How do we "Think"?

 So there I was starring into space lost in thought,bored to death when suddenly something said in class previously came to me,not to be mistaken  for a light bulb getting turned on in my head but more of a  fade in memory.Our lecturer posed this question to us "Does our brain really do the thinking?" we were quick at answering replying "yes","yep" and "yeah" were some of the answers I believe,not really much of question you would think..well neither did we until he showed us an experiment by making a friend of mine touch an object with his eyes closed and then posed the question to him "What is it that you were touching?" to which he replied "a wallet" ,turns out he was wrong it was a card holder."keeping this in mind,for you to recognise this as a card holder you would have to think with your eyes" he said.

                                                   source: brainbrilliance.org

So with that mindset I started thinking about the various ways we think with our senses,needless to say I came up with a few:

                                                    1)Hearing

Source: keyboardlessons.com

  "Ever tried sketching while listening to music and without?have you noticed the difference between the two"  asked my friend Ghiath Abu Rakty who also happens to be quite an amazing pianist, well I did actually because I have tried it a few times,interestingly my work seemed much more amazing it was also influenced by the type of music I was listening to,it seemed like my ears were doing the drawing for me "Thinking" for me in a way I always assumed my brain did.

                                                         2)Sight

                                                        Source: theobloby.blogspot.com

  As I said earlier my friend was asked to try to guess what a card holder was by touching it,so when this train of thought occurred to me I went home closed my eyes spun countless times rolled on the floor at least ten times and tried feel around using only my brain to think.I managed to walk for what felt like a kilometre when it turns out I was just walking in circles,I mistook my bed for my cupboard further proving the point of me Thinking with my senses.

                                                      3)Touch

                                                      

                                                       Source: health.howstuffworks.com

 Another sense too important to ignore,we all use the sense of touch in our lives daily so much so that we take it for granted,taking my sense of touch away was one of the experiments conducted by me using my brain to "Think" on what the object was,taking a chart paper and tracing paper both yellow in colour placed on a dark surface with not much light I tried to tell the difference with just my brain,turns out it was quite impossible to distinguish the two.

                                                      4)Taste

                                                         

                                                      Source: news.sciencemag.org

 Well no experiment to be conducted for this one its been done to me so many times,I remember the countless times I have misjudged food for what it actually was not by just "thinking" with my brain.Me saying "Oh,this is going to taste good" usually lands me in the awkward position of leaving food uneaten after the first bite.

                                                        5)Smell

                                                            

                                                           Source: naturalbodyguru.com

  "Oh there seems to be a burning smell" has probably saved a few objects on planet earth both living and non-living for those quick enough to act,"Oh I think,there's a burning smell...oh well" has probably destroyed a few.Smell is probably the most favourite sense of  creatures on this planet enabling us to enjoy the good things in life."Thinking" with our brain will never be a substitute for the sense of smell.

 Just like reading this post right now we "Think" with our eyes if we tried to close our eyes and "Think" with our brain it would be impossible. Most of us may not realize this but "Thinking" with our senses is what gets us places makes us do things.

I hope this was an interesting view on how we "Think".There could of course be many facts that people can come up with to counter this post of mine but this point of view is out of the box making it possible for us to brainstorm,draw the line a little further than what it was and making us better thinkers and innovators in the end.

What can be done with ....it?

For our second assignment we were asked to think about the stuff that can be done with this uh..thing?:

it can be described as a glass cylinder object mounted on a platform also made of glass.There were a lot of suggestions going around in class "finger washer"said one and believe it or not music instrument was another, apparently by placing a finger in the cylinder and pulling out fast while pushing the sides a "pop" sound could be made, also my personal favourite was the rudeness stopper(finger pointing and what not),so for suggestions from my part:

1) An elbow rest - placing an elbow in the hole wold help avoid putting it on dirt or rough surfaces

2) A mould - it could be used as a mini cookie mould maker making it possible to create a new type of snack, however to use this particular one a bottle of detergent would have to be bought first,the tissue on the side was well used you know.

3)As a stamp- it could be a "weirdly shaped glass bottom stamp" stamp.

concluding thinking out of the box these 3 suggestions seem quite fit (I think).Maybe placing it on top of my head might give me more ideas.

Why did the titanic hit an iceberg?

All right..for our first assignment we were asked to "think why" the titanic hit the iceberg  

personally I don't think it was because the ship was stoned even with all the smoke coming from it ... the "best" answers anyone can come up with seem a little dismissive of the "why" factor,leading us to believe everything leading to the point of it's fall/break/destruction/collapse is almost irrelevant, however one can always speculate:

1) As we all know 3/4 of an iceberg is buried under water, maybe this 3/4 of the iceberg was flat to an extent thereby making it impossible to turn once the iceberg was spotted.

2) The ships wheel broke when the captain got rowdy hosting his best pal's bachelor party on the bridge and therefore the ship couldn't turn at all.

3)  The Titanic met the Kraken and in an effort to save the passengers lives the captain let the ship sail straight to the iceberg, later the passengers that survived either blacked out or were to trauma stricken to believe it was real.

4) The captain of the titanic did spot the iceberg earlier but he saw Captain America stuck in the ice and was too shocked to give an order, leading it to it's inevitable doom.

These four reasons are quite speculative but any of them could be true.

Well hats off to out of the box thinking, one step closer to leaving mainstream behind. 

Credits for the picture of an iceberg go to http://www.dreamyoga.com 

Introduction

So earlier today we were asked to make a blog for our course @MMU  it got me thinking and I was confused on what to put up on my blog..until our lecturer gave us an inspiring speech on how we had to think outside the box and go around our day like when a person asks us our name ("Hey! what's your name?" to which "I am son of ____" would be the reply).Approaching a topic through many different directions no matter how silly they may seem (but make sense of course) would help us eliminate all mainstream thinking and place our minds outside the box making us more effective in what we do, in short no matter what we do creativity is important.