Rapid cognition and Ben Hull

As I mentioned in a previous entry, I was in the airport at the weekend attempting to fly to the UK. I won't go through the whole saga again, you can read the previous posting to see what happened.

At one point during the saga, our plane had to return to the terminal due to a recurring technical fault. The pilot's voice came over the public address system to say that an identical plane was parked next to where we would arrive and there would therefore be a straight swap of passengers and luggage between the two planes.

Simple enough except as almost always happens at times like these, people herd together like sheep near a cliff, each uncertain of what exactly is happening and where exactly they should walk. In any event we walked into the terminal building and headed for gate A4, as stated by the pilot and aircrew as we were leaving the defective aircraft.

As we arrived at gate A4 it was clear that nobody was manning the gate and people were without the most basic information, such as what time the flight would leave, what happens when you have a connecting flight that you will likely miss and so on.

I was standing there with 2 colleagues when I heard this male voice behind me. "Excuse me sir, are you on the London flight?". Sir? The last time anyone called me "Sir" was in Atlanta almost 5 years ago. Aside from that it was an English accent, definitely an English accent.

I turned around and there facing me was a face I recognised for sure. I knew his face from many years before. He was an actor on UK television and I remembered that he had starred in a fairly non-event of a TV series called Hollyoaks. I could not for the life of me recollect his name, nor was I sure I ever knew his name in the first place. Either way I did recognise him.

A little voice in my head, maybe in the brain room (for fans of The Numskulls) was shouting "that's that bloke from Hollyoaks" and I was genuinely excited for some bizarre reason. I remember having the same feeling many years ago when walking along the pavement on St. Stephen's Green in Dublin and realising that Billy Connolly was walking right in front of me. Come to think of it I'm the sort of person that is constantly scanning the throng where I stand so that if there is one famous face in a million I'm likely to see that face.

Anyway, I caught myself getting a little excited and told myself to be careful not to look too excited or impressed. In fact I think what I told myself was to look like I had no clue who he was.

Either way I don't think I did much of a job of feigning it. It was only moments afterwards after I had explained what the situation was with the flight and he had gone back to sit with his girlfriend that I realised that he knew I knew who he was. I started thinking about the work of Paul Ekman and how his ideas are presented in Gladwell's "Blink!". The idea that you think the thought first and it then appears on your face was well and truly put to bed in that book. It was made abundantly clear that it appears on the face first and then is processed on a conscious level.

I got back from the UK last night and just had to find out this guy's name. I'm not really sure why, well in fact I am sure why but it's beyond the realm of this current posting. Anyhow his name is Ben Hull (sounds like his parents were Charlton Heston fans with a sense of humour) and he was indeed in Hollyoaks for maybe 6 years. He's now starring in some other programme about Doctors, or the Police or something of consequence on UK television.

I'm certain that Ben Hull knew the moment he saw my face that I recognised him. I'm equally sure that his expression to me was along the lines of "do you know what.. forget it mate".

Rapid cognition is powerful when you tap into it and annoying when you forget about it. By-and-large we humans are pretty awful at faking it.

Things you don't want to hear at 30,000 feet

I've never been on a plane that has "developed a technical fault". It's just not a nice expression. It's right up there with your doctor saying "we've found a growth". It's just not good news.

So, I was on the way to the UK two days ago on what should have been a very short flight, maximum 50 minutes. Everyone had boarded and the flight attendants had gone through the safety drill. Let me re-live the scene again.

We taxi out to the runway and straighten up. The engine noise increases as we gain speed and everyone braces themselves for the impending thrust. All of a sudden the ground outside is not moving as quickly as before and I realise we are slowing down. The noise drops to a more moderate level and the captain is telling us "folks, we've developed a technical problem so we're on our way back to the stand".

40 minutes later the captain is telling us that the maintenance people have "come up with a fix" and that we should be on our way soon. I have a vision of a maintenance guy holding up a piece of sticky tape and saying to his buddy "yeah, that should do the trick". At this stage people in the plane are surely wondering what exactly was wrong and are wrestling with the internal conflict between "I wish they would tell me what exactly is wrong" and "I'd rather not know".

We taxi again, we wait and wait some more for a slot to allow us to take off and then we're airborne. Only this time we're in the air about 25 minutes when the captain's voice comes over the PA system to say "folks it looks like the technical problem has occurred again - we're going to have to return to have it looked at". So we don't carry on, we go back.

Now nobody is saying anything but some people are definitely worried. Is this a slight problem or a serious problem? Will we be able to land? Needless to say the fact that you're reading this means that we landed OK and I made it eventually to my destination in the UK.

Times like these allow us to glimpse once again how vulnerable we really are when it comes to chance. Up at 31,000 feet and cruising at 500 miles per hour in a 300 ton metal box, the words "slight technical fault" are about as welcome as "forgot to pressurise the cabin" or "one of the engines is hanging off". Somehow we cope and we know that what will be will be - irrespective of what we do.

5 billion years to extinction.. but don't worry

I was reading just the other day how the sun is just this massive ball of gas, made up of hydrogen and helium among other things. It seems that the sun pretty much just operates a perpetual process of nuclear fission, converting hydrogen into helium and pretty much destroying itself for the long term.


The book said that the sun had used up half of its supplies of hydrogen over the past 5 billion years and that it has just 5 billion more years of hydrogen left before it fizzles out and ceases to exist as we know it.

That got me thinking about putting too much store into things like long-range planning, and saving money. I was thinking about my kids and their future kids and so on.

Then I thought about just how far away 5 billion years is, and I thought about how man has evolved so incredibly in far less time than that. At this stage I'm feeling more relaxed about the whole thing knowing that we will surely have evolved into something unreconisable from today, or ceased to exist.

So either way there's not much to worry about.

Who ever decided that supermodels were super?

Maybe it's a sign of the times but it seems to me that we're finally and conclusively starting to lose interest in faux-celebrity. Sure there are still plenty of new attempts to rekindle our interest in celebrities, Big Brother 42, Celebrity Convent and so on. These are all desperate acts aimed at encouraging us to cling on to the vacuous interest we have had in non-entity D-List nobodies.

Maybe the best example of this is the decline of the supermodel. I mean seriously, why were they ever super. Wasn't it one of these supermodels who once famously said "I don't get out of bed for less than 10,000 a day" or something along those lines.

We were spun a line that somehow not only was the act of walking up and down in a frock in front of tiresome people of pivotal importance to society, it was crucial in terms of setting a benchmark for achievement for ladies everywhere. Correct me if I'm wrong but I think I'm safe in saying that there are no really famous male supermodels. That's right, that bloke Fabio is definitely not a supermodel in my book.

Supermodels were briefly front and centre, much like a natural disaster or an outbreak of the winter vomiting bug and then gone again, just like Chesney Hawkes, reduced to performing for £20 a head (including light buffet) for anyone interested in a bit of pop with their garlic bread and cocktail sausage.

Thankfully we seem to have realised, albeit belatedly, that these people are not really doing anything of any real importance. For sure they have nice hair and nice skin and for sure they can change outfit multiple times in an hour but that's about the height of it.

Some have tried to stay current, by befriending pseudo-rockstar boyfriends and making all kinds of overt mistakes and comments in the public eye. Others meanwhile have just simply grown old.

And therein lies the point about supermodels. They are a bit like milk. Fantastic when fresh and useless when old. How ironic that some even featured in the "Got Milk?" campaign.

Somebody somewhere is scratching their head and wondering who or what can take their place. I'm not worried about it.

The pharmacy dance

I have had a bad cough for some time now. I reckon all in all I've had it for nearly 3 weeks. I gave in today and agreed to go and see the company doctor. He had a quick listen to my lungs and said that although he couldn't find much trace of anything it was unusual that I had the cough for so long and wrote me a prescription for some anti-biotic pills.

I dropped into the pharmacy on the way home and there was a load of people all there waiting for prescriptions to be fulfilled, if that is indeed what the pharmacist does with one's prescription.

Anyway there was clearly a bunch of bad stuff going around for there to be 4 or 5 people all there handing in prescriptions at the same time. I drifted over to the right of the pharmacy to check out the multi-vitamins. At this stage I spotted another customer drift to the left to check out the dental products, while another drifted to the back left to look at hair care products.

Then in some kind of beautiful unison the dental-browsing guy drifted towards me, I instantly drifted to the back-left of the shop and the former-haircare-browser moved to occupy the vacant area next to the dental products.


It was a kind of spontaeous human osmosis, as we all drifted silently to maintain the sanctity of each others' personal space.

Isn't this an amazing phenomenon. We don't have to say it but we all know when we need to move on because someone else wants to occupy the little bit of the solar system we currently occupy.

I think there must be a limbic communication going on, a kind-of "any chance we could swap?" communication between our brains outside of our conscious thought.

I got the pills and went home, taking two with water twice daily at regular intervals.

So much time, so little to do... The wisdom of Willy Wonka

If you have ever seen the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory you may have spotted that Willy Wonka says on at least 2 occasions in the film "hurry, hurry - we have so much time and so little to do.. no wait! reverse that".

Isn't that an interesting confusion. Loads of us wake up in the morning without much idea of what we will do today, pretty much living along the lines of "so much time and so little to do".

At the same time, we all know that time in this life is just about the most precious commodity, certainly more precious than oil, gold or plain old currency. If we know time is precious then surely we should be living by the Wonka notion of hurrying to do the things we need to do.

What am I blathering on about?

Well I was driving along in the car yesterday and listening to a podcast by David Maister (link) and he was talking about earning trust with clients. As I listened I thought that this was fantastic information that he was sharing, but then I realised that very very few people were ever really likely to benefit from his wisdom.

Why?

Simply put people are busy finding daft things to do to fill up their day because they have so much time and so little of real importance to do.

Isn't this mad?

I began to wonder whether it will be possible for me to continue to learn indefinitely and I've pretty much decided I can. I'm priming my brain with all kinds of insights from any and everywhere because it just seems that this is a good way of doing so much with so little time.

I have to admit that this makes me feel like I'm making good use of the limited time I have on Earth to make an impact. I certainly won't be able to do that if I'm at home watching reality-TV.