The Divided Brain

The Divided Brain, from Iain McGilchrist

The Divisions of the brain has a rocky history, particularly in our understanding of how we think creativity works in the brain. McGilchrist thinks this needs to be re-addressed, particularly from its simplistic explanation. The common split, suggesting that the brain is equally divided on the left by rational and the right for emotion and creativity is now thought to be wholly wrong. Both side have important roles to play in every mode of thinking.

There is something very important to understand, particularly in humans, about this division, particularly in relation to the function of the corpus callosum, whose role it turns out is to "inhibit" the function of one hemisphere from the other. 

The brain's asymmetry is there for a reason, mostly to do with the types of focus we have to have. the left is for narrow focus, the right is for a broader outlook. This is borne out by people who have damaged one or other of their hemispheres.

When we know something is important and we wish to be precise about it, we use our left hemisphere. When we need a more general awareness we use our right.

Our ability to empathise with others is what allows us to read other people's minds and intentions, and this is what allows us to make bonds with other people.

Our minds use a simplified version of reality and we use mental maps to know where things are and what is important to us. The right hemisphere is used to understand things in context and to understand their implicit meaning. It deals with the embodied world.

For imagination you need both hemispheres, for reason you need both hemispheres.

There is an interesting metaphor used by McGilchrist of understanding the world in the left hemisphere as essentially lifeless and deals with things that are static and essentially lifeless. The right hemisphere as understanding the world as embodied, individual and living.

This offers us two versions of the world, which has favoured the left "rational" side which is not right and has led to many deficiencies in our current view of our place in society.

We have developed something that looks distinctly like the left hemisphere view of the world. Control lead to paranoia. The left hemisphere view seems to be more consistent, largely because it has made it so. A self-fulfilling prophesy.

We must return to what the right hemisphere knows.

As Einstein said, "the intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant...we have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift".

C.L. 27 Aug 2017

Can Creativity be Taught.

Can Creativity be Taught. Sir Ken Robinson.

People often feel that creativity is something you're born with and that you've either got it or you haven't. In this short talk, Ken Robinson successfully and simply argues that creativity can  be learnt and should be an essential part of the schools curriculum.

In my opinion too, creativity is a way of thinking, a way of looking at the world. It's a method that can, and should, be taught by nurturing, inspiring, giving confidence and having a receptive attitude the world outside ourselves.

What he doesn't mention in this brief video is the importance of curiosity, of the desire to know and discover. Prevalent in all creative thinkers is the desire to know and understand more. This is not the whole formula but it is a very important part of it.

Undoubted as well is the ability to think outside or beyond the norms, to have original thoughts that move one step beyond received wisdom. In order to think beyond existing norms you have to know what they are, and that means being immersed in the chosen field, no matter what it is.

Creativity is the process of having original ideas that have value. All creative processes involve evaluation. As Ken Robinson says, it's not a freewheeling process, it does involve "crafting" and working at it. Having value presupposes that there is an eager audience who, if they find the ideas to have value for them, will embrace them. Creativity without evaluation may be fun to conceive, but will be relegated to self-indulgence or frivolity. In order to assess creativity, you just have to identify the criteria. Clear on the criteria of originality and value.
What I love about Ken Robinson's definition is its breadth, you can be creative with anything and in any field. Creativity is not taught by direction instruction, like driving a car, it is a process of enabling, and of encouragement. 

Creative thinking is an extremely powerful tool of change and should not be excluded from the schools (or life's) curriculum because the criteria of evaluation are not as easy as maths or science.

CL 20 Aug 2017 

The Science Of Happiness

The Era of Open Innovation

The Era of Open Innovation.

This talk is deceptively simple but addresses the problem of whether patents promote innovation or protect the larger organisations. Larger organisations are understandably risk-averse, their credo is often to reduce the exposure and risk in order to produce predictably and, of course, profit. Real innovation is, by its nature, risky. The greater the leap, the greater the risk. What Leadbeater looks at, with a beautifully clear train of thought, is whether open source is the real future of innovation.

This is well worth listening to. 

Charles Leon. 7th August 2017

Mental Models: 

How to train your brain to think in new ways.

I remember the moment I first learned what a mental model was and how useful the right one could be. It happened while I was reading a story about Richard Feynman, the famous physicist. Feynman received his degree from MIT and his PHD from Princeton. During that time he developed a reputation for waltzing into the math department and solving problems that brilliant PHD students couldn't solve.

When people asked how he did it, Feynman claimed that his secret weapon was not his intelligence, but rather a strategy he learned in high school. According to Feynman, his high school physics teacher asked him to stay after class one day and gave him a challenge.

"Feynman," the teacher said, "you talk too much and and you make too much noise. I know why. You're bored. So, I'm going to give you a book. You go up there in the back, in the corner, and study this book, and when you know everything that's in this book, you can talk again."

So, Each day, Feynman would hide in the back of the classroom and study the book - Advanced Calculus by Woods - While the rest of the class continued with their regular lessons. And it was while studying this old calculus textbook that Feynman began to develop his own set of mental models.

"That book showed how to differentiate parameters under the integral sign" Feynman wrote. "It turns out that's not taught very much in universities: they don't emphasize it. But I caught on how to use that method, and I used that dam tool again and again. So because I was self taught using that book, I had a particular method of doing integrals."

The result was that when the MIT or Princeton had trouble doing a certain integral, it was because they couldn't do it with the standard methods learnt in school.

"so I got a great reputation for doing integrals, only because my box of tools was different from everybody else's"

When I read this story I realised that the smartest people are not necessarily the ones with raw intelligence, but often the ones with the best mental models.

What is a mental model?

A mental model is an explanation of how something works. It is a concept, a framework, or worldview that you carry in your mind. Mental models guide your perception and behavior. They are the thinking tools that you use to understand life, make decisions and solve problems.

For example, there is no single model from physics or engineering that provides a flawless explanation of the entire universe, but the best mental model from those disciplines have allowed us to build bridges and roads, develop new technologies, and even travel to outer space.

As historian Yuval Noah Harari puts it, "Scientists generally agree that no theory is 100% correct. Thus, the real test of knowledge is not truth, but utility."

The best mental models are the ideas with the most utility. This is why developing a broad base of mental models is a crucial task for anyone interested in thinking clearly, rationally and effectively. The secret to great thinking if a certain worldview dominates your thinking, then you'll try to explain every problem you face through that worldview.

As the proverb says: "If all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail"

The more you master a single mental model, the more likely it becomes that this mental model will be your downfall because you start applying it indiscriminately to every problem.

We all have our favorite mental models, the ones we naturally default to as an explanation. Typically we favour the concepts we are familiar with, but each individual mental model is just one view of reality. The challenges and situations we face in life cannot be entirely explained by one field or industry. All perspective hold some truth. Thus the secret to great think is to employ a variety of mental models.

Mental models provide an internal picture of how the world works, and we should be constantly upgrading and improving the quality of this picture. The mind's eye needs a variety of mental models to piece together a complete picture of how the world works. The more sources you have to draw upon, the clearer your thinking becomes.

As philosopher Alain De Botton notes; " the chief enemy of good decisions is a lack of sufficient perspectives on the problem." Tools for thinking better that rely on a narrow set of thinking tools is like wearing a mental straight jacket. Your cognitive range of motion is limited. And when you set of mental models is limited, so is your potential for finding a solution.

You have to build out your toolbox.

In schools we tend to separate knowledge into different silos - biology, history, physics, etc - But in the real world information is not divided into neatly defined categories. In the words of Charlie Munger " All the wisdom of the world is not to be found in one academic department."

World-class thinkers are often silo-free thinkers. They avoid looking at life through the lens of one subject. By mastering the fundamentals of many disciplines, they are able to make connections and identify solutions that most people overlook. They develop "liquid Knowledge" that flows easily from one topic to the next.



Sources and notes;

Richard Feynman - Surely you're joking Mr Feynman.

The law of the instrument of man with hammer syndrome. The original phrase comes from Abraham Kaplan's book; The Conduct of Inquiry: Methodology of Behavioral science. " Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs a pounding." p28

Charles Munger - A Lesson on Elementary, Worldly Wisdom as it Relates to Investment Management & Business.

Charles Munger - Speach at USC Business School. 1994

James Clear - www.jamesclear.com 


Charles Leon 5th August 2017

If you can't explain something in simple terms, you don't understand it. Schrodinger's Cat Explained (?!)

Ever wondered about what shrodinger's cat was all about?

Schrodingers Cat is one of the most famous thought experiments in modern physics. Created by Austrian Physicist Erwin Schrodinger back in 1935.

The gist of the experiment is as follows:

In a hypothetical experiment...a cat is placed in a sealed box along with a radioactive sample, a Geiger counter and a bottle of poison.

If the Geiger counter detects that the radioactive material has decayed, it will trigger the smashing of the bottle of poison and the cat will be killed.

The experiment was designed to illustrate the flaws of the "Copenhagen interpretation" of quantum mechanics, which states that a particle exists in all states at once until observed.

If the "Copenhagen interpretation suggests the radioactive material can have both decayed and not decayed in a sealed environment, then it follows that the cat too is both alive and dead until the box is opened.

The beautiful animation with "scribbles" by Chavdar Yordanov, graphically explain the thought experiment (well, sort of...)

There have been many objections to the Copenhagen interpretation over the years. These include: discontinuous jumps when there is an observation, the probabilistic element introduced upon observation, the subjectiveness of requiring an observer, the difficulty of defining a measuring device and to the necessity of evoking classical physics to describe the "laboratory" in which the results are measured.

So, are you any the wiser?? Probably, but then again the chances are probably not, it all depends on if you observe it or not.

I agree with Richard Feynman; "If you can't explain something in simple terms, you probably don't understand it"

Charles Leon 2nd August 2017