Defining the Issues: Stimulus from the outside world or from inside your mind turns on a picture we call PERCEPTION. The perception is affected by the concepts we already hold. This explains why different people
perceive the same event differently.
The Blue Room - The Room of Imagination
• Imaginative
• Creative and design-oriented
• Contextual
• Playful
• Tackles novel challenges
• Detects opportunities, takes chances
• Reassemble existing ideas in different ways
• Metaphor-driven
• Possibility-driven, you can be anyone
The Green Room - The Room of Logic
• Reasoned
• Methodical and sequential
• Textual
• Purposeful
• Solves routine problems
• Analyses the risks, treads carefully
• Pull apart the whole to analyse its parts
• Literal-driven
• Reality driven, you are you
The Orange Room - The Room of Moods and Feelings
• The mixing of emotion with thought
• Experience imposes an interpretive landscape
on the present and future
• Sometimes brief and sometimes intensive
• Thoughtful deployment of behaviour
• Private
• Weak physiological responses
• Feeling-oriented
• Always active
• Impeded by stress
The Red Room - The Room of Impulse
• The mixing of emotion with behaviour
• Experience imposes a reactionary
landscape on the present and future
• Usually brief, and always intensive
• Rapid deployment of behaviour
• The Room of impulse
• Public
• Strong physiological responses
• Action-oriented
• Rarely active
• Stimulated and enhanced during stress
What are concepts?
Concepts are the unification of the intellect with emotions. They are ideas, typically expressed as opinions and often based on our perceived views of the world. People grow concepts about religion, politics, manners, behaviour, families, poverty and wealth, drugs and learning just to name a few. We feel comfortable when the concepts we hold match the world in which we exist. When mis-matches occur, as they inevitably do, the emotional side of the concept grows and we feel varying degrees of discomfort. Concepts are the particular sets of thoughts and emotions that grow from experience, and which we defend in our discourse with others. They are the cornerstones of our values and beliefs, our biases and prejudices, our hopes and fears. Concepts are our particular views about particular instances. All concepts have an intellectual (thoughts) and an emotional (felt) component. When there is a mismatch between our concepts and our world, most of us use behaviour to try to modify the world to match our concepts – rather than modify our concepts until they match the world. Mismatches between concepts are the cause of much human conflict. At an international level, countries will slaughter each others’ citizens when concepts between them differ significantly.
What is imaginative thought (Blue Room)?
Imagination can produce real physical, observable effects in the brain. Researcher, Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University has shown that mental imagery activates the same regions of the brain that actual perception does. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this finding. It means humans can use imagination to get angry or to feel pleasure, to picture a perfect golf swing or a boring science lesson at school. In other words, we don’t have to actually do something to stimulate the brain. Just thinking about things can do it for us.
perceive the same event differently.
The Blue Room - The Room of Imagination
• Imaginative
• Creative and design-oriented
• Contextual
• Playful
• Tackles novel challenges
• Detects opportunities, takes chances
• Reassemble existing ideas in different ways
• Metaphor-driven
• Possibility-driven, you can be anyone
The Green Room - The Room of Logic
• Reasoned
• Methodical and sequential
• Textual
• Purposeful
• Solves routine problems
• Analyses the risks, treads carefully
• Pull apart the whole to analyse its parts
• Literal-driven
• Reality driven, you are you
The Orange Room - The Room of Moods and Feelings
• The mixing of emotion with thought
• Experience imposes an interpretive landscape
on the present and future
• Sometimes brief and sometimes intensive
• Thoughtful deployment of behaviour
• Private
• Weak physiological responses
• Feeling-oriented
• Always active
• Impeded by stress
The Red Room - The Room of Impulse
• The mixing of emotion with behaviour
• Experience imposes a reactionary
landscape on the present and future
• Usually brief, and always intensive
• Rapid deployment of behaviour
• The Room of impulse
• Public
• Strong physiological responses
• Action-oriented
• Rarely active
• Stimulated and enhanced during stress
What are concepts?
Concepts are the unification of the intellect with emotions. They are ideas, typically expressed as opinions and often based on our perceived views of the world. People grow concepts about religion, politics, manners, behaviour, families, poverty and wealth, drugs and learning just to name a few. We feel comfortable when the concepts we hold match the world in which we exist. When mis-matches occur, as they inevitably do, the emotional side of the concept grows and we feel varying degrees of discomfort. Concepts are the particular sets of thoughts and emotions that grow from experience, and which we defend in our discourse with others. They are the cornerstones of our values and beliefs, our biases and prejudices, our hopes and fears. Concepts are our particular views about particular instances. All concepts have an intellectual (thoughts) and an emotional (felt) component. When there is a mismatch between our concepts and our world, most of us use behaviour to try to modify the world to match our concepts – rather than modify our concepts until they match the world. Mismatches between concepts are the cause of much human conflict. At an international level, countries will slaughter each others’ citizens when concepts between them differ significantly.
What is imaginative thought (Blue Room)?
Imagination can produce real physical, observable effects in the brain. Researcher, Stephen Kosslyn of Harvard University has shown that mental imagery activates the same regions of the brain that actual perception does. It is impossible to overstate the importance of this finding. It means humans can use imagination to get angry or to feel pleasure, to picture a perfect golf swing or a boring science lesson at school. In other words, we don’t have to actually do something to stimulate the brain. Just thinking about things can do it for us.