500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
A change of pace this week as I continue thinking about Daniel Pink’s book A Whole New Mind and relate it to my own experiences in India this past winter.
Daniel Pink believes that left brain tasks requiring logic, analysis and speedy thinking will be either outsourced to smart and inexpensive labor in India or performed by tireless computers. He advises everyone who wants to get or keep their job to start pumping up their right brain processes – the creative, nonlinear stuff – in order to make themselves indispensable. I have no doubt that he’s right, but when I was over in India I saw little evidence of its linear left brain.
In Rishikesh, India’s yoga center, I was expecting a serene place filled with people whose feet only rarely touched the ground. What I found instead was a narrow bridge called Lakshman Jula alive with humanity and aggressive monkeys. The sacred Ganges was like Times Square, so packed it was with bathers, boats and garbage.
It wasn’t long before the chaotic nature of the place started to close in on me. After my wife got sick (suspicious masala chai we think) I was craving left-brain linearity. I wanted to get some of that in an American hotel near the airport. I’d like to pause for a moment to remark that I work in television for a living, so I have an intimate understanding of chaos and even outright insanity. What made me crack in India?
On the way to the airport in our air-conditioned car we saw motorcycles carrying more passengers than you’d think gravity would permit, and all manner of cargo – wood, entire trees, cooking oil, chairs, more people. I was expecting India to give me something of a balance between spirituality and left-brain IT computer geeks. Instead I got wood smoke, rickshaws and cows. I got noise, loud music, suspicious food and drink and people just trying to survive who hoped I would finance them.
I found little calm on the trip until we got to Mumbai, a jumpy, jangly city of 13 million people. In a temple dedicated to Ganesha, the Hindu god of success, and also in another dedicated to the goddess of prosperity Lakshmi, something happened. I felt that I grasped the spiritual world I had been seeking.
There are seeker/spiritual right-brained friends of mine who tell me that since I was expecting chaos and bad food in India, that’s what I got. Therefore, I created that universe. But I found that in Mumbai, the place that was closest to the cities I know, Los Angeles and New York, I was able to connect with both left and right brain. Too far to the logical side of things and there’s no access to intuition. Too far to the right, too much chaos. I found the balance in Mumbai, if only for a day.
If you’d like to see a slightly different video slideshow version of this story, you’ll find it on Lonely Planet’s website. Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
500 Words on Thursday | Written by Lee Schneider
Disclosure: I like doing yoga. I don’t go for the workout. (I have running for that.) I don’t go for the women. (Though I met a woman in yoga whom I have married.) I go to explore the mindscape and the soulscape. That said, I have a request for all yoga teachers: Can you stop telling us to throw away the mind? You might know the type, the teacher who cranks up the volume on their shallow pop music and shouts over it, “You don’t need your brain – just listen to your feelings!” This instruction makes me want to puke, but I would have to use my brain to do that, so I guess it’s not allowed.
I’m thinking about this because I just saw a new documentary called “Enlighten Up!” It’s the story of a skeptic who tries to find out if yoga can change him. I experienced the story very much through the skeptic’s eyes because he wanted tangible proof of how yoga was working. 
I like that, because it speaks to the existential engineer in me. Seeking such proof involves the brain in the process of healing the body and the spirit. That’s good. Here’s why: You might already know that there are two parts of the brain and they work together. The left brain takes care of the sequential, analytical, logical stuff like doing your taxes and complaining about it. The right brain is non-linear, intuitive and big picture. It’s what we use to connect to the soul, interpret people’s facial expressions, dance with abandon and heal ourselves.
“The brain? That’s my second favorite organ.”
-Woody Allen
As Daniel H. Pink writes in A Whole New Mind, the left brain is bossy and tends to bully the right brain. This is why in meditation we’re asked to “quiet the mind.” It’s an oversimplified instruction – you really want to quiet the left brain — it’s analyzing how annoying it is to sit still — and try to listen to the right brain as it tells its subtle story. One great technique for this is to sit and hum loudly. It gets everything vibrating, clears the mind of extra thoughts and if you don’t go insane first or get evicted, you might discover something new.
I was amazed to learn from Daniel Pink’s book that for years scientists believed it was the left brain alone that “made us human” – our logical, analytical selves vaulted us above dumb animals who have never even attempted to write a novel. The mute, mysterious right brain was thought to be a vestige of a more primitive form of human. But as Pink points out, “We need both approaches in order to craft fulfilling lives and build productive, just societies.”
Works for me. Even when I gaze into my own past I see that my father is a lawyer whose default mode is analytical left brain rationality while my mother, who was an artist, was a devotedly holistic right brain person. Genetically, that’s my recipe. Whatever I am pursuing or pursued by these days is orchestrated by biology, biography and those two halves of the brain playing their symphony together.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I have been staring at a $20 bill on my desk for an hour now but it has yet to turn into $40. If I think about this blog really hard, will it write itself? There are those who believe beliefs can manifest into things, that action and thought are entangled.
There’s a kind of chocolate on the market called Intentional Chocolate. Dr. Dean Radin, a senior scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, co-authored a study on it, a randomized, placebo-controlled double-blind study, to see whether chocolate exposed to the positive intentions of people meditating would make a difference in the mood of people who ate the chocolate. Turns out, according to the paper, that people who ate the “positive thought” chocolate reported feeling better than those who ate regular chocolate. Huh. Would that work with pizza?
Dr. Radin admits to being surprised at the outcome of the test, but he says he’s interested in asking questions about how the world works, regardless of prejudices.
Well, scientists do tend to freak out when you suggest that the consciousness of somebody can change the outcome of an experiment. Richard P. Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia University, was quoted in the Los Angeles Times about the chocolate experiment: “There’s nothing in the way that we understand the universe that would explain how a group of people could influence the well-being of others by blessing their chocolate,” he was quoted in the article. “Besides, if chocolate could be blessed, it could also be cursed.”
Cursed chocolate bunnies aside, Dr. Sloan is an important crusader against quack science and I admire his stand. But there are other beliefs about belief.
One of the premises of quantum physics is that the observer, by the act of watching, affects observed reality. Trying to get my mind around this makes me want to lie down in a darkened room and eat chocolate. But according to a study published in Nature, scientists have demonstrated how a beam of electrons is affected by the act of being observed.
Dr. William Tiller, a Professor Emeritus of materials science at Stanford University, believes that human consciousness can change what we call physical reality. His view is that physics has been examining the interaction of mass and energy and he now wants to bring consciousness to the party. He thinks mass can be converted into energy which in turn can be converted into consciousness. This makes my head hurt, supporting the formula t/C*10=a2. That is, thinking (t) about consciousness ( C ) for ten minutes equals taking two Advil (a2) and lying down in a darkened room.
We all know the saying “I’ll believe it when I see it.” It’s at the heart of “show me” scientific thinking. Dr. Radin argues we have this backwards. It should be, he says, “I’ll see it when I believe it.”
Consider that over the weekend, and if you catch a chocolate bunny smirking at you, do not eat it.
Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.
I know where ideas come from. They come from coffee. While living in Italy, I drank five espresso coffees a day and had lots of ideas. One of those ideas was this: Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation. Unless I wanted to become a professional insomniac I needed an alternative. Switching to green tea has worked but the lower caffeine content results in just 62.5 words per cup. Large vats of it must be brewed by the kitchen staff even to write this blog.
Getting enough caffeine in me to feel the neurons charging is only part of the story. The ideas have to come from somewhere – but where? The first theory involves sweat. 
Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
Hard work isn’t always the answer, but changing perspectives might be, like stepping into the car or into a shower. After stepping into his bath, Archimedes figured out how water displacement could be used to calculate density. Could be the water, but closing your eyes also works. Researchers call this “gating” of visual input, and it might cause solution-related brain activity to burst into consciousness. The ah-ha moment! Dreams are a great resource, too. I’ve had some very big ideas in dreams, and after I wake up I write them down. They usually go like this: “Mungle bubble car mouse tree bliff.” If anyone can make sense of that, drop me a line.
It gets interesting when big ideas visit several people at once. Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus at the same time. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions simultaneously. Does that mean that scientific discoveries are just “in the air” — waiting to be grabbed up by a receptive mind? Can ideas be the product of a collective super-consciousness? That would mean that ideas don’t only come from inside. Instead of a theory of sweat, this is a theory of spirit.
According to Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray Love,” the Greeks believed that the “genius” was a magical, divine entity living in the walls of the artist’s studio. When the artist was working, the genius would come out to help. As Gilbert put it, this was a psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. Your ideas were not yours – they were on loan from higher sources. If your work bombed, it was not entirely your fault. You just had a faulty genius. (Can you give your genius a cup of coffee?) This changed in the Renaissance, when human creativity was put at the center of the universe. Brilliance was being a genius, not having a genius.
Whether I have a genius living in the wall of my office or not, I believe that ideas come from having a prepared mind, and yet there is that undefined something that makes me wonder if a larger consciousness comes into play. 
Television, for example, was invented by several people at once, including a Mormon farmer who was mowing hay in rows and realized that an electron beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines. Then he went in to take a shower. Where do your ideas come from?
Stay curious and see you next Thursday.
