Jason Silva plays the guinea pig during an episode of Brain Games. (Image:: NGT/Stephen Holtzhauser )
It’s the quintessential college experience: late nights, pizza, and heady intellectual conversations. And then there was that one friend, whose philosophical musings would bring unconnected thoughts together into a stream of mellifluous prose; it all sounded pretty convincing at the time – even if the specifics were hazy – leaving us with the sense of fertile pastures just outside our mental grasp.
Jason Silva is the polished, better-sourced, hipper version of that roommate, one that can walk the walk in addition to talking the very frenetic talk. As the creator of the Shots of Awe video series (see an example at the end of this post) and host of National Geographic’s Brain Games , Silva has made a name for himself as a leading science evangelist and technology enthusiast.
But unlike the professorial Bill Nye or the authoritative Neil DeGrasse Tyson, Silva takes a different communications tack, guiding us through a journey of wonder rather than telling us precisely how it is. It’s a refreshing antidote to the jaded, nothing-but-the-facts approach taken by scientists who feel they have the moral high ground, an approach that only serves to propagate a culture war. “I’m interested in exultation, wonderment, inspiration, and content that acts as a decentering experience,” says Silva, using language that could just as easily apply to a religious experience. And in many ways, that’s just what the modern world is to Silva, with its delivery and continued promise of new knowledge and techno-futurism.
To Silva, the sequence of events that, as he puts it, “took a naked ape and put him on the Moon,” required a carefully calibrated balance of human instincts. We are naturally curious explorers, certainly, but unbridled wanderings without focused expertise isn’t particularly productive. On the other hand, ceaseless technical development and capacity building without an inspired objective leads to products with subpar utility. “We love security and ritual and routine,” Silva reflects, “but also mystery and danger. We need to find a way to dance between these two modes, and I think that’s a tough skill to develop. There’s got to be a functional output.”
Silva’s projects cover a wide range of subjects and flavors of “functional output.” His Shots of Awe are “a way to eternalize fleeting epiphanies,” two-minute serums meant to inspire and develop questions rather than to provide detailed explanations. Silva himself is involved with every aspect of production, from video clip curation to music selection and editing, and with a new video every week it’s an ambitious schedule. Brain Games is a larger enterprise, a surprise hit for the National Geographic Channel that has offered a glimmer of educational hope as “lifestyle” shows dumb down other corners of the cable universe. Silva credits the show’s production and writing teams, who combine “triple-vetted” science with a screenwriter’s instinct for pacing and storytelling.
If too-cool-for-school detachment seems to be on its way out as a cultural sensibility – as presaged by empathy-bolstering websites like Upworthy, and Humans of New York – then earnestness is a growth stock and Silva is a blue chip. By his own admission, Silva is “terrified of boredom,” which he characterizes as a coping mechanism to gird ourselves from the exhausting state of constant mental engagement with the world. By chasing novel connections and challenging viewers, Silva hopes to scramble previous mental models and demand a fruitful, if challenging, reconstruction. “When you lose your center, you have to reconstruct your beliefs and understanding about the world,” he notes. “Any engagement that is potent must first disrupt.”
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