A Whole New Mind

Chapter 1-3

So far, in our reading of this book, I have learned a tremendous amount of information about my own mind and how it reacts to things. I never gave much thought to how doing what I was doing came about throughout my body. The most fascinating aspect of the first chapter for me was definitely the part about "The Real Stuff". This was so fascinating to me how each side of the brain controls different aspects of our body and makes us do certain things. I never knew that one side of the brain hears what is being said and its the other side that actually understands it in the context in which it is spoken.
The second chapter was very eye opening for me. This past year has been very enlightening for me. I moved out of my family home and into my own place and with that have taken on a lot more responsibility. I am some what of a shopaholic and because of my recent independent lifestyle I have had to cut back a lot on the more unnecessary items. Reading how so much of our country reacts on abundance. I can completely relate to being in the store and looking at plungers for my apartment and picking up the one that was reasonably priced but also good looking. Its a plunger! Why should I care what it looks like? Apparently I have fallen into the trap of consumer America. Needless to say the plunger is the worst plunger that I have ever come across. Also, from the reading in chapter 2, I have thought about a lot about how so many of our jobs can now be done in India or Asia. I had always wondered why it seemed like every time I called the service department of a tech company either about my wireless router or computer the person on the other end has always seemed to be foreign or had an Indian accent. Now I understand why.
Chapter 3 was somewhat scary to me. Reading about how much of our jobs that we have today are slowly succumbing to being done better by computers is scary. I think we are definitely starting to rely far too heavily on computers and less on our own minds. I'm sure my own father, when graduating college and applying for jobs never had to think if a computer can do his work faster. I think our society is becoming a little too high concept for our own good. It will interesting to see what the future will bring us. Reading this definitely gave me something to think about. Also in chapter 3, the idea that the MFA is taking over for the MBA is exciting for me. I had never heard or read anything about that being that case. To me, as an artist, this makes perfect sense. I think that artists in general have a creative ability that a lot of business people lack. I can remember that when I was entering college for the first time, a lot of my friends who were also thinking about art school, had issues with their parents not accepting art school as an actual school. Now more and more people are hiring people with MFA's over MBA's and realizing that having an MBA isn't the answer for everything.