When babies are deprived of oxygen before birth, brain damage and disorders such as cerebral palsy can occur. A common cause of this deficiency is knotting of the umbilical cord, and in developing nations, untrained delivery, anemia, and malnutrition during pregnancy can also contribute to oxygen deprivation. Extended cooling can prevent brain injuries, but this treatment is not always available in developing regions where advanced medical care is scare. Johns Hopkins University undergraduates have devised a low-tech $40 unit to provide protective cooling in the absence of equipment that can cost $12,000. The device, called the Cooling Cure, lowers a newborn's temperature by about 6 degrees F for three days - a treatment that has been shown to protect the child from brain damage if administered shortly after a loss of oxygen has occurred. The device, simply made of a clay pot, plastic-lined basket, sand, instant cold pack powder, and a temperature sensor, is powered by two AA batteries. repost via: tech briefs tv
Edward De Bono in his ''Lateral thinking'' said, ''the whole purpose of lateral thinking is to restructure the mind patterns, to disrupt them, to be able to see the things in a different way''. When I watched this presentation it gave me the idea of being reading a really good summary of De Bono's book. Here Luke Williams apply the notion of disruptiveness to three main areas: strategies, thinking and expectations and explain how the introduction of this concept can leverage innovation, hence success, in your company.
This talk is full with real business cases of Frog design (where the speaker is a fellow) and other business leader that relate this theoretical process with real successful innovations. One thing that I personally found really interesting is that the organizational processes to innovate are shifting their focus from efficiency and system theory to a more anthropological area, actually they are going into the psychology of the people involve in these processes. What DeBono wrote thinking in the improvement of the creative performance of individuals now is been taken as a way to improve organizational performance on innovation, in other words, how we can make innovation part of our organization process? or how we can build an organization centered on innovation? well...improving the creative performance of each person involved in the organization. But it is still a gap of going from the individual to the organizational level, and it is how we translate an mind process in a collective process. Again De Bono give us a hand in his book the "Six thinking hats'', but even when he manage to describe how to deal with the collective addressing of problem there is still an environmental issues to solve in order to empowered the creative processes in collective work settings, but that's another post.
For now it's good to enjoy a very dynamic talk, full of nice examples, of how to address the innovation through disruptiveness, a concept cast almost forty years ago that still remain fresh.
Some weeks ago i came across with the knowledge that we posses some neurons call mirror system-or mirror neurons- wich give us the ability to feel what others are felling, just by see them or by hear them. Well this system is the base of the empathy, but empathy may be the base of another big thing...Society perhaps? but how study empathy can give us insights of how society evolve? -here it gets really good- because studying empathy we can study the history of human social counsiousness or to whom we think -and fell- we are related to. From the blood ties, passing through religion to Nations states and going further, Jeremy Rifkin explain the ideas coming from his six years research on this topic. This video extract, and illustrate in the very clear way of CongnitiveMedia, a part of a talk given by the autor on which he refers to the discovery of the mirror system and how that new insight open a new path for understand history, pass and future.
Recently I came across with a video that introduces the idea that we have a neuronal mechanism that allows us to share the experience of other people just by look at them or heard them. This mechanism it's call the Mirror System. This neuronal device, that don't depend on any specific brain structure, was first found on monkeys as an unexpected neuronal response when some scientific team in Parma were studying the response of some neural groups related with conscious movement. The exercise was grab a piece of food, when the monkey grab it the neurons ''turn on'', the surprise was when the exactly group of neurons also ''turn on'' when the monkey saw one person of the team grab the food.
That found opens a complete new research branch in neuroscience and until now it has been prove that this system has incidence in motor, sensitive and symbolic system. This means that through the ''mirror system'' it can be trigger motion, sensitive and emotional responses in the subject that look or hear an action. This is why we make funny faces when we see a football player get kick by another, or why movies make us cry.
The mirror system it's the only mechanism that has proven to be fundamentally social, that means that it is a specific device to learn and behave socially. The thing that I see as a relevant issue here is that when you are worried about to understand human behaviour (like Design as a discipline it is) you have to be conscious about the importance of firsthand experience and above all, of observation; because this means that through experience and observe the human behavior you can easily address gestures, emotions and comprehensions that can drive conceptually and formally the develop of a project.
The relevance and functions of the mirror system go, of course, far beyond the field of design and can give us a knowledge greater than confirm a fact well know by experience (observation and firsthand experience are our best tool for design) and it can put us in the real and deep understanding of human behaviour.
