Pragmatic Thinking

Andy Hunt was on campus yesterday with an abridged version of his talk "Refactoring Your Wetware". He talked about the dual-sided nature of our brains and how to make them more useful.

Specifically, technical people spend most of their time in what he calls L-Mode (a.k.a. left-brain functionality), which is the analytical, logical side. However, the logical side is slow and can't really multitask. R-Mode (right brain) is parallelized and efficient at pattern-matching, and this makes it very efficient at solving problems using previously learned information. Since R-Mode is nonverbal and artistic, though, the main challenge is to figure out what that part of the brain is coming up with - and using L-Mode at any time will interrupt what R-Mode is doing.

Altogether it was a very interesting and useful talk. I heard several new ideas for recording and organizing ideas, as well as reminders of what I knew or suspected before (namely: you can't hold on to ideas in your head, and if you try to do so, you'll stop getting new ideas). On that note, I'll probably be starting a personal wiki soon. If so, I'll keep you posted.

Any Hunt's Weblog