🎲✨The Nexialist #0072

Buy me a Coffee | Randomizing Your Research | Randomized Life | Reading a Scientific Paper | Grounded Theory | Heptabase | Mercurial | Age of Anxiety | Why Do We Dream?

Welcome to the most random list of serendipitous content of your week, The Nexialist.

So, after months of inner debate, this guy who writes you this newsletter is doing something out of his comfort zone: I decided to create a Buy Me a Coffee account. If you’re not familiar with this platform, it’s a way for creators to get some financial support from their communities. I do not have plans to make The Nexialist newsletter something paid, so I thought this would be a nice way to open this possibility for you to contribute if you feel like it, let’s say something I brought here helped you immensely to solve something. Look at it as a token (not crypto) of gratitude for the lovely crafted content you get in your inbox every Thursday. You can contribute just one time with one (or more) coffees —starting at 3€— or pay a monthly subscription for 7€.

If you can’t contribute financially, don’t worry, you can help The Nexialist grow in other ways: share the newsletter with other people, with your friends, family, in your company, in your WhatsApp groups, or invite me for paid projects with your company/organization/collective (more about that at the very end of the newsletter). But for now, thank you for sticking around and helping me grow this thing. Enjoy this week’s (not-so-random) selection:

1 year ago » The Nexialist #0021: Quicky Nexialist | Quiet Storm | Future of Sex | Sex in Space | Vintage Flirt | Gaudí | Weird Dreams | Amish Tech | Planning Toolbox | Future Laboratory and Decolonizing Foresight

🎲Randomizing Your Research

Marie-Michèle Larivée’s Trendsletter always has helpful and inspiring pieces of knowledge. This time, the topic synchronized with something I was looking for: how to hack my research process and burst the invisible algorithm bubbles I’m in. She brought a list of suggestions and reminders (go there to see more):

Alternate the types of resources with online and offline content.

Diversify the type of sources: collecting while reading the newspaper or an academic journal, having a conversation with friends, an expert, a family member, listening, people watching, etc... etc..

Make the conscious random choice that might mean putting yourself in an odd position to join a random event you wouldn't go to normally or something else.

For online research: Change browser sometimes (often), using an alternative search engines, and take a friend’s account into account.

🗺Randomized Life

Max Hawkins was the inspiration for Marie’s newsletter on Randomizing Research, so I went to look him up. This guy developed tools to randomize his life: from his meals to events, even tattoos, or choosing the next place to live as a nomad. His website gives you access to some of these tools. Below is a quote from his TED Talk:

Paradoxically, giving up control to this machine actually made me feel more free than when I was making choices. Because I discovered that my preference had blinded me from the complexity and the richness of the world. And following the computer, gave me the courage to live outside of my comfort zone. To discover parts of the human experience that I’d ignored because they were too different or not for me.

🧠Reading a Scientific Paper

Some time ago I put my fear aside and learned an important skill: reading scientific papers. I studied to be a communicator, more specifically to work in the Advertising Industry. Now I see that my education was not at all directed at academia but it was preparing me for the industry.

A mass of knowledge is available in scientific papers, and many (i not most) of them are made available online, but many of us are still scared or lazy to read them. When working for Envisioning, we always had to look beyond the hype about the emerging technologies we were looking at, and the best way was to actually find papers and read through them. Especially because we had to get technical in some of those technology descriptions. This post goes into the intimate reading method of different people and helped me learn how to find my own way of doing it.

Read: How to (Seriously) Read a Scientific Paper - Elisabeth Pain | Science

⛳️Grounded Theory

Months ago I wrote on a beige post-it: Grounded Theory. I think I heard it on an episode of Brené Brown’s Podcast. The post-it ended up in a drawer (as they sometimes do). Then it resurfaced on my desk last week and decided to look it up. To my surprise, this led me to a whole Youtube channel from the University of Amsterdam from 5-6 years ago about research methods and statistics. Also, Dr Moerman is so excited about the topic that I watched the whole thing and saved the channel to explore later.

🐙Heptabase

Gustavo sent me this link a few weeks back and I’m so impressed. A tool that helps collect notes, organize and visualize them, and then make sense of them. Their slogan is: “A note-taking tool for visual learning. Make sense of complex topics.” Looks to me like a mix of Evernote, with the organization of No.tion and visualization of mindmaps. I haven’t used it yet, but I’m definitely interested.

☿Mercurial

On The Nexialist #64, I shared Magdalena Bay’s new and delicious album with you, Mercurial World. On Monday, Merriam Webster’s word of the day was Mercurial, which I actually did not know the meaning of and it also relates to randomizing, but in this case, moods.

1: of, relating to, or born under the planet Mercury

2: having qualities of eloquence, ingenuity, or thievishness attributed to the god Mercury or to the influence of the planet Mercury

3: characterized by rapid and unpredictable changeableness of mood // a mercurial temper

4: of, relating to, containing, or caused by mercury

Also, I’m a Gemini (my birthday is coming soon!) and Mercury is Gemini’s ruling planet, so maybe that explains the stereotyped instability of our moods.

Recently, I also learned in some parts of Brazil you can say someone is Aluado, roughly translated to “enmooned” or someone who changes their mood according to the moon (or a bit crazy, lunatic). It got me thinking about how before algorithmic times, celestial objects were/could be considered our “mood randomizers.”

👁Age of Anxiety

Apart from such a beautiful album cover, I am impressed with Arcade Fire’s new album, WE. Starting with the odd format of the album, with some tracks in two parts and Interludes, along with curious track names: Age of Anxiety I, Age of Anxiety II (Rabbit Hole).... The album feels like a sci-fi book of short stories (which I love), made to be appreciated with no distractions. Take a look at the lyrics for End of the Empire I-IV:

Midway through life (unsubscribe)

Virgil said, "Let's take a ride" (unsubscribe)

You'll need a divine guide (ain't no way of life)

'Cause this inferno's hyperdrive (don't believe the hype)

And the dreams in your head

The algorithm prescribed

Do you feel alright?

💭Why Do We Dream?

Exactly one year ago, I brought a new post from The Guardian: “AI inspires hypothesis that sleeping human brain might try to break its overfamiliarity with daily data.” Yes… Our brain could be taking the role of randomizing our boring lives by making our dreams super weird. In this video from “It’s Ok to be Smart,” Jon shares some theories on Why do We Dream? Below, two theories:

-Threat-Simulation Theory: dreams (or nightmares) helps us practice for dangerous situations in a safe environment.

-Social Simulation Theory: as a social species we can practice social situations (going naked to school, anyone?)

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🔌Let’s Collab?

I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist. 

I offer inspiration sessions, called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other Bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below: