In parallel with the practicing of Cognitive Edge methods my interest in music attracted me to the idea of running discos for our local play group and school. As Dave was telling his story of the children’s party I found lots of parallels with my discos which as my final guest blog I would like to share:

The starting conditions for a children’s disco depend very much on circumstance, the time of year or what they had for tea. For a primary school leavers disco they can be particularly excited and burst in on you and begin bouncing off the walls and each other. Play the wrong record at this point and you get showered with peanuts and chewy sweets. This is truly the CHAOTIC domain and I once had the (hilarious at the time) chance to share a hall with Postman Pat who got dragged across the floor and beaten by a pack of five year olds.

It is at these times I would introduce a little turbulence and control in the form of shouting for the head teacher and playing ‘Superman by Black Lace’ which although very childish, usually creates a mild pattern in everyone combing their hair and skiing to the beat.

This second quarter is I believe the COMPLEX domain, I try and read the signals from the numbers up dancing and occasionally introduce attractors such as ‘The Macarena’ or Saturday Night’ which help to create just enough order to make the trouble makers feel a little isolated.

Requests are the big problem. Kids know all the rudest and most dangerous tracks that you as the DJ must never play in a Church of England School. My trick for the third quarter of the night is to send in advance request forms to the school inviting the kids to nominate their favourite party records. This allows me to control the later stages of the night with a ‘top ten’ which controls the flow of requests (“did you put it on your request sheet”) and works as direct feedback to the crowd as they hear what their own unique preferences. You might think this would be a SIMPLE domain solution playing a list of ten requests but it takes an ‘expert’ to veto just which Slipknot, Marilyn Manson and Slim Shady tracks they can be allowed and how best to sequence them to maintain the interest of the whole crowd.

The final quarter is where it gets easy. As the parents begin to arrive there are certain records that I have played at the end of every disco so it has become part of the ritual for them all to join in with ‘Tragedy’, ‘the Grease Megamix’ and finally ‘YMCA’. Truly the SIMPLE domain, anyone could do this bit, just follow the recipe.

As for learning lessons from a negative experience, I once had a granddad collapse part way through the night and as he lay with a crowd around him, I decided the best thing was to lower the tempo and slow down the light sequencer. As the paramedics arrived I changed the record and put on ‘Candle in the Wind’ thinking that it was nice and slow and respectful. All eyes were on me as those immortal lines sang out (long before Lady Diana) about “candles burning out long before ….” It still makes me shudder with embarrassment.

Anyway its been a ball, thanks for all your comments and supportive emails, thanks to Dave et al for the opportunity and I pass on to the next guest …

Its Halloween and we just got back to Peterborough in time for our usual trick or treaters. When the kids were younger we always did the house up like the Adams family home with strobes, and candles and plenty of eery sound affects. Here is one of the few genuinely chilling stories I collected on my travels, read no further if you scare easily …

One of the nature reserves deep in the Fens can be accessed only by a long lonely track leading from the farm to the reserve. As you walk along the stony path you pass two cottages on the right hand side. These cottages are known locally as the ‘phantom cottages’ as there are certain times of the year when passers by have reported that they have been surrounded by a smell of roses at times when you would not expect to smell roses.

This track is rumoured to be the place where someone was murdered and the body left un-noticed for weeks. This gives certain more sensitive folk, a distinct feeling of unease as they walk along, with only their footsteps interrupting the peace and quiet of the area. The ex-site manager used to call this area ‘Hereward country’ as Hereward the Wake had once lived in this area. There are numerous ghostly tales associated with the area but this one is absolutely true.

One late and stormy afternoon as he was walking along the track past the phantom cottages and on through the reserve it was particularly gloomy and spooky. Storm clouds were gathering and you could hear thunder rumbling away in the distance.

Suddenly, as he neared the clearing where the old shed he called an office stood, he was aware of something as he peered into the gloom under the old yew tree. Hardly daring to give a second glance he noticed what looked to be two cowled figures dressed in what he later described as “garments from the middle ages”.

They looked like they were stooping beneath the tree and stared out into the gloom towards him. The hairs on his neck stood on end and his pace quickened as he tried to make it to the shed before these two apparitions might approach him when the smaller of the two shouted out in a quiet but perfectly understandable voice. “Have you got the keys?”

He realised that it was two of his reserve workers sheltering from the rain, waiting for five o’clock when they could go home.

Driving round Sunderland this week has brought back so many memories of my youth, none more than all the bands I used to go and see. Knowing this is the killer conversation whenever people of my age meet, I apologise in advance for such indulgence but here are a few of my recollections.

At what must have been the age of fourteen (pretty close to the boy (William) in my favourite film ‘Almost Famous’) my first ever concert was that of Black Sabbath on the Master of Reality tour at Newcastle City Hall and I remember my dad coming to pick me up and looking out for me with my long hair and dressed head to foot in faded denim and him realising that the entire audience was dressed that way.

The Sunderland Mecca every Friday night was a fantastic place, Geoff Docherty the concert promoter has written a great autobiography (A Promotors Tale) of his efforts to get us the best bands to visit us the North East.

Mott the Hoople, Nazareth, Budgie, Genesis, Groundhogs, Stray, Wishbone Ash, Wizzard, ELO, Sweet, Heavy Metal Kids

The Sensational Alex Harvey Band were particular favourites with huge cardboard cut-outs of dancing girls for the big song and dance endings and more latterly with huge polystyrene walls that Alex used to break through during Framed.

I was there for an amazing Rod Stewart and the Faces gig where most of the FA Cup winning footballers were on stage with them and John Peel the DJ that night reckoned it was his favourite gig ever.

I saw Queen five times and managed to get all the band to sign their first album cover.

Cockney Rebel, UFO, Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy, Silverhead, Uriah Heep and Iron Maiden

We used to go to Newcastle City Hall and the Mayfair regularly to see the bigger tours featuring Peter Gabriel, Roxy Music, Yes, Jethro Tull, The Tubes, Rory Gallagher, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult and Rainbow.

I was there for Deep Purple when Ian Gillan came back on stage before the encore to tell us that Sunderland had beaten Man City and were now in the 1973 FA Cup Final – priceless.

Hawkwind were a particular pivotal moment in my life as it was the first time I had seen a naked woman in the form of Stacia dancing to Silver Machine during the Space Ritual Tour.

During 1973 and 1974 a few of my friends and I formed a group with me on drums and we played the Londonderry pub twice but never got any further. Rob our vocalist now sings with Dr Feelgood and our guitarist Paul is still playing as Landermason.

In the later seventies, Docherty took on the Seaburn Hall and gave us the Vibrators and the Jam’s first ever gig up north I remember seeing Pauline from Penetration enjoying herself in the audience and feel certain this was the tipping point for her taking to the stage.

Sunderland Band – The Toy Dolls were a particular favourite and I remember a great Christmas gig in the Old 29 with Olga singing his heart out on top of a huge Marshall stack.

During the punk years The Boilermakers, a local proper workingmens CIU club, kept a lot of the old metal bands in business and we had Tygers of Pantang, Lucas Tyson, Cirkus, Becket, Son of a bitch (later to become Saxon) and Geordie with ACDC singer Brian Johnson on a regular basis.

I went on to Sunderland Polytechnic where we booked lots of big names, Tom Robinson, Screaming Lord Sutch and I particularly enjoyed Jimmy Purseys Sham 69 despite being chased away at the end by the Sham Army.

My best friend Geoff went to Newcastle Poly where we managed to get tickets for the Clash and I was tight against the front of the stage for the entire gig.

The final gigs I went to up here were T Rex, with one of Marc Bolans final gigs supported by the Damned and a couple of visits of Iggy Pop at one of which David Bowie sat side stage playing keyboards. Oh and finally I came back to see David Bowie’s awful Glass Spider Tour play at Roker Park, at the end of our Street around 1987.

“Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist, but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”

So said G. K. Chesterton in an oft used quote that supports the theory that fairy tales are an important method of patterning young minds.

I recently read the inspirational book, Soil and Soul by Alastair Mcintosh who I met at an excellent VINE – ‘Values in the Natural Environment” conference back in March earlier this year. The book is very readable and mixes ecology, sustainability and storytelling (three things now dear to my own heart) and details his successes as an activist against Corporate power. Campaigning with the residents of the Isle of Eigg as they became the first community ever to clear their laird from his own estate.

What interested me most was his explanation of how individuals who think they are working for the common good can suddenly head up a perceived and often real force for evil which ignores individuals and looks to all intents and purposes to exist only to fulfill the selfishness of the leader. Historical figures a plenty fit this description but I have seen this a number of times in recent months and its apparent ignorance of the damage it was causing has caused me great concern. Alistair says:

“What is sometimes called the ‘system’, or, more explicitly, ‘the Domination System’ then is an emergent property of ordinary human failings and commonplace darkness. the monster is created bit by bit by individuals, but its emergent properties transcend us all. This perhaps, is what our forebears meant by ‘the devil’ … The flaws in our nature that allow such emergence – that indeed make it inevitable – are so common place as to pass normally unremarked.”

He goes on to speculate that recent studies of “authoritarian personality suggest probable links between the need to dominate others and the ‘loss of soul’ in early childhood“.

In the book Alistair then explains how he became a fan of the Walter Wink approach. Walter Wink , a theology professor who came up with three ways to engage with such powers:

1. naming the powers
2. unmasking the powers
3. engaging the powers

Now I realise this is beginning to look like something out of Merlin but if you are at all interested in the details of these methods I strongly urge you to buy and read the book. Winks approach seems to boil down to the fact that such authoritarian regimes cannot tolerate dissent; it cracks their spell of consent. That is why fascist regimes have to be totalitarian, all-embracing, they have to have undivided obedience from their subjects.

I am instinctively drawn to this material as if it contains some hidden truth of which we are not aware but should be. It seems to me explainable as an attempt to dissolve the feedback mechanisms of the system at source and suck out the energy, that feeds the ‘dragon’ at the centre. Alistair believes that the ultimate challange to such systems might come from the bardic order, ie storytellers. The common task of the bard being “to get out and help to constellate (group meaningfully together) an alternate reality“.

Therein lies the paradox where storytellers need to work to remove dragons from the public conscience and not introduce them.

The venerable Bede was a constant presence in my upbringing in Sunderland, I went to Bede School and I was born a couple of hundred yards from St Peters Church (pictured above) where in 680 AD at the age of seven, Bede was entrusted to Abbot Benedict to be educated.

Only recently have I begun to appreciate how influential Bede and his work have been on all of us as he was the first to use the term AD as an historical dating device, is thought to be the ‘father of english history’ and is the only englishman in Dantes Paradise.

Bede was to me a good example of the benefits of Dave’s concept of ‘signified narrative fragments’. Bede collated narrative both written and oral of which he questioned, challenged and signified their importance and reliability. So good were his verbatim recording of these fragments that historians have since been able to piece together just what books and reference material Bede would have had available. (perhaps he might also be the father of metadada).

One interesing example relates to St Augustine who in 597 AD had written to Pope Gregory then head of the Roman Church to ask:

“why there are different customs in different churches” despite a “common faith”. Pope Gregory replies “it pleases me, that if you have found anything, either in the Roman, or the Gallican, or any other church, which may be more acceptable to Almighty God, you carefully make choice of the same, and sedulously teach the church of the English, which as yet is new”

“Choose, therefore, from every church those things that are pious, religious, and upright, and when you have, as it were, made them up into one body, let the minds of the English be accustomed thereto”

What an amazingly complex domain approach. Don’t just force the Roman version of Christianity upon the English, look at what is already there and if it works don’t try to replace it, the detail of the Church of England religion should be emergent to fit the population of England.

I find this original anecdotal fragment both heartening, because it shows that religion wasn’t being force fed with its strange and exotic rituals but instead allows for amalgamation of our holy days and festivals, and sad because the religious leaders would subsequently succumb to the evils of power and authority and try and wipe out older tradition.

Reading these original fragments gives me a very different understanding of Roman History than that written by some historians and probably helps explain the presence of the occasional green man, ancient yew tree or three hare ceiling carving that we find within our local British churches.

Arrived in Sunderland (on the north-east coast of England) to look after my Dad while the rest of the family go off on their half term holidays. I left the North-East back in 1980 because of the awful job prospects in this area after the closing of the Shipyards.

Sunderland in 1850 was the largest shipbuilding port in the world and in 1900 employed twenty thousand workers on shipbuilding related industries. Searching through my family tree almost all the males since the first census of 1841 seem to have been shipwrights or boilermakers (one was a hairdresser).

My dad was a plumber, working on and off for Sunderland Shipbuilders and various house plumbing firms but the consistent thing was that he regularly handled raw asbestos and a wide range of other dangerous chemicals. Now he has multiple myeloma and pleural plaques on his lungs. He was diagnosed early last year and almost crippled by the bone deteriation and at that time my mam became his primary carer. within six months she (a non-smoker, non-drinker) had herself been diagnosed with and in November died from lung cancer. We have no proof that this was because she washed my dads overalls that were covered in asbestos dust.

Anyway dad is in good spirits especially as Sunderland have just beaten Newcastle, our sworn enemies were it not for the fact that first my brother and now my son have found their perfect partners in black and white shirt wearing girls.

I am looking forward to a week of exploring old haunts, visiting relatives who might give me more clues towards my family tree (last time my Aunty hinted that a number of children were not of their legal fathers thanks to a very naughty great uncle) and wallking along the Roker beach breathing in the wonderful bracing air direct from the North Sea.

Sunderland folk are now more often referred to as ‘mackems (and tackems)’ mainly because that is how we pronounce make and take which is a clear difference in pronounciation from that of ‘geordies’ who say it more like mayke and tayke. This was then said to be because we mack the ships and you tack them away.

I mustn’t take too long posting this blog as my dad doesn’t have broadband and so I am piggybacking on generous neighbours who have unsecured networks and who might go to bed and switch me off at any minute. Oh and the game is now on Match of the Day.

The clocks go back tonight in the UK so the evenings will get dark earlier as we leave British Summer time so it is an extra hour in bed tonight.

The first little neural correlate deserves a hat tip to PsyBlog for linking to an interesting and very relevant piece of neuroscience research originally reported in Science Magazine dated 3 October 2008

Hagar Gelbard-Sagiv et al report that as we experience anything memorable, the storage of the memory of that event can be monitored as the firing of specific neurons. When asked to recall that event those identical neurons fire.

Now this may not strike you as important but it has previously only shown to be theoretically true. The relevance of this for me is that when running a ‘future backwards’ session we disrupt linear thinking. This allows each memory of an event or decision to fire independently and allow the individual or group to re-experience it as if it was happening now. Feelings and associated emotions will all re-emerge allowing a true recollection and self-realisation of the event in relation to today.

The second little neural correlate is that as the individual retells the event from their perspective it is an anecdotal fragment in the first person form – the perfect story form for empathy, storage and subsequent recall in memory.

And the third little neural correlate is the slightly older study of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirror_neuron”>mirror neurons wich enable us to imagine ourselves in the shoes of the person recalling the event as if we were having that experience ourselves.

So there you have it three little but killer reasons why future backwards is my favourite Cognitive Edge method and I didn’t even mention oxytocin or police interviewing suspects, perhaps I’ll save that for my final blog next week.

I have for a long time been a fan of the Riverford Farm and its organic veg boxes (source of my BatMilk story) which has led to a franchisee called Rivernene Farm which now supplies the Peterborough area where I live. What interested me most was the way that alongside the sumptious box of vegetables we receive every week is a leaflet containing recipes and the latest news from the farm. Now these are simply anecdotal fragments in Cognitive Edge terminology, but over time they give a genuine understanding of the problems and pride our local growers are facing. So much so I have begun to feel a real connection with the local farm, its landscape and its produce. I so like and encourage the idea that farmers should be telling us of the environmental benefits, a job traditionally done by the environmental organisations, but they are doing it locally and on a weekly basis.

One amusing story of emergence recently concerns the ripening sweetcorn crop. It turns out that the local badger populations first at Riverford (back in 2005) and now in Rivernene (2008) cannot get enough of the organic sweetcorn and not only do they devour as much as they can eat but seem to have a bit of a party and a rave in the process. An “orgy of consumption” is how they describe it. A very recent newsletter from the Rivernene Farm suggests that the only way to prevent this is to nip it in the bud before any badger gets a taste of the succulent corn for once they do they will repeatedly come back for more and despite huge electric fences they will tunnel in Colditz style to get have a corn rave.

Something vibrant and visual to cheer you up. I stumbled upon this prototype of a Flickr search engine called Hive Mind. Take a look at the results when you search for ‘fractal’