Sunday 17 March 2013

outside the box



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“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I’ll never know.”
Groucho Marx.
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The last contributions for the CODEX BETWEEN THIS AND THAT book are dropping in. There is a range of views. Moreover - about 77% of people who agreed to write in are somewhere between superb and outstanding at “thinking outside the box”.   I am astounded by the span of thoughts and vocabulary used.  
Q1: Is it because those people are thinking their thoughts and not mine that they seem  so much more creatively insightful?

The ability to think in novel and useful ways has been the defining feature of humans. We invented the wheel, which is nothing like any of the mutations and instruments found in nature. We invented the codex so perfect, it had not changed it’s fundamental structure for over a thousand years. We invented electricity and lightbulb. And then we coined the term “lightbulb moment”.

This week’s Horizon (still available on BBC iPlayer)) was about the brain and the insight and how all of that works: how without thinking logically and methodically we come up with extraordinary ideas. Insight moments, as it turns out, are fleeting and elusive - no wonder I struggle to capture them! They do not come from nowhere, but they are a result of a chain of events and they require awareness bordering obsession. Each problem has an insight bubbling in the background. It is the right hemisphere, apparently, that is capable to making far reaching connections.  
Q2. Do people, who are blind in the right eye - so all input information is first streamed to their right hemisphere - make more insightful associations?

In two weeks I am going to the lecture by Professor Vincent Walsh about lightbulb moments. I expect it will be currious and illuminating. ←This sounds like one of those James Bond puns. Very uncreative of me.