Author Archives: teddiecooke

Bitcoin is undoubtedly a magnificent crypto-asset, but how does it stack up to peak experiences in lived life, in its overall value?

Does the moral choice to enjoy possession of bitcoin survive consideration of the alternative possibility of creating a spherical concert hall, for example?

Though I’m very long on bitcoin (which is already at c. $50k), and therefore tempted to hoard my stash till my dying days, I am also long on the value of human experience, which I think of as the essence of the value of our miraculous existence.

This presents a specific practical question: what should I do, hoard my bitcoin or turn it into magical experiences in a spherical concert hall?

In this post I set out to decide. I’m assuming you know all about Bitcoin, so I’ll focus mainly on describing what a spherical concert hall is, on the basis of the only example that yet existed, before comparing the relative value of owning a Bitcoin vs such a concert hall.

Part 1: The short, glorious history of the Kugelauditorium

The so-called Kugelauditorium was a spherical concert hall built by architect Fritz Bornemann after a musical concept from electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen for the West German pavilion at the astonishing Osaka 1970 world fair. It charmed half a million people in its brief existence, but has not been re-attempted since.

Design of the structure

The basic idea of the ‘Kugelauditorium’ was, in Stockhausen’s own words, to create “a spherical chamber, with a platform, transparent to both light and sound, hung for the listeners. They could hear music coming from above, from below and from all directions.”

3D sound arrangements

Concretely, this was accomplished with a huge spherical Buckminster Fuller Dome, in which a raised platform, transparent to sound, sat up to 500 people roughly in the middle of the sphere. A total of fifty sets of loudspeakers arranged in 7 rings allowed sound to be played from any point in 3-Dimensional space. You can see how it was wired above.

Stockhausen is pictured above standing at the sound desk, where he could control the position and trajectories of up to ten individual sound channels, using either a ten-channel rotation mill made to Stockhausen’s spec or instead a spherical controller designed by Fritz Winckel of the Electronic Music Studio at the Technical University of Berlin .

Manipulating the sounds

The Kugelauditorium was something between a concert hall and a new musical instrument, and enabled the invention of a new, completely 3-Dimensional form of audiovisual music, one in which the content of the musical sounds and their spatial paths, accompanied by light trails, were composed together, to produce dynamic structured murmurations of enshrouding audiovisual sound.

Audi-visual music

Though I haven’t been able to learn so much about the visual component of the Kugelaudtorium, it’s clear that the visual environment was as much a part of the music as the auditory one. Below you can see the auditorium in a state of darkness. Just imagine all the different motifs of lights-sounds flying around the interior. Just imagine how much easier and better this could be done with today’s electronics and software!

A note on audiovisual interactions in perception

Work over more than a century in multisensory integration in humans has detailed the many ways in which sight and sound interact, and their different specialities for perception. For example, sound has much high temporal resolution than vision. Three bleeps played simultaneously with two flashes of light can lead to a visual experience of three flashes, as sound dominates vision in matters of time. Spatially, though, vision is more precise than hearing, so when you see a flash in space played at the same time as a bleep, the perceived position of the bleep will be pulled towards the sound in experience.

This suggests that an experience of location in space much more precise than the spatial resolution of human sound perception can be accomplished by addition of correlated light- an extraordinary possibility.

Compositions in spherical music

Stockhausen, Zimmerman and Blacher among others composed extraordinary new compositions for this unique space.

Sadly it is of course impossible to re-experience this music till we build another such space.

What happened to the Kugelauditorium?

Vastly ambitious for 1970, Stockhausen’s Kugelauditorium rocked the Osaka world fair, and enjoyed more than half a million visitors.

The project was however beset by technical, social and financial issues, and never made it back to Germany, where it had been constructed; instead, it fell into ruin, and in the fifty years since its heyday no further attempts have been made to create such a spherical concert hall.

Overall, it seems to me to be a first attempt at a potentially outstanding genre of musical experience. Is there any town or festival in the world that wouldn’t appreciate the play of a contemporary version of this instrument? Is there a composer who wouldn’t light up at the chance of creating for this medium (assuming the right tools). Is there a festival goer who wouldn’t love to chill to whatever, say, Nils Frahm or Jean-Michel Jarre could cook up? It seems unlikely.

It’s thought provoking indeed to look at some of Jarre’s audiovisual work, for example this from Notre-Dame cathedral:

Part 2: Financial vs experiential capital

There’s a serious question that all of us implicitly answer through the living of our lives, that is much more general than the one I’m posing here, which is roughly: to what extent should we value experiences over things? Or alternatively, what is the relative value of financial vs experiential capital?

There are many ways we can come at this question, and I’d be very interested to hear other frameworks. But given the (perhaps illegitimately binary) choice: which would you rather possess, some bitcoin or a spherical concert hall, I come at it by thinking of which of how the two rank in terms of their uniqueness, perceptibility and generosity.

Implicitly, I’m saying that we should optimise in this world for these three elements.

a) Scarcity of bitcoin vs spherical concert halls:

There are 21 million Bitcoin VS zero spherical concert halls.

On this front, it’s clear the concert hall wins. There have been zero examples of this form of Being in the last fifty years, whereas 18 million bitcoin have already been mined, even if no more than 21 million ever will.

Overall, though, the world is awash with Bitcoin but entirely lacks any spherical concert halls.

So the spherical concert hall clearly wins here.

b) Perceptibility of bitcoin vs spherical concert halls:

Perceptibility is important, because all consciousness derives from perception (cf Merleau-Ponty).

Bitcoin actually put a heavy weight on perception – albeit indirectly. So bitcoin owners ten frequently to Google the price of their asset, and look yearningly at the prices from half a decade ago etc. These experiences are of low quality, linking mainly to avarice, and not challenging or inspiring the perceptual systems.

The Kugelauditorium, by contrast, is perhaps the greatest object of perception invented in the 20th century: challenging, bending and stimulating the senses in astonishing, transformational ways.

Again, the spherical concert hall wins.

c) Generosity of bitcoin vs spherical concert halls:

While Bitcoin can in principle be given away, its sky-rocketing value disincentivizes spending it, let alone donating it. Meanwhile, sadly, your bitcoins make your friends unhappy as they all wish they had this chancey asset to their person instead of you. Their lives are diminished by your luck.

Bitcoin is, then, a zero sum game, at the individual level. If you own a bitcoin, that means that somebody else doesn’t. It is at best non-generous, and at worst an act of avarice, to actually own one.

By contrast, everyone will obviously want to hang out in your Kugelauditorium. It is by nature a shared social space that purveys to its occupants riches from the outer frontiers of what is experientially possible in the human mind. It is inherently a generous concept.

One might also consider electricity consumption. The total bitcoin network usage is as much as 121 terra-watt-hours. If we divide this equally between the c. 18 million bitcoin in existence, each existent bitcoin consumes roughly as much energy as a house in the US (7 MWhrs).

This is quite ungenerous to a struggling planet. But the energy consumption of future Kugelauditoria may be similar, so on this sub-point it is a draw.

But overall Kugelauditoria are inherently much more generous.

Conclusion

Looked at through these lenses, it’s better to own a spherical concert hall than Bitcoin. I have therefore liquidated by Bitcoin holdings to fund the creation of a second Kugelauditorium.

The task of creating the second Kugelauditorium with contemporary materials, electronics and software is spine-tinglingly laden with possibility. It should be orders of magnitude easier, cheaper and more elaborable building a spherical concert hall now than it was 50 years ago. I expect that we may be able to create something relatively astonishing.

Since I have no idea how to build anything, I have created this form for anyone who wishes to help.

The main areas where we can anticipate the need for help to begin with are:

• Design / construction of geodesic dome
• Rigging of speakers and lights
• Electronics for pushing the light-sound around the sphere
• Software to enable speedy creation and sharing of audiovisual compositions
• AI programs for translating existing repertory of music into audiovisual 3-D sound.

Once again, do please sign up to help here.

We have a preliminary spot in Burgundy for building the first Kugelauditorium; the intent is to open-source the designs and findings in the hope that every town around the world, or at least one other group, will eventually build one for themselves.

A three-step technique for creating space, slowing down and enhancing creativity.

“When one has much to put in them, a day has a thousand pockets.”

– Nieztsche

One of the challenges of living, working and socializing all from home during this Pandemic-induced lockdown is that the spatial structure of our days has been largely dissolved: where before we’d have a repertoire of different spaces for different activities, now everything’s happening at home.

If you think about a typical pre-COVID day for someone who works in an office for example, events are naturally distinguished by where they take place. 

In my case, I’d get up, exercise in the park, cycle to the office, work and have discussions in different meeting rooms, go out for lunch, return to the office, go for a walking meeting, perhaps zip across town for a meeting in a café; and then after work, I’d often meet someone for food and sometimes go a concert or an exhibition: all in different, distinct locations… in short, my day would have as its backbone an elaborate spatial journey.

But with this lockdown, even though much of the content of my former lifestyle has been recreated digitally (including the parties- the subject of another post), it’s all now happening in my flat on my laptop. So all this experience has lost any meaningful spatial component. 

The troubling consequence of this is that the day can feel without shape, and time can seem to slip past; it’s relatedly more difficult to remember what happened… and despite in some sense now having more time… it’s easy to feel as though I have less.

Moreover, without clear demarcation of work and home life, the preoccupations of the day naturally infest my evenings… it becomes more difficult to turn off, and equanimity and mental freshness can suffer. 

Having struggled with this, I’d like to offer an analysis of why this happens based on how we humans apprehend time and space, followed by a three-step technique for structuring your home-life during the lockdown in which you can conduct a substantially more spacious, creative and calm existence.

Before we get to that, though, let’s consider how we relate to time and space cognitively, to understand our options.

How we experience time

Space and time are deeply interconnected in our way of understanding the world, and indeed time is mostly conceived through spatial metaphors. 

We compute these metaphors so effortlessly, that we’re rarely aware of their presence in our experience. But whenever we “squeeze in a trip to the gym between meetings” or “look forward to the summer”, or talk of “distant memories” a “crowded schedule” or “way back when” or indeed when we enjoy “bitesize” content or bemoan the boringness of a “long argument”, we’re borrowing our mental mastery of space to imagine and reason about time.  

Specifically, our spatial metaphors for time carry an underlying mapping: 

1. time = space or journey through space
2. moments of time = locations or objects in that space 

These metaphorical schemas are amazingly flexible and sophisticated. When we say a busy day is “back-to-back” with meetings, we’re imagining the day (time) as a container (space) and our activities (which take time) as objects (smaller space-occupying entities) filling that container. In this example, the objects fill the container so tightly that they press against each other, leaving no space (i.e. time) for that coffee at which you wished to pick my brains, or whatever. Therefore, even if I just respond “sorry I’m back to back” you immediately grok my meaning. 

This is of course taken to a nefarious extreme by calendars, which reduce time to a grid of boxes in space- with very potent, and many regrettable, consequences for our experience of our lives. That though is a different subject to the one we have on our hands here.

Now, while the high-level mapping of time to space is almost ubiquitous in cognition, there are interesting cultural and contextual variants. In Chinese culture, time goes up and down, not forward and backward, as it does in western cultures. We’ll avail ourselves of that flexibility later.  Even with the forward/backward time relationship in English, we flexibly use different sub-variants, without necessarily realizing that that’s what we’re doing. 

“Wednesday’s meeting has been brought forward by two days. What day is it now on?”

Some will say “Monday”, others “Friday”. Both make perfect sense, but which you choose depends on whether you imagine from an object- or observer-centric framework. In the observer-centric case, the event currently sitting in the space of Wednesday is an object being brought forward towards you, the observer, which will land it on Monday; but if you assume an object-centric perspective, you are Wednesday and move forward two days in time, landing on Friday. Check our Lera Boroditsky’s extraordinary work on the embodied cognition of time, from which these examples are taken. 

Anyhow, this mapping of time to space is of course a good design principle for the mind, since, in the normal peripatetic run of things, different events happen in different spaces, as we saw earlier with my routine. This natural pattern or constraint cascades down into how memory works: indexing very thoroughly on the spatial. We remember things primarily by where they happen, and only indirectly by when. This is incidentally why “memory palaces” are such a potent device for remembering things in sequence (i.e. time): they leverage our powers of spatial recollection to structure long temporal sequences in our imaginations through imagery.  

Why living all of life in a confined space can mess with our sense of time, and feel cramped and stressful. 

We’ve seen how our experience of time is rooted in our apprehension of space, and how this is reflected in memory. So when we stop moving around over the course of the day, we shouldn’t be surprised that it messes with our experience. 

And this is why a day spent all in one spot will tend to feel like it’s passed quicker: as we experience the sequence of activities in our day, each is a little bit less distinctive and differentiated than it would be under normal conditions because it lacks spatial context, and the different portions of the day then bleed into each other.

This interfusion of the different parts of the day diminishes them all. Your yoga headspace carries into your work headspace carries into your argument with your flatmate headspace carries into your creative time headspace, and the resources of your mind are never fully focused on any one of these things.

And this lack of distinctness to individual moments in your day has its flip side in memory, where because there are no spatial hooks for it to gain purchase on, it becomes difficult to remember what we did: there are no differentiated locations to trigger recollection. It’s as if all the photographs have been made on top of each other on a single print. 

And when we lack spaciousness like this, things quickly begin to feel claustrophobic, monotonous and stressful.

How we can control our experience of space and time using our imaginations.  

We’ve seen that time is spatial, and that when we take spatial experience away, it can be stressful and confusing. What to do about this?

Well, it turns out that our dependence on space is both the disease and the cure to this one: by imagining and relating to our spaces differently, we can regain control of our experience of our time.   

In order to manipulate back into health our diminished experience of time, that is, we simply have to manipulate our experience of space- with the tools at our disposal. 

This might seem tricky, given we’re stuck indoors, but in fact our experience of space is much more highly contextual, subjective and full of opportunities for alteration than we normally imagine, or commonly admit.  

This is because space as it arises in our experience (which we often confuse with the space of physics) is not a feature of the world, but of our relationship to it. By changing how we relate to our home spaces, we can transform them. 

One way of seeing this is to think of how we tend to be surprised when we revisit places last seen in early childhood: they seem much smaller than we remembered, because when we were small they were relatively bigger in relation to us. 

This phenomenon goes way beyond the size of our bodies, into their skills, interests and athleticism: people with heavy backs perceive slopes as steeper, for example; we experience the world in terms of how we can act within it.   

To get a handle on how our experience of space is our experience of our possible movements, ask yourself this: have you ever had the strange experience that an empty room can come to feel larger when it is filled with furniture?

How can this be? Well, one way of thinking about this is that now the space is structured, there are more opportunities for movements than before: it, therefore, is bigger so far as your body is concerned. 

On top of this, we don’t experience spaces devoid of their emotional, social and pragmatic contexts. Space isn’t just a container, but a field of action, pregnant with significance: for example, people can tell almost as much about your personality by looking at picture of your office or bedroom than they can from meeting you personally.  

A carpenter’s studio invites a totally different set of actions than a kitchen and feels correspondingly different- even if laid out much the same. Changing the colour of the walls of a room can make it feel more spacious, warmer, more formal, more calming. 

So we see from all of these examples that our experience of space is highly embodied, contextual, and subject to all manner of emotional layerings. This gives us a clear set of tools for how to change our experience of time in a restricted space: by manipulating our patterns of behaviour, emotion and perception.  

With this analysis in our back pocket, let’s look at five strategies that can be deployed against the problem of expanding subjective time in the lockdown, which collectively add up to turning your home into a kind of memory palace.  

The three-step technique

1. Divide your home into a set of distinct locations, with activities for each  

Your home is your new city. Let’s kit it out accordingly.

Of course, we need to work with the tools at our disposal: which will seem meagre to begin with, but all of which we will see can be applied to an arbitrarily small space.

First, choose ten activities you want to accommodate in your lockdown

Ten activities is a good basic repertoire. I do in my life: sleep, yoga, reading, washing, working, writing (managerial), work (creative), exercising, partying, eating/socialising.

Your repertoire will, of course, be different depending on what you like doing, and need to do. It’s actually quite fun to reflect on your life and make a list of ten best-version-of-you core activities. Not a bad moment to dig out that list of unactioned new year’s resolutions: that habit of a daily workout? Now’s a good time to actually begin doing it.

Another way of finding your ten activities, is simply to think “what are the activities I’d love to be able to do somewhere else, but I can’t”?

Whichever way you create your list, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes of honest, joyful self-reflection.

Next, find ten locations around your home to which to assign these activities

Reminder: to be calm during the storm, we want to have clear, differentiated spaces in which we can conduct the activities of our new life in a way that we are “insulated” from distraction, and in such a way as to foster calm, creativity and joy.

So the next step is to select ten distinct locations within the overall space of your home, to which you’ll uniquely assign these actvities.

For me, I had to choose ten locations across the four available rooms to me: bedroom, bathroom, living room, kitchen. If you have more space than this, be expansive. If you have less, zoom in. 

You really can do all this in quite small spaces. The only constraint here is to ensure these locations are each at least a metre or so apart from each other. I think it would be just about possible with a bit of creativity to do this in the smallest flat I ever lived in, a 3x3m garret in Paris in my early twenties.

Not having much space to play with is actually part of the fun. I’m grateful I don’t live ibn a castle: it would remove the opportunity for creativity.

To illustrate, I have had to set up four different locations in my sitting-room, for example, and three in my bedroom. Neither room is especially large. One important trick when you are creating several locations in a small room, is to ensure that when you’re in those spaces, that you’re pointing in different directions: out of sight is out of mind, and this will help them differentiate the locations later and make them feel “insulated” from each other. In this way, in that old cell-like flat in Paris, I’d have arranged the spaces “looking outwards” roughly in the four corners, and against the four walls, with a space in the middle to get to ten. 

Assign activities to locations

After you’ve chosen ten locations, link the activities to them uniquely. I have several types of work requiring a desk, and so I have set up three tables in my living room and I move tables to do different kinds of work. 

So, zooming in on my livingroom, we have three desks, pointed in different directions, for different kinds of work. The Eastern desk (in front of the window) is for working on managerial tasks at Memrise -a diversity of tasks. The Southern-facing one (less than 2 metres away) is also for working on Memrise, but this is for creative work- which I especially enjoy, but which can be difficult to find intellectual and emotional space for in the course of a busy day. The third desk (facing West) is for writing. This way, I’ve created differentiation between these kinds of work. 

My full list of locations and activities is then this:

1. Bedroom: Bed (sleep)
2. Bedroom: floor by bed (yoga)
3. Bedroom: Rocking chair by window (reading)
4. Bathroom (washing)
5. Sitting room: East wall (working)
6. Sitting room North wall (working)
7. Sitting room West wall (writing) 
8. Sitting room: space in middle (exercising)
9. Kitchen (eating) 
10.  Bar counter between kitchen and living room (partying)

Now’s the moment then to get

2. Imaginatively amplify the distinctiveness of these spaces

We now have different locations for different activities. The next step is to amplify. their felt differentiation using our imaginations, and a few props.

Remember, space is a space by dint of the full gamut of the perceptual and emotional experience that is taking place within it. So we can change space by manipulating the experiences

Our key levers here are:

• The activity itself
• Props (photos, hats, lamps)
• Lighting
• Music
• Aromas (candles, food)
• Simple imagination.

To see how we can leverage these easily controlled inputs to create differentiation, let’s look at some examples. 

Bathroom

I’ve kitted out my bathroom as a Hammam (by adding a chair, a kettle, and some imagination). Where before, I’d be in and out in five minutes, I now hang out there for 30 minutes with my (imaginary) friends, the room steamed up by running a lidless kettle into the corner and letting it boil. 

Sitting room (4 locations)

In my sitting room,  I’ve set up, as we saw, four locations: three separate desks and exercise space. 

To stop them interfering with each other (i.e. feeling like the same space), I ensure with music, props and lighting that each has an entirely different feel and vibe to the others: to go along with the different patterns of activity and so on.

So when I’m at the East Desk (reserved for Memrise managerial work) I have a fully differentiated multi-sensory set-up that changes the character of the whole room, and effectively makes the location I’m at feel like a totally different space.

Specifically, when sat this desk, I keep all the curtains drawn, play Balkan music whenever I’m say there and imagine I’m in Croatia. On my desk, I keep a photo of Novak Djokovic and hanging on the nearby cupboard is a traditional Croatian dress. All of these things in combination give the location the feel of a totally different room. 

If I then move to the North desk (which takes me ten minutes, as we’ll see later) I open the curtains, change the music to jaunty Italian Tarantella, and enjoy a spacious paper-only desk environment. On the wall in front of me is a view of the Italian town of Cividale that I once ineptly painted. No matter, I imagine it as a window and I’m in Italy, doing wonderful free creative tasks. Again, it feels like I’m not only in a different room but in a totally different country. 

The West desk is for writing: things like this blogpost, love letters to my girlfriend (currently quarantined in Burgundy, France), and other purely verbal activities. The wall in front of me is covered in bookshelves. Since this is a space of pure ideas, and we’ve already established it’s in effect possible with these techniques to change country, I take it a bit further here and imagine I’m entering into a beyond-worldly magic space of pure imnagination. The music genre here is jazz, and since I tend to sit here at night, the lighting’s also naturally different. My props here include my computer, but I keep the internet off to aid the sense of isolation.  

Kitchen 

I visit the kitchen three times in the day, but I make sure that each feels like a different experience. 

My kitchen in the morning is a French Café. I drink coffee while listening to French radio. I eat a croissant. I talk to myself in French. I complain about the government. No mobile phones are allowed. 

It’s all very different in Berlin (lunchtime). Here I’m in Kreuzberg, surrounded by hipsters. I’m listening to Wagner. I’m talking to myself in German. I’m actually not listening to Wagner, I’m playing café sounds to give me a sense of being in an energetic social spot. 

In the evening, there isn’t a specific nationality to the kitchen: it’s more of a guest spot for different cultures depending on what I’m cooking. Devices are actually allowed in the kitchen in the evening (as I like to dine over Zoom with a friend and a bottle of wine).

But all in all, the kitchen manages to be three spaces only through changing up the food, the attitude, the music, the props.  

Bedroom

My favourite location is the rocking-chair by the bedroom window. I’d picked this up off the street years ago and it had sat there broken and never-sat-upon as a vague never-quite-prioritized to-do item.

Self-isolation and duct tape dealt with that, and now I can read before bed while calming myself down after the energetic day by rocking myself back and forth. An aromatic candle further changes the mood, and my bedroom is now a no-device zone so if there’s a disaster I won’t get to know about it till tomorrow morning.

In sum

You won’t land on a set-up this elaborate overnight. You can gradually experiment and find what feels right in terms of props, music, rules, lighting, and activities in each location around your home.

But the basic principle is very simple: by behaving in thought, imagination and action as if each location is an entirely different space/room/country, you make it feel so.

And this does a massive amount to free us from the sense of claustrophobia and time-disappearance that living all day in one place can occasion.

3) Design your preferred daily adventure, then perform it. 

Our next step is to build a schedule for our days that travels through our newly invented repertoire of spaces: which may now exist in many different countries, yay!

Designing your daily journey

But schedules suck. They constrain and control, and we don’t want too much of that. So the way we’re going to organise our day’s activities is to transform our schedule into more of an adventurous travel-journey. Doing so is pretty simple: we just need to decide on our itinerary.

To do this, simply pick a path through your new city-home that fits with what you need to do across the day. Writing it down helps. This is your daily journey in the new imagination-built city in your home. Hopefully, we manage through this tool to construct a daily routine as exciting as any that ordinary life could offer.

Performing your daily journey

We have all the pieces in place, now we just need to begin performing them. 

A few tips follow as to how to do that in the most effective way possible. 

Stick to your itinerary

Itineraries work best when you stick to them, so keep a softly sounded alarm of some kind to let you know when it’s time to move on. Pomodoro is a good tool for this.

Consider changes in costume between activities

Often in normal life, we habitually change clothing for the different activities in our day: with different outfits for work, gym, socialising etc.

It’s good to reproduce these habits in our new city-home. Even small changes do good work to make different moments feel different: the addition of a hat, putting on a jumper, changing our shoes. And they take hardly any time to implement.

Use physical activity to amplify transitions between spaces

A dominant feature of our experience of spaces, and of times, is landmarks and moments of significant transition. This is why rituals are so important to creating experiential space: they act as tools to amplify transitions in our moods. 

To boost differentiation between moments in our day, getting moving acts a ‘reset’: there’s nothing like it to freshen yourself physically and emotionally. My current favourite mode of doing this is dancing socially for five minutes: by powering up Zoom and getting on a virtual dance party. But press-ups stretches or even jumping jacks equally get the job done. 

My advice is to aim for one of these approximately hourly and to deploy them even if you’re not changing location.  

Consider adding a “travel-time” layer

This one is for the advanced practitioner.

Let’s return to our core inspiration: the city. The nature of a city is that it takes time to get between places, which enriches the overall experience and introduces breaks and stimulation between activities. To solve the problem of an absence of the experience of travel-time and the consequent reduction in felt spaciousness, we have to add these back in with a bit of embodied, performative imagination.

The baller options here is to magnify the scale of your flat by simply forbidding yourself from moving at a normal speed between rooms. After extensive experimentation, I’ve found that an allowed pace of 1-2cm/second works well for moving between spaces (this only applies to changing locations, by the way, you’re going to need to move around at your desk at normal speed). But I wouldn’t recommend this on day one, you won’t have the discipline yet. 

Whether you choose a physical activity or slowed movements, in time these embodied practices begin to make the whole flat seem much larger. Space is, after all, relational. And there are in fact numerous additional benefits to this approach. You realize, for example, that there’s a ten-minute walk or ten press-ups between you and the fridge (even though  it’s just 6m away), and so you begin to find it much less tempting to grab a snack mid-task.

An  example schedule

Here’s an example of what a schedule can look like, once you’ve divided your home into ten locations for unique activities, and ‘gamified’ the transitions between the spaces.

• 6-6.15 a.m. Wake up, travel to Hammam
• 6.15 -7 a.m. Wash, hang out in the Hammam, dress
• 7-7.30 a.m Commute to Paris (kitchen), while listening to a podcast
• 7.30- 8 a.m Enjoy Parisian breakfast, coffee, French radio.
• 8-8.15 a.m. Commute to Croatia (East desk) 
• 8.15-12.30 a.m: Croatia. Management work / meetings on Memrise. Occasional breaks to dance between tasks. 
• 12.30-1 p.m. Freshen mind with 30 min stroll through the Park (central living room) on way to Berlin. 
• 1 p.m- 1.45 Lunch: Berlin lunch. 
• 1.45- 2 p.m. Commute to Italy while calling family members.
• 2-4 p.m. North desk: creative Memrise work in Italy listening to Tarantella
• 4-4.15p.m Jog to Croatia (through park)
• 4.15-6.45 p.m More Memrise management work in Croatia (East desk) 
• Travel to Ukraine (kitchen, last night)
• 7 p.m. Cooking and dinner with friend over Zoom
• 8- 8.15 p.m Travel by bicycle to the West desk (realm of pure ideas)
• 8.15p.m- 10.15 p.m.  West Desk writing in pure realm of ideas. 
• 10.15p.m.10.30 p.m. Walk home to bedroom.
• 10.30-midnight: Rocking chair reading until sleep.

If suitably enacted, each of the events in this schedule will be insulated emotionally and mentally from the others and will lead to gloriously pure and focused consciousness, as well as a very clear recollection of the events once they’re completed.  

To sum it all up

Time in the lockdown can slip away from us, and disturb our mental tranquility. Being locked up inside our homes can be claustrophobic, stressful, boring and uncreative. This simple methodology will allow you to free yourself from these issues. 

By combining perceptual, bodily and imaginative techniques, the featureless open scape of a day at home can assume all the spatial trappings of an adventure out around a city, with all the benefits of fun, memorability and distinctiveness, but none of the incidental opportunities for contracting COVID-19. 

When you get this method spinning, you’ll feel calmer. You’ll feel like you have more time in the day. You’ll be able to concentrate with a greater purity of focus. You’ll be able to do more different things throughout the day. And you’ll have a tonne of fun while you’re doing them, which is something we all need a bit of in our lives right now.

Finally, with luck, you may find that the core principles underlying this technique will serve you well even when you’re back to living out in the world again. I’m certainly intending on keeping the bedroom as a no-device zone, and on keeping the Hammam too: if nothing else, this lockdown has taught me that I have been under-using my bathroom like a muppet.

Parties are the highest form of human art and the purest arena for self-expression.

For millennia, festivals, booze-ups, house parties, birthdays, feasts, lock-ins, weddings, wakes, raves, dances, and religious rituals of all different shapes and sizes have been the pre-eminent conduits in people’s lives for love, transcendence, friendship, intellectual progress, and spiritual celebration.

Parties structure our sense of autobiographical time, define our kinships, and create the opportunity for us to expand our consciousness beyond the banal strictures of the everyday.  They can, as a consequence, claim credit for a startling percentage of the total meaning and joy ever experienced by human beings.

But what is it that makes the party such a potent tool for meaning, joy and human connection? 

Embarrassingly for our civilization, parties have hitherto gone almost entirely unstudied- if research budgets are any indication, we value the understanding of sub-atomic particles millions of times more than of our own consciousnesses. But this epic cultural fail should not tempt us to underestimate how well we can understand parties, nor indeed their importance. 

In my posthumous work, a General Theory of Parties, I’ll go into all of this in much more detail, but I thought it might be worth sharing an overview of how parties function now, and a sketch of an analysis

What makes a good party?

One simple way to approach the question of what makes a great party is to make a list of the greatest party moments of one’s life, and then to inspect each for what took place in the surrounding party-context to set up that sublime party-moment.

I actually recommend you do this before reading further. List three truly great parties and try to work out what it was that made them so damn good. It’s not difficult to come up this way with a list of universal party ingredients.

When I conduct this reflection on the greatest party experiences I’ve enjoyed, which of course dominate the list of the happiest and most profound moments of my life, what’s so striking is that the same ingredients co-occur even across wildly different parties.

Parties with very different scales, different purposes, different kinds of people, music, patterns of mind-alteration have similar categorical ingredients.

Specifically, the four best parties I have ever experienced (outside of Burning man, a category of its own) were:

• A spontaneous house party for ten in Paris in 2005 (10-ish people)
• My parents 40th wedding anniversary (120-ish people)
• My best mate Al’s stagnight (2016, 20 people)
• The Oregon Eclipse (5000 people)

The ten universal ingredients of great parties

 1. A theme or focus

Every great party has a theme of some kind, an organising goal or principle that acts as the source of emotional harmony and energetic co-participation. There are times, admittedly, when a theme can be implicit, or can spontaneously arise during a party, or can derive from the history of the community who make the party (as at Burning Man) but great parties are always, at some deep level, about something. (As an interesting aside, this mirrors the intentionality of consciousness).

At the Oregon Elipse, the theme was essentially cosmic. It was about the eclipse, but more generally it was about how we fragile humans are

The drugs were psychedelic; the scale demanded a seven-day party; the eclipse itself a moment of the profoundest meditative reflection.

At my parents’ 40th, the theme was family values, the love of a couple; at the Oregon eclipse, the

2. Great People

Like a murmuration of starlings, parties exist as an emergent property of all their participants’ behaviour. This is a miraculous phenomenon, and entirely beyond the scope of any kind of contemporary scientific discourse to model.

It follows that people and their behaviour are the essence of the party. One can observe that all other elements in our list of ingredients are simply ways of mediating the interactions of people withing the time-space of the party.

This has numerous and profound implications for party design; most obviously, getting great people to come is key. But equally, ensuring that those who come are committed to the party, motivated to co-create and participate. This is one of the reasons Burning Man is the greatest party in the world: the incredible levels of creative devotion of the community who reinvents it every year.

This point deserves elaborate treatment but I’ll make note here of a few of the basic laws of people-related party-organisation

Diversity is key

Whenever there are more than three people together, a virtual party begins to simmer in the space of the possible: add some beers and music, and this could very quickly become a happening.

Good parties, like Rugby teams, have people of all shapes and sizes: sexy people, rowdy people, dancers, intellectuals, drunkards, cynics,

Every attendee is a micro-host

Of course individuals may play many roles. In particular, there is a continuum between host and participant, so that hosts are also participants, and good participants will be constantly seeing opportunities for micro-hosting (whether initiating a singsong, rescuing a lonely participant, welcoming a new arrival, fixing an issue with the alcohol supply-chain or what have you).

Prioritise the fun people

Fun people are especially important guests at parties: their intuitive gift for perceiving the dynamics of the experience and acting on it have super-linear effects on the happening of a party. Fun people should always begin your act of invitation, for these superadditive reasons:

1. They are more likely to be up for attending or co-hosting a party
2. They are more likely to be naturally good and actually practised at holding space for fun, and seeing opportunities for fun.
3. They are more likely to be broadly recognised as such, and so be able to attract further great guests.

So in other words, if you’re hosting a party, a great rule of thumb is to invite the most fun people you know. And if you’re attending a party, never forget that your participation is constitutive of the party that emerges.

3. A narrative through time

Perhaps the greatest error people make with parties is failing to recognise the importance of sustained engagement over time. Experience is deeply temporally contextual, and to completely refresh that mental context, to flush out all of the deeper accumulated boringness and narrow preoccupations of the mind, can take two-four weeks: hence the typical length of a summer vacation, or the fact that hardcore burning man participants always go to “pre-burn” to help set the thing, and themselves, up.

This is where narratives come in. They accelerate and bring structure to the principle of refreshing experiential space. This requires time. In the context of parties, eight hours seems to be the minimum amount of time for the generation of valuable experience. But we also need to remember that the broader context of the party, including the invitation, the period of anticipation and the process of preparation are equally part of the critical context for the experiential dynamics of the party itself.

An interesting conceptual entrée into this is to meditate on why the amount of fun had at parties correlates so consistently with the difficulty of getting to them. When I first observed this, I assumed it was a coincidence. It seemed so counter-intuitive that my favorite parties were the ones where the car had broken down on the way; where I’d had to walk four miles over a snowy field; when I’d had to get a dangerous boat ride.

These moments when the journey provides unnecessary friction… at the time you feel furious, you regret the decision to attend the party. But such parties turn out again and again to be the best.

Why is this? Well, such adventures create new emotional space in our minds for experience, they generate distinctiveness from normal life and above all they encourage commitment.

4. Many different spaces

The spaces of a party are the containers that determine the tenor and dynamics of the interactions of the participants at each moment in time. We need lots of different spaces for all the moods people need to borrow from in the course of the party, and great parties always involve a multitude of spaces. 

We can begin here by listing a small subset of the large variety of conversations a party needs to create space for:

• Playful chitchat
• Catching up
• Discussing deep new ideas
• Seduction and flirtation
• Deep-and-meaningfuls
• Vulnerable sharing

Each of these varieties of conversation demands a micro-world to house it: some combination of mood, context, decoration, degree of background noise, chance of interruption,  etc. You don’t want to be engaged in a deep-and-meaningful in a crowd listening to jazz: that works better in a yurt at 3 a.m.

Hence for conversation alone, a diversity of spaces is foundational. But of course, great parties are much more than conversation. Participants have to be able to find spacetime for dance, for love-making, for sleep, for gossip, for shelter, for mischief in all its many varities.  That’s why great parties always have a multitude of spaces.

In this context, the agency of party-cipants is key. The joy of parties is to have a degree of autonomy in navigating the pleasure-domes. A basic repertoire of spaces at a good bash will include neutral areas like toilets, chill out zones, raving zones, light dance zones, kitchen chitchat zones, spacious gardens.

5. Multisensory delights

Great parties almost always take pleasures to delight the senses. Delighting the senory organs has an interesting and potent incremental low-level effect on our consciousness: they stimulate, and they are pleasurable in themselves, and because of this they prime and attune our delight and pleasure, bring us back to the body: thus providing a natural precursor to debauchery, falling in love, having fun.

Sounds

Smells

Lights

Lights . this interacts with principles of

Tastes

Touches

Furs, silks, feathers,

Because of the principle of participation, when created and shared, treats like these give rise to extra sinews of emotional and intellectual connection at the party.

6. Great music

The liquid architecture of music is of course fundamental to parties, and barely requires explanation here. It plays two fundamental roles:

a) It makes people feel different

And if we double-click on what happens when it makes everyone feel different, it does so in a comprehensive fashion: music alters perception of time and space, emotion, mood. In one memorable study, people listening to German techno underestimated the speed of the cars they were driving by up to 50%.

b) It makes different people feel different in a similar way.

Thus, music is a vector of commonality: it brings people together into the same experiential spaces, and so connects them directly.

With its inevitable copartner dance, music provides an under-appreciated vector of virtual reality. The whole space of a room feels differently if you change the music.

7. Dancing

Dancing is of course key. At every good party I’ve ever been to. Why is dancing so important?

8. Costume:

It is, let’s face it, very boring being ourselves. The golden shimmering force of universal infinite consciousness pulses through us all, yet most of the time the lenses of our minds refract it down onto our council-tax bills, job frustrations, disappointments in ourselves, and counterfactual fantasies about, for example, how we might be more beautiful, or more effective.

Parties generally, and costumes specifically, are an extraordinary tool for freeing ourselves from the banality of ourselves, and expanding the scope and possibility of our imaginations.

Great costumes connect us with other narratives that bring joy and fun, they create distinctness from everyday experience, and their feedback-effects encourage us to be more interesting and daring.

They also help others at parties: they entertain others, providing sensory decoration and phenomenological arousal.

Of course, costume (combined with lighting) can elevate and make accessible people’s attractiveness, and this creates new opportunities for pleasure, naturally enough.

9. Mind-altering substances

Now I don’t wish to endorse the use of mind-altering substances. In my view, a ten-year apprenticeship in the art of classical memory techniques is the only legitimate form of psychoactive substance, and I worry a lot about the appalling cognitive effects of, for example, alcohol on people’s perceptual and intellectual capabilities.

That said, it cannot be denied that mind-altering substances are a universal feature of human happenings through the millennia. And that different substances have different qualities roles to play.

All psychoactive substances are, by definition, tools of consciousness, which interact of course with the broader experience of the spacetime of the party. Empirical data indicates that people will often take a number of different substances depending on where they are in the party, and that these substances are often constitutive of costume, music, etc. Alcohol is of course the most common substance across so many cultures.

Among the psychoactive effects of drugs is that they change visual and sensory acuity, affecting for example the vibrancy of colours and tastes; they alter mood, and interpersonal attitudes (love, openness etc), inflecting for example generosity; they affect the basic structure of experiential spacetime.

If we take the example of alcohol, it lowers people’s inhibition and critical intelligence making everyone more interesting and the expression of deeper desires come closer to the surface. This tends to enable more fun. In the case of psychedelics such as mushrooms, they seem from the written accounts I’ve been able to assess, to alter the quality and resolution of spacetime, and bring less distinctive cognitive discrimination between, as well as enhanced relationship to music.

10. Performances / entertainment

Performances create mnemonic foci or landmarks in the timespace of the party, and can in a way be viewed as worlds within worlds. Parties can hold on their shelves many different performances, but these of course work best when they are consistent with the theme of the party.

• These can often be the most important, the most memorable things at parties
• A poem can contain a universe
• Performances create intense focal-points of experience
• They are at their most powerful when they flow from the participants, and there is a witnessing and connection with the very people with whom you’re partying

How these ten ingredients come together in the invention of party/consciousness time-space

What unifies the ten ingredients of incredible parties is that each is a distinctive tool for acting on the shape of consciousness. Together, they offer a toolkit for the architecture of time-spaces of human consciousness.

Party-composers thus deploy costume, spaces, music, mind-altering potions, sensory delight, narrative and so on to create journies that bring the consciousnesses of their participants into new vistas.

When these tools are marshalled with intent towards a particular purpose (celebrating the arrival of Spring, someone’s marriage, the end of a war, global community) they enable party-goers to enjoy spectacular communal transformations of consciousness, attaining feelings and perceptions of the world, themselves, and their relation to each other that simply aren’t possible in other art forms like conversation, film, literature, or even the philosophical study of fundamental ontology.

Thus parties help people escape the strictures of their normal selves and voyage wild and deep into the frontiers of consciousness, which is to say of their own existence. And this is the thing about parties, they’re not a form of thinking about living, they *are* living. The changes they bring to consciousness are not a means to an end, they are the end. This is what is so spectacular and mind-blowing about the medium of parties, and helps account for their universal role across history at the heart of all that is good in human life.

On top of this, let’s not forget that these aren’t linear journeys like books and films; they’re not separable from the minds of their consumers. For party-goers have agency, they’re all on different journeys, and these spaces and experiences are co-created. The partygoers make the party, it is all inherently improvised and co-created.

Seen in this way, parties can be seen as co-created time-space journeys to lastingly new perception of how the world works, changing people for the better and creating meaning in their lives.

The process of enacting a party looks like collective invention, participative theatre, a massively multiplayer game, the original form of virtual reality.

A note on mind-world relativity

This theory of parties leans on the concept of mind-world relativity. 

In follow up posts, I’ll address what extensions will be required to Relativistic Mathematics to capture the way that the timespace of parties relates to the timespace of the participants consciousnesses in law-like fashion.

I had the pleasure of going to a brief but masterfully delivered laughter meditation class at the Serpentine Gallery this last weekend by “musician, mystic and laughter meditation practitioner, Laraaji” who lead a series of workshops during the opening days of the Grace Wales Bonner exhibition that has since become a lasting shrine of sound.

Here is a pic from the beginning of the workshop. I really dug his orange blanket full of treasures pregnant with spiritual meaning; combined with a tremendously trustworthy and calming American voice.

It was a cracking workshop, just 45 minutes long but during that brief time he effortless vehicled fifty members of the public into contagious laughter all the way from  interactive song and contagious group laughter through to a delightful, “healing”, meditative space.

I wanted to make a note of what I felt were the masterful features of how he did it before I forget:

• He’d begun already as we filed into the room with pretty music of the om-ic sort
• He then led straight in without introduction to call and response, beginning with amusingly simple and enjoyable-to-copy sounds
• These sounds were just at the limit of working memory, but satisfyingly effortless to recall like a six digit number spoken verbally (try having someone repeat “297692” vs 203618647″: the 8th number is the straw that breaks the phonological loop‘s back).
• After having us sing back to him musically sounds along the lines of “tumtumtumtum”<>”tumtumtumtum” // lumlumtumtum<>lumlumtumtum, “tumbumbumtum”<>tumbumbumtum”, he gradually evolved the call and response into laughter-esque sounds along the lines of “hahatatahatahata”
• Then he made quite a good joke about a landlord (somehow the worldly reference from such a guru made it unexpectedly funny, though I forget the joke).
• Then he has us smile with our mouths and with our mouths and our eyes, and explore the difference in the latter and  the feeling it occasions inside: actually feeling happier due to the feedback.
• Then he has us all stand up and assume a liquid body (flopping around most liquidly, which allowed I guess any narky tension to flow away)
• Then he had us hold our hands, consecutively, on our heads, throats, hearts, chest-bone, and belly and direct laughter to them and and explore the different qualities of laughter that brings resonance to these places.
• By this stage we’re all feeling pretty doused in merriment
• All the while playing pretty music
• Then he had us bring our arms right up into the air, fill our lungs to the brim, and deflate in laughter: a neat way of making sure the internal force is there to power and laugh that begins, which proved very powerful and effective.
• Going through this many times consecutively had us all overflowing with spontaneous laughter, which quickly became contagious in a way that itself is rather fascinating, and served to re-project one into hilarity every time one came off the ridge down into a trough of mere giggling.
• Then he had us lie on our backs and listen to polyphonic gong and other nice instrument music as we basked in the afterglow of delighted sparkling emotion that follows deep laughter.

Here he is explaining it himself, meanwhile, to someone called Daniel Blumberg “from Hebronix”.

Here’s a sweet little link between the nature of imagination and memory as evidenced in the brain of a rat considering which way to go next in a maze, the activity of whose cortex is being measured live by in-vivo recordings. It’s from some seminal work done by Adam Johnson and A David Redish more than a decade ago.

The gif here shows the position of the rat in a maze that is described by the ‘place cells’ in its own cortex, which were themselves previously mapped as it had made its way through the space. Place cells light up when you’re at a particular point in space, firing independently of anything you’re looking at. The map, in somewhat meta fashion, is derived from measuring directly from the rat’s brain: its memory for the space has come to map the space.

The gif illustrates the moment the creature reaches a T-junction and considers what to do next. The shite circle marks the actual position of the rat. You can see its ‘memory’ for places to right and left lighting up as it considers which path to go down. It’s actively exploring its memory, in an imaginative fashion. It’s a very relatable graphic, extremely thought provoking to consider.

It reminds me of a quote from an engaging article about the recent Carlsen / Caruana world championship Chess bout in which it was said that “Caruana’s brain scurried back and forth through innumerable tunnels of calculation looking for ways to fight back”. This is intuitively phenomenologically what we do when we consider different possibilities, and it’s (as ever) nice to have that conviction that the fresh boots of a easily referenced information gives one.

Some interesting things to wonder about, that I haven’t quite grokked:

• What happens the first time the creature is in a space and is wondering which way to go next? The memory’s not quite there yet, so how would the explorations work? (perhaps, because experience runs deep into perception, there isn’t a case that isn’t undergirded by some degree of memory, however novel).
• What is the purpose of the exploration of memory/imagination? Presumably, to fish out some extra information (presumably connected to or part of the memory) to marry with current goals. Cf the Caruana quote. This would make this somehow similar to attention.
• But if we don’t allow ourselves to talk about “fishing out” (which is lazy and dualistic) then what causal effect on the system as a whole is the
• And of course, are there a hundred analogues of this in other forms of decision making, in other areas of the brain, with related dynamics and logic?

The research, btw, to derive this result was quite remarkable: requiring disambiguating where the rat was looking from what it was thinking. The places it is exploring in its imagination/memory are distinct from the places it is looking. This is a live read from its memory/imagination as it explores what should happen next.

Adam Johnson, the driving force behind the research sadly died shortly afterwards and much too young of cancer. This is a moving document put together by his colleagues in his lifetime that captures something of his intellect and character and the high regard in which he was held by his colleagues.