Best Of Gillian Deacon's "A Love Affair with the Unknown"
Here is a selection of memorable quotes from A Love Affair with the Unknown: Leaning into the Uncertainty of Modern Life by Gillian Deacon
Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson has studied brain imagery in highly creative people to get a scientific understanding of what neurochemistry is at work during acts of invention. Carson's research shows that creative people spend less time using the executive control functions of their brains—things like reason, evaluation, and judgment—and more time in what neuroscientists call the default mode network—absorbing, connecting, and envisioning.
The key to achieving those states is something Carson identifies as "cognitive disinhibition," a state in which we are more alert and aware of the unfiltered details around us. A mind that is open to new experiences and ideas is the gateway to so-called aha! moments. What seem like flashes of cognitive inspiration are actually formulated below the level of conscious thought.
If we don't allow ourselves enough time in those liminal states, uncertain and precarious and open, any potential ideas will fade away before they can surface, shut down by our commanding grip on certainty.
p. 94-95
As frightening and destabilizing as it often feels, uncertainty is the only real space where new information can come into view. Randomness. Epiphanies. Fresh ideas.
Innovative approaches. They can result in some of our favourite experiences when they happen-but they only happen outside of certainty. The best meals you eat in a city or neighbourhood you're visiting are often the ones you discover after getting disoriented and turned around from where you'd planned to go, so you ask a local and stumble upon a treasure. In that uncertainty, you are receptive to the possibility of something good.
p. 97
Re: Rick Rubin
His talent, by all accounts—including his own—lies in his ability to listen, to be open to possibilities, and to ask the right questions that lead the artists to find their way to the best music they can make.
Rubin's approach to his work is a powerful example of not being attached to outcomes. To the extent he has any plan at all when he walks into a recording studio, it is to create a state of uncertainty from which new possibilities may flow; relying on what Albert Einstein called the "sacred gift" of the intuitive mind. Rubin has experienced, in his decades of breaking ground in the music business-and hitting platinum along the way— that there is great power in not knowing, It frees us up to progress, untethered as we are to assumptions. "Curiously," he writes, "not being aware of a challenge may be just what we need to rise to it.”
p. 98-99
We are socialized to believe that wisdom is knowing-that the more a person knows, the wiser they are. We put our trust in those who seem to know a lot, and we resist admitting when we don't know something. Too often, we think of not knowing and vulnerability as weaknesses. But I think we've got it backwards. Socrates said, "I know one thing-l know nothing." And maybe that's the difference between wisdom and knowledge: those that are wise can accept being lost and not knowing. That's the kind of honesty that builds trust. When you admit to all that you don't know, what you do know is more reliable. And being vulnerable allows opportunities to learn and grow: we can't be taught what we think we already know.
p. 154
Striving for perfection is a curse— presumably because it's unachievable. As Ursula K. Le Guin beautifully put it in her book The Wave in the Mind, "Perfectionism is our most compulsive way of keeping ourselves small, a kind of psycho emotional contortion-ism that gives the illusion of reaching for greatness while constricting us into increasingly suffocating smallness.'
p. 159
