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Permalink Reply by Ria Baeck on December 22, 2011 at 11:29am

Hello Jitendra,

Wouldn't it be more inspiring to ask a question that brings participants to do it immediately - create the collective wisdom - and at the end reflect on what they just learned? instad of asking Is this possible? then you get people who say yes, other can say no and not much might happen...

And for the second question: what might be some of the factors that support us in making leaderfull groups and communities?

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Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on December 23, 2011 at 2:39pm

Thank you for your wisdom, Ria.  I agree with a couple of your points and in fact made some adjustments accordingly.  However, there is a particularly powerful issue regarding leadership and personal power that we're going to unravel a bit before we land in our collective wisdom space.

Each Occupy Heart call is designed to evoke a collective inner experience, though we do this at the end in order to anchor our journey.  We had resounding appreciation for this structure last week.  We'll see how it progresses.

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Permalink Reply by Ria Baeck on December 23, 2011 at 4:19pm

Can you say more on 'this structure' that you were using?

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Permalink Reply by Occupy Cafe Stewards on December 23, 2011 at 4:32pm

Come experience it. Words won't do.  

Process is sensitive to so many conditions and factors, you can have apparently identical structures yielding dramatically different results.  

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Permalink Reply by Ben Roberts on December 23, 2011 at 9:13pm

Here is the piece I referred to on fMRI studies and the importance of emotions in decision-making: "The Biology of Right and Wrong" in which Peter Saalfield reports on the work of Joshua Greene of Harvard.  An excerpt:

As his subjects considered these variations, they all showed increased activity in brain areas that assign emotional value to items like food and money... Moral decision-making, Greene believes, “involves a whole lot of systems in the brain that are not specifically devoted” to that task alone; his results illustrate that even when humans are considering hypothetical moral scenarios or calculating abstract probabilities, they rely to some extent on emotions for guidance.

Thus rationality, unlike “manual mode” on a camera, cannot function independently of emotion, even in people who tend to be more rational—or utilitarian—decision-makers. “Reason by itself doesn’t have any ends, or goals,” Greene says. “It can tell you what will happen if you do this or that, and whether or not A and B are consistent with each other. But it can’t make the decision for you.”

Yet even though emotions will probably always affect people’s decisions, Greene thinks their input can—and should—be minimized in certain scenarios. By learning more about the neurological mechanisms of moral decision-making, he hopes that people may one day improve the judgments they make. “I think that we are too willing to rely on our automatic settings,” he says. “Our [emotions] are there for a reason and they do a lot of good, but they also get us into trouble in situations that they weren’t designed for.”

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