Ideation and plasticity of the brain

'The ability to personalise our brain in response to environment and individual experience is known as "plasticity". As we make our unique way through life, we develop our own particular perspectives due to the connections between our brain cells that are driven and shaped by our specific experiences. It is these connections which normally enable us to associate people, actions and objects with the sequence of episodes that amount to our life story. Our brain is in constant two-way dialogue with the outside world, shaping and re-shaping our neuronal unique configurations into a unique "mind"'. Susan Greenfield, pharmacologist.

Innovation spaces

'PCs are being replaced at the center of computing not by another type of device—though there’s plenty of excitement about smart phones and tablets—but by new ideas about the role that computing can play in progress. These days, it’s becoming clear that innovation flourishes best not on devices but in the social spaces between them, where people and ideas meet and interact. It is there that computing can have the most powerful impact on economy, society and people’s lives'. Mark Dean, IBM Research.

Idea representation

‘A lot of young artists now have an idea and want to illustrate it, but they do almost everything they can to avoid paint and the sensuality of painting. It’s all so concept-based – and the real killer is computer art. Some of it is all right when you first look at it, but when you look closer it becomes more vacuous. The whole thing for me is the spontaneity that happens in the process of creating something’. (John Hoyland 1934-2011)