When used as a verb, “lurch” is usually defined something like this: “1. To stagger. 2. To roll or pitch suddenly or erratically.” When the word refers to an act, it refers to something that is observably opportunistic. That is to say, something that is, at minimum, seeking an edge, an advantage, an opening, a gain—expediency—and doing it so abruptly that this “something” seems to appear out of nowhere. A lurch tends not to be very elegant, and usually, it is not very helpful.
As I explain in my book, LEAP!, and as I’ve described any number of times in this column, the act of LEAP!ing, even when it seems to appear abruptly, is not coming “out of nowhere.” Rather, it is coming from a brain or brains that are operating at an expeditious new level of competency. Years ago, at Brain Technologies, we styled this new mindset “the dolphin” mindset (as compared to the carp, shark and not-quite-flying-fish mindsets). This new mindset isn’t so much free of so-called brain biases as it is capable of recognizing such thinking, valuing and behaving deficiencies and devoting—quickly, if needed—its considerable brain powers to producing something more constructive, more edifying, more real and beneficial than lurches.
My definition of the LEAP! is this: “Finding and mobilizing the next right, smart, good thing or move.”
I define each of those components thusly:
• “next” is what fits best in the coming moments
• “right” is the needed essentials
• “smart” is the opposite of what’s dumb
• “good” is what is fair, moral, “virtuous” (and a clear majority agrees that it is)
• “thing or move” is something that allows you to attend to the world in concrete fashion; something that can be acted on, if not now, then soon
What usually prevents any brain—yours, mine, ours, theirs—from producing the LEAP! is those brain biases mentioned a moment ago. Biases result when (as an absolutely right-on rule-of-thumb in the neurosciences puts it) “neurons that fire together, wire together” in ways that don’t match up very well rationally with the circumstances. Usually dating from when we are very young, brain biases keep reappearing because the neurons that produce these biases have been firing together for so long that they are now wired together. When something spooks them, they don’t even have to check it out. They just fire automatically. Together.
As the 2012 U.S. presidential election draws to a close, I have this ugly feeling in the pit of my stomach that there have been almost no LEAP! moments in the political developments that will produce the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the next four years. It has been brain bias time to wretched excess. Virtually all of the $6 billion that will have been spent by Nov. 6 on this campaign has been wasted seeking to ignite “neurons that fire together because they are wired together.” And when brain bias is “the decider,” the outcome almost always ends up on the wrong side of the ingredients in the LEAP! “recipe” for future-making I shared above.
To paraphrase Senator Lloyd Bensen’s famous debate riposte, “President Obama and Governor Romney, we’ve known LEAP!s, and neither of you is much of a LEAP!er.”
Consequently, the best we Americans can hope in the next four years is that things don’t get a lot worse, no matter which candidate ends up sitting in the Oval Office.
