Pink---Part One and Play

 Part one of Pink’s book is talking about the history of the exploration of left and right hemisphere of brain. In the past, people thought the left side was the crucial half and the right part was just subsidiary. However, in recent research, people find they are two half-brains, designed to work together as a smooth, single, integrated whole in one entire, complete brain. They have different functions, but both of them are equally important. “The left hemisphere controls the right side of body, the right hemisphere controls the left side of body; the left hemisphere is sequential, the right hemisphere is simultaneous; the left hemisphere specializes in text, the right hemisphere specializes in context; the left hemisphere analyze the details, the right hemisphere synthesizes the big picture.” Only put the two together and one gets a powerful thinking machine. We need to have a while new mind in conceptual age.

Play

“Play will be to the 21^st Century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society—our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value. —Pat Kane”

In conceptual age, commingling work and play has become both more common and more necessary. It is true that if people do something that is not having fun doing it, they could rarely succeed. So play is becoming an important of work, business and personal well-being. Its importance manifesting itself in three ways: games, humor and joyfulness.

Games

As John Paul Gee said “games can be the ultimate learning machine”. There is a hot discussion about video games recently. Some people even regard video games as art and think it is helpful for the development of people. I agree with this idea. Video games operate with—that is, they build into their designs and encourage-- good principle of learning, principles that are better than those in many of our skill-and- drill, back-to-basics, test-them-until-they-drop-schools. Many aspects of video gaming resemble the aptitude of symphony—spotting trends, drawing connections, and discerning the big picture. Therefore, it enhances the right-brain ability to solve problems that require pattern recognition.

Humor

Humor embodies many of the right hemisphere’s most powerful attributes—the ability to place situations in context, to glimpse the big picture, and to combine differing perspective into new alignments. When it comes to management in business, it reduces hostility, deflects criticism, relieves tension, improves morale, and helps communicate difficult messages. It is also an important characteristics in daily life, people tend to like humorous people because they can make life colorful and it is easy to have a good relationship with this kind of people as well.

Joyfulness

I really love the idea of laughter club. At first, I thought it was just a place people talking jokes. I am surprised people there just get together laughing for no reasons. “If you are laughing, you cannot think. That is the objective we achieve meditation.” The laughter there is unconditional, the source of laughter is not outside the body, it is within us. Maybe the pure laughter has more to do with relationships than jokes. People rarely laugh alone. Laughter is a form of nonverbal communication that conveys empathy.