Give your subconscious a chance to be creative

A discussion on NPR the other day gave TPP pause, yes, it was about cell phones, and similar devices, robbing you of your creativity, and it most certainly is true.  Many years ago a book told a story about how Linus Pauling liked to think about a problem he was trying to solve a night before he went to bed, and how in the morning he often had a new thought about the problem. Hey, it sounded easy enough, so what the heck.  And it works, but there's a catch.  Your subconscious brain will work on and provide new thoughts, ideas, solutions, to problems, but it's very quiet. You must give it a chance to surface because any little thing commanding your attention will keep you subconscious thoughts from surfacing.  And this was the essence of the NPR commentary; unless we get bored we never hear that quiet voice. Now this isn't quite true, but you do have to have a quiet reverie, and TPP's shows up during his 20 min walk to campus. You don't have to concentrate very hard while walking, so you give your brain an opportunity to sort of day dream, and poof, up pops an idea.  Sometimes TPP has to grab the idea and think about it hard, or it escapes, disappears, sometimes to never appear again. But the secret is to have that day dreamy cognitive drifting about. Ah, but the young ones all around have a constant digital input, sounds, images, their I-devices that turn them into I-zombies. With years of practice, TPP is quite good at this creative thinking. Of course, not all the ideas are gems, so sorting and vetting is required, but new ideas are a place to start. So, yes, your toys are robbing you of your creativity, and so do a great many life styles that lack any day-dreaming time.  So TPP shall parrot the NPR advice; turn off your input devices and get bored. 

How to kill an iZombie

Sometime back TPP commented on iPhone zombies, but a similar affliction can also occur due to ear buds and whatever they are delivering from an iPod, so the result is an iZombie. Like all zombies, you have to know the right way to kill them, but based on recent events that may not be too difficult. You turn an ordinary person, often a student around here, into an iZombie by giving them a smart phone and a set of ear buds either attached to the iphone or an ipod, either or both transform the user into an iZombie. To kill an iZombie, you simply must steer them gently into an intersection or actually any urban street at all and in no time at all the traffic will claim another iZombie. So much easier than axes or swords or shotguns. Yes, why they might even get hit by a bicycle going at a good clip. Now this concerns TPP, the bicyclist could get hurt seriously, particularly when they are a senior citizen. So it is quite lucky, although no small amount of bicycling skill was involved, that TPP was able to avoid narrowly such a collision not because of his concern for the iZombie, but who wants to get a broken bone in the process?  And who but an iZombie would walk down a driveway and into the street without a single hesitation or a glance in either direction?  But maybe it would be wise to find that old Chinese meat cleaver built rather like a heavy-duty machete and mount it on the handle bars.  Abe Lincoln would approve.