The blue and the green
Via my evil twin Richard Wiseman comes one of the best color optical illusions I have ever seen. The original was apparently posted on Buzzhunt Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s incredible optical illusion website: You see embedded spirals, right, of green, pinkish-orange, and blue? Incredibly, the green and the blue spirals are the same color. At first I thought Richard was pulling our collective legs, being a trickster of high magnitude. Like I said, incredible! The reason they look different colors is because our brain judges the color of an object by comparing it to surrounding colors. See? The overall pattern is a spiral shape because our brain likes to fill in missing bits to a pattern. This is why I tell people over and over again: you cannot trust what you see even with your own eyes. So the next time someone swears they saw Jesus, or a UFO, or a ghost, show them this picture.
The coming boom and bust of design thinking
There is tremendous excitement right now about “design thinking” (see Helen Walters’ review of the best design thinking books of 2009, for example). Battered by economic failure, public uncertainty and the failure of traditional forms of leadership and management, many are gazing hopefully towards design thinking as a new management wonderdrug that will help them make sense of what is going on and secure their next big bonus, election or promotion. A Tweet I received a few days ago from @rosariocacao is typical of this excitement. See if you can count the number of buzzwords crammed into just 140 characters: “Design thinking – the premier organizational path to breakthrough innovation and collaboration While I too am excited that the general public is starting to better understand and appreciate the value design, it may be wise to inject a small note of caution gained from bitter experience before we get too carried away. Here is why.
120 Ways to Boost Your Brain Power
Here are 120 things you can do starting today to help you think faster, improve memory, comprehend information better and unleash your brain’s full potential. Solve puzzles and brainteasers.Cultivate ambidexterity. Use your non-dominant hand to brush your teeth, comb your hair or use the mouse. Write with both hands simultaneously. Switch hands for knife and fork.Embrace ambiguity. Readers’ Contributions Dance! Contribute your own tip! There are many, many ways to keep our brains sharp.
The Foundation for P2P Alternatives
Michael J. Gelb—How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci
Audience: Leaders, managers, professionals, people working in teams (special adaptations for trainers, engineers, financial services, marketers and salespeople)Competencies: Creativity, accelerated-learning, leadershipProgram formats: Keynote speech, half-day to two-day workshop Thinking creatively, learning faster and leading change, these abilities are at a premium in a highly competitive global business environment. What if you could call on history’s greatest genius, Leonardo da Vinci, to be your personal mentor in cultivating these highly prized elements of human capital? Anatomist, architect, botanist, city planner, chef, humorist, engineer, equestrian, inventor, geographer, geologist, military scientist, musician, painter, philosopher and raconteur, Leonardo da Vinci (1452 – 1519) helped bring the Western world out of the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance. Now his approach to optimizing human potential is more relevant than ever.
Types of Skills Everyone Should Know – Video – Top 100 Important Skills
3. Split Firewood Seasoned splitters use a maul, not an ax, to prep firewood. Michael Lewis
Creative Thinking Articles and Techniques by Michael Michalko
George de Mestral was inspired to improve the zipper. He thought about the essence of zippers which is to fasten two separate pieces of fabric together. His question became “How do things fasten?” One day when George was hunting birds with his Irish pointer, he traveled through some burdock thistles. When you are committed and start to actively work on a problem that you are passionate about, you will start to notice more and more things that relate to what you are working on. The burdock fascinated George and he imagined a fastener that mimicked a burdock. George envisioned two fabrics that could attach in this manner with one having a surface covered with minuscule hooks and another with hoops. It was not logic that guided his thinking process but perception and pattern recognition between two totally unrelated subjects: zippers and burdocks. Cognitive scientists understand the importance of perception and pattern recognition as a major component of creative thinking.
Task Coach
