art

When In Doubt, Differentiate

Posted in art, creativity, perception, resourcefulness, thinking on June 20th, 2010 by Mo Fox – Be the first to comment

Pencil Differential

I did higher maths at school and loved it, though it was far from my best subject.  Great teacher, models, complexity – you beaut. But the biggest attraction for me was that surprisingly, maths was all about the process rather than the outcome.  Getting the ‘right’ answer was never as important as the way we approached the problem, and we could get nearly full marks without having correct results.
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Standard maths classes were taught an endless list of formulas and where to apply them. Somewhat like many contemporary case-study based business consulting models. However we had to be much more creative.   We were expected to derive the formulas in the first place.  Which meant we had to understand how the ‘engine’ of what we were working on functioned.   read more »

Perception Is The Root Of All Error

Posted in Innovation, art, change, creativity, perception, resourcefulness, thinking on June 2nd, 2010 by Mo Fox – 1 Comment

The Eyes Have It

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Well, maybe not all.  But about 90% of all mistakes we make apparently come down to errors in perception (how we map the information we take in) rather than faulty thinking. That’s a phenomenal statistic, because it implies that by just changing how we see things we can have a profound effect on the results we get.
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Phenomenal, but valid.
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Have a frolic through the pages of current pop neuroscience (the divine Johah Lehrer, Gregory Berns‘ Iconoclast, Norman Doige et al) and you will come away with a clear understanding that the human brain is geared entirely around efficiency.  It has to be.  We input well over 100 million bits of information every single second of which we can process only a few hundred and consciously play with around 5.  Yes, 5. Out of over 100 million. And that’s on a good day.  So in order to make sense of it all and not short-circuit like a deranged terminated Dahlek, the brain looks for patterns and experiences to create shortcuts and filter out 99.9% of the material it’s being bombarded with.  Therefore, if this large rectangle was a door yesterday, it’s likely to be a door today, and so are all those other large rectangles etc… (oops, no, this one’s actually a deflection portal to the trans-dimensional floordrobe and stenchpit my teenage son alternately hibernates and mutates in… Note to self: engagement perilous.) read more »