It is a story's ability to draw people into common experience that Docter, who is like his Pixar colleague Andrew Stanton a Christian, says best allows him to exercise his faith in his work.
" In making these worlds I feel closer to God through working out the details of my creation as He must have worked out the details of His creation. Before I wrote out the character of Carl, I thought about his life story—where he came from and what went into to making him who he is so he would feel as rich and real as he possibly could. And that seems a bit like God with us—I know everything about him, and took great joy in making him."
It’s not everyday a bunch of monkeys gives support to one of you ‘pet’ teaching theories but here it is.
Anytime you’re trying to learn something new musically you’re only truly practicing when you’re doing it correctly. If you’re getting it wrong 50, 40 or 30% of the time you are NOT practicing. (Other than practicing how to do it wrong, and chances are you already excel at that).
Prof Earl Miller from MIT, who has already spent more time than is healthy teaching monkeys how to use computers, found that monkey's neurons became more efficient when they made the right decisions but showed no change when they got it wrong. In short (neurologically speaking) you don’t learn by your mistakes.
So what should you do next time you pick up your guitar, or piano (my, you are strong!) and try to get the nice scientist to give you a banana?
Slow the music down till you can play it easily. Playing everything at top speed is one of the biggest errors that people make.
Play a smaller section. Most musicians practice as much music as they can manage till they make a mistake and then they start again.
Bad monkey!
What is happening? Simple.
Every single time you play you are making a mistake.
So what are you really practicing? Making mistakes.
No bananas for you Bonzo!
Isolate the one element that is causing the musical train wreck and just practice that.
It might be a physical thing - you just can’t get your fingers in the right place. So forget about the song, the groove, the tempo. Just get the chord.
It could be a mental thing. The reason you keep messing up is you don’t really know what you’re supposed to be playing in the 14th bar. Learn it.
It could be stamina. Forget the song. Put on Season 2 of My Name Is Earl
But remember you’re only practicing if you’re getting it right all the time. Listen to the monkeys.
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“I was drawn, over and over again, to the disconcerting recognition that so very many of the people I had most admired and loved, either in life or in books, had been believers...a life like Gandhi’s, which was focused on God so deeply, reminded me of all the human qualities that have to be denied if you embrace the bleak, muddled creed of a materialist atheist. It is a bit like trying to assert that music is an aberration, and that although Bach and Beethoven are very impressive, one is better off without a musical sense...When I think about atheist friends, including my father, they seem to me like people who have no ear for music, or who have never been in love”.
The example of believers stood out in more profound ways too “one thing that finally put the tin hat on any aspirations to be an unbeliever was writing a book about the Wagner family and Nazi Germany, and realising how utterly incoherent were Hitler’s neo-Darwinian ravings, and how potent was the opposition, much of it from Christians; paid for, not with clear intellectual victory, but in blood. Read Pastor Bonhoeffer’s book Ethics, and ask yourself what sort of mad world is created by those who think that ethics are a purely human construct. Think of Bonhoeffer’s serenity before he was hanged, even though he was in love and had everything to look forward to”.
I guess some Christians are cool after all.
Dawkins and Hitchens have issued a response...
Read the whole interview
Related posts: A Narrative of (Three) Surprising Conversions (pt 1)
