Surprise!

Our three-million-year-old wiring system is notoriously bad at things like happiness and contentment. But when it comes to startle reflexes and orienting responses, like reacting to the sound of a snapping twig behind us in the dark or bursting out laughing at an unexpected twist in a joke, we’ve got the right tools for the job. Storytellers understand our nervous systems’ predispositions to fight and flee – this is what accounts for our attraction to conflict-based narratives and the marketing of everything from NBA games to political candidates. 

It takes more and more these days to get our attention – and you can only deal with so many mid-sentence interruptions and online popups before life becomes like TV and your brain adapts by drifting into low amplitude, monkey mind beta waves – so let’s remember that our ability to respond to our environment has more to do with physiology than psychology. 

Generations of educators who were trained in behaviorism mistakenly came to believe that our decision-making and behavior is a function of operant conditioning, so they manipulated their students with rewards and punishments. But reacting isn’t acting, and it’s definitely not thinking. Pavlov won his Nobel because of how his dogs salivated and digested, not because the dogs consciously associated a bell with food or engaged in any critical thinking around their own food choices, or the nature of food, or power and the procurement of food. 

If our goal is to plant seeds of lifelong learning, or even to encourage colleagues and employees to actively learn when we’re not around, we need to make a clearer distinction between strategies for dog training and helping human beings think.

The real challenge for us is habituation. Our brains are basically efficiency machines. Consciousness takes a lot of energy; our brains make up just 2% of our mass but consume 20-25% of our energy. It would be an exhausting waste of those resources to consciously process every time we took a breath – ”Wait, did I just inhale twice?” So, it’s a good thing that we routinize behaviors like brushing our teeth or finding our way home. 

However, even though going on autopilot can be efficient, we also use it as a coping mechanism, and that can be a problem. We get desensitized and/or bored pretty quickly, and once we think we know what to expect, we tune out. Many passengers don’t listen to the airline safety talks before takeoff, even though the information could potentially save their lives. Negative effects ranging from racism to close-to-home car accidents increase when we rely on what we think we already know instead of staying open, aware, and actively processing the information we are receiving in real time.

Apart from shocking us out of our reverie and causing us to pay more attention, surprise can be truly delightful. (Pro tips for the holidays: Gift cards suck. Opening presents is awesome. Opening presents that you have to find around the house via rhyming treasure hunt clues presented by sock monkeys is hilariously awesome. Ask my daughter.) In support of this point, and mostly because sharing these stories puts a smile on my face, I offer two case studies featuring very different people and the same result:

Early in our relationship I texted a few of her closest friends, hired a former student of mine who had Open-Source Learned his way to becoming a chef, and catered a surprise dinner on Avila Beach. 

There we were, walking down the beach just before sunset, when I pointed at the group sitting and standing around beautifully set tables with linen, silver, etc. and said, “That looks fun.” My wife agreed — and kept right on walking. About 20 paces later, she paused, turned, and her face… I still don’t know how to describe the expression she made. There was a lot going on. It was kind of like the time we were hiking and trying to figure out what kind of animal we were looking at on a distant slope. It wasn’t any of the things we tried to imagine, until we realized it was none of those things because it was a bear. 

My wife suddenly realized all the people she saw were people she knew, who were now all staring in our direction, smiling, lifting glasses, and yelling “Surprise!” and “Happy Birthday!” She brought her hands to her face, said a bunch of OMG stuff that made no sense, giggled like a maniac, squealed, and officially started the party. 

My Dad has two facial expressions: blank and a Mona Lisa-level crooked smile.

He is also a very smart man who is very hard to surprise. My Dad doesn’t really care about stuff, but he loves spending time with his family, so for his 50th birthday I decided to organize a surprise birthday dinner with all the extended family from around California. This was back in 1994, before everyone was on smartphones or the World Wide Web. I had to drive from LA to Monterey via Fresno to get all the relatives on board with the plan. 

We walked into a restaurant in Pismo Beach – oddly, as I think about it now, only about 5 miles from the beach where I would surprise my wife more than 20 years later – with my Mom and my sister. 

Three steps inside the restaurant, and everything went still. It was like a movie scene where the city slicker walks into the honky tonk and the record scratches. Then everyone yelled, “Surprise!” My Dad stopped in his tracks. His expression was totally blank. Then he began to recognize faces. He raised his left forearm parallel to the floor and pointed at one of his cousins. I’ll never forget that Mona Lisa smile.

I hope this week surprises you kindly, and I wonder how we might all surprise people in our lives to create memories and understandings that make life a little more fun and interesting.

I’d like to know: What surprises you? When do you like surprises and when do they rub you the wrong way? Drop me a line and tell me about it. I’m curious.

Curiosity is worth practicing. That’s how we get better at it. When it’s done particularly well, curiosity can be elevated to an art form. Curiosity makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click HERE to unlock your free membership subscription.

Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.

It seems useful at this point in history to learn as much as we can about how principled people managed to sustain themselves and communities of purposeful value in past authoritarian societies.

In “The Good Traitor” writer Kate McQueen chronicles the efforts of Carl von Ossietzky, a journalist the Nazis feared so much that they sent him to a concentration camp. From The Atavist: “The Nobel Peace Prize ceremony took place in Oslo on December 10, 1936. Ossietzky did not attend, nor did Maud; the Nazis withheld the necessary travel visas. Also absent were the Norwegian king and the crown prince. The same was true of ambassadors from England, Italy, and Denmark, whose governments had ordered them to stay home. An ensemble played the Norwegian anthem but not the German one.

Frederik Stang, a professor of law at the University of Oslo and a former minister of justice, stood before the thin crowd and read a short speech about Ossietzky on behalf of the Nobel committee. Stang opened by emphasizing that Ossietzky did not belong to any political party, and in fact no political tag could easily be pinned on him. If anything, he said, Ossietzky was a “liberal of the old school,” with “a burning love for freedom of thought and expression; a firm belief in free competition in all spiritual fields; a broad international outlook; a respect for values created by other nations—and all of these dominated by the theme of peace.”

He conceded that the laureate was mainly known for his work as a journalist, but disputed the notion that Ossietzky was less deserving of the award because he had become “a symbol of the struggle for peace rather than its champion.”

“In religion, in politics, in public affairs, in peace and war, we rally round symbols. We understand the power they hold over us,” Stang said. “But Ossietzky is not just a symbol. He is something quite different and something much more. He is a deed; and he is a man…. It is on these grounds that Ossietzky has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and on these grounds alone.”

Like most students, I graduated high school thinking I was bad at math. Years later I was surprised to learn I actually tested better in math than I did in language. I wasn’t surprised at all to learn that the shift from arithmetic to algebra and calculus is actually a semantic shift that has nothing to do with skill-building. Short version: learning about math and how people think about math is at least as interesting to me as math itself, which is fascinating. 

In Mathematica: A Secret World of Intuition and Curiosity, David Bessis seeks to understand how mathematicians think and do what they do. From Quanta Magazine (this article was also republished in Wired): “He hopes (the book) will “explain what’s going on inside the brain of someone who’s doing math.” But more than that, he added, “this is a book about the inner experience of humans.” 

In Mathematica, Bessis makes the provocative claim that whether you realize it or not, you’re constantly doing math — and that you’re capable of expanding your mathematical abilities far beyond what you think possible. Eminent mathematicians like Bill Thurston and Alexander Grothendieck didn’t owe their mathematical prowess to intrinsic genius, Bessis argues. Rather, they became such powerful mathematicians because they were willing to constantly question and refine their intuitions. They developed new ideas and then used logic and language to test and improve them.

According to Bessis, however, the way math is taught in school emphasizes the logic-based part of this process, when the more important element is intuition. Math should be thought of as a dialogue between the two: between reason and instinct, between language and abstraction. It’s also a physical practice of sorts, like yoga or martial arts — something that can be improved through training. It requires tapping into a childlike state and embracing one’s imagination, including the mistakes that come with it.

I’m not an AI cheerleader, but I am open to exploring the use of AI tools, so when Surfing on Entropy creator Dale Adams told me about ElevenLabs I was intrigued. From their website: “The ElevenLabs voice generator can deliver high-quality, human-like speech in 32 languages. Perfect for audiobooks, video voice overs, commercials, and more.” I’ve tuned my AI voice so that it almost sounds like me, but the whole idea still gives me the creeps, so I’m not quite ready to have it tell you about it just yet.

Seeing the world through other people’s eyes sometimes makes me forget everything that’s wrong and fall in love with the world and humanity. This is one of those moments – not only is the photograph amazing, but it really does look like musical notes, and thanks to an innovative musician, now we can hear it! Head over to boingboing for the image and the tune: “Icelandic photographer Haukur Sigurdsson took a fantastic photograph at the Fossavatnsganga ski marathon depicting a group of cross country skiers who happened to look like notes on a musical staff. The image hit r/BeAmazed and the Redditors went wild. Later, musician Matthew Cahn played the tune.”

I don’t know whether to file this under “The Far Side” or Hannibal Lecter. I knew that killer whales torture seals (to me, the audio of people watching is the most disconcerting part), take out great white sharks, and teach each other to sink boats, but in the 1980s they started a weird fad I forgot all about until an orca near (appropriately named) Point No Point in Washington state brought it back last week. From CNN: “In 1987, a group of killer whales off the northwestern coast of North America briefly donned salmon “hats,” carrying dead fish on their heads for weeks. Recently, a male orca known as J27, or “Blackberry,” was photographed in Washington’s Puget Sound wearing a salmon on his head, and many observers declared that the trend had returned.”

We're the only species who follow unstable leaders. This is true – it has little to do with America – around the world, pack leaders are unstable. Animals don't follow that.

– Cesar Millan

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David Preston

Educator & Author

​https://davidpreston.net​

Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE

Header image: “Shouldering the imitation ox”, from a 1909 edition of Richard Kearton’s Wild Nature’s Ways via Public Domain Review