| Initially |
| Dyslexia |
| Bilexia |
| Educational Systems |
| Brain Functions |
| An extreme example |
| CreativityInnovation«Flow» |
| Finally |
Initially
The point is not only dyslectic people to be vindicated. The point is not only to change the education paradigms. The issue is to eradicate dys- from our lives. Every human being to feel that they live a fulfilling life in the present, to be happy finding fulfillment in his everyday life, to feel connected to his environment and the people around him and to fly with the strong wings of inspiration, hope and love, dancing in the light to the rhythms of universal music harmony.
The situation seems utopic and it is utopic because there is no such place, a heavenly place or a lost paradise which man can find so as to assure him a happy life. There is no such place but there is a way even under the worst external circumstances as Joe the welder proves ... man can be adjusted so that he can live in such a paradise ‘here and now’ in any place where he could be. This mode of life, this possibility of human beings, this amazing capacity of the human brain, approach from different sides:
1. Jill Bolte Taylor who describes euphoria and the magnificent sense of calmness that she felt when the functions of the left hemisphere of her brain were dramatically restricted due to cerebral hemorrhage after a stroke i .
2. Ken Robinson talking about creativity, the various types of intelligence and the necessity to change the education paradigms ii .
3. Iain McGilchrist presenting the different functions of the two brain hemispheres: we feel that our life has no meaning, we feel unhappy because we focus mainly on the function of the left hemisphere of the brain. A black and white photograph cannot depict the multitude (variety) of colors. But the world of the right brain hemisphere deals with the present, with NOW and when the man’s consciousness opts to give him more time, he feels that his life has a meaning, he feels happiness and fulfillment iii .
4. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi suggesting the term ‘flow’. ‘Flow’ is a state of increased focus, composed ecstasy, euphoria and feedback that successful people experience in various activities such as arts, games or workplace iv .
5. Eckhart Tolle talking about the liberation, completeness, light, the feeling of solidarity and totality, happiness and creativity that come out when the consciousness of man is liberated from the dominance of the past and the future, when he is free from the functions of the left hemisphere of his brain, when he lives in the present, he lives NOW, and gives more time to the functions of the right hemisphere of his brain v .
Dyslexia/Bilexia is the gift that made it possible for all these five dots to be united. And many more ...
The text of the post:
^ Dyslexia
By definition, the term dyslexia indicates illness, defect, a problematic situation (dysentery, dysplasia ... dystopia!). The educational environment of modernity, a genuine “child” of the industrial revolution and a direct descendant of the Cartesian anthropology ("I think therefore I am"), which fantasizes that rational thought is the highest human function that differentiates man from animals. Therefore, having given absolute value by thinking in words, has diagnosed thinking in pictures as a disease.
On the other hand, in postmodernity the advantages of thinking in pictures gains in recognition and the education community already argues about “The Gift of Dyslexia” 1 , “The Advantage of Dyslexia” 2 . However, the derogatory term DYS-lexia is still in common use!
In general, the prefix dys- carries a negative meaning. Particularly in Greek it means “hard, bad, unlucky, etc., destroying the good sense of a word, or increasing its bad sense: hence, joined even to words expressing negation” (Liddell & Scott). But the mental function that provokes the symptoms characterized as dyslexia is literally, a gift for those people whose brain works this way. Usually these people have an increased awareness of their environment, they are more curious than the average person, mainly think in pictures rather than in words, have the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, are genius at divergent, at “out of the box” thinking, they are extremely intuitive and clairvoyant, they perform better in Multi-dimensional thinking (using all of their senses) and have vivid imagination. If not oppressed, overturned or destroyed by parents or teachers, their scores appear to be higher than average and are unusual creative.
«Dyslexia is our best most visible evidence that the brain was never wired to read. I look at dyslexia as a daily evolutionary reminder that very different organizations of the brain are possible. Some organizations may not work well for reading yet are critical for the creation of buildings and art and the recognition of patterns, whether on ancient battlefields, or in biopsy slides. Some of these variations of the brain's organization may lend themselves to the requirements of modes of communication, just on the horizon». 3 . Not all children with dyslexia have extraordinary talents, but every one of them has a unique potential that all too often goes unrealized because we don't know how to tap it» 4 . «Having dyslexia won't make every dyslexic a genius, but it is good for the self-esteem of all dyslexics to know their minds work in exactly the same way as the minds of great geniuses. It is also important for them to know that having a problem with reading, writing, spelling, or math doesn't mean they are dumb or stupid. The same mental function that produces a genius can also produce those problems. The mental function that causes dyslexia is a gift in the truest sense of the word: a natural ability, a talent. It is something special that enhances the individual» 5 .
The teacher enters the class and starts to teach Addition:
“1 plus 1 equals 2”.
The next day, the teacher asks:
“Children, what does 1 plus 1 equal?”
Johnny looks around looking lost.
The teacher looks at him and thinks: “the child is stupid!”
But Johnny’s mind is on fire:
1 + 1 = 2 as the teacher said but he have had enough with “logical” thinking. He is attracted by the divergent thinking, the “out of the box” thinking, the “mad”, the inventive, creative thinking, so:
1 + 1 = 11 (if you put them side by side) ...
1 + 1 = 1 (if put one on top of the other) ...
Johnny remembers the teacher’s “reasonable” addition, but he is attracted by his “crazy” images and he is unable to pick up a choice ...
A child’s mind who thinks in words, that is verbally, works as a train moving on rails, or it works as a serial electronic processor. The mind of the dyslectic, the one who thinks in pictures, works as a parallel electronic processor, moving in space, flying, running like a wild horse ... It is more difficult to tame, but when tamed, when someone manages to control it, then it is more efficient, it is creative, inventive, innovative.
An Indian film entitled “Like Stars on Earth” (Taare Zameen Par - Stars on Earth), a Bollywood production, which addresses the issue of dyslexia, has been released in 2007. Isaan, an 9 year old dyslexic boy has been held back in third grade and is treated by his family and school as a lazy and stubborn boy. Isaan’s parents decide to send him to a boarding school so he can learn to behave. There, Isaan experiences daily failure and punishment, which push him to introversion, lower self-esteem and throw him into severe depression, resulting to abandon drawing, the only thing he truly loves and inspires him,. Eventually, a teacher called Nikumbh, who as a student “suffered” by the same “disability” of dyslexia, informs Isaan’s parents about the gift of dyslexia and helps him rediscover his inspiration 6 .
«The real tragedy of dyslexia is that no one tells this to the children who year after year, publicly, humiliatingly cannot learn to read, despite all their intelligence, and despite the critical importance of just their type of intelligence for the species. Also no one tells the children's peers. This view does not minimize the difficulties every child with dyslexia confronts and learning, on the contrary it tells these children just how important they are to us all. ... It is in the highest interests of our society to protect the potential contributions of our children with dyslexia. As described in the work of Harvard scholar, Gil Noam, ‘There is a necessity that we help them endure what is difficult and foster their resilience, so that they are prepared to invent the next light bulb when they are ready’» 7 .
^ Bilexia
«Human being were never born to read” Reading is a human invention that reflect how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new. In this ambitious, provocative book, Wolf chronicles the remarkable journey of the reading brain ... over the course of a single child's life, showing in the process why children with dyslexia have reading difficulties and singular gifts» 8 . Current educational systems tend to cultivate and assess verbal thinking, either exclusively or as a priority. About 15% of the population, are gifted at thought in pictures. This percentage when asked to join in an educational system that mainly cultivates and assesses verbal thinking, because of their difficulty to cope with, usually they develop defense mechanisms. These defense mechanisms most of the times are grouped under the derogatory term “dyslexia”. It's as if basketball couldn’t be considered a worthwhile sport and anyone who could become a talented basketball player could spend his life carrying the title of “A Bad Football player!”.
«Jackie Stewart, the Scottish racing driver, won twenty seven Grand Prix titles, was knighted by Prince Charles and had one of the world's most successful racing careers before he retired, he is also dyslexic. Recently he concluded a speech at an international scientific conference on dyslexia by saying: ‘You will never understand what it feels like to be dyslexic. No matter how long you have worked in this area. No matter if your own children are dyslexic. You will never understand what it feels like to be humiliated your entire childhood and taught every day to believe that you will never succeed at anything. ... The plot of the dyslexia story is one that could be told with minor variations all around the world. A bright child, let's say a boy, of arrives at school full of life and enthusiasm. He tries hard to learn to read like everyone else. But unlike everyone else, he can't seem to learn how. He's told by his parents to try harder. He's told by his teachers that he's not working to potential. He's told by other children that he's a retard and a moron. He gets a resoundingly message that he's not going to amount to much and he leaves school bearing little resemblance to the enthusiastic child he was when he entered. ... If a struggling young reader is lucky -however very lucky- someone along the way will help him or her discover an unexpected talent. Jackie Stewart said that if he hadn't discovered that he could race cars, he would surely have been in jail or worse, because he had learned how to use a gun» 9 .
In the beginning there was a request for the prefix dys- to be removed from the term dyslexia and be replaced with a term that indicates the ability to think in pictures. For the language orientated people the charismatic visual thinker is considered dyslexic, while if the dominant model was that of thinking in pictures, the gifted in verbal thinking child would be called “dis-visual”.
Initially there was a thought to use a word that charges dyslexia with a positive meaning, e.g. to use a compound term that begins with the prefix Eu- and then a word related to the picture could be used ... However the result would not even sound nice: euicon, euimage, eupicture ... bliach ... deadlock, embarrassment, wonder and ..., dyslexia ... OK, let's replace the "d" to "b" as many dyslexics do:
Bislexia or bilexia
The prefix bis- in Latin mean double 10 . A dyslexic person instead of having one word, one answer, like it is requested in verbal thinking, he/she has invented another “word”, his/her creativity has found one more answer, so he/she has two words (bilexia) and as long as he/she hasn’t learn to “control” his/her gift, he/she loses it, he/she feels awkward and he/she doesn’t know which answer to choose, he/she is getting confused.
Bilexia = two words!
The number 1,000,000,000 is called a billion, literally “twice million” however, in this case, it means a thousand millions. So bilexia can also mean “a thousand words” ... or rather “an image”, as the wise saying goes: “a picture is worth a thousand words”.
Bilexia = thousand words (one picture)
^ Educational Systems
Some teachers, parents and students have a negative attitude about Dyslexia: "What does dyslexia mean? Young scoundrels, they should only sit down to read and learn! What that means they cannot! They do not want! They are lazy and useless. Actually, it doesn’t seem wrong to speak about "young scoundrels”... The brain with predominate right hemisphere, is pleased with divergent thinking, invention, innovation, "revolutionary” and "illegal" 11 , way of thinking, the «out of the box» 12 thinking. Children with this way of thinking often react to the depreciation charge in subversive way, that is, they act like "young scoundrels". It’s worth considering though, that this rebellious and out of limits way of thinking and reacting, may consist their natural way of brain function.
Progressively, more people get informed about dyslexia. However, among these informed, a great majority although looking over dyslexic with sympathy and understanding, they end up with an even worse attitude: "dyslexic! Poor child being sick, problematic, we should help you to learn how you can join the rest of us!". Definitely, a child gifted in visual thinking, should be encouraged in developing her/his verbal abilities as well. In this case, educators should pay great attention in NOT do this at the expense of the child’s original skills.
Often educational systems that nurture and cultivate mainly verbal thinking, tend to reduce almost inhibit creativity, innovation, ingenuity, and imagination in students.
To use once more the example of the basketball player, it is like telling someone who could be an NBA star: «Poor little thing! You are 2 meters and 15cm... you will never be a good footballer, you have a problem, but don’t be discouraged, come, we will teach you at least how to shoot the ball to the goalpost and not to send it to the viewers and everybody laugh at you»! This kind of compassionate attitude, teemed with sympathy and kindness, is even worse! It imposes a self-evident feeling of inferiority to the «sufferer». The problem is not only to make someone who is charismatic in thinking in pictures, to use verbal thinking –of course this must be done too – but also to change the educational system so that it cultivates harmonically the functions of both hemispheres of the brain. It is important that «basketball» be recognized as a game as important as «football».
Conclusively, it is not the dislectic child that has a problem but our educational systems because they cultivate solely verbal thinking. Educational systems disable students who are charismatic in thinking in pictures (dislectic) by making them to feel inferior and down rated. They also disable children who are charismatic in verbal thinking because they do not give them the opportunity to cultivate their creativity, their ingenuity, their innovativeness and imagination, their indirect thinking, their kinesthesia and empathy.
«In the coal mine it is the canary which dies first, although it is not responsible for the toxic gases»! The children who bear the title of ‘dyslexic’ are not the problematic ones, but problematic are the educational systems which encage their victims in verbal thinking. Children who are charismatic in thinking in pictures suffer in these educational systems which cultivate and evaluate solely the function of the left hemisphere of the brain and this way they are ‘expelled’ from the ‘system’. But they are not responsible. They are the ‘indicator’ which shows that there is something wrong with the ‘system’.
Banish the prefix DYS- from dyslexia. And adopt the term ‘bilexia’ which will notify a skill, the ability of the brain to think in pictures.
Consequently, the person who is charismatic in thinking in pictures can be called ‘dislexic’ because of the ability he has to think in pictures, and not ‘dyslexic’ because of the defect he has in verbal thinking. Students who are charismatic in thinking in pictures should be assisted to think in words (verbal thinking) Accordingly, it is necessary for students who think verbally and are belauded by the educational systems (which either exclusively or in priority cultivate and evaluate verbal thinking), to be assisted to think in pictures also.
From the Greek verb ‘μάω-μω’ derive the words: μύηση-induction, μύθος-myth, μάουσα=μούσα-muse>μουσική-music, μανθάνω-learn, μαθαίνω-learn, μάθηση-learning, μάντης-foreteller, μήνις-anger, μανία-mania, μηνύω-send a message, μήνυμα-message, and the English words, meaning, mind.
Information, enlightment, the abstract knowledge that derives from the way the left hemisphere of the brain functions e.g. memorizing words from a book which describes the way you should ride a bicycle.
Induction, the experiential, experiential knowledge that comes from the way of functioning of the right hemisphere of the brain. E.g. the experiential learning how to ride a bicycle when the body kinesthetically has learnt how to ride a bicycle. Educational systems should not only give information to the students but they should also make sure that they are introduced to cultivating and evaluating equally both verbal thinking and thinking in pictures. This way they create human beings who are accomplished and able to take advantage of the harmonic cooperation of both hemispheres of the brain. Both, verbal thinking and thinking in pictures.
«We know that the curious mix of challenge and gift to be found in dyslexia, in which the brain struggles to learn to read, contains insights that are transforming our understanding of reading» 13 and furthermore of Educational systems.
«We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention we rearrange the very organization of our brain which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. ... Our ancestors’ invention could only come about because of the human brains extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures. A process made possible by the brain's ability to be shaped by experience. This plasticity at the heart of the brain's design forms the basis for much of who we are and who we might become» 14 .
A basic feature of our brain is ductility, its amazing ability to rearrange, to change, to create new connections and neural ways between neural circuits in order to serve new demands and requirements to learn a new mental function. Therefore, education transforms forever both the physiology and the mental function of our brains:
«Historical and evolutionary view of the reading brain provides us a very old and very new approach to how we teach the most essential aspects of the reading process. Both for those whose brains are poised to acquire it, and for those whose brains have systems that may be organized differently, as in the reading disability known as dyslexia. Understanding these unique hardwired systems which are pre-programmed generation after generation by instructions from our genes, advances our knowledge in unexpected ways that have implications we are only beginning to explore. ... There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain's ability to learn reading lies it's protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain prophecies that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill. Computer scientists use the term ‘Open Architecture’ to describe a system that is versatile enough to change or rearrange to accommodate the varying demands on it within the constraints of our genetic legacy. Our brain presents a beautiful example of open architecture. Thanks to this design we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.
»It's reading can be learned only because of the brain's plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually» 15 .
^ Brain Functions
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor a Harvard-trained neuroanatomist, explains in a different way the functions of both our brain hemispheres:
«For those of you who understand computers, our right hemisphere functions like a parallel processor, while our left hemisphere functions like a serial processor. ... Because they process information differently, each of our hemispheres think about different things, they care about different things, and, dare I say, they have very different personalities.
»Our right human hemisphere is all about this present moment. It's all about "right here, right now." Our right hemisphere, it thinks in pictures and it learns kinesthetically through the movement of our bodies. Information, in the form of energy, streams in simultaneously through all of our sensory systems and then it explodes into this enormous collage of what this present moment looks like, what this present moment smells like and tastes like, what it feels like and what it sounds like.
»Our left hemisphere thinks linearly and methodically. Our left hemisphere is all about the past and it's all about the future. Our left hemisphere is designed to take that enormous collage of the present moment and start picking out details, and more details about those details. It then categorizes and organizes all that information, associates it with everything in the past we've ever learned, and projects into the future all of our possibilities. And our left hemisphere thinks in language» 16 .
Brain researcher Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story, in TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design)
with the title:
«My stroke of insight»
Feb 2008
Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, in her book ‘My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist's Personal Journey’ (published in 2008 by Viking Penguin) refers to the function of our brain hemispheres:
«To the right mind, no time exists other than the present moment, and each moment is vibrant with sensation. Life or death occurs in the present moment. The experience of joy happens in the present moment. Our perception and experience of connection with something that is greater than ourselves occurs in the present moment. To our right mind, the moment of now is timeless and abundant. ... our right mind is free to think intuitively outside the box, and it creatively explores the possibilities that each new moment brings. By its design, our right mind is spontaneous, carefree, and imaginative. It allows our artistic juices to flow free without inhibition or judgment. The present moment is a time when everything and everyone are connected together as one. As a result, our right mind perceives each of us as equal members of the human family. It identifies our similarities and recognizes our relationship with this marvelous planet, which sustains our life. It perceives the big picture, how everything is related, and how we all join together to make up the whole. Our ability to be empathic, to walk in the shoes of another and feel their feelings, is a product of our right frontal cortex”. “Just opposite to how our right hemisphere thinks in pictures and perceives the big picture of the present moment, our left mind thrives on details, details, and more details about those details. Our left hemisphere language centers use words to describe, define, categorize, and communicate about everything. ... Our left hemisphere looks at a flower and names the different parts making up the whole - the petal, stem, stamen, and pollen. ... It excels in academics, and by doing so, it manifests a sense of authority over the details it masters» 17 .
The British psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, in 2009, published a book with the title: «THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World» (Yale University Press 2009). In November 2010 in a lecture at www.theRSA.org at the British «Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce» he presents the basic topic of his book and explains the differences of both our brain hemispheres:
«The division of the brain is something neuroscientists don't like to talk about anymore. It enjoyed a sort of popularity in the '60s and '70s after the first split brain operations, and it led to a sort of popularization which has seen been proved to be entirely false. It's not true that one part of the brain does reason and the other does emotion; both are profoundly involved in both. It's not true and language resides only in the left hemisphere, it doesn't, important aspects are in the right. It's not true that visual imagery is only in the right hemisphere, lots of it is in the left. And so in a sort of fit of despair people have given up talking about it but the problem won't really go away because this organ which is all about making connection is profoundly divided. It's there inside all of us. And it's got more divided over the course of human evolution so that the ratio of the corpus collosum to the volume of the hemispheres has got smaller over evolution. And the plot thickens when you realize that one of the main, if not the main, function of the corpus collosum is in fact to inhibit the other hemisphere. So something very important is going on here about keeping things apart from one another. ... Well it's not just we who have these divided brains; birds and animals have them as well. I think the simplest way to think of it is if you imagine a bird trying to feed on a seed against a background of grit or pebbles it's got to focus very narrowly and clearly on that little seed and to be able to pick it out against that background. But it's also, if it's going to stay alive, it's got to actually keep a quite different kind of attention open, it's got to be on the lookout for predators or for friends specifics but for whatever else is going on. And it seems that birds and animals quite reliably use their left hemisphere for this narrow focused attention to something it already knows is of importance to it and they keep their right hemisphere vigilant broadly for whatever might be without any commitment as to what they might be. And they also use their right hemispheres for making connections with the world, so they approach their mates and bond with their mates more using the right hemisphere.
»Left hemisphere dependent on denotative language and abstraction yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualized, explicit, general in nature but ultimately lifeless. The knowledge is mediated by the left hemisphere is however within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection but the perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness. ... Birds and animals quite reliably use their left hemisphere for this narrow focused attention to something it already knows is of importance to it. ... The left hemisphere's talk is very convincing because it shaved everything that it doesn't find fits with its model off and cut it out. So this particular model is entirely self-consistent largely because it's made itself so..
»The right hemisphere by contrast yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, never perfectly known and to this world it exists in a certain relationship. ... The right hemisphere sees things in context. It understands implicit meaning, metaphor, body language, emotional expression in the face. It deals with an embodied world in which we stand embodied in relation to a world that is concrete. It understands individuals not just categories. It actually has a disposition for the living rather than the mechanical.
»We need to rely on certain things to manipulate the world but for a broad understanding of it we need to use knowledge that comes from the right hemisphere. ... The right hemisphere gives sustained, broad, open, vigilance, alertness where the left hemisphere gives narrow, sharply focused attention to detail.
»It turned out that Einstein's thinking somehow presaged this thing about the structure of the brain. He said, "The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rationale mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant but has forgotten the gift"». 18
Renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society. Taken from a lecture given by Iain McGilchrist as part of the RSA's free public events programme:
In the introduction to his book «THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY» , Iain McGilchrist makes refference to the scientific debate about the differences of the two brain hemispheres:
«A number of the most knowledgeable people in the field have been unable to escape the conclusion that there is something profound here that requires explanation. Joseph Hellige, for example, arguably the world's best-informed authority on the subject, writes that while both hemispheres seem to be involved in one way or another in almost everything we do, there are some ‘very striking’ differences in the information processing abilities and propensities of the two hemispheres (footnote n. 1: Hellige, 1993, p. 168). V. S. Ramachandran, another well-known and highly regarded neuroscientist, accepts that the issue of hemisphere difference has been traduced, but concludes: ‘The existence of such a pop culture shouldn't cloud the main issue – the notion that the two hemispheres may indeed be specialised for different functions.’ (footnote n. 2: Ramachandran, 2005, p. 279, n. 4). And recently Tim Crow, one of the subtlest and most sceptical of neuroscientists researching into mind and brain, who has often remarked on the association between the development of language, functional brain asymmetry and psychosis, has gone so far as to write that ‘except in the light of lateralisation nothing in human psychology/psychiatry makes any sense.’ (footnote n. 3: Crow, 2006, p. 793). There is little doubt that the issues of brain asymmetry and hemisphere specialisation are significant. The question is only – of what?
(footnote n. 4: Many others in the field are similarly convinced that the issue is important. John Cutting, author of the most comprehensive study ever made of the right hemisphere and its functions in relation to psychiatric illness (Cutting, 1990), writes that ‘the single greatest advance in neuropsychology in the last 50 years has been the discovery of hemisphere differences in every aspect of human life’ (Cutting, 2009). Marcel Kinsbourne, despite his justified aversion to ‘dichotomania’, has for decades done more than most neuroscientists to pursue the differences between the hemispheres. Claude Braun, another distinguished neuroscientist with an interest in hemisphere differences, writes that ‘the vast database of animal research [and] human neuropsychiatric research ... both clearly establish numerous important and spectacular specialisations of the right hemisphere’ (Braun, 2007, p. 398). Elkhonon Goldberg has consistently championed the view that there are important differences in hemisphere function (see p. 482, n. 16 below). Robert Ornstein, having written a book about hemisphere differences, The Psychology of Consciousness, in the 1970s, became so frustrated with the vulgarisations that for 20 years he concentrated his research on other matters and gave hemisphere research up as a bad job. He has now returned to it, and admits that he was ‘bowled over’ on returning to the literature in the 1990s to find how much evidence had come forward that ‘the division of the mind is profound’ (Ornstein, 1997, pp. 3–4)». 19
Also, in his book «The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning. Why Are We So Unhappy?» published in 2012 , Iain McGilchrist quotes:
«Each of these neuronal masses is sufficient in itself and on its own to sustain consciousness. And since attention is an aspect of consciousness (a machine can carry out tasks, but it cannot attend) each can therefore attend to the world in a different way. What we call our consciousness moves back and forth between them seamlessly, drawing on each as required, and often very rapidly. For in humans, too, it turns out, the hemispheres pay different types of attention to the world — reach out a hand towards it (for that is what the word 'attention' means, the reaching out of a hand) in a different way or with a different set of priorities and values: to grasp and take for our own use, or to forge a connection and explore. The left hemisphere, as in birds and animals, pays the narrow-beam, precisely focussed, attention which enables us to get and grasp: it is the left hemisphere that controls the right hand with which we grasp something, and controls the aspects of language (not all language) by virtue of which we say we have 'grasped' the meaning — made it certain and pinned it down. The right hemisphere underwrites sustained attention and vigilance for whatever may be, without preconception. Its attention is not in the service of manipulation, but in the service of connection, exploration and relation. That is, after all another reason why we reach out a hand — to connect, to create, to share in another's fate, or to explore the world for what it is.
»The left hemisphere abstracts and generalises ... The left hemisphere's world is a representation only. It is like a map ... If I am travelling from London to Edinburgh, I really don't need to know all about the houses along the way, and what the people there like for supper. ... the left hemisphere is better at carrying out certain procedures that involve manipulating numbers, but has less of a grasp than the right hemisphere of what those numbers mean. Much of mathematics is dependent on the right hemisphere: most of its great discoveries were perceived as complex patterns of relationships, and only later, often much later, translated painstakingly into linear sets of propositions. Deductive logic 20 , it turns out, depends on the right hemisphere. ... Rationality, the schematic carrying out of algorithmic procedures in the way that a machine would, is better done by the left hemisphere.
»The right hemisphere seems to be involved more with new experience, new events, things, ideas, words, skills or music, or whatever it may be, while they are still fresh, original and unique, and so to speak present, to the mind. The right hemisphere's world is present .... By contrast the left hemisphere's world takes over once whatever it is is represented — literally 're-presented' after the fact: once it is familiar and known, as an instance of something, a concept. You can actually see this process happening using brain imaging. The left hemisphere abstracts and generalises, where the right hemisphere's world remains truer to each embodied instance, and appreciates the unique. As things are present in all their particularity, with all their individual, incarnate qualities, they are mediated by the right hemisphere: as they become general, abstract quantities, they are mediated by the left. ... In the contemporary world, where I fear we are currently in thrall to the left hemisphere's way of thinking, this problem, that the piece of paper has become more important than the reality that it refers to, is endemic.
»Τhe left hemisphere's raison d'être is to narrow things down to a certainty, the right hemisphere's is to open them up into possibility.
»In life we need the contributions of both hemispheres. As Kant memorably put it, concepts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind». 21
Maryanne Wolf professor in the Department of Child Development Eliot-Pearson at Tufts University of Massachusetts and Director of the Centre of Research for Reading and Language, in her remarkable book, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain» (2007) mentions about brain functions:
«The brain of a dyslexic person uses more and more the functions of the right hemisphere than the left. ... The idea that for dyslectic persons the right hemisphere is more active than the left, has started to predominate. ... As observed some years before by distinguished researchers Ovid Jeng and William Wang, the left hemisphere of the brain developed into a tool responsible for the unique accuracy and time synchronization which are needed for speech and writing. On the contrary, the right hemisphere is suitable for a greater variety of functions such as creativity, and speech efficiency» 22
«Albert Einstein did not speak much until three years of age and he was mediocre at any subject that require the retrieval of words such as a foreign language. He wants said my principal weakness was a bad memory especially a bad memory for words and texts. He went so far as to say that “words did not seem to play any role” in his theoretical thinking which came to him through “more or less clear images”». «How can we explain the preponderance of creativity and thinking outside the box in many people with dyslexia?». «Dyslexics themselves are frequently in doubt with high talents in many areas. I would suggest to you that this is no accident. We are this led to the paradoxical notion that the very same anomalies on the left side of the brain that have led to the disability of dyslexia in certain literate societies, also determine superiority in the same brains». 23
Dr George Pavlides 24 has invented an interesting device to monitor the way that the pupil of the eye moves while the person is reading or simply is asked to watch a row of bright points. Even 4-year- old, young children can undergo the test, that is, long before they can read. The movement of the pupil of most people is linear, harmonic and follows a normal pattern. The movement of the pupil of dyslectic people or people reaching the age of learning to read when the symptoms of dyslexia is diagnosed, is chaotic, the pupil moves uncontrollably up and down, back and forth and does not follow a normal pattern. This random movement of the pupil is considered by many people as having root in an inherent deficiency. Of course this random movement of the pupil causes problems during the effort the child makes to manage to read. Though, it is most likely this chaotic movement to happen to those whose conscience, the brain, chooses to use the way the right hemisphere chooses to function. As McGilchrist quoted, the sparrow uses focused attention to recognise the seed among similar in size stones, and this ability is attributed to the left hemisphere. While it uses the functionally chaotic and disorderly way of the right hemisphere to observe the environment for possible predators.
It is possible that the Pavlidis’ test, following the movement of the pupil of the eye, examines in an objective, laboratory way the tendency of the consciousness of the brain of the examinee to prefer to use the functions of his left hemisphere of his brain or the right one.
When the movement of the pupil is linear, it is being supported by the left hemisphere whilst when the movement is chaotic, it is supported by the right hemisphere.
^ An extreme example
In Greece, on September 17th 2013 in the Government Gazette (first issue, number 193)
Law number 4186
Restructuring Secondary Education
Article 1
Concept and Objectives of the Lyceum
it is stated:
a) Providing overall quality education that will contribute to the balanced cognitive, emotional, intellectual and physical development of all students. b) The promotion of critical thinking, initiative, creativity and skills of students. f) Ensuring balance in school life so that students have the opportunity to combine knowledge, leisure, creation and the opportunity to participate in the production of common projects within the educational community in which they participate. g) The development of problem solving skills and for application of knowledge. h) The cultivation of the ability of each individual for critical approach and developing their skills for new information technologies. i) The teaching skills that facilitate access for students to the labor market.
Very nice essay but The only real aim of the Greek Lyceum for all the educational community i.e. teachers, parents and students is to assure entry to a «good» University or Technical Education Institution. «Proper» preparation for the Panhellenic Exams means that students aspiring to «succeed» have to memorise as much as they can even for subjects such as Mathematics and Informatics (ICT).
The «overall quality education that will contribute to the balanced cognitive, emotional, intellectual and physical development of all students» is forgotten about, and what is left is even more cultivation and stricter evaluation of the left hemisphere of the brain and memorising.
In the Greek educational system, everything is evaluated on the basis of the students’ contribution to their preparation for the Panhellenic Exams taken in the end of the 3rd Class of High School in order to be accepted in the University. The only matter that counts even for subjects such as Mathematics and ICT, is memorization. The rationale of the most successful «coaches» in Maths is to «solve» that is memorise as many exercises as you can so that you can have more possibilities during the exams to solve the exercise that you luckily enough have already memorised. The way that the student is evaluated in ICT, is a negative Guinnes Record! A student who can use a computer perfectly, who might be the greatest hacker will fail in the ICT exams if he can not memorise the words from the ICT book! Even in ICT it is memorisation that counts! There is also a more absurd example. A student can be an accomplished artist like Pablo Picasso or Leonardo Da Vinci ... If he does not memorise the words in the school book for Art he will never pass the exams for Art,, he will fail because he will not have written the correct words! And the same applies to Music!
Since 1998, the chances to change the Greek educational system have faded out because the teachers take written exams (ASEP) in order to be appointed. Therefore, they compete solely for their capability in memorising. For 17 years, ASEP hires for the educational system, only people who are competent in lexical thinking as though memorising is the paramount educational skill. So, our brains who are used to functioning mainly in verbal thinking, have no reason to worry because thinking in pictures is not cultivated. On the contrary, they feel contented inside this one-dimensional educational frame and they take it for granted. This is how it came to be considered as a matter of course that ICT, Art and Music must test the students for their ability to memorize if they want to be considered serious school subjects!
^ Creativity - Innovation - «Flow»
«Creativity, which is the process of developing original ideas that have value, and Innovation, which is the process of putting new ideas into practice. ... Companies often divide the workforce into two groups: the ‘creatives’ and the ‘suits’. You can normally tell who the creatives are because they don’t wear suits. They wear jeans and they come in late because they have been struggling with an idea. ... Everyone has huge creative capacities as a natural result of being a human being. The challenge is to develop them. A culture of creativity has to involve everybody not just a select few». 25
«I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this, he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. We don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this? Every education system on Earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and at the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance every day to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance». 26
«The problem is that the current system of education was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. It was conceived in the intellectual, culture of the enlightenment. And in the economic circumstances of the industrial revolution. ... Our children are living in the most intensely stimulating period in the history of the earth. They're being besieged with information and calls for their attention from every platform - computers, from iPhones, from advertising hoardings, from hundreds of television channels and we're penalising them now for getting distracted. From what? Boring stuff at school, for the most part. ... Divergent thinking isn't a synonym but it's an essential capacity for creativity. It's the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways of interpreting a question, to think not just in linear or convergent ways. To seek multiple answers, not one. So there are tests for this ...and they gave them to 1,500. ... and on the protocol of the test if you scored above a certain level you'd be considered to be a genius at divergent thinking. So my question to you is what percentage of the people tested of the 1,500 scored at genius level for divergent thinking. Now you need to know one more thing about them - these were kindergarten children. So what do you think? What percentage at genius level? 80? 98%. ... They retested the same children five years later aged 8 to 10. What do you think? 50? 32% They retested them again five years later, ages 13 to 15. You can see a trend here can't you? 10%! ... This shows two things: one is we all have this capacity and; two, it mostly deteriorates. Now a lot of things have happened to these kids as they've grown up, a lot. But one of the most important things that has happened to them I'm convinced is that by now they've become educated. They've spent ten years at school being told there's one answer it's at the back and don't look» 27 .
Our left hemisphere is about the past and the future. The knowledge that we acquire from the left hemisphere is abstract without pictures, subtracts and generalizes, it has the advantage of perfection but for this perfection we pay the forfeit with the void and loss of creativity. The world of the left hemisphere is only a reconstruction , a dead map, useful only for beneficial to us exploitation of our world, but it is void of empathy, the feeling of solidarity, of calmness, unity, the joy of the feeling of aggregated existence. The right hemisphere on the other hand, is about the present moment. It is about ‘here and now’. The right hemisphere projects a world of live creatures who are interconnected in a world full with life and creativity. It is this difference in function of the two hemispheres that EckhartTolle quotes in his own vocabulary, in his book: «The Power of Now». With the terms «brain» and «thought» he refers to the left hemisphere, while he uses the terms «non-brain», «consciousness without thought», «intellectual calmness», «enlightment», «sense of solidarity with the existence», when he talks about the right hemisphere of the brain.
«The philosopher Descartes believed that he had found the most fundamental truth when he made his famous statement: “I think, therefore I am”. He had, in fact, given expression to the most basic ... The compulsive thinker, which means almost everyone, lives in a state of apparent separateness, in an insanely complex world of continuous problems and conflict, a world that reflects the everincreasing fragmentation of the mind. ... Identification with your mind creates an opaque screen of concepts, labels, images, words, judgments, and definitions that blocks all true relationship. It comes between you and yourself, between you and your fellow man and woman, between you and nature, between you and God. It is this screen of thought that creates the illusion of separateness, the illusion that there is you and a totally separate "other." Thinking has become a disease. Disease happens when things get out of balance.
»Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being “at one” and therefore at peace. At one with life in its manifested aspect, the world, as well as with your deepest self and life unmanifested - at one with Being. When a thought subsides, ... you feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. This is the beginning of your natural state of felt oneness with Being, which is usually obscured by the mind. ... You will also feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within. It is not a trancelike state. Not at all. There is no loss of consciousness here. The opposite is the case. ... In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake than in the mind-identified state. You are fully present. ... And yet this is not a selfish but a selfless state. It takes you beyond what you previously thought of as “your self”.
»The mind in itself is not dysfunctional. It is a wonderful tool. Dysfunction sets in when you seek your self in it and mistake it for who you are. ... To the ego, the present moment hardly exists. Only past and future are considered important. ... Even when the ego seems to be concerned with the present, it is not the present that it sees: It misperceives it completely because it looks at it through the eyes of the past. Or it reduces the present to a means to an end, an end that always lies in the mind-projected future”». 28
When a person is trained to focus on the function of the left hemisphere, he loses creativity, the sense of joy and beauty of life:
«In the normal, mind-identified or unenlightened state of consciousness, the power and infinite creative potential that lie concealed in the Now are completely obscured by psychological time. Your life then loses its vibrancy, its freshness, its sense of wonder. ... The beginning of freedom is the realization that you are not the possessing entity - the thinker. ... You then begin to realize that there is a vast realm of intelligence beyond thought, that thought is only a tiny aspect of that intelligence. You also realize that all the things that truly matter - beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. You begin to awaken. ... When you do use your mind, and particularly when a creative solution is needed, you oscillate every few minutes or so between thought and stillness, between mind and nomind. No-mind is consciousness without thought. Only in that way is it possible to think creatively ... The mind is essentially a survival machine. Attack and defense against other minds, gathering, storing, and analyzing information - this is what it is good at, but it is not at all creative. All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. The mind then gives form to the creative impulse or insight. Even the great scientists have reported that their creative breakthroughs came at a time of mental quietude. The surprising result of a nation-wide inquiry among America's most eminent mathematicians, including Einstein, to find out their working methods, was that thinking "plays only a subordinate part in the brief, decisive phase of the creative act itself." ... When you are present, when your attention is fully and intensely in the Now, Being can be felt, but it can never be understood mentally. To regain awareness of Being and to abide in that state of "feeling-realization" is enlightenment. ... The enlightenment is simply your natural state of felt oneness with Being. It is a state of connectedness with something immeasurable and indestructible, something that, almost paradoxically, is essentially you and yet is much greater than you. ... The mind, to ensure that it remains in control, seeks continuously to cover up the present moment with past and future ... The vitality and infinite creative potential of Being, which is inseparable from the Now, becomes covered up by time, your true nature becomes obscured by the mind. ... The reason why some people love to engage in dangerous activities, such as mountain climbing, car racing, and so on, although they may not be aware of it, is that it forces them into the Now - that intensely alive state that is free of time, free of problems, free of thinking, free of the burden of the personality. ... Unfortunately, they come to depend on a particular activity to be in that state. But you don't need to climb the north face of the Eiger. You can enter that state now. ... The simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking!». 29 . They don’t know how to direct their consciousness to the functions of their right hemisphere which modern people need to cope with the new challenges of life.
«As the world spins faster and faster, organizations everywhere say they need people who can think creatively, communicate and work in teams: people who are flexible and quick to adapt. Too often they say they can’t find them. ... In December 1862, Abraham Lincoln gave his second annual address to Congress. ... “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country”.
»I love the word: ‘disenthrall’. What he meant was that we all live our lives guided by ideas to which we are devoted but which may no longer be true or relevant. We are hypnotized or enthralled by them. To move forward we have to shake free of them.
»ONE OF THE MAIN REASONS that so many people think they are not creative is education. Picasso once said that all children are born artists: the problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. Creativity is not solely to do with the arts or about being an artist, ... The dominant forms of education actively stifle the conditions that are essential to creative development. Young children enter pre-school alive with creative confidence; by the time they leave high school many have lost that confidence entirely.
»People use the term ‘academic ability’ to mean ‘intelligence’. It is not the same thing at all. Academic work focuses on certain sorts of verbal and mathematical reasoning: on writing factual and critical essays, verbal discussions and mathematical analyses. These are all very important forms of ability. But if human intelligence was limited to them, most of human culture would never have happened. There would be a lot of analysis but not much action. There would be no practical science, no technology, no functioning businesses, no art, no music or dance, no theatre, poetry, love, feelings or intuition. These are large factors to leave out of an account of human intelligence. If all you had was academic ability, you couldn’t have got out of bed this morning ... there wouldn’t have been a bed ... Nobody could have made one. They could have written about the theoretical possibility of a bed, but not actually constructed the thing.
»Employers say they want people who can think creatively, who can innovate, who can communicate well, work in teams and are adaptable and self-confident. They complain that many graduates have few of these qualities. ... Conventional academic programs are not designed to develop them.
»Raising academic standards alone will not solve the problems we face: it may compound them. To move forward we a need fresh understanding of intelligence, of ability, and of the nature of creativity» 30 We need the way of thinking that is slanderously classified as dyslexia by the old academic educational standards.
«Knowledge about reading failure. Provides a different angle on this knowledge base with some surprises for anyone who looks there. ... Recent advances in neuro-imaging research begin to paint a different picture of the brain of a person with dyslexia. ... So we are also in the exciting. Early stages of understanding the little studied benefits that accompany the brain development of some persons with dyslexia. It is no longer reducible to coincidence that so many inventors. Artists architects. Computer designers radiologists and financiers have a childhood history of dyslexia. ... What is it about the dyslexic brain that seems linked in some people to an paralleled creativity in their professions. Which often involve design. Spatial skills. And the recognition of patterns. ... Will individuals with dyslexia be even better suited to the visual technology dominated future?» 31 .
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, researcher of the psychology of the human creativity and happiness, in his book «Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience». New York: Harper and Row 1990, he presents the findings of his research (during which he made use of more than a hundred thousand interviews) according to which people are happy when they are in a state of ‘flow’ a kind of internal inspiration. With his avant-guarde work, he contributed to the understanding of happiness, of consummation of the human being and he coined the term of ‘flow’ to name a state of augmented focus, a plunge, euphoria and feedback that he noticed that successful people feel in various activities such as art, games or work. When someone is in a state of ‘flow’ he fully participates in what he is doing, he is devoted and absorbed in this activity and gets feedback from his own activity doing something that inspires him. The time’stops’, the person is in a mild state of ecstacy, he is outside his egotistic self, (he is not laden with thoughts and desires), he lives in the present, in the «now» and he achieves the best result with the least effort. Biomes which emerged when the consciousness, the mind, attention, the ego and self-consciousness which have been trained to focus on the way of functioning of the right hemisphere, as was described by Iain McGilchrist and Jill Bolte Taylor.
In a speech that he delivered at TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talks with the title: ‘Flow, the secret to happiness’ (Feb 2004), Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points out that money does not make us happy, he studies people who find pleasure and contentment in activities that bring them to a state of ‘flow’:
«I started trying to understand the roots of happiness. ... about 30 percent of the people surveyed in the United States since 1956 say that their life is very happy. And that hasn't changed at all. Whereas the personal income, on a scale that has been held constant to accommodate for inflation, has more than doubled, almost tripled, in that period. ... after a certain basic point -- which corresponds more or less to just a few 1,000 dollars above the minimum poverty level -- increases in material well-being don't seem to affect how happy people are. In fact, you can find that the lack of basic resources, material resources, contributes to unhappiness, but the increase in material resources does not increase happiness. ... I tried to understand: where -in everyday life, in our normal experience- do we feel really happy? And to start those studies about 40 years ago, I began to look at creative people -first artists and scientists, and so forth- trying to understand what made them feel that it was worth essentially spending their life doing things for which many of them didn't expect either fame or fortune, but which made their life meaningful and worth doing.
»This was one of the leading composers of American music back in the '70s. And the interview was 40 pages long. But this little excerpt is a very good summary of what he was saying during the interview. And it describes how he feels when composing is going well. And he says by describing it as an ecstatic state.
»"Ecstasy" in Greek meant simply to stand to the side of something. ... A mental state where you feel that you are not doing your ordinary everyday routines. So ecstasy is essentially a stepping into an alternative reality. ... Ηe says also that this is so intense an experience that it feels almost as if he didn't exist. ... When you are really involved in this completely engaging process of creating something new, as this man is, he doesn't have enough attention left over to monitor how his body feels, or his problems at home. He can't feel even that he's hungry or tired. His body disappears, his identity disappears from his consciousness. ... This automatic, spontaneous process can only happen to someone who is very well trained and who has developed technique. And it has become a kind of a truism in the study of creativity that you can't be creating anything with less than 10 years of technical-knowledge immersion in a particular field» 32 .
About “flow” Daniel Goleman in his book “Emotional Intelligence” states:
«A composer describes those moments when his work is at its best:
»“You yourself are in an ecstatic state to such a point that you feel as though you almost don't exist. ... My hand seems devoid of myself, ... I just sit there watching ... And it just flows out by itself”.
»His description is remarkably similar to those of hundreds of diverse men and women—rock climbers, chess champions, surgeons, basketball players, engineers, managers, even filing clerks— when they tell of a time they outdid themselves in some favored activity. The state they describe is called “flow” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the University of Chicago psychologist who has collected such accounts of peak performance during two decades of research. Athletes know this state of grace as “the zone”, where excellence becomes effortless, crowd and competitors disappearing into a blissful, steady absorption in the moment.
»Being able to enter flow is emotional intelligence at its best; flow represents perhaps the ultimate in harnessing the emotions in the service of performance and learning. ... That experience is a glorious one: the hallmark of flow is a feeling of spontaneous joy, even rapture. ... Indeed, it interrupts flow to reflect too much on what is happening—the very thought “I'm doing this wonderfully” can break the feeling of flow [because in self-examination the consciousness jumps in the functions of the left hemisphere]. Attention becomes so focused that people are aware only of the narrow range of perception related to the immediate task, losing track of time and space. A surgeon, for example, recalled a challenging operation during which he was in flow; when he completed the surgery he noticed some rubble on the floor of the operating room ... while he was so intent on the surgery part of the ceiling had caved in—he hadn't noticed at all.
»Flow is a state of self-forgetfulness, the opposite of rumination and worry: ... People in flow are so absorbed in the task at hand that they lose all selfconsciousness, dropping the small preoccupations—health, bills, even doing well—of daily life. In this sense moments of flow are egoless. ... People in flow exhibit a masterly control of what they are doing, their responses perfectly attuned to the changing demands of the task. And although people perform at their peak while in flow, they are unconcerned with how they are doing, with thoughts of success or failure—the sheer pleasure of the act itself is what motivates them.
»Entry to this zone can also occur when people find a task they are skilled at, and engage in it at a level that slightly taxes their ability. As Csikszentmihalyi told me, “People seem to concentrate best when the demands on them are a bit greater than usual, and they are able to give more than usual. If there is too little demand on them, people are bored. If there is too much for them to handle, they get anxious”.
»Spontaneous pleasure, grace, and effectiveness characterize the flow. ... The quality of attention in flow is relaxed yet highly focused.
»Flow is a state devoid of emotional static, save for a compelling, highly motivating feeling of mild ecstasy. That ecstasy seems to be a by-product of the attentional focus. Watching someone in flow gives the impression that the difficult is easy; peak performance appears natural and ordinary. This impression parallels what is going on within the brain, where a similar paradox is repeated: the most challenging tasks are done with a minimum expenditure of mental energy. In flow the brain is in a “cool” state ... the brain “quiets down” in the sense that there is a lessening of cortical arousal.
»A strained concentration -a focus fueled by worry- produces increased cortical activation. But the zone of flow and optimal performance seems to be an oasis of cortical efficiency, with a bare minimum of mental energy expended.
»In this state even hard work can seem refreshing or replenishing rather than draining». (Daniel Goleman, «Emotional Intelligence», chapter 6 «The Master Aptitude - Flow: The Neurobiology of excellence?»).
«Since the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally. ... The left hemisphere's values are those of utility and pleasure. But meaning cannot come from this linear project, any more than happiness can be pursued. Happiness and fulfilment have to be the by-products of something else, of looking elsewhere. This was a point made by Viktor Frankl in his great book, Man's Search for Meaning 33 . If we espouse the view of the left hemisphere we will never find meaning, because it cannot understand. It has no way to break out of the system of signs. It does not understand the power of metaphor, through which alone meaning would come about. It is not in touch. That is not its purpose, not what it evolved to help us do. It evolved to help us manipulate. ... Our problem is not that we have failed to find an answer to the question of the meaning of life that would satisfy the left hemisphere — in the nature of things, no such answer could exist. Our problem is that we have allowed ourselves to respond to this failure by deriding the question as meaningless. We shouldn't be trying to find a glib, explicit answer to it, since any such answer would be bound to be wrong. Meaning emerges from engagement with the world, not from abstract contemplation of it». 34
Jill BolteTaylor, in a speech in 2008 at Ted.com describind the stroke she had in the left hemisphere of her brain, reports:
«And then I lost my balance, and I'm propped up against the wall. And I look down at my arm and I realize that I can no longer define the boundaries of my body. I can't define where I begin and where I end. ... And in that moment, my left hemisphere brain chatter went totally silent. Just like someone took a remote control and pushed the mute button. Total silence. And at first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated by the magnificence of the energy around me. ... I felt at one with all the energy that was, and it was beautiful there. Then all of a sudden my left hemisphere comes back online and it says to me, “Hey! We've got a problem! We've got to get some help”. And I'm going, "Ahh! I've got a problem!"». ... But then I immediately drifted right back out into the consciousness - and I affectionately refer to this space as La La Land. But it was beautiful there. ... and any stress related to my job - it was gone. And I felt lighter in my body. And imagine all of the relationships in the external world and any stressors related to any of those - they were gone. And I felt this sense of peacefulness. And imagine what it would feel like to lose 37 years of emotional baggage! I felt euphoria - euphoria. It was beautiful». 35
The Indian film director of the film ‘Elizabeth’(1998) Shekhar Kapur, (https://en.wikipedia.org) in his speech at Ted.com (November 2009) mentions that an essential prerequisite for inspiration is turning back to ‘zero’ the emptiness, the chaos and the sense of panic which is connected to the loss of the ‘equipment’ of thought and the approach to the biomatic situation of ‘I know that I know nothing’ which is a solid ground where inspiration, creativity and innovation flourish.
«When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience. So I come up, and I say, "What am I going to do today?" I'm not going to do what I planned to do, and I put myself into absolute panic. It's my one way of getting rid of my mind, getting rid of this mind that says, "Hey, you know what you're doing. You know exactly what you're doing. You're a director, you've done it for years." So I've got to get there and be in complete panic. It's a symbolic gesture. I tear up the script, I go and I panic myself, I get scared. I'm doing it right now; you can watch me. I'm getting nervous, I don't know what to say, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't want to go there.
»I'm allowing myself to go into chaos because out of chaos, I'm hoping some moments of truth will come. All preparation is preparation. I don't even know if it's honest. I don't even know if it's truthful. The truth of it all comes on the moment, organically, ...
»And you put yourself into a state of panic where you don't know, and so you don't know. And so, because you don't know, you're praying to the universe because you're praying to the universe that something -- I'm going to try and access the universe the way Einstein -- say a prayer -- accessed his equations, the same source. I'm looking for the same source because creativity comes from absolutely the same source that you meditate somewhere outside yourself, outside the universe. You're looking for something that comes and hits you. Until that hits you, you're not going to do the first shot. So what do you do?
»So the first thing about storytelling that I learned, and I follow all the time is: Panic. Panic is the great access of creativity because that's the only way to get rid of your mind. Get rid of your mind. Get out of it, get it out. And let's go to the universe because there's something out there that is more truthful than your mind, that is more truthful than your universe. [unclear], you said that yesterday. I'm just repeating it because that's what I follow constantly to find the "shunyata" somewhere, the emptiness. Out of the emptiness comes a moment of creativity. So that's what I do». 36
The successful author and novelist, Amy Tan talks at ted.com (Feb 2008) about the prerequisites for creativity to flourish , and she starts with an essay from her childhood under the title: «Where does creativity hide?»:
«The Value of Nothing: Out of Nothing Comes Something. That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B+. What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create. And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity.
»When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily; I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong. And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually -- the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new.
»Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect. ... Some people would say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk -- van Gogh syndrome -- that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. I do have to say, somebody -- I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't -- I suppose it does something in some part of your brain». 37
In order for creativity to flourish , a prerequisite is an arrest of the dominant function of the left hemisphere. Jill BolteTaylor takes the matter further. Describing her experience when she had a stroke she says that she was in a state of Nirvana. Her stroke was due to haemorhage in the left hemisphere of her brain which stopped functioning. Then she felt so happy, an impressive sense of calmness, solidarity, love and harmony which - because of her Budhist background - she considered she came to the state of nirvana. She was impressed because she had thought that it was impossible for her to live such a big experience in her life.
«I felt enormous and expansive, like a genie just liberated from her bottle. And my spirit soared free, like a great whale gliding through the sea of silent euphoria. Nirvana. I found Nirvana. ... But then I realized, "But I'm still alive! I'm still alive, and I have found Nirvana. And if I have found Nirvana and I'm still alive, then everyone who is alive can find Nirvana." And I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres - and find this peace. And then I realized what a tremendous gift this experience could be, what a stroke of insight this could be to how we live our lives. And it motivated me to recover.
»So who are we? We are the life-force power of the universe, with manual dexterity and two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. Right here, right now, I can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere, where we are. I am the life-force power of the universe. I am the life-force power of the 50 trillion beautiful molecular geniuses that make up my form, at one with all that is. Or, I can choose to step into the consciousness of my left hemisphere, where I become a single individual, a solid. Separate from the flow, separate from you. I am Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor: intellectual, neuroanatomist. These are the "we" inside of me. Which would you choose? Which do you choose? And when? I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be. And I thought that was an idea worth spreading». 38
‘Heaven is here, hell is also here’, heaven is inside us and so is hell. The cultivation of both the right and the left hemisphere brings about not only an improvement of the prowess in thinking in pictures, in collateral thinking, inventiveness and creativity, but something more important. It gives to human beings the feasibility, whenever they want to recall a biome of extreme euphoria, happiness, serenity, peace, love, solidarity and harmony which is so strong that a neuroanatomist – a modern scientist - came to the point to identify it as the state that the Buddhists call nirvana. This experience that Bolte Taylor had was so impressive that she considered it a major purpose in her life to inform people about this impressive potential of our brain.
^ Finally
Take the “dys” out of dyslexia. Let’s turn the dyslexia to bilexia, that is, talk about two or a thousand words, or talk about an image. The issue is not simply to discharge a 15% of students of a slanderous classification. The issue is not even simply reconsidering our views on educational systems that suppress creativity. The issue is to focus equally both to “football” as well as to “basketball” that is in cultivating the function for both of the left and right cerebral hemisphere. The aim is to enable humanity to liberate itself from the tight corset of morality and naive faith in ideologies, which follows the absolutism of the function of the left hemisphere, in order to pass to the next stage of self-consciousness: that is, a stage where a complete human being would be perceived as someone able to exploit the function of both the cerebral hemispheres. The one who lives in the present (NOW) a life filled up with meaning. The one who enjoys finding a meaning in everyday life, the one who feels connected with the environment and fellow human beings and flies with the strong wings of inspiration, hope and love, dancing to the rhythms of universal music harmony.
A very good example of a universally educated person who turns to advantage both lexical thinking and thinking in pictures which means that he uses both hemispheres of his brain, is the main hero of the film (Bollywood production 2009) «3 IDIOTS». Rancho who is a student at Imperial College of Engineering a famous technical college in New Delhi 39 .
Another impressive example of a person who has found completeness, in a miserable for all the rest of the students daily routine, is Joe who Csikszentmihalyi refers to:
«Joe (Joe Kramer) was in his early sixties, a welder in a South Chicago plant where railroad cars are assembled. About two hundred people worked with Joe in three huge, dark, hangarlike structures where steel plates weighing several tons move around suspended from overhead tracks, and are welded amid showers of sparks to the wheelbases of freight cars. In summer it is an oven, in winter the icy winds of the prairie howl through. The clanging of metal is always so intense that one must shout into a person’s ear to make oneself understood.
»Joe came to the United States when he was five years old, and he left school after fourth grade. He had been working at this plant for over thirty years, but never wanted to become a foreman. He declined several promotions, claiming that he liked being a simple welder, and felt uncomfortable being anyone’s boss. ... Now close to retirement, Joe still enjoys work every day.
»The rest of the welders we interviewed regarded their jobs as burdens to be escaped as promptly as possible, and each evening as soon as work stopped they fanned out for the saloons ... to forget the dullness of the day with beer and camaraderie.
»Joe has never been a workaholic, completely dependent on the challenges of the factory to feel good about himself. What he did at home was perhaps even more remarkable than his transformation of a mindless, routine job into a complex, flow-producing activity. Joe and his wife live in a modest bungalow on the outskirts of the city. Over the years they bought up the two vacant lots on either side of their house. On these lots Joe built an intricate rock garden, with terraces, paths, and several hundred flowers and shrubs. ... After work he could sit on the back porch, and by touching one switch he could activate a dozen sprays that turned into as many small rainbows. ... Since he worked most days, by the time he got home the sun was usually too far down the horizon to help paint the water with strong colors. ... He found floodlights that contained enough of the sun’s spectrum to form rainbows, and installed them inconspicuously around the sprinklers. ...
»Joe is a rare example of what it means to have an “autotelic personality,” or the ability to create flow experiences even in the most barren environment - an almost inhumane workplace, a weed-infested urban neighborhood» 40 .
i Jill Bolte Taylor: «At first I was shocked to find myself inside of a silent mind. But then I was immediately captivated ... it was beautiful there. ... And I felt this sense of peacefulness. ... I felt euphoria - euphoria. It was beautiful. ... I pictured a world filled with beautiful, peaceful, compassionate, loving people who knew that they could come to this space at any time. And that they could purposely choose to step to the right of their left hemispheres - and find this peace. ... We have two cognitive minds. And we have the power to choose, moment by moment, who and how we want to be in the world. ... The more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner-peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be».
1. Jill Bolte Taylor, «My stroke of insight» Feb 2008.
Jill Bolte Taylor got a research opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: She had a massive stroke, and watched as her brain functions — motion, speech, self-awareness — shut down one by one. An astonishing story.
2. Jill Bolte Taylor, «My stroke of insight».
ii Ken Robinson: «Academic work focuses on certain sorts of verbal and mathematical reasoning: on writing factual and critical essays, verbal discussions and mathematical analyses. These are all very important forms of ability. But if human intelligence was limited to them, most of human culture would never have happened. ... There would be no practical science, no technology, no functioning businesses, no art, no music or dance, no theatre, poetry, love, feelings or intuition. These are large factors to leave out of an account of human intelligence. If all you had was academic ability, you couldn’t have got out of bed this morning ... there wouldn’t have been a bed ... Nobody could have made one. ... Employers say they want people who can think creatively, who can innovate, who can communicate well, work in teams and are adaptable and self-confident. They complain that many graduates have few of these qualities. ... Conventional academic programs are not designed to develop them. Raising academic standards alone will not solve the problems we face: it may compound them. To move forward we a need fresh understanding of intelligence, of ability, of the nature of creativity, we must change Education Paradigms».
1. Ken Robinson, «Do schools kill creativity?» Feb 2006.
Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity
2. Ken Robinson, «Bring on the learning revolution!» Feb 2010.
In this poignant, funny follow-up to his fabled 2006 talk, Sir Ken Robinson makes the case for a radical shift from standardized schools to personalized learning — creating conditions where kids' natural talents can flourish.
3. In talk from RSA Animate, («Changing education paradigms» Feb 2010) Sir Ken Robinson lays out the link between 3 troubling trends: rising drop-out rates, schools' dwindling stake in the arts, and ADHD. An important, timely talk for parents and teachers.
4. Ken Robinson: «How to escape education's death valley» Apr 2013.
Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish — and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.
5. Ken Robinson: Out of Our Minds. Learning to be Creative. By Capstone Publishing 2011.
iii Iain McGilchrist: «Since the Industrial Revolution, we have constructed a world around us externally that is the image of the world the left hemisphere has made internally. ... But meaning cannot come from this linear project, any more than happiness can be pursued. Happiness and fulfilment have to be the by-products of something else, of looking elsewhere. If we espouse the view of the left hemisphere we will never find meaning, because it cannot understand. That is not its purpose, not what it evolved to help us do. It evolved to help us manipulate the world. Meaning emerges from engagement with the world».
1. In this RSA Animate, renowned psychiatrist and writer Iain McGilchrist explains how our 'divided brain' has profoundly altered human behaviour, culture and society: «The Divided Brain».
2. Iain McGilchrist, «THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World», Yale University Press 2009.
3. Iain McGilchrist: «The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning. Why Are We So Unhappy?» Yale University Press 2009.
4. Dr Iain McGilchrist speaking at Creative Innovation 2012 – «The Courage to Think Differently».
iv 1. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: «TWENTY-THREE HUNDRED YEARS AGO Aristotle concluded that, more than anything else, men and women seek happiness. While happiness itself is sought for its own sake, every other goal—health, beauty, money, or power—is valued only because we expect that it will make us happy. Much has changed since Aristotle’s time ... and yet ... We do not understand what happiness is any better than Aristotle did, and as for learning how to attain that blessed condition, one could argue that we have made no progress at all.
»Despite the fact that we are now healthier and grow to be older, despite the fact that even the least affluent among us are surrounded by material luxuries undreamed of even a few decades ago, and regardless of all the stupendous scientific knowledge we can summon at will, people often end up feeling that their lives have been wasted, that instead of being filled with happiness their years were spent in anxiety and boredom.
»I spent the next quarter-century investigating ... and what I “discovered” was that happiness is not something that happens. It is not the result of good fortune or random chance. It is not something that money can buy or power command. It does not depend on outside events, but, rather, on how we interpret them. Happiness, in fact, is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated, and defended privately by each person.
»Yet we cannot reach happiness by consciously searching for it. “Ask yourself whether you are happy,” said J. S. Mill, “and you cease to be so.” It is by being fully involved with every detail of our lives, whether good or bad, that we find happiness, not by trying to look for it directly. Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychologist, summarized it beautifully in the preface to his book Man’s Search for Meaning: “Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue ... as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”
»Yet we have all experienced times when ... we feel a sense of exhilaration, a deep sense of enjoyment ... This is what we mean by optimal experience. ... The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. ... Such experiences are not necessarily pleasant at the time they occur. ... But in the long run optimal experiences add up to a sense of participation in determining the content of life - that comes as close to what is usually meant by happiness as anything else we can conceivably imagine.
»My first studies involved a few hundred “experts” -artists, athletes, musicians, chess masters, and surgeons- in other words, people who seemed to spend their time in precisely those activities they preferred. From their accounts of what it felt like to do what they were doing, I developed a theory of optimal experience based on the concept of flow—the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.
»I examine the process of achieving happiness through control over one’s inner life.
»“Flow” is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.
»Finally, the last step will be to describe how people manage to join all experience into a meaningful pattern (chapter 10). When that is accomplished, and a person feels in control of life and feels that it makes sense, there is nothing left to desire. The fact that one is not slim, rich, or powerful no longer matters. The tide of rising expectations is stilled; unfulfilled needs no longer trouble the mind. Even the most humdrum experiences become enjoyable.
»When people try to achieve happiness ... they usually seek to maximize pleasures that are either biologically programmed in their genes or are out as attractive by the society in which they live. Wealth, power, and sex become the chief goals that give direction to their strivings. But the quality of life cannot be improved this way. Only direct control of experience, the ability to derive moment-bymoment enjoyment from everything we do, can overcome the obstacles to fulfillment.
»As J. S. Mill wrote, “No great improvements in the lot of mankind are possible, until a great change takes place in the fundamental constitution of their modes of thought.” How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depend directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences. Whether we are happy depends on inner harmony. ... The problem arises when people are so fixated on what they want to achieve that they cease to derive pleasure from the present. When that happens, they forfeit their chance of contentment». (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, «Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience», Harper Collins 1990, p. 1-10)
2. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: «Flow, the secret to happiness», Feb 2004.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow".
v Eckhart Tolle: «Enlightenment is a state of wholeness, of being “at one” and therefore at peace. At one with the world, as well as with your deepest self - at one with Being. Υou feel a certain stillness and peace inside you. You feel a subtle emanation of joy arising from deep within. It is not a trancelike state. Not at all. There is no loss of consciousness here. The opposite is the case. ... In this state of inner connectedness, you are much more alert, more awake. You are fully present. ... And yet this is not a selfish but a selfless state. ... Beauty, love, creativity, joy, inner peace - arise from beyond the mind. ... All true artists, whether they know it or not, create from a place of no-mind, from inner stillness. ... The simple reason why the majority of scientists are not creative is not because they don't know how to think but because they don't know how to stop thinking».
Eckhart Tolle, «The Power of Now».
1 The Gift of Dyslexia: Why Some of the Smartest People Can't Read...and How They Can Learn. by Ronald D. Davis (Author), Eldon M. Braun (Contributor). A Perigee Book 1994/1997/2010.
2 The Dyslexic Advantage: Unlocking the Hidden Potential of the Dyslexic Brain. by Brock L. Eide M.D. M.A. (Author), Fernette F. Eide M.D. (Author)
3 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
4 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
5 The Gift of Dyslexia: Why Some of the Smartest People Can't Read...and How They Can Learn. by Ronald D. Davis (Author), Eldon M. Braun (Contributor). A Perigee Book 1994/1997/2010.
7 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
8 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
9 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
Jackie Stewart: https://www.youtube.com
11 «Francesca Gino, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, conducted the first study measuring dishonest behavior in creative people (2012). They organized five experiments that measured dishonesty. In each experiment, participants who identified as being very creative or participated in the creative mindset scenario showed higher levels of dishonest behavior in the subsequent tasks. Gino, along with Scott Wiltermuth, assistant professor of Management and Organization at the University of Southern California, revisited the idea that creativity and dishonesty are related in 2013. The study found participants who demonstrated greater dishonest behaviors were more creative in the required activities. “If you break a rule, if you start behaving dishonestly, that’s going to really free up your mind ... therefore, you’re going to be more creative,” Wiltermuth said». (http://www.columbiachronicle.com)
12 «“Out of the box” is an expression that describes non conformal, creative thinking. The term is said to derive from a famous puzzle created by early 20th century British mathematician Henry Ernest Dudeney, in which someone is asked to interconnect nine dots in a three-by-three grid by using four straight lines drawn without the pencil leaving the paper. The only way to solve the puzzle is to extend the lines beyond the artificial boundary created by the nine dots. And by using tree straight lines ... and by just ONE single line with THREE different ways (one is ten-year-old girl’s solution)!!!». («Out of the box» - «Thinking Outside the Dots»).
Ten-year-old girl’s solution:
13 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
14 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
15 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
17 Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, «My stroke of insight», New York Times Bestseller published by Viking in May 2008.
18 The text of the speech, «The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World» 17 November 2010: https://www.theRSA.org.
19 Iain McGilchrist, «THE MASTER AND HIS EMISSARY. The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World», Yale University Press 2009.
20 Deduction: In the process of deduction, you begin with some statements, called 'premises', that are assumed to be true, you then determine what else would have to be true if the premises are true. For example, you can begin by assuming that God exists, and is good, and then determine what would logically follow from such an assumption. You can begin by assuming that if you think, then you must exist, and work from there. In mathematics you can begin with some axioms and then determine what you can prove to be true given those axioms. With deduction you can provide absolute proof of your conclusions, given that your premises are correct. The premises themselves, however, remain unproven and unprovable, they must be accepted on face value, or by faith, or for the purpose of exploration. (http://www.psych.utah.edu/gordon/)
21 Iain McGilchrist, «The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning. Why Are We So Unhappy?» Yale University Press 2012.
22 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
23 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
24 George Pavlides is a Professor at the Faculty of Learning Difficulties at the Macedonia University, Clinical Professor of Penn State University USA and lifelong member of the International Academy of research in learning disabilities. He took his PhD from the Psychology Department of the University of Manchester, England. In 1978 he invented the eye movement test which is internationally known as ‘PAVLIDIS TEST’. This particular test enables us to diagnose and make prognosis for dyslexia and ADHD at a very early age, before the child learns to read. The method has been internationally acknowledged with patent diplomas in the USA, France, Canada and England, and it is used by many universities among which are Harvard, Boston, Penn State, Columbia and many more.
25 Ken Robinson: Out of Our Minds. Learning to be Creative. By Capstone Publishing 2011.
26 Ken Robinson’s talk in ted.com, Jun 2006: «Do schools kill creativity?». Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity. He challenges the way we're educating our children and champions a radical rethink of our school systems, to cultivate creativity and acknowledge multiple types of intelligence.
27 This RSA Animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award: «Changing Education Paradigms».
Watch this lecture in full here: Sir Ken Robinson - «Changing Paradigms».
28 Eckhart Tolle, «The Power of Now».
29 Eckhart Tolle, «The Power of Now».
30 Ken Robinson: Out of Our Minds. Learning to be Creative. By Capstone Publishing 2011.
31 Maryanne Wolf, «Proust and the Squid: the story and science of the reading brain». Harper Perennial 2008.
33 «What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence» (Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning, WASHINGTON SQUARE PRESS 1985, p. 133).
34 Iain McGilchrist: «The Divided Brain and the Search for Meaning. Why Are We So Unhappy?», Yale University Press 2012.
40 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, «Flow. The Psychology of Optimal Experience», Harper Collins 1990, p. 147-149.
