PDA's News Rack: February 2016

In the past month we’ve been reading, listening to….

 …Radio 4’s Something Understood’s episode ‘Repeat after Me’ presented by the poet Ross Sutherland. He showed how repetition of phrases can be used as an emotional support and help in critical situations. A stand-out example was from Sutherland’s childhood. Doctors had told him to use the phrase “It is passing” whenever he experienced an asthma attack and had forgotten his medication.

Sutherland showed the roots of that auto suggestion in the pioneering work by Émile Coué; and his phrase ‘ça passe’, which Sutherland noted was much easier to say that ‘It is Passing’. C. Harry Brooks went on to literally write the book on the use of auto-suggestion and the use of the repetitive phrase.

Sutherland also showed how phrases and words can lose their meaning on repeated use, and how repetition creates a sing song quality that sticks in our minds.

And he dealt head on with the oft repeated phrase “I love you.” Plus detours via TV genre classic ‘Twin Peaks’ and the legend of Sisyphus: it’s worth downloading and, unsurprisingly, it bears repeated listening.

The Power of Repeated Listening

How humans hold onto their roles with the rise of the robots, Artificial Intelligence and powerful algorithms was the subject of Andrew Hall’s Financial Times Article, Robots will force experts to find other routes to the top. Hall argued that the increasing application of clever software means that many of the ways people trained, the repeated experience of routine tasks, will disappear. This means that professionals will need to be nurtured in new ways, potentially with more intense training, over a shorter time period.  And a key skill that the human expert will have to rely on to stand out in the robot age is that individual's ability to listen.

We’re back at the end of March with what we’ve humanely listened to...