pen is great; it’s the kind that can write even upside down
in a boiling toilet, should that need arise.5 The notepad is a
cheap 69-cent affair from the grocery store—skinny, not spiral
5.
Folks also recommend the Zebra T3 series; see http://www.jetpens.com for both a pen and mechanical pencil version.
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bound, like an oversize book of matches. I can carry these
with me almost everywhere.
Index cards
Some folks prefer having separate cards to make notes on.
That way you can more easily toss out the dead ends and
stick the very important ones on your desk blotter, corkboard,
refrigerator, and so on.
PDA
You can use your Apple iPod or Touch or Palm OS or Pocket
PC device along with note-taking software or a wiki (see Sec-
tion 8.3, Manage Your Knowledge, on page 228 for more on
this idea).
Voice memos
You can use your cell phone, iPod/iPhone, or other device to
record voice memos. This technique is especially handy if you
have a long commute, where it might be awkward to try to
take notes while driving.6 Some voicemail services now offer
voice-to-text (called visual voicemail), which can be emailed
to you along with the audio file of your message. This means
you can just call your voicemail hands-free from wherever you
are, leave yourself a message, and then just copy and paste
the text from your email into your to-do list, your source code,
your blog, or whatever. Pretty slick.
Pocket Mod
The free Flash application available at http://www.pocketmod.
com cleverly prints a small booklet using a regular, single-
sided piece of paper. You can select ruled pages, tables, to-do
lists, music staves, and all sorts of other templates (see Fig-
ure 3.2, on the next page). A sheet of paper and one of those
stubby pencils from miniature golf, and you’ve got yourself a
dirt cheap, disposable PDA.
Notebook
For larger thoughts and wanderings, I carry a Moleskine note-
book (see the sidebar on page 66). There’s something about
the heavyweight, cream-colored, unlined pages that invites
invention. Because it feels more permanent than the cheap
6.
Remember to use your hands-free device per local laws :-).
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Figure 3.2: Disposable pocket organizer from pocketmod.com
disposable notepad, I noticed a tendency to not write in it until
a thought had gelled for a while, so I wouldn’t fill it up pre-
maturely. That’s bad, so I started making sure I always had a
backup Moleskine at the ready. That made a big difference.
The important part is to use something that you always have with
you. Whether it’s paper, a cell phone, an MP3 player, or a PDA
doesn’t matter, as long as you always have it.
TIP 8
Capture al ideas to get more of them.
If you don’t keep track of great ideas, you will stop noticing you
have them.
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Moleskine Notebooks
A very popular style of notebook these days is made by
Moleskine (see http://www.moleskine.com). These come in
a variety of sizes and styles, ruled or not, thicker or thin-
ner paper. There’s a certain mystique to these notebooks,
which have been favored by well-known artists and writ-
ers for more than 200 years, including van Gogh, Picasso,
Hemingway, and even your humble author.
The makers of Moleskine call it “a reservoir of ideas and
feelings, a battery that stores discoveries and perceptions,
and whose energy can be tapped over time.”
I like to think of it as my exocortex—cheap external mental
storage for stuff that doesn’t fit in my brain. Not bad for ten
bucks.
The corollary is also true—once you start keeping track of ideas,
you’ll get more of them. Your brain will stop supplying you with
stuff if you aren’t using it. But it will quite happily churn out more
of what you want if you start using it.
Everyone—no matter their education, eco-
Everyone has good
nomic status, day job, or age—has good
ideas.
ideas. But of this large number of people
with good ideas, far fewer bother to keep
track of them. Of those, even fewer ever bother to act on those
ideas. Fewer still then have the resources to make a good idea a
success.7 To make it into the top of the pyramid shown in Fig-
ure 3.3, on the next page, you have to at least keep track of your
good ideas.
But that’s not enough, of course. Just capturing ideas is only the
first step; you then need to work with the idea, and there are some
special ways we can go about doing that to be more effective. We’ll
talk about this in depth a bit later (see Section 8.3, Manage Your
Knowledge, on page 228).
Get something to take notes on, and keep it with you.. . .
STOP
7.
If you doubt this, just ask any venture capitalist.
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Figure 3.3: Everyone has good ideas; fewer go further.
3.3 Linear and Rich Characteristics
Of course, there are quite a few differences between R-mode and
L-mode beyond R-mode’s unpredictability.
If you’ve ever said, “I’m of two minds about that,” you were probably
more literally correct than you thought at the time. You actually
have a number of different processing modes in the brain. Each
one has unique characteristics that can help you just when you
need it most.
The fastest processing modes are the muscle-memory sorts of
responses that don’t even travel up to the cortex itself.8 Piano play-
ers don’t think about each and every note and chord in a fast
passage; there isn’t time. Instead, the muscles involved more or
less just tackle the problem on their own without much conscious
involvement or direction.
Similarly, that instinctive slam on the brakes or quick dodge on the
bicycle doesn’t involve any CPU processing—it’s all in the periph-
erals. Since lightning-fast typing and similar physical skills aren’t
of too much interest to us as programmers, I’m not going to talk
too much about these non-CPU modes and responses.
8.
The cortex, which comes from the Lat
in word for tree bark, is the outer layer of folded gray matter and is key to conscious thinking.
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There is of course plenty to talk about with these two major modes
of thinking and consciousness, R-mode and L-mode, and what
they can do for you.
In the 1970s, psychobiologist Roger W. Sperry pioneered the
famous “split-brain” studies, where he discovered that the left and
right hemispheres process information quite differently from each
other (and just to add a little street credibility, he won the Nobel
Prize for this work in 1981).
First, here’s a little something to try. While seated, lift your right
foot off the floor, and make clockwise circles. Now, while doing this,
draw the number six (6) in the air with your right hand.
Notice that your foot will change direction. It’s how you’re wired.
Cut the wiring, and two things happen: you’ll have some very odd
experiences, and famous researchers get a chance to learn a lot
about the brain.
Sperry’s research took patients who had an operation such that
their left and right hemispheres could no longer communicate or
coordinate with each other. The connections were simply cut right
out. This made it relatively easy to see which hemisphere was
uniquely responsible for specific behaviors and capabilities.
For instance, in one experiment, these split-brain patients were
shown a different image in each eye at the same time. If asked to
name the object they saw, they’d report the image seen in the right
eye (using the primarily verbal left hemisphere). But if asked to
identify it by touch, they’d report the image found in the left eye
(which is attached to the nonverbal right hemisphere). Figure 3.4,
on the next page, shows what was going on.
It was Sperry who originally assigned these different capabilities
purely on a hemispheric basis and added the terms left brain and
right brain to the modern lexicon. As it turns out, that’s not entirely
true, as described in the sidebar on page 70, so I’ll refer to these
modes as linear mode (L-mode) and rich mode (R-mode).
Sperry, Jerre Levy, and subsequent researchers identified the fol-
lowing characteristics as being associated with each mode.9
9.
As described in The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain [Edw01].
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Figure 3.4: Split-brain subjects showing sensory preference
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Left Brain vs. Right Brain
There’s really no such thing as left brain and right brain
thinking per se; the various lobes of the brain and structures
at different levels cooperate in a highly distributed fashion,
from the older, reptilian-like mechanisms up to the more
recently added neocortex. But despite that cooperation,
you still have these two different cognitive styles—our CPU
#1 and CPU #2.
These different cognitive styles are known by many names.
In the pop psychology lexicon, they are still simply known
as left-brain and right-brain thinking. But that’s a misnomer,
because the dance of neurons is quite a bit more compli-
cated than that, so various other terms have emerged.
Guy Claxton, in Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind: How Intelligence
Increases When You Think Less [Cla00], refers to these as
d-mode and the undermind. The d in d-mode stands for
“deliberate,” and undermind emphasizes that the CPU #2
processing occurs at a preconscious level.
Dan Pink, author of A Whole New Mind: Moving from the
Information Age to the Conceptual Age [Pin05], refers to
these two as l-directed and r-directed.
Dr. Betty Edwards, of Drawing on the Right Side of the
Brain [Edw01] fame, was the first to break out of the
right/left brain mold and referred to these simply as L mode
and R mode.
To help clarify the nature of each of these cognitive
modes, I will refer to them in this book as linear mode and
rich mode, abbreviated as L-mode and R-mode.
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Characteristics of L-mode Processing
L-mode processing is comfortable, familiar, geek turf. L-mode gives
you these abilities:
Verbal
Using words to name, describe, and define
Analytic
Figuring things out step-by-step and part-by-part
Symbolic
Using a symbol to stand for something
Abstract
Taking out a small bit of information and using it to represent
the whole thing
Temporal
Keeping track of time and sequencing one thing after another
Rational
Drawing conclusions based on reason and facts
Digital
Using numbers as in counting
Logical
Drawing conclusions based on logic (theorems, well-stated
arguments)
Linear
Thinking in terms of linked ideas, one thought directly follow-
ing another, often leading to a convergent conclusion
This is clearly the motherhood-and-apple-pie of the white-collar,
information-worker, engineering kind of life. These are the abilities
we are tested on in school, use on the job, and fit in nicely with the
sort of computer systems we’ve enjoyed up to now.
But as Pablo Picasso famously observed, “Computers are useless.
They only give you answers.” What would make him say such a
heretical statement?
If “answers” are useless, then that would imply that the question
is more important. In fact, that sort of opposite view of things
seems to be a hallmark of R-mode thinking. To those of us firmly
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entrenched in the L-mode way, the R-mode traits may sound a
little strange, fuzzy, or even acutely uncomfortable.
Characteristics of R-mode Processing
In comparison to L-mode, R-mode gives you the abilities shown
in Figure 3.5, on the next page. These are all important, as we’ll
see, but note right off the bat that intuition—the hallmark of the
expert—is over here.
This side of the house is nonverbal. It can retrieve language but
can’t create it. It favors learning by synthesis: putting th
ings
together to form wholes. It’s very concrete, in the sense of relating
to things just as they are, in the present moment. It uses analogies
to evaluate relationships between things. It likes a good story and
doesn’t bother with timekeeping. It’s not bound by rationality in
that it does not require a basis of reason or known facts in order to
process input—it’s perfectly willing to suspend judgment.
The R-mode is decidedly holistic and wants to see the whole thing
at once, perceiving the overall patterns and structures. It works
spatially and likes to see where things are in relation to other things
and how parts go together to form a whole. Most important, it’s
intuitive, making leaps of insight, often based on incomplete pat-
terns, hunches, feelings, or visual images.
Overall, though, this is far less comfortable territory. These traits
seem more appropriate for artists or other weirdos. Not engineers.
Not us.10
And what about “nonrational”? That borders on insulting. Many
programmers would rather be accused of murder than be accused
of being anything less than completely rational.
But many very valid thought processes are not rational, includ-
ing intuition, and that’s OK. Are you married? Was that a rational
decision; that is, did you list the pros and cons or make a decision
tree or matrix to make that decision in a logical, rational manner?
Didn’t think so.
10. They aren’t even measurable. HR can’t measure or reward most of these skills, at least not as easily as they can the L-mode traits.
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Figure 3.5: R-mode attributes
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There’s nothing wrong with that; just because a thought process is
nonrational or nonrepeatable doesn’t mean it is unscientific, irre-
sponsible, or inappropriate in any way.
Did the discussion of the Dreyfus model make you uncomfortable
because it’s not an event-style theory that can be proven? If so,
that’s your L-mode bias showing.
There’s a lot of value in R-mode processes
Power is going to waste.
that we’re not using; a lot of power is
Pragmatic Thinking and Learning Page 8
