Month: September 2022

NUMBED. The majority of workaday lives are occupied with numbingly dull tasks that leave the body weary and repeat endlessly in this fight against the Theatre of the Absurd. The Mind is reduced to a litany of shopping lists, muted by media obsessed with the lowest common denominator, and what remains of curiosity and wonder is squashed into oblivion. View in LinkedIn

SILO-LAND. The greatest challenge to accessing this treasure trove of original thought is that specialization has created deep dark silos with their own impenetrable languages and inaccessibility. The age of the polymath is long past. This means that cross-fertilization between fields is much harder today. The wonderful hybrid vigor of cross-pollination has led to hothouse fragility and inbreeding. View in LinkedIn

NEW IDEAS. To walk in the shoes of another is to see the world from another perspective. To glimpse, even for a minute, however superficially, the mind of a mathematician, a quantum physicist, an astrophysicist, a botanist, a geologist, or a paleontologist, is to enrich our experience in ways that cannot be counted. View in LinkedIn

CURATION. A curated journal club is an entity from my past experience. The method of curation is to carefully isolate key and provocative original thoughts and try and draw the dots between them. And, like the best of Chinese cooking recipes, in bitesized pieces that can serve as nodules of meditation about that world view. View in LinkedIn

GESTALT TRICK. A trick I learned in learning Spanish at an older age is to let go the editorial pen and go with the flow of a sentence. It does not matter if you miss some of the words, go for the gist. Until this happened, my learning was constantly hijacked by my ignorance. The gestalt is the key. The same applies to glimpsing another way of thinking. View in LinkedIn

GLIMPSES. The same gestalt trick applies to penetrating the silos of foreign language: even when the content is way, way beyond your pay-grade, as so often it is in these esoteric rabbit holes, let go, and just follow the gist, get the flow, immerse in the ambience. View in LinkedIn

NEW WORLDS. If you allow yourself to go down these dark and foreign rabbit holes, putting your feet in somebody else’s shoes and tasting original thought in the raw in bitesized pieces, you will quickly learn that completely new universes of ideas have opened up to you. View in LinkedIn

THE HUNTING DOG. For me, researching these postings have been my Hunting Dog, a reason to go where I have no business going, and to continue the process of self-education driven by curiosity and wonder, leading more often than not to a state of awe. My motivation, I confess, is strictly selfish. View in LinkedIn

CAREER CHOICES. There are, presumably, some young enquiring minds who may stray onto these posts and be suddenly engaged enough to choose a career path in these esoteric fields. For sure that happened to me quite early in life when I read a book on circadian rhythms. It was quickly clear to me that the life sciences were of supreme interest. View in LinkedIn

MIND THE GAP. A state of awe is the beginning of the path to the secular sublime, the realization that we know little, and it is the gaps that illuminate the nature of reality. It is what is missing that is the most important part of this portrait. View in LinkedIn