OK, so not the most sexy blog title in the world.  In fact, it was so dire, I added in the sound slang simply to try and curry favour with you, and to express my nerdish pleasure at the topic.

I’ve always believed that the fact our brains are split in two tells us something profound about our world.  There’s the rhythmic right and the logical left.    This is a standard starting-point for training in creativity or emotional intelligence.  But even those who use it nowadays – Daniel Pink for instance – are at pains to point out that it is only a metaphor.  The whole of the brain is involved in our reasoning and emoting; these functions are not divided up into neurological parts.

Then I came across the work of Iain McGilchrist, a former Oxford literary scholar, now a doctor, psychiatrist and writer.  His book The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World is a groud-breaking work that not only provides scientific evidence for the left-right split – technically called ‘brain lateralisation’ – but also draws out implications for weaknesses of Western society.  Perhaps his most thought-provoking insight is that each hemisphere produces a distinctive worldview!

Iain McGilchrist was recently on the BBC Radio 4 show Start the Week.  He will also be giving a keynote speech for the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) on the 17th Nov 2010; 13:00 (i.e. today).  Entitled The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, you can listen to it live here.

Exciting, isn’t it?!?  Yeah…

P.S. The title of McGilchrist’s book is taken from Nietzsche.  Isn’t everything these days?

Image credit: croush.

Last Satuday (5 Dec)  I delivered a course called Right-Brain Rising: How to Harness All Your Mind at Queen’s University, Belfast.  This was the blurb.

One-half of our brain deals with logic, facts and argument. Traditional education encourages that, and traditional jobs use it. Now the rules have changed. The age of ‘left-brain’ dominance has gone. New abilities are required for professional success and personal fulfilment. Following bestselling author Daniel Pink, this workshop will focus on discovering and developing these ‘right-brain’ abilities – design, story, symphony, empathy, play and meaning.

I’ve never based a whole 1-day workshop around a book before, but visitors to this blog will know how much I obsess about the excellence of Pink’s book.  I did begin by placing Pink’s ‘why right brainers will rule the future‘ thesis into psychological context.  I mentioned the ground-breaking work of Rodger Sperry on the lateralization of brain functions, as well as the innovative attempts of Ned Herrmann to carry this insight into the realms of personality profiling, creative thinking and team dynamics.

Most of my courses are fairly ‘left brain’ in the sense of sequential, info-rich and analytical.  But I’m coming to the conclusion that it’s a rather contradictory to try to teach right-brain thinking by left-brain methods.  So, instead, on this course, I mostly allowed each technique to be exercise-driven in the way I taught it.

So, for example, when it came to teaching empathy, I left behind definitions and models, and instead got the class to observe body language on video clips and watch out for micro-expressions, as well as participate in role-playing and acting assignments.

For story, we wrote mini-sagas, created opening novel lines, and wove stories around interesting photos.  Other right-brain ‘senses’ had us re-designing annoying household items, listening to great symphonies, and dissecting the world’s funniest jokes!  There was also some heated discussion as to the merit of the ‘life is a game‘ metaphor.

I’d love to know if anyone else in Northern Ireland has read Pink’s book.  What did you make of it?

Image credit: spierzchala.

Do you remember a short drama series in the 80s called The One Game? The plot centred on a battle of wits between an arrogant businessman and a eccentric games developer within a ‘reality game’ named after the title of the show.  I loved it and had a chance to watch it again recently.  Like all quality entertainment, it has aged very well.

It got me thinking about other attempts to use the ‘game’ motif to blend mundane reality with the extraordinary.  Here’s what came to mind.

The Game - A film in which “wealthy financier Nicholas Van Orton gets a strange birthday present from wayward brother Conrad: a live-action game that consumes his life.”

The True Game – A fantasy novel in which the world is like one, massive game of living chess.

The Most Dangerous Game of All – A short story about a hunt-loving aristocrat who goes after the deadliest game there is: another hunter.  For variations on this theme see films like Predator, The Running Man (forget the film, read the book), Hard Target, and The Condemned.

The Magus – A serious novel about a young man who who becomes “embroiled in psychological illusions of a master trickster that become increasingly dark and serious.”

Which takes us full circle.  And don’t even get me started on Wittgenstein’s language games!

I’ve been challenged on the helpfulness of the ‘reality versus game’ dichotomy we live by after re-reading Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.  Here’s what he says:

“The more a job inherently resembles a game – with variety, appropriate and flexible challenges, clear goals, and immediate feedback – the more enjoyable it will be regardless of the workers level of development… There is no question that a playfully light attitude is characteristic of creative individuals.”

I’m reminded of some other quotes found in Pink’s A Whole New Mind.

• “The opposite of play isn’t work.  It’s depression.”  Brian Sutton-Smith
• “Games are the most elevated form of imagination.”  Albert Einstein
• “Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society – our dominant way of knowing, doing and creative value.”  Pat Kane

There are so many implications in this for how we approach our work and shape our lifestyle.  Entrepreneurs must reflect on the implication of the ‘business as game’ model of ethics.  For me, it raises big questions about how I design my training courses.  When a newbie, my courses were information rich and substance heavy.  I tagged on exercises if there was time.  Now, I try to balance talking with doing, change the pace, and introduce as much variety as possible.

But perhaps even that isn’t enough.  Maybe the whole day should take the form on one, big game.  Heck,  who wants to limit training to the training room anyway?  Let’s take the game of learning out into everywhere!

Only one problem.

How?

Here are some aptly themed books to help you out:

If Life is a Game, These are the Rules: Ten Rules for Being Human

Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships

The Game of Life and How to Play It

Image credit: Corey Leopold.

So the other day I got the chance to see the film that won those eight Oscars – Slumdog Millionaire.  Here’s how the Internet Movie Database describes the plot.

“A Mumbai teen who grew up in the slums, becomes a contestant on the Indian version of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?” He is arrested under suspicion of cheating, and while being interrogated, events from his life history are shown which explain why he knows the answers.”

One of the things I liked about it was the way it started, which got me thinking from the outset.  The story begins with a multiple-choice question typed on the screen. “Jamal Malik is one question away from winning 20 million rupees,” it reads. “How did he do it? A) He cheated. B) He’s lucky. C) He’s a genius. D) It is written.”

Here is a fair selection of the different ways people imagine success can come in life.  You can take a short-cut.  You can win a lottery (or equivalent).  You can be smarter or better than everyone else (or at least the vast majority of people).  Or you can follow your destiny.

I’m a fan of short-cuts.  I don’t mean doing things that are unethical or illegal.  I mean what is sometimes called ‘lazy intelligence’.  Getting the same reward as others for less work, or more reward for the same work.  There is a way of planning this form of ‘cheating’, commonly called the Pareto principle, the 80-20 rule, the law of the vital few and the principle of factor sparsity.  I’m a fan.  To find out more, read the books of Richard Koch.

Then there’s luck.  Believe in it or not, but it does play a part in success if you learn to use it right.  A better name for this phenomenon is serendipity, the accidental discovery of something good while looking for something else.  This has led to many of the great scientific discoveries in the fields of chemistry, pharmacology and astronomy.  Or, for the more psychologically minded, there is synchronicity, when two seemingly unrelated events come together in a meaningful way.  (Example.  I had just learned about synchronicity and was thinking about it.  Two days later I went into a second hand book shop.  I saw a book on synchronicity on the floor, having never seen one before.  True story.)

Intelligence is still a topic for hot debate.  However the research plays out in academia, I think I’m safe in saying that intelligence is a lot borader than it used to be.  The usual ‘Emotional Intelligence’ formula is success = IQ + EQ (emotional quotient).  For others, its left brain + right brain.  Choose Goleman or Howard Gardner, Pink or Ned Hermann; it doesn’t matter too much.  These are different ways of saying the same thing.  You can develop your intelligence in every way that matters.

And as for “It is written”, I’m still thinking about it.  I like the whole destiny thing, Dawn doesn’t.  I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell‘s stuff again recently.  Here’s a good quote that perhaps sheds some light on it.

“BILL MOYERS: Do you ever have the sense of… being helped by hidden hands?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: All the time. It is miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as a result of invisible hands coming all the time – namely, that if you do follow your bliss you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.”

For me, it’s comedians.  Maybe this is because I’m not naturally much of one myself, or maybe it’s because, deep down, I want to be one.  Whatever the reason, I love watching them at work and going to live stand-up when I can.

Last month – March 14th – I got a chance to test myself out a little.  I delivered a course at Queen’s on the psychology and practice  of humour.  Apart from being a blast, I think I got to give the class a new perspective of the comic side of life.

For instance, I showed the relation between joke-telling and problem-solving.  According to Edward de Bono, they both require the same set of skills – the reconstructing of existing patterns of thought.  Also, I talked about the place of playfulness and humour as one of the 24 ‘signature strengths’ of positive psychologist Martin Seligman.  Finally, my main man Dan Pink got a mention, as the ‘sense of play’ – explained in terms of games, humour and joyfulness – is one of his six senses of out new, right-brain world.

The basis of almost all humour lies in pain, surprise, lies or word-play.  Some of this requires a different, more aggressive, less polite way of communicating than most people are used to.  So, during the course of the day, we practiced on our skills by playing different games that required the use of our malicious streak – games that worked on our attitude or our power of emotional exaggeration.  There was also basic creativity games, writing games, and games involving various types of gag e.g. the infamous ‘Not Joke’!

For those of you wanting to explore humour further, I would recommend these:

’10 Ways to be Funny’ by Justin Becker is good because it deal more with the required attitude to life than specific gags.  Although the context is for men, I don’t see why it isn’t equally applicable to women.

If you’d like to know how you can use humour in your work situation I would recommend the Laughter Workshops or Office Humour sites.

There’s loads of work-related humour on YouTube.  Take at look at here or here for examples.  Then there are series such as Man in the Box and Chad Vader – Dayshift Manager.  And finally, there’s The Office, with plenty of laughs on workplace motivation, presentations, appraisals and reviews.

But remember – as Nietzsche said, “To laugh is to be malicious, but with a good conscience”!

So abandon niceness all ye who would enter here…