The Monday Media Diet with Katie Dreke

On the Long Now Foundation, The Mountain In The Sea, by Ray Nayler, and Collective Neuroscience

Katie Dreke (KD) is a strategist, designer, and futurist who thrives at the intersection of culture, technology, and human behavior. She’s also a longtime friend of WITI. Happy to have her with us this week.

Tell us about yourself.

I’m a PNW local. Born and raised in the Seattle area, now living in Portland, Oregon. I currently run a consulting studio focused on brand and innovation strategy, but prior to that my employment gave my family and I the opportunity to live in some amazing cities (Amsterdam, Sydney, Tokyo) and experience expansive world travels together.

I grew up playing a ton of sport, and reading a boat load of science fiction, and neither of those things have changed very much.

I’m a mother of two, and somehow through the crazy hallucination known as ‘the passage of time’ they are now much taller than me, and will shortly leave my husband and I with a house much too big for only two people.

As much as I adore cities, and their incredible bottomless energies, I find I am truly at my best and most ‘default setting’ when I’m in the wild. I feel so lucky that everywhere I have ever lived in the world I’ve had access to the ocean, and to the mountains. Whenever I feel overwhelmed by the woes of modern life, a brisk hike in the trees brings me back to center.

Describe your media diet.

Exclusively science fiction books. Occasionally podcasts. A few newsletters. I hardly watch classical TV anymore, although I do love a good long-form series in the winter season, something like: Foundation, Severance, Silo, Outer Range, The Expanse, Station Eleven. I really appreciate a long story arc that I can work through over many weeks/months, something that is deep and well constructed. A world that I can sit inside of and visit for a while.

A few years ago when I was training for a marathon I went super deep into the podcast catalogue of the Long Now Foundation. Many of those episodes are over 2hrs long and were perfect for my weekend long-runs. The content is so inspiring and intellectually dense, sometimes I would come back from my run and hardly remember having done it at all!

I don’t commute to an office anymore. But occasionally I’ll have a morning meeting downtown, or a need to drive to the airport for an early flight, and I’ll catch Morning Edition from NPR on the radio – it’s just like bumping into an old friend for a nice chat on the sidewalk.

At home, we have a big internet connected speaker in the main living room area and I have Radio Paradise playing there 365. They curate the absolute best playlist of tunes I have ever experienced. I never have to wonder if I will like what they play, and I never can predict or anticipate what song will come next. It’s my favorite place to both discover new artists, and revel in deep cut favorites, and its perfect background for our life and our home, regardless of who might be visiting, or what we might be doing. I adore the beautiful simplicity of radio in ways that are hard to describe.

What’s the last great book you read?

The Mountain In The Sea, by Ray Nayler made me see the world, the accelerating and destabilizing advancement of AI, and our emerging ability to understand and engage with the sentience of animals in a way that I can’t ever unsee again. It’s a little bit near-future-cyber-punk, and a lot deeply-empathic-coevolutionary-endgame. My daughter is studying Marine Biology at university right now, and it was an extra treat to read this book together at the same time. Very highly recommend.

What are you reading now?

I’ve got quite a few queued up on my bedside table right now. Several are stories I’ve been keen to revisit after years of still thinking about them on the regular:

_ The Bone Clocks, by David Mitchell

_ Aurora, by Kim Stanley Robinson

_ The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells

_ Anathem, by Neal Sephenson

And then there are a few new and spontaneous selections from two of my favorite book stores here in Portland – Powell’s Books & Parallel Worlds:

_ This Is How You Lose The Time War, co-written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

_ Alien Clay, by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I feel naked if there are not at least 6-8 good solid reads waiting impatiently for me in a big stack.

What’s your reading strategy when you pick up a print copy of your favorite publication?

This is a funny question. And it made me reflect. And when I do, I realize that I have a sort of ritualized engagement with print media. Whenever I pick up a newspaper, or a magazine, a coffee table book, or a zine, my process seems to be the same every time:

Round 1: Flip. Skip. Scan headlines. Scan photos. Scan articles. Filter.

Round 2: Select articles. Power through them, methodically, slowly, one at a time.

Round 3: Take photos of my most favorite articles, or cut them out, because I’m slowly becoming my grandmother.

Who should everyone be reading that they’re not?

A few years ago I realized (quite naively) that the vast majority of the science fiction I had been reading was from white authors, and mostly from male authors. I decided to go on a deliberate journey of reading exclusively black women science fiction authors to see what I would find, and to feel how it would feel. I wanted to look for elements and narratives that I hadn’t been exposed to before, and to deepen my love of sci-fi by bringing more voices into the party.

If you’re thinking of taking a similar exploration, I’ve got a starter list for you:

Octavia Butler:

_ The Evening and The Morning and The Night

_ Fledgling

_ Parable of the Sower

N. K. Jemisin:

_ The Broken Earth Trilogy

_ The World We Make

Nnedi Okorafor:

_ Binti

_ Who Fears Death

What is the best non-famous app you love on your phone?

Every once in a while, I have a small bout of claustrophobia. It might happen in a car, or most often in an airplane as people are boarding, and once even on a rollercoaster. It’s usually when I’m super tired, or overly stressed. I’ll feel the surging spike of my heart racing, and general discomfort everywhere, it can be quite awful.

The one little tool that I can always count on bringing calm and balance back into my mind and body is called: Pause

It’s a simple little trick really. Place your finger on the screen. Follow the dot. Don’t move too fast. Listen to the sounds.

The audio design does something wonderful to my brain. I can look at my Oura ring data and literally watch my heart rate come down, down, down. Just knowing it’s on my phone, and that it always works, means I often don’t even need to open it at all.

Plane or train?

Train. My life in the PNW will not be complete until there is a Shinkansen train line running from Vancouver B.C. to San Francisco. After living in Tokyo for 3 years I am absolutely ruined and nothing else is acceptable.

What is one place everyone should visit?

The Hoh River Rainforest in my home state of Washington.

Seattle gets about 36 inches of rain per year.

By comparison, the Hoh Rainforest receives as much as 14 feet of rain per year.

The prevalent fog and mist can also contribute the equivalent of another 30 inches of rain, resulting in one of the world's lushest rain forests.

The western slopes of the Olympic Mountains are the first area to get hit with moisture-laden wind and rain storms that come in from the Pacific Ocean. As the air rises along the windward slopes of the mountains it cools and brings precipitation, lots and lots of it.

The Hoh Rain Forest is actually one of four rain forests on the Olympic Peninsula. However, it is the only one that has been awarded the distinction of being a World Heritage Site and a Biosphere Reserve by UNESCO. Its completely unique ecosystem that has remained unchanged for thousands of years and it is now the most carefully preserved rain forest in the northern hemisphere.

The most common types of trees that grow in the Hoh Rain Forest are Sitka Spruce and Western Hemlock (Washington's official state tree), which can reach over 300 feet high and seven feet in diameter. Most of them are covered with gigantic living clumps of hanging moss and ferns.

The best place to start is at the Hoh Rain Forest Visitor Center. From there you can walk along multiple nature trails. The experience is much like walking through a living green cathedral. If you go on a day when there are not a lot of other visitors, you cannot help but notice how quiet it is. The moss is very effective at absorbing sounds, dampening even your own movements. It’s otherworldly.

The best time to visit is actually when it is most damp and raining because that is when the moss is the most lush and green. Another reason to visit during the rainy season is that you are more likely to see an Ariolimax columbianus (a banana slug), which is the second largest species of land slug in the world. This is their kingdom, and here they can grow up to 10 inches long and weigh a quarter of a pound. The rainy winter and spring seasons are also the best times to see Roosevelt elk that live in the area since they move to the higher elevations in the summer.

Tell us the story of a rabbit hole you fell deep into.

I love rabbit holes. If I’m not careful I will fall in and stay all day. The chase is pure satisfaction, and rabbit holes are often where I get into my best flow state of thinking and ideating.

Recently - for a client assignment - I was looking for a ‘hook’, a logical and strategic reason (and if I’m completely honest, a reverse engineered strategic reason…) for why we had opted for the use of poetry and music over the past 4 years of brand campaigns.

Sometimes when you look through the rear view mirror you can see things even more clearly than through the windshield. 👁️

In this hunt for a hook I stumbled into the emerging discipline of ‘Collective Neuroscience’.

Neuroscientists typically will investigate one brain at a time. They seek to observe how neurons fire as an individual person reads certain words, for example, or plays a video game.

As social animals, however, those same scientists do much of their work together—brainstorming hypotheses, puzzling over problems and fine-tuning experimental designs together. Increasingly, researchers are now bringing that working reality into how they study brains collectively.

‘Collective Neuroscience’, as some call it, is a rapidly growing field of research. An early, consistent finding is that when people converse or share an experience, their brain waves synchronize.

Neurons in corresponding locations of the different brains fire at the same time, creating matching patterns, like dancers moving together.

Auditory and visual areas respond to shape, sound and movement in similar ways, and higher-order brain areas seem to also behave similarly during more challenging tasks such as making meaning out of something seen or heard.

When listening to the rhythms of spoken poetry, or the beat within a musical performance, these entanglements of mind and brainwave increase even further.

Essentially – the experience of “being on the same wavelength” as another person is a completely real phenomenon, and it is observable in the activity of the brain.

I wonder – what are the chances that we might be on the same wavelength right now? (KD)