Friday, January 15, 2010
the "Oh sh*t!" circuit and the Delete key
In the January issue of Wired magazine, there is a fascinating article on the nature of scientific work. Specifically, it investigates the way scientific progress happens. It turns out that there is an enormous amount of failure involved. A researcher named Kevin Dunbar spent a year observing scientific researchers at their work, and found that:
Science is a deeply frustrating pursuit. Although the researchers were mostly using established techniques, more than 50 percent of their data was unexpected. (In some labs, the figure exceeded 75 percent.) “The scientists had these elaborate theories about what was supposed to happen,” Dunbar says. “But the results kept contradicting their theories. It wasn’t uncommon for someone to spend a month on a project and then just discard all their data because the data didn’t make sense.” Perhaps they hoped to see a specific protein but it wasn’t there. Or maybe their DNA sample showed the presence of an aberrant gene. The details always changed, but the story remained the same: The scientists were looking for X, but they found Y.
Not only did things not go as planned most of the time, but the not-going-as-planned was discounted and abandoned more often than not:
According to Dunbar, even after scientists had generated their “error” multiple times — it was a consistent inconsistency — they might fail to follow it up. “Given the amount of unexpected data in science, it’s just not feasible to pursue everything,” Dunbar says. “People have to pick and choose what’s interesting and what’s not, but they often choose badly.” And so the result was tossed aside, filed in a quickly forgotten notebook. The scientists had discovered a new fact, but they called it a failure.
It turns out that the brain is wired to tune out anomalous information, stuff that seems not to jibe with how think the world should be. Dunbar performed some experiments and verified this:
As he tried to further understand how people deal with dissonant data, Dunbar conducted some experiments of his own. In one 2003 study, he had undergraduates at Dartmouth College watch a couple of short videos of two different-size balls falling. The first clip showed the two balls falling at the same rate. The second clip showed the larger ball falling at a faster rate. The footage was a reconstruction of the famous (and probably apocryphal) experiment performed by Galileo, in which he dropped cannonballs of different sizes from the Tower of Pisa. Galileo’s metal balls all landed at the exact same time — a refutation of Aristotle, who claimed that heavier objects fell faster.
While the students were watching the footage, Dunbar asked them to select the more accurate representation of gravity. Not surprisingly, undergraduates without a physics background disagreed with Galileo. (Intuitively, we’re all Aristotelians.) They found the two balls falling at the same rate to be deeply unrealistic, despite the fact that it’s how objects actually behave. Furthermore, when Dunbar monitored the subjects in an fMRI machine, he found that showing non-physics majors the correct video triggered a particular pattern of brain activation: There was a squirt of blood to the anterior cingulate cortex, a collar of tissue located in the center of the brain. The ACC is typically associated with the perception of errors and contradictions — neuroscientists often refer to it as part of the “Oh shit!” circuit — so it makes sense that it would be turned on when we watch a video of something that seems wrong.
However, the "Oh Shit!" circuit is not the whole story. There is another part of the brain that closes the deal by editing out parts of reality that conflict with our picture of it.
But there’s another region of the brain that can be activated as we go about editing reality. It’s called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or DLPFC. It’s located just behind the forehead and is one of the last brain areas to develop in young adults. It plays a crucial role in suppressing so-called unwanted representations, getting rid of those thoughts that don’t square with our preconceptions. For scientists, it’s a problem.
When physics students saw the Aristotelian video with the aberrant balls, their DLPFCs kicked into gear and they quickly deleted the image from their consciousness. In most contexts, this act of editing is an essential cognitive skill. (When the DLPFC is damaged, people often struggle to pay attention, since they can’t filter out irrelevant stimuli.) However, when it comes to noticing anomalies, an efficient prefrontal cortex can actually be a serious liability. The DLPFC is constantly censoring the world, erasing facts from our experience. If the ACC is the “Oh shit!” circuit, the DLPFC is the Delete key. When the ACC and DLPFC “turn on together, people aren’t just noticing that something doesn’t look right,” Dunbar says. “They’re also inhibiting that information.”
Between the Oh Shit! circuit and the delete key, the brain is set up to protect our existing pictures of the world from threatening anomalies. And in a lot of situations, that's probably a good thing. It would be impossible to focus on anything without such a capacity.
But progress in science depends on noticing anomalies. Anomalies are the things that tell us where our existing models are inadequate, and can point the way towards evolving new models.
Given our propensity for censoring out anomalies, Dunbar wondered how any kind of progress happened at all. He sat in on a lot of lab meetings where results were discussed. What he found was that meetings where diverse groups of scientists, people with very different kinds of expertise, were involved were much more effective than discussions among people who shared a common area of expertise:
The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. “After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved,” Dunbar says. “They made it look easy.”
When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That’s because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.
This is very relevant to the working process for acting that I teach in the class, in particular to the challenge of articulating an underlying objective. As an actor studies a role, he/she becomes an expert on it. The challenge of distilling her understanding of the role into a single phrase, the underlying objective, that captures the urgency and significance of the character's struggle is an extremely valuable one. It is in that struggle to articulate, to find expression, to communicate, that the actor is challenged to touch in herself the the place in herself that corresponds to the place in the author that prompted her to create the role in the first place.
In finding our way to that expression, anomaly is very important. When most of us approach a text initially, we have an evaluative relationship to the figures presented therein: we are interested in the choices they make in the situations in which they find themselves, and the way in which those choices work out. Based on those factors, we form judgments about the figures in question. We are interested in evaluating them as a way of gaining insight about our own lives.
To work on a role as an actor, we need to approach the role empathically rather than evaluatively. We need to understand what makes each step that the character takes the next necessary thing for them. We are not interested in judging them, but rather in connecting with them, getting in touch with what makes them tick. Unfortunately, our first encounter with a script tends to produce an evaluative way of looking at the character. We need to work our way around to an empathic way of looking at the character, but that is not easy. Once the evaluative way of looking at it lodges itself in our minds, we can puncture it only with difficulty.
That's where anomaly comes in. When we read something in a script that triggers our Oh shit! circuit, we need to pay close attention to that. It's often the key to moving past the evaluative to the empathic.
In our first night of class in the Essentials class, we talk about the role of Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire. I ask everyone to imagine that they are going to play Blanche, and then I walk them through the posing of the initial questions they need to consider. One of them is the character's strengths. The initial ones that come out usually have to do with "I'm charming", "I'm insightful" "I'm clever", "I'm refined". It often takes quite a while before someone comes out with "I'm caring" or "I'm loving", and yet those strengths belong to Blanche indisputably. She cared for her dying relatives through protracted and hideous illnesses, and she feels deep remorse about her contribution to the death of Allan Grey. And Stella affirms these qualities when she defends Blanche to Stanley. These are not the aspects of Blanche that the text puts in the foreground, but they are definitely there. An actor approaching this role needs to pay attention to the clues that Blanche is not merely an unlucky charmer with a lot of education. The success of the piece depends on the actor discovering this vulnerability, that is, on noticing the anomalies that disrupt a purely evaluative view of her. It's in that disruption that vulnerability is born.
Monday, January 11, 2010
Thursday, January 07, 2010
breaking it down
Here was the request for explication:
I'm curious though as to what rules you've come up with for choosing a strong NEED (and to see an example of how it's applied to a scene). You don't have a book I could be referred to and I can't take your classes since I'm not based in the U.S., so it would be great if you're willing to share your insights to the acting community here.
I responded (I'll include my response below), and received the following response to my response, from a newcomer to the thread:
I have an MFA in acting and find your writings remarkable. Your analysis is the most concise and applicable information I have encountered and I am overwhelmed by your generosity in posting it online. Truly well done and thank you.
Naturally, it felt good to get a compliment like that. Mark Twain once said he could live for two months on a good compliment; ditto for me. Reading that compliment made me think that I should do a blog post and include the comment that elicited that compliment. I do it with a little hesitation, because this point i one of the things that makes what I teach truly distinctive, and there is a temptation to hoard it for my students only. However, I know that putting it out there will be the better choice karmically, and I hope it will make some of you consider studying with me. So here goes:
Thanks for your comments.
I once asked one of my mentors at Yale whether he would write a book, as it seemed to me that what he presented in class and in scene work was truly visionary, and the world would be the better for becoming acquainted with what he had to see. He chuckled and simply said "No." Astonished, I asked him why not. His answer was that what he was teaching couldn't be taught in a book.
I say that to frame what I am about to write. I appreciate your interest in what I have written, and so I am going to do my best to oblige you, but I am skeptical about how well I can make myself understood in this kind of format. That's only because I think to a great degree the concepts I teach have most of their meaning in the context in which they are used. But I will walk you through some things.
The first things about the underlying objective is that it is a need, not an out come. So for Blanche DuBois, arriving in New Orleans, the fact that she wants he sister and brother-in-lew to welcome her into their home, and the fact that she hopes to find a husband, are outcomes. THey are what we refer to as plot objectives. Getting Eunice to orient her and let her into Stella's apartment, once she learns Stella is not around, is also a plot objective, albeit much shorter term. But both of these things are outcomes Blanche would like to bring about. The question is: what is the need that drives her to pursue these outcomes?
It is axiomatic to this approach that there is only one need that remains the same throughout the stage-life of a figure or character(our term for a character is a "who-am-I" ). This is kind of an astonishing demand, but it is justified (and this I do not discuss with my students unless they ask) by the fact that the writer is presenting a distillation of a person, not a person in total.
Anyway, the underlying objective, which we also call the play objective, the life objective and the scene objective, are ALL THE SAME. The scene objective and the life objective are the same. They do not change. A consequence of this is that the scene objective does not change over the course of the scene. This is a crucial point. The need pursued by the actor stays constant. Plot objectives can change, but scene objective remains unchanged. In fact, the reason that we discard one plot objective and take up another (ie change course) is because the new direction promises to provide more of what is needed than the old one.
Another point is that the underlying objective has to be HOT or visceral. It can't be cerebral. I tell my students to avoid Oprah-talk like "approval, understanding, validation, support." These are really pop-psychology euphemisms for thrue needs, and it's not necessarily that they are wrong, but they won't light a fire in anyone. I tell people to try to speak in the language of the morning DJ, ie be as plain spoken as possible, to "dumb it up", not to be confused with dumbing it down.
Secondly, the thing pursued must be positive. I use what is called the dating game test. Someone proposes that Hedda Gabler's UO is "control." So I say: "Bachelorette #1, what she cares about more than anything else in the world is control. Do you want to date her?" This is a way of getting the students to recognize that they have not provided an empathic account of what the who-am-I needs when they provide an answer like "control." The UO has to be something attractive to pursue, which Stanislavsky actually says in his list of criteria in the Units and Objectives chapter in AAP. A major premise of this entire approach is that the actor's talk to herself about the role must be legitimating of what the actor will have to pursue in the role: judgmental talk has the opposite effect.
Finally, I (and my teachers) demand (and this is critical) that the UO be phrased in a particular way. This is absolutely mission-critical. The UO should be phrased EXACTLY as follows: "What I need to GET FROM the world, my life, my partner is my..."
One reason the UO needs to be phrased in this way is that the GET FROM sets up the listening or "receiving" that the character does in the scene. In each moment, the actor/character is asking for what she needs, and then checking to see whether they are getting a piece of it in a way that is TOTALLY INDEPENDENT of any and all plot outcomes. This is the most important point, and the most difficult to explain. What it does NOT mean is that what the actor is listening for at each moment is whether or not she has successfully moved an inch closer to realizing some plot objective (this is the convention conception of what it is like to pursue an objective), but whether, in that moment, in an immediate way, she has gotten a small piece of the same thing she will get a big bucket of if she gets one of her plot goals.
When I ask students to suggest an underlying objective for Blanche, they suggest many plot objectives (find a husband etc), but they also say: happiness-- begging the question, we all want happiness. but what is happiness for Blanche. That is what we are trying to say. Security-- too Oprah-ish, also fails the dating game test, in a big way. Comfort-- tempting, but also doesn't really pass the dating game test: someone who values comfort above all else seems to be selfish and lacking in aspiration or ambition. Love: we all want love, but unfortunately the word doesn't have enough teeth, by itself it is more Oprah talk.
When they pose plot objectives, I call them on proposing plot objectives, and then ask, "what will that give you?" I tell them that is the appropriate question when a plot objective arises.
One way to get to the UO is to think about what has been lost. Everyone has a past, and there are always important clues in that. Blanche has lost Belle Reve, and her place in that world as a sought-after hothouse flower of refinement and feminine bounty. These are the treasures she was born into, her birthright, her "beautiful dream", this is the source of belonging for her. So as Blanche, I can pursue my belonging, my birthright, my lost way of life. I can look for that in one way from Stella, in another way from Stanley, and in another way from Mitch. When I tell Stella about all that has happened, each moment she listens attentively, each moment she empathizes and expresses sympathy, I get a piece of my birthright, because she is according my the respect and care she owes me according to our common origin. Similarly, if she welcomes me into her life, tells me I can stay as long as I want, that I should treat the house as my own, and tells her husband to just deal with it, I get a huge bucket of my birthright. If she acts like I am being melodramatic, then she is refusing to give the losses their weight, and I lose a piece my birthright. And if she chooses Stanley the Polish proletarian over me, then I lose a colossal piece of my birthright. What I pursue in each moment independently of the plot, and what I pursue through plot objectives, are one and the same.
There is not one answer to the UO question for any character, but there are many that will not work. The ones that are "ready to hand" generally derive from the student looking at the situation from outside of it, and it is only after they have tried these ready to hand ones on for size, and seen how they fail, that they will begin to make headway towards finding one that comes from a bond between their own gut and the circumstances and language of the play.
It can also be good to try to look for bits of language that characters use to try to clinch negotiations and close deals, and make use of them. I use a two page play by John Patrick Shanley in which a character complains that he was at a "nice, silly party, about to get somewhere with a nice, silly woman" when he was dragged away by his best friend, for reasons that have yet to be explained. So the acotr might pursue "my nice-silly". Since it turns out that the character is asking not to be subjected to blid-faith tests of friendship, but rather to be taken as is, "my nice-silly" works well. Grammar can even be abused and often should be, so that someone might pursue "my fresh" or "my clean".
There is a lot more to it, particularly in understanding how the UO is to pursued from various partners, but this is at least an introduction.
I hope you enjoyed this. Let me know if you have questions in the comments and i'll do my best to respond.
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
the whole twitter thing
This is a post I sent out to my acting classes that are starting next week, describing how I'd like to integrate Twitter into the training.
If you have read through the startup post by now (and if you haven't please do ASAP :)), you know that one of the things I asked you to do is to create a Twitter account, and to let me know what your Twitter name is. I imagine that may have been a little surprising.
I thought I would write and tell you a little about where I was coming from with that, and where I am going, or perhaps where we may be going. Recently, I read a remarkable book called Here Comes Everybody, by Clay Shirky . Shirky is an eminent writer on the social implications of digital technology. This book was about the social media revolution: the changes that email, the Internet, Facebook, Myspace, youtube and Twitter have wrought on our world. I heartily recommend it; it is a fascinating and inspiring account of how the way we live now came to be, and the possibilities and dangers of that new way of living. Shirky offers anecdote after amazing anecdote illustrating the ways the new connectedness is making movements and undertakings possible that were never possible before.
Upon reading the book, I naturally began to think about how these social media practices might have an impact on how I teach my class. Around the same time, I wrote a blog piece called 15 minutes a day, describing the process I used for part of writing my dissertation in German literature at Stanford. The idea is that for most people, when they have a significant undertaking, the biggest difficulties are procrastination and the guilt that flows from procrastinating, which in turn spawns more procrastination, and a vicious cycle is set in motion. In the five years of teaching the acting class, it has become clear to me that avoidance of the work for the class during the week can be a significant problem for some people. I present a whole framework for work on a role in the class, and as inspiring as I believe what I am presenting to be, it can be overwhelming at first. The overwhelming-ness can make procrastination attractive, and then the deadlines start to loom, and it's at that point that some people make the choice to withdraw from the class. This is a disappointing outcome for all concerned, and so to attempt to head that off I wrote the "15 minutes a day" blog post, to suggest an approach that, if adopted early on, might prevent this from occurring.
The idea is that you commit to do 15 minutes of work every day on the class. No more work is required if you're not in the mood. 15 minutes is a small enough unit to take the edge of the intimidation that the magnitude of the undertaking can instill. Upon occasion, she might be drawn in by the work, and work longer than 15 minututes, but there is no obligation to do so. (The days when you get together to rehearse with your partners will clearly require some more time, but it's the alone time that tends to be the sticking point) This has the effect of defusing procrastination, keeping the actor in touch with the work on a daily basis(which tends to keep the unconscious mind chewing on it even when you are doing other things), and affirming experientially the fact that bit by bit progress can be made. All of this conspires to change the actor's relationship to his work: the work becomes a familiar, known quantity, rather than a menacing mountain to be climbed at unknown cost and consequence; that is, the work becomes domesticated, it is tamed.
So what does all of this had to do with Twitter? Well, in the class, as you will soon learn, each week I present a short "body work" component, something that takes only a couple of minutes to do a day, and helps to heighten your awareness of various parts of the body and the ways in which we are prone to carry tension in them. To support this work, you have a body work buddy who you contact when you have done your body work for the day. You email, text, or leave a voicemail messssage containing a "mantra" that I assign each week to say that you have done the body work for the day. This has the effect of reinforcing some principle we are working on in the class, through the content of the message, the mantra, for both you and your partner, but through the act of contacting each other, it also helps recall the class and the work associated with it to mind, making it less likely that the demands of daily life keep you from getting to your work. It's a gentle reminder to do the body work.
It occurred to me that we might add Twitter to the mix in the following way: I will create a Twitter List that contains the accounts of all the people in the class (and only those people). It will only be viewable by people in the class. Whenever you do some work for the class, whether it is doing some assigned reading or homework on your role or rehearsing with your partner, you can then tweet about it. This means that any day of the week, you can look at the Twitter list (perhaps when you receive the mantra from your body work partner) and see what other people in the class have been doing, what they have been working on. This, I think, would help people who feel stymied about what the next step to take is in their work. This way, they can see what their colleagues have been up to, and follow their lead or be inspired to go in a different direction. And I think everyone will be supported in their own work by the knowledge that their colleagues are staying involved with their work for the class.
People occasionally express to me disappointment that there is not more of an opportunity to interact with their classmates in the class. If all goes well, you will have a close positive working relationship with your scene partner. The opportunities to connect with others in class, though, while certainly there, are a bit limited. By tweeting with each other during the week, we will increase the sense of connectedness in the group, as well as support each other in staying close to the work. And your own social network will be that much richer upon leaving the class, which, whatever your life goals are, can only be an asset. Also, if you are not a tweeter already, you will have mastered a new form of social networking that I believe is going to be increasingly important in our society in the future.
Of course, it will require some effort from everyone to get this started, and if you don't know Twitter, it may require some courage as well. There isn't a lot to it, but anything new and foreign can require that some inertia be overcome. But I say: cmon in, the water's warm! I think it has the potential to be a great addition to the class.
My Twitter name is @actbetter. Follow me, and I'll follow you back!
FAQ
How do I create a Twitter account?
Go to twitter.com. Shouldn't take more than two minutes
What is a tweet?
A tweet is a message that you publish on Twitter. The tweet appears on the Twitter pages of those who have subscribed to your tweets ("followed" you). A tweet is limited to 140 characters.
How will I find the Twitter list for the class?
I will send you the URL in short order.
Does this mean I am going to get a bunch of annoying messages to my phone?
No. You can set up your Twitter to send updates to your phone, but that is not the default, so it won't happen unless you go to the extra effort to make it happen.
How can I find out more about Twitter?
As simple as Twitter is, there are lots of ways to amplify it and add bells and whistles. A good primer, you're interested in learning more, can be found here. No obligation though, feel free to keep your Twitter use totally bare bones, if that's what you prefer. But I hope you'll give it a try.
Monday, January 04, 2010
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