Tom Wujec on 3 ways the brain creates meaning

Where Do Bad Moods Come From? What causes bad moods? Why do we sometimes slip into angry fits and melancholy torpors? In general, happy moods have easy explanations – we know why we’re elated. But a bad mood often seems to arrive out of the blue, a gloomy weather pattern that settles in from everywhere all at once. WHAT is it? Visual thinking, also called visual/spatial learning, picture thinking, or right brained learning, is the phenomenon of thinking through visual processing. Visual thinking has been described as seeing words as a series of pictures.[citation needed] It is common in approximately 60%–65% of the general population. "Real picture thinkers", those persons who use visual thinking almost to the exclusion of other kinds of thinking, make up a smaller percentage of the population. Research by child development theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be 'true' "picture thinkers".

EMOTIV INSIGHT: Optimize your brain fitness & performance by Tan Le Our mission to empower individuals to understand their own brain and accelerate brain research globally was set into motion with the launch of this Kickstarter campaign for Emotiv Insight. Over the course of this campaign, you joined our community and pledged to change how people think about their brain and how we could use brainwear to improve how we live, work, and play. Thanks to you, we are making the Emotiv Insight a reality! Thank you again for being such an awesome community! The human brain, our most advanced organ, is an intricate and complex network of connections. Largely enigmatic, it’s our own personal machine that can extract patterns from overwhelming amounts of data.

How Did Evolution Shape Human Behavior? Wonderfest 2010: How Did Evolution Shape Human Behavior? News In November, Stanford University and UC Berkeley were home to the 12th Annual Bay Area Festival of Science, aptly named Wonderfest . Two Leakey Foundation Grantees, Henry Gilbert , Assistant Professor of Anthropology at CSU East Bay and David DeGusta , former Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Stanford , were featured speakers.

Visual Thinking + Synthesis Photo by Ken Yeung I really enjoy talking complex subjects, processes or business problems and boiling them down to their core essence. This is becoming known as the process of "Visual Thinking". I use visual metaphors and storytelling to do this.

Five ingredients for innovation The political, social, and economic problems of tomorrow aren’t going to be solved using the methods honed by Baby Boomers and their parents (no offense to either generation). That message took center stage at this year’s World Innovation Forum, which took place on June 12th and 13th. But no matter how old you are, progress and prosperity are dependent on innovation. Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn? This is part of my Startup Advice series I often have career discussions with entrepreneurs – both young and more mature – whether they should join company “X” or not. I usually pull the old trick of answering a question with a question. My reply is usually, “is it time for you to earn or to learn?” Let’s face it. Mind Maps and Mind Mapping The human brain is very different from a computer. Whereas a computer works in a linear fashion, the brain works associatively as well as linearly - comparing, integrating and synthesizing as it goes.Association plays a dominant role in nearly every mental function, and words themselves are no exception. Every single word, and idea has numerous links attaching it to other ideas and concepts.

The New Model for Innovation Is Social Most business leaders are by now aware that the growing use of mobile phones is changing the competitive landscape for all companies, no matter what the industry. The extent of those changes is greater than most appreciate, however. They include entirely new methods of designing products and completely revamped methods for selling them. They also involve a fundamentally reinvented relationship with customers: To be precise, the customers are now the boss. Mind map A mind map about educational technology A mind map is a diagram used to visually organize information. A mind map is hierarchical and shows relationships among pieces of the whole.[1] It is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the center of a blank page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Major ideas are connected directly to the central concept, and other ideas branch out from those major ideas. Mind maps can also be drawn by hand, either as "rough notes" during a lecture, meeting or planning session, for example, or as higher quality pictures when more time is available.

COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE It's also possible for groups of people to work together in ways that seem pretty stupid, and I think collective stupidity is just as possible as collective intelligence. Part of what I want to understand and part of what the people I'm working with want to understand is what are the conditions that lead to collective intelligence rather than collective stupidity. But in whatever form, either intelligence or stupidity, this collective behavior has existed for a long time. Five glorious presentations on visual thinking Do you think in words or pictures, or both? Visual thinking engages the part of the brain that handles visual processing, and is said to be both "emotional and creative" so you can "organise information in an intuitive and simultaneous way". A picture really might be worth a thousand words, while being easier to understand and recall. Therefore it is worth exploring how visual thinking can help you communicate ideas to colleagues and clients.