Thursday, February 5, 2009

Brain of winked eyes, caught the blink!


Every one of us wink and blink when we have kept our eyes opened. But, our brain blinks and winks more and more when we begin to think, question and investigate with a thought which is in our mind.

Muscle of thinking -- brain, also see through the critical thinking with the information what we observe through our eyes and what we infer by seeing, reading & practicing -- all of these are (needs of) keen inquisitive observations. And, the brain keeps generating ideas for recognizing the patterns when the eyes are open and also when they are closed.

I was moving along with car, which was driven by one of my manager in a sunny noon. Beside me my friend MSH was seated and we were busy looking outside the window of a car and talking about a incident report, which MSH related to the Bengaluru traffic. In a signal, my eyes moved over the advertisement board, which was different from other board's I saw. And, the contents written in the board was also different in the way it imparted the meaning to the people who looked and perceived it by their thinking.

That advertisement said, "Let's be a responsible public.". In a wink my eyes caught colors of those letters in the board. And, it had other meaning. Quickly I asked MSH to look at the board and he too caught the other meaning of the words, that were written on the advertisement board.

The words written on the board brought me the James Bach's Blink Testing oracle to my mind. I said to MSH, what we identified after a blink of our eyes was the illustration of Blink Testing.



Picture: Photo snap of the advertisement board and the written content on it.


At the first sight I read it as "Let's be a responsible public.". But in fraction of an eye wink, the brain caught the blink and it showed "Let's be a responsible public." in the eve of Republic Day that was celebrated on 26th January. The board also said "Let's be a republic." along with "Let's be a responsible public.". Here I made use of heuristic (Blink Testing -- also can be an oracle) to infer that the other meaning i.e., 'republic' what I got, was from Blink Testing.

After an hour, moving in front of the same advertisement board in the same car, eyes and brain started to wink in finding those words that I read an hour back. But, the whole board was painted with color that appeared as red-in-color and did feel like those words are winking at us by hiding behind the paint which appeared to be red-in-color.


"There can be as much value in the blink of an eye as in months of rational analysis."
-- Malcom Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, 2005

"We learn by example and by direct experience because there are real limits to the adequacy of verbal instruction."
-- Malcom Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking, 2005


Source of the above quotes: quotation page