Here is an interesting quote from Brian Eno. Great musician from the 70's and collaborator with David Byrne and U2. He has also created some app for the iPhone that is supposed to be pretty cool. Anyway the quote is below. It's from a year of his diary published about 10 yrs ago. But it's out of print and costs over $100 to buy it now. He is also coming to CSU Long Beach in a few months and would love to go , but THAT costs $100 to see him speak. Man, just cause he's smart does he have to be expensive too?

One suggestion is that the whole basis of human specialness is our ability to cooperate — and to cooperate you have to be able to imagine what it would be like to hold another picture of the world. You’re unable to cooperate unless you can be mentally in at least two worlds at once — your own and that of the person with whom you’re working. The failure to grasp other pictures of the world is what we call autism, and in its extreme from is something we regard as a sever dysfunction. Well, all animals are by our standards relatively autistic — unable to see into each other’s minds, lacking empathy.

So how do we develop this ability to experience and speculate about other ways of thinking and feeling about the world? I think we do it by continually immersing ourselves in cultural experiences that rehearse us. This is obvious in films and novels — where we quite explicitly enter an imagined world and then watch imaginary quandaries. In doing so we develop a lot of surrogate experience about what it is like to be someone else, somewhere else, with different assumptions.

Something cool to think about when creating or viewing any type of artistic project, be it music, movies, paintings, books etc. Hopefully most art can be entertainment AND something to take you outside of your life for awhile.