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Manoush Zomorodi: Hello, friend. This is an episode of Note to Self, but from when we used to be called New Tech City. Same good content, just the old name. Enjoy.
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From WNYC, this is New Tech City, where digital gets personal. I'm Manoush Zomorodi. It's day five, your second to last challenge for the Bored and Brilliant project. As we come towards the end, maybe you've loosened your grip on your phone. Maybe you even thought through a problem or just had some extra time to think. The grand finale is almost here. An assignment from the artist Nina Katchadourian, you're going to get that tomorrow. Today's challenge is less about your phone and more about getting you in a creative mindset. We want you to do something that will activate your brain's default mode. Some scientists also call it the Imagination Network.
Just a reminder from our episode a couple weeks back, this is the part of your brain that's hard at work when your body is at rest, or it's doing something that doesn't take much thought, like sitting on a bench, folding laundry. Your mind begins to wander, and that's when it comes up with its most novel ideas, or just novels in general. Gary Shteyngart is the author of Super Sad True Love Story. His latest book is a memoir called Little Failures, and he knows firsthand how important it is to tap that Imagination Network.
Gary Shteyngart: You need the board mode, and you also need to be what Saul Bellow called the great noticer, you need to notice everything around you. I remember before the iPhone, I would take a cab, let's say, from midtown to downtown, and I'd notice a thousand things, and I jot them all down when I get home, but now I can't notice anything because I'm tweeting.
Manoush Zomorodi: Okay, admittedly, he writes great tweets, but Gary says his phone habits are stopping him from seeing the world around him in creative ways.
Gary Shteyngart: Maybe I'll look up and tweet about something I've noticed, but not that much. I think what's really being lost for someone like me is not just my ability to read long-form fiction or long form-nonfiction, but also the ability to be present in the world, instead of being present in that alternate world.
Manoush Zomorodi: Noticing, it's step one to creating something. This, friends, is what we're going to do today.
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Challenge number five is called one small observation. Today, go somewhere public. The mall, the gas station. Just go into the hallway at work or at school, take a cab ride around town, whatever. Hang out, watch people, watch someone. Try not to be too conspicuous. Now let your mind wander. Activate that Imagination Network and notice things.
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Hello. To get some more sparks flying, I invited Rita J. King into the studio. Rita's career also depends on noticing details and tapping her imagination, but she's done an amazing job of blending technology and creativity.
Rita J. King: I'm a futurist at the Science & Entertainment Exchange.
Manoush Zomorodi: Rita's the person a movie studio calls up when they're setting a film in like 2050, and they need to make it fanciful and far out, but still believable.
Rita J. King: Sometimes it's thinking about what a village or a town might look like, or how people might act a century or two centuries in the future, which is very hard to predict. Other times, it's inventing technologies, inventing story architectures. It really varies.
Manoush Zomorodi: How cool is that? Rita has to put herself into the minds of people living in the future. Tell me about how you get into a headspace to think about something like that.
Rita J. King: Being radically present is the key, really, to being a futurist. I try to look at what are called the uninventable details, those strange little things that make an environment unique to itself. I have been keeping notebooks my entire life, and I write down what I see. It could be a snippet of dialogue that you hear people on the train saying. It could be the color of someone's sweater. It could be the way birds fly across the sky. In fact, it can be the tiniest little detail.
Manoush Zomorodi: There's a reason why Rita thinks we should try getting our brains to this place to spend more time imagining.
Rita J. King: I can guarantee at the end of a day of doing that, someone's brain is going to feel different than it normally would.
Manoush Zomorodi: Your brain's going to feel different?
Rita J. King: Yes, your brain's going to feel different. The biggest things start with the tiniest little observations.
Manoush Zomorodi: Do you think it's bad if I ask people because we are radio? If I asked them to record their one observation, that would be great.
Rita J. King: You thinking, like, what kind of details, Manoush? Challenge week is getting weird.
Manoush Zomorodi: Yes, well, it gets weirder tomorrow, but I feel you. I asked members of the New Tech City team to do this challenge the other day and then record themselves.
Team member 1: Every day I go to work and I walk down pretty much the same streets, and I have passed by this one set of townhouses at least a thousand times, and never until today, when I was just looking, did I notice that a series of them, almost all of them had the same motif of wrought iron railings with acorn themes. These beautiful little iron acorn shapes in different sizes. It's like one had one up and then the next one had to have a matching acorn. All of a sudden, the whole block, it's like acorn railings block. Anyway, they were kind of beautiful, and I felt a little more connected to history.
Team member 2: This morning I was walking behind a woman wearing high-heeled snow boots. At first, I was just like that seems like the least practical invention that I can possibly think of. I realized that she was using the heel as an ice pick. I figured that what must be going through her mind was a very well-deserved screw you to me and all of the other people who had judged her footwear choices.
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Manoush Zomorodi: All right, Bored and Brilliant people, go out there, observe someone, their footwear, try not to be creepy. Observe a state of mind, an uninventable detail, whatever, whatever beautiful little nugget of life that you and Gary Shteyngart might have missed if your nose were stuck to your phone. If you feel inclined, and we hope you do, record what you come up with using a voice memo app on your phone. There are two good ones. One is the built-in voice memo app on the iPhone, and for Android, there's one called Easy Voice Recorder. Then email it to us. We're newtechcity@nyc.org.
Tomorrow, ah, your last challenge, just in time for the weekend. The words that come to mind for this one, mundane and epic. This is courtesy of the artist Nina Katchadourian, who has an assignment for you. Nina, you're in charge of challenge number six.
Nina Katchadourian: Yes. I like assignments and I like limitations, and that's why I think we've arrived at this assignment the way we have.
Manoush Zomorodi: I'm Manoush Zomorodi. This is New Tech City and the Bored and Brilliant challenge.
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