belugas (cont'd from "eagles and belugas")

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a coworker's boyfriend.
This guy is a rare breed. Good looks aside, he's an artist and a scientist.
Not many people can pull off the left/right brain balance like that.
He was also the guy who inspired me to write my post titled "eagles and belugas" (see, http://ideadrivr.blogspot.com/2010/11/eagles-and-belugas.html).
Out of that same conversation we discussed his thesis piece. As a biochemist myself, I understand the need for scientists to focus their study. This focus, for a biochemist, could be the interaction between one antigen (lock) and one antibody (key) or, for a marine biologist, this focus could be studying one species at a time.
This is all good for understanding complicated ideas (because of the simplification) but for both these disciplines, there may be higher order interactions that could only happen when you study multiple molecules or species.

That is to say, sometimes a clearer picture can be revealed by tackling the problem at a more complex stage. This is the whole premise to his research.
I find this absolutely brilliant. Simplifying things is good and beneficial for the most part, but unfortunately the world isn't a simple model like how most scientists try to distill information to.
Another flaw to this is that scientists studies these animals in isolation - this is a biased, distorted view of reality. I'm all for simplicity, but wouldn't it be easier to just collaborate and combine the data to create a bigger, more truthful picture?

Experiment:
Take a look at each picture in sequence and tell me what you see:

What do you see??

Just some random coloured lines right?

Yea, that's a slanted red line

ohhh, this one is green, I like green

Purple is alright as well.

Creative thinking can be sorta similar. Sometimes by simplifying your thinking too much, you end up losing some perspectives and new ideas that can only be gained by a more involved thinking process. Often you also lose the bigger picture of how these creative ideas can interlink and give rise to bigger, better ideas. Try not to always think simple ideas, venture out of your comfort zone and combine smaller ideas together to create a more complex idea. Who knows, maybe it'll be the next big thing.


btw, this is what the picture is supposed to be:

When you add the different (simple) layers together, you create something more complex, yet more beautiful.