0 Obviously Not

Earlier this month we had the 2013 awarding of the annual Ig Nobel Prizes. These are awarded for unusual or trivial scientific discoveries. The stated aim of the awards, which are run by an American magazine, Annals of Improbable Research (AIR), is to "honour achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think." So here are the pick of this year's awards:

MEDICINE - for assessing the effect of listening to opera, on heart transplant patients. The patients being mice.

PSYCHOLOGY - for confirming that people who think they are drunk also think they are attractive. This was proven by experiment.

PHYSICS - for discovering that some people would be physically capable of running across the surface of a pond. If the people and the pond were on the moon.

PROBABILITY - for first of all discovering that the longer a cow has been lying down, the more likely it is that cow will soon stand up; and secondly, that once a cow stands up you cannot easily predict how soon that cow will lie down again.

Surely much of this is of little interest to us or is plain and simply obvious, isn't it? But ask yourself do we take things in our life for granted, do we automatically assume that we know exactly what's going on? Should we stop and pause for a moment and ask ourselves some very simple and obvious questions? Do we not do this because we don't think that we can get hold of the answers or do we not do it because we don't want to hear the answers or do we just not ever stop and think? I think that we could learn more about our human experience when we question more of what we take for granted in life.

At the end of the day NLP is not so much interested in what you think as to how you think. So using the examples above, from an NLP perspective I'm not as interested in whether cows like lying down or not, I am more interested in how did the scientists do their research, and how does what they learn apply elsewhere; for instance could we do the same research with teenagers? NLP is more about your thinking processes not the content of what you are thinking about. Sometimes we all get lost in the content of our lives, our stories, our problems and dramas. I have often noticed that when people listen to each other, the "listener" is simply waiting for a break in the conversation and then proceeds to talk about what they have done or experienced which is most similar to what they just heard. Now this is perfectly acceptable in building relationships and rapport; and in fact your brain works by making associations between things in the first place, so it is actually quite natural. Once you become aware that you are about to do that you can ask yourself should I share this or should I actually be listening some more to what this person has to say?

There is often more than there appears to be on the surface, when we are prepared to stop and look that is. In 2000 Andre Geim and Sir Michael Berry won the Ig Noble physics award for magnetically levitating a live frog. In 2010 Geim won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work on graphene. If you didn't know graphene is one-atom thick layer of the carbon, it is very strong, light, nearly transparent, and an excellent conductor of heat and electricity. Nothing wrong with Andre Geim's thinking processes then.

"Written By Ewan Mochrie"

Source: art-of-kisses.blogspot.com