Rain chains provide a useful image of how neurons work.

Neurons link information to actions.

• Actions can be thoughts (neurons activation), emotions (hormone release) or movement (motor neuron activation).

Rain chains provide reminders that:

• Acts, words, emotions and thoughts are triggered by sensations (sights, sounds, touch, taste, smells).
• Sensations accumulate over time. A lot of individual drops on the roof combine to form the water at the bottom of the rain chain. Actions link back to sensations but it may take some work to tease out the link. The original sensation may be a very weak signal and there may be a long delay between signal and action.
• The sensations we’re exposed to, the books we read, the shows we watch, the music we listen to, the sights we see, the things we hear, the people we’re around; all impact how we act, what we say and what we believe.

• Tony Hsieh
• Jeff Bezos
• Nassim Nicholas Taleb
• Daniel Coyle
• Adam Grant
• Scott Adams
• Ben Thompson
• Tiago Forte

We argue about signals, interpretation & effort

By “we” I mean all of us.

You and I aren’t arguing. We get along great.

We as people argue a lot.

When people argue it comes down to three things: signals, interpretation and effort.

Dan Roam in his brilliant book The Back of the Napkin provides a remarkably clear explanation of how we take in information.

We’re visual creatures. Even if we’re listening to information we’re “picturing” six things:

1) Who / What

2) How many

3) Where

4) When

5) How

6) Why

After we take in information, especially if it’s the same information, we argue about signals (who/what, where and how many), interpretation (how and why) and we argue about effort (what should be done next and how much blood and treasure should be spent doing it).

Depending on attention and experience people will see different details of who/what is in a scene. Two people will look at the same scene and see different numbers, different locations and perceive different timelines and orders.

“How” is an interpretation of cause and effect. It’s a story we start telling ourselves about cause & effect relationships based on how the whos/ whats, the numbers of the whos/ whats and the location of the whos / whats change over time.

We take the story a step further with “why?” “Why?” is an interpretation of meaning, a reason behind the cause.

We see different things, argue about what we saw, get frustrated with different interpretations and then argue about what to pay attention to and what to do next.

https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/organization/our-insights/safe-enough-to-try-an-interview-with-zappos-ceo-tony-hsieh

both the doctor and the patient have skin in the game, though not perfectly, but administrators don’t—and they seem to be the cause of the troubling malfunctioning of the system.

A doctor is pushed by the system to transfer risk from himself to you, and from the present into the future, or from the immediate future into a more distant future.

From Skin in the Game by Nassim Taleb

I suspect many primary-care practitioners will want to ignore this new target. They understand the downsides of the relentless expansion of medical care into the lives of more people. At the same time, I fear many will be coerced into compliance as the health care industry’s middle management translates the 130 target into a measure of physician performance. That will push doctors to meet the target using whatever means necessary — and that usually means more medications.

Don’t Let New Blood Pressure Guidelines Raise Yours

Trump Team Killed Rule Designed To Protect Health Workers From Pandemic Like COVID-19 –

https://www.npr.org/2020/05/26/862018484/trump-team-killed-rule-designed-to-protect-health-workers-from-pandemic-like-cov

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/01/americans-are-delaying-medical-care-its-devastating-health-care-providers/

Updated: December 2021

Focus:

• “How can we improve our ability to work together on hard problems?“

Main Effort: 

• Book: Learning faster and adapting faster.
• Newsletter: The Human Element

Slow Burns (subjects I’m tracking):

Decisions & Behavior

• Behavior
• Emotions
• Happiness

Collaboration

• Narratives
• Centralized vs Decentralized Organizations
• Communication

Politics & Economics

• Livelihoods of the Future. What will we do? How will we provide for our families? How will we contribute to our communities?
• Blockchain (Distributed Ledgers, Smart Contracts & DAOs)

Health

• Breathing
• Fascia & Flexibility
• Mitochondria, cellular respiration and electron transport

Updated: December 2021

With more changes happening more often, how do we improve our chances of being happy and healthy in the future? How do we help our kids be happy and healthy in the future?

Over the last 50+ years I’ve been traveling around the world learning new things. Over the last 10 years I’ve picked up the learning pace, learning more things about more things at a faster pace.

The most important thing I’ve learned over the last five decades is none of us have all the answers. Each of us have a few of the pieces.

If we’re going to learn and adapt, we have to be able to share and we have to be able to communicate.

Thanks for stopping by.

Here’s what I’m focused on now:

Questions? Something interesting you’d like to talk about? My email is: jared@jaredeast.com