Visual Science // An Animated Look At The Divided Brain

Today we bring you another great video from RSA Animate, the same folks that turned Sir Ken Robinson's "Changing Education Paradigms" into a mind-blowing animation. This time they've taken up their pens to illustrate "The Divided Brain," a lecture by psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist, author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World.

McGilchrist explores how the common perception of the brain being divided into to halves, with the left handling logic, reason and language and the right taking care of emotion, visual imagery and creativity, doesn't tell the whole story. The brain is indeed "profoundly divided," he says, and has become more so as humans have evolved, but the major difference between the two hemispheres is the right's capacity for broad sustainable awareness and the left's narrow focus and attention to detail, both of which are needed for reason and imagination.

An imbalance between these two hemispheres, with the left's "what" taking precedence over the right's "how", can be found at the root many problems in contemporary society, McGilchrist says, driving things home with a killer Einstein quote.

Hit play and give both sides of your brain a little exercise:

-- John Ruscher

NEW MEMBER PROFILE // Gary Boas Explores The Cutting Edge of Science and Technology

Gary Boas at the Cadillac Ranch in Amarillo, Texas.

Freelancer writer, editor and web content developer Gary Boas has been working remotely for years, but now you'll find him in our new top-of-the-line coworking space. "While the home office thing has its advantages, it has glaring disadvantages as well," he says. "Namely, it's totally isolating."

In the past Boas has longed to break from that isolation, but that's difficult to do when you work independently:

"I've toyed with setting up a water cooler in my house and inviting people in off the street to chat about who won American Idol or whatever," he says. "In the end I decided joining something like 3rd Ward was a much better idea."

Boas works primarily in the sciences. "I'm an editor with a trade journal devoted to the biomedical applications of optics, for example, and the webmaster with a biomedical imaging center at Mass General Hospital in Boston," he explains.

He recently wrapped up work on a feature article about the "far-flung future" of optics technology, which he says "is probably at least slightly more interesting than it sounds. I'm looking at technologies currently being developed for military (laser weapons), automotive (self-driving cars) and organic LED (designer lighting) applications." He's also participating in National Novel Writing Month. "I'm not writing a novel, per se, but rather what I lovingly call 'my memoirs'—a collection of stories from a year I spent hobo-ing around the US, with occasional incursions into Mexico and Ireland."

On top of being able to interact with others during his work day, Boas was also attracted to our coworking space by the range of people and ideas. "I like 3rd Ward specifically for the mix of people and the variety of activities you'll find here," he says.

Want to check out some of Boas' work? Try "Photonics in Space: Optics-based instruments will help crack the mysteries of the cosmos," an amazing cover story for Photonics Spectra, or this entertain article about past ideas of what the future would look like.

-- John Ruscher

SCIENCE SCENE // MIT Research Skylar Tibbits Explains "Self-Assembly"

For people who make things, the materials are as important as the process of constructing. So imagine if that material was animate, robotic and knew how to assemble itself. In this mind-blowing TED Talk, MIT researcher Skylar Tibbits talks about how that might one day happen--and as it were, how we do have the technology, While still a long way off, it's fodder for a whole new world of makers (and inevitably, terrifying sci-fi horror flicks.)

--Layla Schlack