This is my first post on the topic of Nerd Talk. I want to make it clear that I do have a social life. :) But I think everyone who works in technology or software development has what I call a nerd attack every now and then.
This section is where I’ll talk about my nerd attacks. The aim is to have a bit of fun and unwind.
This first nerd attack happened while I was reading and practicing exercises from the book Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain by Betty Edwards.
On page 109, there’s a key exercise that helped me understand the difference between seeing a drawing as something specific and sequential, while looking for meaning (the left side of the brain), and seeing lines, shapes, empty spaces, the distances between lines, and the whole picture *parentheses*_the right side_*parentheses*.
According to Betty, what gets in the way of our progress in drawing is our overuse of the left side of the brain, which is responsible for verbal communication, reading, analysis, and interpretation. We can command the left side: when we want to read a book, we simply read. But we don’t access the right side directly. It takes time; it’s more associated with holistic vision, seeing the whole, the feeling of being connected, and intuition. The right side only comes into play when we stop thinking that every problem in the world can be solved through logical reasoning (the left side). We keep clinging to the habits that scientific academia can bring, and never relax. That’s right! The answer is easier than I thought. Here’s what happens to me:
Usually, when I'm a little tired of programming, I go for a walk—not to compete, not wearing a watch, just walking and looking at the sky and nature. Almost every time, I get some *insights* into the problem I was stressed about and couldn't solve, because the left side of my brain wouldn't let the right side have a say. Doing activities that awaken the right side lets us learn more, and in a sustainable way.
There’s a high price to pay for overvaluing the left side of the brain, as our society does. We lose the power of intuition, which is very powerful. Common sense is the key to escaping this trap: know your limits. Of course, we won’t abandon our daily activities. We need to set aside a little time each week for activities that develop our other senses and the right side of the brain. One activity that’s very effective for this is drawing.
Our society is great at labeling problems. Someone who can’t read or write is called illiterate. Betty asks whether we’re now living in a society of people who are illiterate when it comes to drawing. That means we’re losing a lot by relying exclusively on written language. We’re failing to explore our enormous potential.
With this brief explanation, I think the importance of balancing our lives with tasks that involve both sides of the brain is clear. So let’s get back to today’s Nerd Talk:
As I said, I was doing the following exercise (look at the photo to make it easier):
Drawing exercise: credit to Betty Edwards
- Put one hand behind your back, slightly clenched, so that it is a little wrinkled.
- Focus your eyes on the lines that form on the wrinkled skin of your hand, and simply draw what you see with your other hand without looking at the paper. Do this for five minutes.
So far, so good. The problem was that I simply didn’t have an alarm clock to tell me when the five minutes were up and I could stop the exercise. That’s when I thought of making an alarm-clock program that would play a sound after five minutes, and decided to build it with Scratch. I was about to open Scratch on Windows when I had my nerd attack:
Why not take this opportunity to install Scratch on my laptop running Ubuntu?
But Scratch didn’t have a stable Linux version; there were a few attempts, but they weren’t stable. Well, I didn’t give up. I went looking for Scratch for Linux, downloaded the binaries, and tried to install it. Then came another surprise: there was a list of at least 11 dependencies that needed to be installed before Scratch could be installed. :( I was a little discouraged, but I’d already started, so I had to see it through. After at least an hour and a half, I finally installed Scratch. Then I made the alarm program and did the exercise. Whew!
You can see the program I made in Scratch in the image below:
The exercise is excellent. It’s clear that by focusing on random lines, there’s no room left for the analytical left side to make associations or try to name objects. I simply drew intensely for five minutes. The left side isn’t suited to this task, so it lets the right side simply do what it does well! The feeling of failure and mental exhaustion we have when we start drawing comes precisely from not understanding this characteristic of the brain. Our left brain is very busy processing information and trying to find meaning, so we don’t do what we need to do: simply draw, put lines on paper, see the distances between lines, and forget that a particular part of the drawing is a hand. Think about lines, the distances between them, and empty spaces.
That’s it for my first Nerd Talk, and I hope you enjoyed it.