The Tides and a Creative Community
FIRE MOUNTAIN NATION 2
BUILDING A CREATIVE COMMUNITY
The Tides and a Creative Community
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Frank Andres 10.9.16
© Copyright Frank W. Andres 2016. All Rights Reserved.
Introduction
In a series of blog entries, we are looking at Fire Mountain Nation…a creative community…in the San Francisco Bay Area… that is in a state of being created itself…Such a community can help save America…it can be among new creative industries that the Internet now is allowing to emerge…Creativity is an enterprise of the mind…thus it is important to know how the mind works and provide the best circumstances for a community of mind to work effectively and efficiently together.
I just read The Tide…The Science and Stories Behind the Greatest Force on Earth, by Hugh Aldersey-Williams. I selected this from the shelves of new books just published because I have been interested in the relationship between tidal patterns and mental activity in human beings.
I feel that this internal tidal rhythm must be made a part of the regime in our creative community.
We Have the Tides in Our Minds?
When I was in high school, I recognized that my mental powers flowed and ebbed throughout the day and night in a pattern similar to the tides…My mental pattern displayed a high level of mental activity between 5am and 11am…and then again in the evening from 5pm to 11pm. In college I was careful to schedule my classes and my sleep patterns such that I could study during my strong mental periods with great results. When I was married subsequently, and then had children, I recognized that my daughter had a mental pattern similar to mine…whereas my wife and son had the same pattern six hours later than that of my daughter and me…that is, they had high levels of mental ability and activity between 11am and 5pm….and 11pm and 5am….Our family coordinated school and family activities to coincide with patterns of mental strengths with very good results. When I start gathering friends to start a creative community…it will be imperative to take these mental patterns in account…Let us look at what this would mean.
Incorporating the Tides into Creative Work
During the past fifty years I have read a few articles and books aboutpeople being either “larks” or “owls.” The “larks” are people who like to arise from sleep early in the morning, say around 5am or so…and retire in the evening around 9:30 pm or a little later…Owls were notorious for desiring to “sleep in” in the morning..arising around noon or so…and then liked to stay up all night…most insomnia seems to be related to this latter group of people….When I first recognized this pattern in my mental activities, I wondered why businesses did not take these mental patterns in account…especially businesses like engineering or university research that rely heavily upon cognitive output….
When I was an economist, a civilian employee with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, San Francisco District…I learned that the tides along the West Coast of the country are asymmetrically diurnal…that is, there is a pattern of high-low, low-high, high-high, and low-low…every day…Therefore,
I thought our mental surges during the day replicated this pattern..This book,
The Tides, has set me straight on this idea…most tides throughout the world have high tides approximately equal two times a day, 12 plus hours apart… thus pattern proceeds daily…with the day time high tide for example appearing approximately 43 and half minutes later each day…until high tides return to the same time approximately a fortnight later….
When I wrote my book, Omicron Blue, I had my characters studying at night because I thought that both mental patterns featured their highest mental strengths at night…This led me to hypothesize that perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago humans were scavengers that lurked in the night for food when predators were few…now I know that high levels of mental activity day and night are of equal force and elevation…the question remains…why do both mental patterns possess such power in the night?…for “larks’ a high-high mental activity modern electrical illumination means that a high level of mental activity between 5pm and 11pm still can fit into a regular modern daily work pattern…However, for “owls,” the situation is different…their high level of mental activity in the night between 11pm and 5am does not usually conform to work-sleep practices in this modern age…which can result in insomnia and less than efficient mental work patterns….
It is apparent that our mental activity follows a circadian pattern…with the same pattern exhibited day after day…through every season…whereas, as we have said, a circatidal pattern, that is, the real tidal pattern, changes by 43 and a half minutes every day…What this means is that our mental patterns have a tidal pattern…yet they don’t….this means that our mental activity is related more to the appearance of the sun every day…although the fact that every other high period of intense mental activity occurs at night when there is no sun might point to other factors…The fact is… the diurnal aspect in these mental activity still points to a lunar origin to these patterns even though they may have been adjusted through our evolutionary past.
Fire Mountain Nation and Mental Work Patterns
As The Tides points out…many species of sea life adjust their sleeping patterns to take advantage of the prime feeding times in tidal areas which occur at high tide once in the day and once in the night…Regardless of the inconvenience…those birds and sea creatures are there…when a full dinner is in the offing.
It is obvious that such an adjustment although an annoyance could be beneficial for humans in this modern age of creative work. With the Internet, more creative work can be conducted in one’s home… at any time… and that time can be selected as to be advantageous mentally….So when group work is required, people should be assigned to times according to mental abilities, taking in consideration right and left hemispheric dominance… which will be discussed in another blog entry…and according to times of high mental strength…with people with similar high-high mental prowess…
So…mental strengths…aligned in tidal patterns…will be an important piece of the puzzle when we create our community of creators.