young, and Jakob Trollbäck.

Let’s be clear: I want this book to be useful to you. There are many great how-to books and biographies out there, and even more gorgeous collections of current and classic work to awe and inspire. But looking at catalogs of artistic success won’t make you a better artist any more than looking at photos of healthy people will cure your cold. You’ve got to take action!” ~ Stefan G. Bucher

(Sure, this may be somewhat remiss in overlooking the basic mechanism of combinatorial creativity, but it’s it’s hard to argue with the need to make ideas happen rather than just contemplating them.)

Though Bucher designed the book as a sequence, it also works choose-you-own-adventure-style and, as Bucher is quick to encourage, asks for hands-on interaction — dog-earing, marginalia, doodles. “If you keep this book in mint condition, I’ve failed,” he says.

We are all different people, but we face a lot of the same questions. The point of this book is to give you lots of questions you can use to look at your life — in a new way, with a different perspective, or maybe just in more detail than you have before — so you can find out how you work, what you want to do, and how you can get it done in a way that works for you. Specifically.” ~ Stefan G. Bucher

Thoughtfully conceived and charmingly executed, wonderfully playful yet infinitely useful, 344 Questions is the kind of treat in which anyone with a beating heart and firing neurons would find delight — and, more likely than not, find some big answers, too.

Page images copyright © 2012. Pearson Education, Inc. and New Riders

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Sentics: Emotional Healing Through Music and Touch

A sensory antidote to addiction and depression, or what artificial intelligence has to do with poetry.

In the late 1960s, as advances in neuroscience technology were making the brain knowable in entirely new ways and illuminating it as an input device, Austrian-born scientist and inventor Manfred Clynes became interested in its capacities as an output device. He began experimenting with the basic expressive time forms of the central nervous system, which he called “sentic forms,” and argued they were universal — something he proved by deriving sounds from people’s emotional expressions through touch and gesture, then playing these sounds to people of different cultures, who were able to correctly identify the original emotions the sounds were expressed.

Based on these findings, Clynes developed an application in which subjects used touch to express a sequence of emotions — neutrality, anger, hate, grief, love, sexual desire, joy, and reverence — through finger pressure. The 25-minute sequences, called sentic cycles, were based on a precise mathematical formula and resulted in subjects reporting calmness, energy, an alleviation of depression, and even a loosening of the grip of tobacco and alcohol addictions. Clynes used his research as evidence that that it was possible to counter a negative emotional state by inducing a rather rapid shift into a positive one, particularly showing that music was most powerful mechanism for inducing love, joy, and reverence.

How remarkable it would be if one could experience and express the spectrum of emotions embodied in music originating from oneself—without the crutch of a composer’s intercession, without being driven by the composer; and to do so moreover whenever we wish, not when circumstance may call them forth. This, indeed, has become possible through the development of sentic cycles.” ~ Manfred Clynes

In 1972, Clynes began distilling his theory into a book that took him four years to write. In 1976, he published Sentics: The Touch of the Emotions, in which he outlined his findings of emotional perception and response at the intersection of music, art and mathematics. (Also featured are a number of Clynes’ poems, some of which artificial intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky quoted in his seminal 1986 book, The Society of Mind.) Blending clinical research, theory and philosophy, the book laid the foundations of the sentics field, insights from which have since seeped into everything from psychotherapy to addiction rehabilitation to education.

Changes in respiration and heart rate during a sentic cycle. Respiration accelerates during anger and hate. During grief the respiration has a gasping character with rest periods at the expiratory end of the cycle. Respiration slows during love, and speeds up markedly for sex. (Inspiration is downward in the figure.) During reverence there is a marked slowing down of respiration with resting phases at the inspiratory phases of the cycle (paralleling those

Perhaps the most important application and effect of sentic cycles lies in their ability to influence the urges and driving forces of the personality. The sense of calmness and satisfaction of being, as such, or the sensation of being emotionally drained, which occasionally replaces this, noticeably alters the dynamics of drives. One may observe the replacement of the neurotic anxious drive— the rigid drive toward self-imposed goals—by a creative drive coupled with joy in its exercise. This displacement of a drive whose satisfaction lies in a distant goal (which cannot be achieved in the present) by a creative drive whose exercise provides a continuous flow satisfaction coupled with joy) is a remarkable aspect of sentic cycles. It appears that needs for smoking and perhaps even drugs may be seriously altered through the use of sentic cycles.” ~ Manfred Clynes

A big thanks to reader Jeff Beddow for flagging Sentics in his comment on this recent piece about 7 essential books on music, emotion and the brain.

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10 Life Lessons from Esquire’s “What I’ve Learned” Interviews

From 50 Cent to Julia Child, or what Apocalypse Now has to do with sperm whales.

Since 1998, Esquire magazine has conducted more than 300 interviews with artists, athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, musicians, politicians, scientists and writers. The series — called “What I’ve Learned” — provides a fascinating cross-section of the lives of prominent people. From Buzz Aldrin to Batman, the interview list reads like a Who’s Who of our era.

We’ve chosen 10 timeless quotes on how to live, from 10 of our favorite interviews in the series, a fine extension of these 5 guides to life from cultural luminaries, featured here last spring.

Smoke like a chimney, work like a horse, eat without thinking, go for a walk only in really pleasant company.” ~ Albert Einstein

Get yourself in trouble. If you get yourself in trouble, you don’t have the answers. And if you don’t have the answers, your solution will more likely be personal because no one else’s solutions will seem appropriate. You’ll have to come up with your own.” ~ Chuck Close

You practice and you get better. It’s very simple.” ~ Philip Glass

A big part of life is realizing what you’re good at.” ~ Alyssa Milano

Children teach you that you can still be humbled by life, that you learn something new all the time. That’s the secret to life, really — never stop learning. It’s the secret to career. I’m still working because I learn something new all the time. It’s the secret to relationships. Never think you’ve got it all.” ~ Clint Eastwood

You can’t just live in a comfortable little suburban neighborhood and get your education from movies and television and have any perspective on life.” ~ J. Craig Venter

A friend is someone who will tell you when you’re bullshitting, when you’ve overstepped a mark, or when you’re being an idiot.” ~ Sting

I think we will make it. Because one quality people have — certainly Americans have it — is that they can adapt when they see necessity staring them in the face. What to avoid is what someone once called the definition of hell: truth realized too late.”~ E. O. Wilson

The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile. I think of my strawberry souffle. I did that at least twenty-eight times before I finally conquered it.” ~ Julia Child

In the end, winning is sleeping better.” ~ Jodie Foster

In addition to reading the “What I’ve Learned” archives online, you can also collect the interviews in book form — Esquire published an anthology of their own favorites as The Meaning of Life: Wisdom, Humor, and Damn Good Advice from 64 Extraordinary Lives, featuring icons like George Carlin, Ray Charles, Faye Dunaway, Eminem and Oliver Stone.

Kirstin Butler is writing an adaptation of Gogol for the Google era called Dead SULs, but when not working spends far, far too much time on Twitter. She currently lives in Cambridge, MA.

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