musings on interesting ideas

Warwick university researchers (in education) have come up with a version of Sudoku which uses colour as well as numbers.

http://www.warwick.ac.uk

I find this really interesting because colour is a right brain function so I would assume that playing this game will be getting you to think more right brain.

This is also interesting because other research on the size of the hippocampuses (hippocampi) [which is the area of the brain involved in location finding ability] of London Cab drivers suggests that stimuation of a specific part of the brain causes it to physically grow and perform better.

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/doc_WTX032958.html

So maybe playing colour sudoku could develop your right brain thinking.

If data is “stuff” and information is “useful stuff” then this raises some interesting questions about what we are doing to ourselves in our society at the moment. We all seem to be suffering from data overload which cause stress, ill health, long working hours, etc. Maybe what we have been doing with all those computers and bits of technology is capturing and disseminating more and more data? But have we spent any real effort in trying to figure out now to turn the data into information? Surely if we could do this then we could decrease the data overload problem?

In your work and personal life how could you:

• Decrease the amount of data that you need to handle?
• Increase the amount of information that you handle?
• Develop techniques for converting data into information?

How one Canadian guy started off with one red paperclip and by repeatedly trading it up for more valuable items has finally bought a house.

For the full story see: one red paperclip

So nothing is impossible!

Practically every language in the world (all as far as I know) is built on the idea of nouns and verbs:

• Nouns are things which are acted upon.
• Verbs act on nouns.

Is this the only way that a language could work? Could you imagine or even develop a language that did not have nouns and verbs?

Nouns and verbs (and our language generally) have a strong effect on how we perceive and explain the world. If we could change our language then we could change our thinking.

An interesting question is whether language creates the way we think or whether the way we think has created a language to suit it?

Our imagination does not stretch very far in this area. In Star Trek most languages including the Klingon language is still based on Nouns and verbs.

How would changing our language effect out thinking?

A large amount of western thinking, and in particular scientific thinking, is based on the concept of cause and effect. It appears, to our minds, to be how the world works. A cause creates an effect. If there is an effect therefore there must be a cause. If a cause exists then there must be an effect.

This has been an incredibly useful way of thinking and has had a large impact on creating our civilisation, science and technology. But is it the only way of looking at the world? In Physics this idea has been largely dropped in the newer fields such as quantum mechanics. Biologists are now starting to discard some of their ideas about “Stimulus/Response”.

How often does the “cause/effect” way of thinking affect our thinking? How could we change this?