Seven ± Two

A recent article in Wired about the possible long-term effect of the internet on our brains reminded me of the concept of cognitive load: -

The depth of our intelligence hinges on our ability to transfer information from working memory, the scratch pad of consciousness, to long-term memory, the mind’s filing system. When facts and experiences enter our long-term memory, we are able to weave them into the complex ideas that give richness to our thought. But the passage from working memory to long-term memory also forms a bottleneck in our brain. Whereas long-term memory has an almost unlimited capacity, working memory can hold only a relatively small amount of information at a time.

Most of us know cognitive load theory as 'Seven ± Two'; the idea that we can really only hold between five and nine chunks of information in our short-term memory at one time, that our RAM is limited to that many memory slots.

So how might Seven ± Two relate to creativity and performance?

Every improviser knows the discipline of 'clearing the mind' ahead of a show.  If two or three of your seven memory slots are occupied before you hit the stage then you are, by definition, 'preoccupied'.  I would say that all acts of creativity require a similar understanding.  If writing comedy is all about jamming together seemingly dissonant ideas then a preoccupied mind is always going to inhibit the process.  Whatever it takes for you to clear your mind is what you need to do.

But sometime our cognitive load can't be cleared by a mere act of will or a routine of breathing exercises.  Sometimes those 7±2 memory slots are preoccupied by something bigger than ourselves.  Something like grief or dread or hope or joy.

In which case all we can do is recognise that this is the case and try again later.

A correction

Watts emailed to say that his last post confused Richard Eyre and Nicholas Hynter and I repeated this mistake without checking.

However, his argument remains unchanged.  As does my response.

More thoughts on collaboration

It was a sure bet that Andrew Watts would take exception to my entry on the lack of collaboration in the stand-up milieu: -

It's different from other art forms because your collaborator will have a different function - Alan Bennett talks about how productive his relationship with Richard Eyre is - but there it's because Eyre is, as a director, coming at each script from a different angle to the writer.  But in stand-up, there is a direct relationship between you and the audience; and any collaborator will feel like a third party in a marriage.

Andrew is wrong-headed here (knowing him, perhaps deliberately so); he confuses the roles within a collaborative arrangement with its overall intent and he knows that a raving* of comics riffing off each others' bon mots in the pub is not the actual work of writing


I think that the real reason that so few stand-up comics can effectively write for another is a lack of personal vision (or 'voice').  No writer can collaborate with a performer who lacks the discipline to reject a joke, no matter how good, on the grounds that it isn't right for his or her act.  Occasionally I've been asked to direct a comic who hasn't yet got this voice / vision thing right and the project has quickly fallen apart.  Conversely the few times I've been lucky enough to direct comics who have artistic certainty the resulting shows have been great.


Interestingly, it's about the time that a good comic finds a voice that he or she begins to attract a fan base.  There is a consistency to Stewart Lee's left-of-centre political material that sets him apart from Tim Vine's manic punnery.  Fans will pay more and travel further to get what they want from either act than for a night of 'voiceless' acts no matter how funny.

Sadly, my own set is still a mishmash of personal anecdotes, cleverish observations, puns and so on.  Charitably you'd say that I'm still finding my voice.  Until then collaboration would be counterproductive so my ideas won't coming around Devizes to beat Watts' at sport any time soon.

***

I can't resist mentioning the comparison that has been made between the Bennett / Ayres collaboration with that of the playwright Anton Chekov and the director Constantin Stanislavsky.  Until he joined the Moscow Art Theatre Chekov was convinced that The Seagull was a comedy

* My suggestion for the collective noun

Idea sex

"What I need," said Andrew Watts, "is a gang."

One of the obvious challenges of stand-up comedy is its single-handedness.  You write alone, perform alone, succeed alone and die alone.  This fosters a natural tendency for solipsism.  Stand-up comics are far more likely to see others as rivals than do improvisers or comic actors working in, say, sketch comedy.  I wonder how much this strange individualism hurts stand-up as a form.

In an essay in the Wall Street Journal Matt Ridley posits that human development accelerated not because of any physiological change in our bodies (Neanderthals had physcially larger brains than we do now) but because of trade.  The exchange of ideas that happened synchronously with the exchange of goods and services created the collective brain that has taken us from the Serengeti to cyberspace.  Ridley sees 'ideas having sex' as the basis for innovation: -

Dense populations don't produce innovation in other species. They only do so in human beings, because only human beings indulge in regular exchange of different items among unrelated, unmated individuals and even among strangers. So here is the answer to the puzzle of human takeoff. It was caused by the invention of a collective brain itself made possible by the invention of exchange. 

The life of a stand-up comic stands in direct opposition to this idea.

Much of this isolationism is self-inflicted (the circuit is overpopulated by socially dysfunctional loners) but there is a cultural insistence in operation as well; one of the few absolute taboos in the industry is joke theft.   Recently Freakonomics ran a terrific piece on this: -

More often than not, however, the norms deviate from copyright: for example, copyright protects expression but not ideas, but comedians’ norms protect expression as well as ideas. Or authorship: under copyright law, two individuals who cooperate in creating a work are considered joint owners of the work. In contrast, if one comedian comes up with a joke’s premise and another thinks up the punchline, under comedians’ norms of ownership the first owns the joke and the latter has nothing.

The essay goes on to say: -

The law is not always necessary to foster creativity. Using informal group norms and sanctions, comedians are able to control joke-stealing. Without the intervention of copyright law, comedians are able to assert ownership of jokes, regulate their use and transfer, impose sanctions on joke-thieves, and maintain substantial incentives to invest in new material.

I'm not sure that I agree with this.  Gaining a reputation for stealing someone else's material (and it is considered theft) can kill a career so many comics deliberately avoid exposure to other comedy forms for fear that any exposure could contaminate their material.  The only defense against an accusation of joke thievery is "I came up with it independently" and this is partially effective at best.  In no way am I condoning joke theft; simply observing that this enforced isolationism that is a reaction to this fear has a downside.

Comedians, playwrights and novelists still live with a romanticised creator-as-auteur notion that is outdated as it excludes the possibility for collaboration and therefore stymies innovation.  The accusation of collaboration or worse hangs permanently over Shakespeare.  Yet collaboration has been de rigueur  in other comedy forms since long before the writers' room on Sid Caesar's show and the Second City technique of writing down and refining sketches that were originally improvised.

The rest of the world collaborates.  The idea of the scientist as solo genius died with the Manhattan Project.  Creative conferences like MaxFunCon and SWSX abound and multiply. yet when stand-up comedians gather there is a miasma of jealousy, envy and paranoia.  A common criticism of stand-ups when they join writers' rooms is that they don't play nicely with others.  In Ridley's terms they don't like their ideas having sex with other people's ideas.

Strange, as this is the only sex many comics are likely to get.

Cutting what?

The world's press is full of dark forebodings about the scale of the reductions to be made by every responsible economy in public service spending.  Here in Britain the broadsheets and tabloids alike are gleefully full of hyperventilating predictions of 'swingeing cuts'.

The UK has to find something like £170,000,000,000 in savings in the coming years. The rhetorical game for the politicians is to frame a 'cut' as an abstract necessity rather than as the loss of someone's job, which is what it usually amounts to.

On a long drive over the Bank Holiday weekend I listened to a Merlin Mann podcast which had a topic like 'Finding More Creative Time', a perennial favourite with the GTD crowd.  Part of Mann's argument was the need to combat the pernicious nature of a 'meetings culture'.  We're all aware of the effect that meetings, especially the compulsory yet unagendaed, standing (ie automatically recurring) kind have on morale and also productivity.  He rightfully points out that the most effective, most creative teams tend to have the fewest formal meetings.

How much time do public servants spend in meetings?  The excellent blogs of Winston Smith  (assisted housing), Frank Chalk (teaching) and David Copperfield (policing) each critique the British public service environment from the vantage point of front-line services.  Time 'wasted' in meetings is a consistent complaint in all three.  Meetings mean that less gets done.  That front-line staff hate meetings as much as bureaucrats and consultants thrive on them is all you need to know.

So consider this: -

Every untaken team building away day, additional-yet compulsory-diversity training session or off-site OH&S refresher represents a potential cost saving, perhaps even a retrenchment avoided

If we're having to do more with less then surely we can start by getting more from the people we currently hire*.  A crackdown on useless meetings would have the same fiscal effect as a freeze on new hires. 

My business is based on face-to-face delivery so a total ban on meetings would kill me.  What Mann is really stressing is ensuring that meeting time is seen as a scarce resource.  I work on a rule of thumb that the opportunity cost of putting one salesperson in a room with me for a day is  £900 per representative.  I doubt that too many public servants have the same reason to pause before blocking out colleagues' diary-time via MS-Outlook.

* The flaw in the argument might be that there is less incentive to reward productivity in the public sector.  If less meetings in a hospital = more productive nurses = less nurses.  That the hospital saves money is cold comfort to the staff deemed surplus to requirement