Big Wide World

What kind of thinker are you? Do you think with your right side of the brain or the left side? Do you even know?

This might not be a huge issue for you, but knowing how you think helps you problem solve, learn and do pretty much anything analytical or academic.

For instance - I know that I'm pathetic at science, history or math. My mind can't think in those terms. But I excel in philosophy, social sciences, humanities in general. For a while, that left me frustrated because not understanding how my brain functions made me just say "I suck at math" and I left it at that. Now, knowing how I think, I can try to focus on thinking in a different way since now I know there is a different way.

I'm not a linear thinker. I think through synthesis. Its a method of solving a problem by looking at the whole and trying to use pattern-matching to solve the problem. More to the point, I'm a chaotic thinker. I look at the whole, then put the pieces together (yeah, always been good at puzzles). This is in contrast to a way of thinking as analysis, in which a problem is solved by breaking it down to its pieces and analyzing the pieces one at a time. This is a linear way of thinking.

I don't understand the linear thought process. But I've seen it at work. Anyone who is good at history is clearly (to me) a linear thinker. And being good at it and liking it are two separate issues.

Now, a quick google search and wiki search starts to suggests some primary ways of starting to figure out whether you think through analysis or synthesis.

There seems to be a suggestion that if you're left handed, you use the right hemisphere of your brain and think through synthesis. If you're right handed, you use the left hemisphere of your brain and you think through analysis. I'm not saying this is exact but there seem to be some suggests of this.

Think about how you multi-task. This is how I know where I fall on the thinking scale. When you mulit-task, do you tend to have a lot of tasks, but do one at a time, or do you have 30 things going at once. Personally, i know i'm a chaotic thinker because I always have lots of little projects, little tasks, and I'm jumping from one to the other. It doesn't bother me that I start something and then have to come back to it. I know some linear thinkers, and if they do this, it drives them crazy. they need to do one thing at a time or they get bewildered. At work, I always have a lot of post-its with random bits of information everywhere. I also have online PIMS and on my Ipod Touch, on my blackberry and on my Nokia. I have bits of information everywhere, but I pretty much always know where it is. Linear thinkers tend to be more composed in their thinking and tend to have information at one location or one primary source.

And I'm not suggesting that you can't be both, or that different situations have led you to adapt to thinking in both terms. We learn and adapt so you could use both methods. I tend to use the one and have difficulties with the other (I can do math, it just takes more effort). This is just a simple introduction to helping you get started in terms of figuring how you think in order to overcome any frustrations that might have come up.

apparently, smokers want a smoke after seeing health labels:

"A three-year, $7 million neuromarketing study done in Oxford, England has found that cigarette health warning labels actually make smokers want to smoke more, not less. Neuromarketing research studies how the brain reacts to various types of marketing stimuli. Researchers studied 2,000 people from five different countries using sophisticated brain-testing technology, like electroencephalography and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to gain a better understanding of consumer behavior. A surprising finding involved the health warning labels placed on cigarette packs. Researchers asked subjects if the warning labels worked to help them reduce smoking, and most said "yes." But when they repeated the same question while flashing images of the labels to the subjects while they underwent an MRI, they found that the images activated "craving spots" in the brain, indicating that the health warnings actually encourage smokers to smoke more." Source: Advertising Age, October 21, 2008

The study comes from the book Buyology, by Martin Lindstrom (Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Chapters). He examines the conscious and subconscious motivations behind our needs to buy (and buy and buy) and puts the study in contexts of neuromarketing, the study of marketing in terms of sensorimotor, cognitive, and affective responses to marketing stimuli (check out neuro science marketing blog here).

I would have to read the study on the link between health warning labels and smoking in order to evaluate it, but it appears that there is a legitimate question on whether its the labels that prompted the craving to smoke or the seeing the actual cigarette (package). I would hope that the book would address that issue.