The best-seller, Software For The Brain (Wrightbooks 1989), was first published by Michael Hewitt-Gleeson 18 years ago in Australia and internationally and is now in its Fourth Edition.

FREE COPY: You can click here to download your own copy.

This book presents the ‘universal brain software’ which may be the most powerful brain software in the world.

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Just imagine you owned the world’s most powerful iPod which could easily store a library of over 10,000 songs.

Now, imagine you posessed only one Patsy Cline CD to load and play on your iPod. There’s nothing wrong with Patsy but a daily diet of I Fall To Pieces and Your Cheatin’ Heart limits your long term music entertainment.

Similar limitations apply to your necktop computer if you only possess one brain software–logic–available for you to use.

Logic is useful enough for basic mathematics, labelling and mail-sorting and dealing with the past but it’s not nearly enough to help you cope with life and the challenges of the future.

THREE QUESTIONS (Write month/year in boxes)

1. Do you have access to a laptop, palmtop or desktop personal computer? If so, estimate when was the last time you added or upgraded the software?
______________
2. Do you have a sound system—a CD player, a vinyl turntable or an iPod/MP3 player? If so, when was the last time you added a CD or abum to your library, or some tracks to your playlist?
______________
3. Do you have a necktop computer—a brain? Yes, you do. When was the last time you added or upgraded your neuroware or brain software?
______________

THINK ABOUT THIS
If you were educated in the Western education system—Europe, the Americas, Australia etc—the brain software you are using, logic, is 2500 years old.

The logic operating system was developed by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle in Greece around 500 BCE. It was picked up by the Church via Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century and embedded in its education system which was then spread, with missionary zeal, around the world. The Western education system, with its RIGHT/WRONG logic brain software, may be Europe’s greatest historical export.

Think of your brain as a necktop computer. Which, of course, it is.

Your brain’s computing power, with its massive network of over 100 billion brain cells, is around 100 TFlop/s (“teraflops” or trillions of calculations per second).

Each one of your billions of brain cells is like a computer processing unit—taking information IN and sending it OUT. It’s the earth’s supreme intelligent machine. And, you are a lucky owner.

The problem is how to boost your brain’s software because the software you are currently using is over 2500 years old!

DID YOU KNOW?
• In 2008, the worlds #1 supercomputer is Roadrunner–at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico USA–which was built by IBM.
• It has set a new record of 1.7 petaflops.
• But human brains are still better than supercomputers in many respects.
• Brains are portable. Roadrunner is the size of two basketball courts and weighs 200 tons.
• The average brain is 56 cubic inches and weighs 3.3 pounds.
• The human brain is distinguished by its ability to think and create in addition to simply processing information quickly.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE …
There’s one big difference between your brain and a supercomputer: consciousness.

You are aware of this difference and a computer is not.

Computers do not have emotions, thoughts and dreams. At least not yet! Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly developing emotional capabilities in computers and robots.

GLOBAL VILLAGE 100
What if we could shrink the earth’s population, as a thought experiment, to a village of precisely 100 people with all the existing human ratios remaining the same?

What would that little global village look like?

This micro-village would look something the following. There would be:

Think about it and post your comment:
When you think about the world from this compressed perspective what, in your opinion, is the most interesting thing for you to consider?

What is the human global brainpower?

How many human brains in the world?

As of this post there are: 6,706,760,775

For the latest number you can click here and go to the US Census Bureau anytime and check their population clock.

In any situation, thinking involves two basic processes:

escaping from your current view of the situation, and

searching for a much better view of the situation.

•

ESCAPE + SEARCH = THINK

The Current View of the Situation (cvs)
can never be equal to
the Better View of the Situation (bvs)

(cvs≠bvs)

Escape from your cvs
and search for a bvs!

(cvs2bvs)

You can search for a bvs that is
ten times better than your cvs.

(cvs X10 = bvs)

•

ESCAPE

If we can escape from our current viewpoints, thinking patterns, righteousness and established ways of doing things–our CVS–we can then take a quantum leap ahead of our own experience and jump to ‘a much better way’–a BVS.

Kangaroo Thinking
Sometimes I call this Kangaroo Thinking because we can experiment and we can innovate in leaps and bounds.

SEARCH

Search for alternatives, options and possibilities because there is ALWAYS a BVS!

There are always many, many different ways of looking at any particular situation. Whatever it is that we are currently doing, someone else, somewhere, is already doing it a “much better way”. Once we escape from the CVS–the current way–we can search for the BVS–the much better way.

THINK

Thinking is a skill. To become proficient in escaping from your CVS and searching for a BVS (the much better way) always involves practice and repetition–at least ten times–if we are to build new cognitive patterns and acquire skill and virtuosity.

“I used cvs2bvs quickly today when faced with a process problem. I was reviewing data recently transferred into an updated Risk Management Database which will be several days work. Instead of ploughing into it I used the cvs2bvs technique to generate a number of alternative ways of tackling the issue. I will admit I didn’t come up with 10 alternatives but I had several options to review. I estimate the small amount of time taken to plan the approach will save me at least a days work.”
–@cgd.vic.gov.au

The Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse was established on 23 May, 2000, and given three primary functions:

* to hear evidence of abuse from persons who allege they suffered abuse in childhood, in institutions, during the period from 1940 or earlier, to the present day;
* to conduct an inquiry into abuse of children in institutions during that period and, where satisfied that abuse occurred, to determine the causes, nature, circumstances and extent of such abuse; and
* to prepare and publish reports on the results of the inquiry and on its recommendations in relation to dealing with the effects of such abuse.

Yesterday they issued their long-awaited report which you can now download here …

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Belfast Telegraph:
“The topmost and implacable priority of Benedict’s Church is at all costs to retain control of the formation of the next generation of Catholic children.

“It acknowledges the sin while resolving to retain the occasion of sin. It has no firm purpose of amendment. Priests may be prosecuted, bishops may resign. But the buck stops with Benedict”.

••• For more on this article click through here …

It’s well worth a visit to The de Bono Society “an information based social networking site for all de Bono followers”.

It looks as though there will be regular updates and a lot of the information is free. De bono has finally gone pro bono.

I think this is a good thing. It’s something I’ve encouraged Edward de Bono to try for many years. The original culture of the net was that “information wants to be free” which was coined by Stewart Brand way back when it all got started. SOT has been pro bono since 1995 when we first went online.

The de Bono Society offers a credible environment for social networking and an impressive range of videos, text and other lateral thinking resources from Edward’s 30 years of work in the field of cognitive science.

For anyone interested in thinking and teaching thinking this new website is an enriched precinct in cyberspace to benefit from the great body of work of one of the modern founders of the field of cognitive science.

••• Visit The de Bono Society by clicking here …

Take a look at RMA!

So what’s the NBT, the Next Big Thing, from the people that gave us the INTERNET?

As everyone knows, the US Defence department invented ARPANET which we now call the INTERNET.

So, if you check out RMA you might find it interesting to snoop in on current military thinking and take a look at what they’re up to. It’s called RMA …

Supernova remnant G1.9+0.3.

The most recent supernova in our galaxy has been discovered by tracking the rapid expansion of its remains. This result, using NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory and the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Large Array, will help improve our understanding of how often supernovae explode in the Milky Way galaxy.

The supernova explosion occurred about 140 years ago, making it the most recent in the Milky Way. Previously, the last known supernova in our galaxy occurred around 1680, an estimate based on the expansion of its remnant, Cassiopeia A.

Click through to NASA for more …

Click through to NASA and Atlantis shuttle mission …

Mission specialists Mike Massimino and Mike Good completed the mission’s fourth spacewalk today at 5:47 p.m. EDT.

The spacewalkers continued repairs and improvements to the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS) that will extend the Hubble’s life into the next decade.

The spacewalk lasted 8 hours, 2 minutes.