Cartoon Pen & Watercolour Copyright 2008 Jean Burman
HAVE A LISTEN!
Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine – Simon & Garfunkel
(funny how the lyrics work as well today as they did back then – grin)
Had it not been that the Large Hadron Collider was shut down last week… (and remains out of commission still)… we might have been forgiven for thinking that scientists had this week successfully created the first ever black hole with their new fangled contraption!
A black hole so deep and so dark and so unstable that it had successfully sucked a bunch of the world’s largest banks, institutions and corporations into the empty ugly void of financial “deep space”. A black hole of such gargantuan proportions that every man woman and child on the planet will not escape the “gravity” of it.
Alas… unable to blame the Collider (because it has already broken down)… we are forced to cast around for another villain. And what we see is something way more sinister. There at the helm of the mother ship… set on a doomsday course to oblivion… sits a bunch of egocentric greedy individuals whose free-range money grabbing actions have served to rewrite the pages of history with the blood of all those who trusted them to deliver up their dream of a better situation.
Worse still they were acting with impunity.
The fact that it has all gone badly wrong… was (and I dare say, still is)… of little consequence to the perpetrators.
Self regulation? Yeah right. No regulation? Oooo yeah even better!
Well what in the heck did we expect? Every mother out there could tell you… give a kid an inch and they will take a mile. And there is no reason to expect that growing TALLER will change a thing! (grin)
Loss of confidence in financial markets will have far reaching consequences… reverberating far beyond the US domestic market. Whether we like it or not we are in the midst of a global economic crisis. Everyone everywhere will suffer in some way. The US bailout may not successfully avert the inevitable… but it might shore up confidence just long enough to stabilise the markets for a short time until something can be worked out.
However without significant regulatory change the climate of corruption will continue to exist. What happened before will happen again. The challenge now (indeed the obligation) for politicians of every stripe is to get off their political high horse… and ensure that it can’t. This is not the time for politicking and political point scoring.
It’s funny… but the human mind is not something that we “think” about all that often. And that’s a paradox in itself isn’t it? Here are a couple of mind teasers to kick off this post
You know… I could have sworn there were only 3. But there’s 6. Honest!
And how about this one?
Seems no matter what you do… the answer will always be that infernal 9!
But the classic is the Spinning Lady… and I will come back to her in a moment.
(You might want to scroll her out while you read on – she can be extremely distracting! LOL)
First I wanted to tell you what I discovered this week whilst having my eyes tested for new glasses. As part of the test the Optometrist tested my eye dominance. To do this… she asked me to look though the gap between my outstretched overlapped hands and focus on a point in the distance. I then closed one eye and then the other without moving my hands. The eye that continues to see the focal point is the dominant eye. For me… it is my left.
This got me thinking… and when I got home I did a little research to see if my left eye dominance had any influence over the way I see my world. And guess what? Turns out it does.
As most of us probably already know… the left brain controls the right side of the body and vice versa. [I feel sure this was God's way of showing us that he has an overtly perverse sense of humour] (grin)
And we’ve heard a lot about left brain dominant people being analytical… whilst the right brain dominant are considered to be more creative. What I wondered then… was whether my left eye dominance had anything to do with my being right brain dominant. And guess what? Turns out it does.
Getting back to the Spinning Lady and the test which is supposed to sort the left brainers from the right brainers. Take a look at this.
Hmmm… now what does it mean when she spins both ways. Does that make me a no-brainer?!
When I first watched this… she would only spin clockwise (which puts me fair and square in the middle of the creative right brain dominant camp). No matter what I did… even standing on one ear… I couldn’t get that aggravating woman to spin the other way! Then someone interrupted me with a question. It was a question that required an analytical response. Sure enough… when I looked back at the screen… off she went in the other direction. But then I couldn’t get her to go back!
I have since perfected this… and can now control her at whim. When I want her to go clockwise I listen to a beautiful piece of music and dream of my next painting. When I want her to go anticlockwise I have to think about… um…well… what I’m going to cook for dinner… (ha… and you thought I was going to say econometrics didn’t you?)
Seriously… anyone can do this. And here’s the trick. Stare at her pivotal foot and the shadow crossing the floor. Soon you will see that she is in fact not even making a full rotation… but simply going back and forth!
Mind bending? Yeah… you betcha.
In reality… I believe our brains are multi-functional and multi-dimensional. Our ability or otherwise to use elements from both hemispheres of the brain simultaneously is determined by how often (and how well) we utilise the abilities of each side… and how well we are able to “make the swap”… (further developing neural pathways between the two).
Certainly genetics has some part to play in this… but I believe most of us ultimately “become” what we think about (and do) the most. We are the product of our own activity and learning. To limit the potential capacity of our brilliant minds to one hard and fast rule about whether we are left brain or right brain dominant seems somehow to insult the creator… whomever “she” may eventually prove to be!
Truth is… we are more than probably… a little bit of both. Or maybe even a lot. Exactly how muchof both is determined by you. Each and every one of us is unique in our own special way… with something to offer that no-one else can. Our challenge is to find that uniqueness and bring it to the table.
