Science, especially here in Australia, has a PR problem. People think it's dry and boring, and that you can only do it if you're logical, or good with numbers. No doubt at some point in your life you've been schooled on this; the idea that those of us who use the right side of our brains are more creative, spontaneous and subjective, while those who tap the left side more are more logical, detail-oriented and analytical.

Too bad it's not true.

The neuroscience community has never accepted the idea of left-dominant or right-dominant personality types. Lesion studies don't support it, and the truth is that it would be really inefficient for one half of the brain to consistently be more active than the other. It’s an old-fashioned view of intelligence that teaches many of us early in life that we’re either ‘creative’ or ‘logical.’ And when a 12-year-old fills out an online personality test that pegs her as a right brained, and decides to skip her maths homework because she thinks her brain is just no good at numbers, that myth starts to become destructive. 

It’s given us a society with far too many accountants repressing their inner acrobats, and far too many ballerinas that should have been biologists. 

Thanks to an outdated education system and a popular discourse that’s obsessed with dualism, we’ve ended up with the idea that rationality (science) and creativity (art) are at odds with each other. Which is sad, because the sciences are actually a deeply creative field. In coding and mathematics, for example, there are many different creative ways to arrive at the same answer, if not improve it. In physics a lot of the best science is done through the same kind of highly conceptual, creative thinking used by artists. Indeed, scientists themselves describe science not as a set of facts, or vocabulary to memorise, or a lab report with the right answer, but as an ongoing exploration of questions we don't have answers to. That's the challenge, the adventure in it.

The symbiosis of science and art goes both ways of course. Great artists are often incredibly scientific in their approach. The work of someone like Android Jones, Yayoi Kusama or Ryoji Ikeda requires a technical proficiency that is easily the equal of a materials scientist or a cancer researcher, involving thousands of hours of hypothesis, experimentation and iteration. The same is true for the world’s best contemporary dancers, fashion designers, or graffiti artists. Top scientific institutes understand this. It’s why NASA has a dedicated art studio, and why CERN's Large Hadron Collider has an ongoing arts residency. Far from being the opposite of each other, science and art are very close cousins. 

So what does this mean for you? Well, one of the hallmarks of science is discarding old beliefs when new evidence presents itself. It’s easy to internalise the right brain/left brain myth because as humans, we like categories, classifications and generalizations. There's something seductively simple about labeling yourself and others as either a logical left-brainer or a free-spirited right brainer.

Stop it. This is flat-earth thinking, and it leads to a lot of perverse outcomes, especially in education and business. Labeling people this way is no better than judging them according to their astrological sign or blood type. We shouldn’t underestimate our potential by allowing a simplistic myth to obscure the complexity of how our brains really work. Every time we label ourselves as ‘not creative’ or ‘terrible at technical stuff’ we’re using a lazy heuristic that doesn’t do us, or anyone else any favours. 

You are not a label. 

Your brain is not a computer. 

It has an amazing ability to reorganize itself by forming new connections between its different components, allowing you to continually learn new things and modify your behavior. It is the most complex organism we know of in existence, and gives you a deep wellspring for scientific thought, wild bursts of creativity, abstract reasoning, and astounding acts of love and kindness. 

Science fiction headlines

Dubai recently announced a strategic plan that would see all of its government documents secured on a blockchain by 2020. C’mon Australia. Coindesk

Magic Leap just released a series of patents for its most ergonomically compact designs so far. Mixed reality and intuitive computing is getting closer… Upload VR

A driverless truck has just made the first ever large scale autonomous delivery of 50,000 cans of beer, and pulled off some clever marketing in the process. Tech Crunch

Microsoft engineers have reached human parity on conversational speech recognition, with a word error rate that’s equal to professional transcriptionists. The Verge

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh have restored the sense of touch to a car wreck victim, with a mind-controlled, pressure sensitive robotic arm. NPR

A Swedish woman has given birth from the same womb she was born from, with her mother as the donor. It’s the first womb transplant with a successful birth. Parent Herald

A US company will launch the first gene therapy for an inherited disease next year, targeting an incurable mutation in people’s eyes that leads to blindness. MIT Tech Review

NASA’s Frontier Development Lab is using AI to track asteroids, dramatically improving our chances of responding to a threatening object hurtling toward us. How We Get To Next

Good news you probably didn't hear about

A 22-year-old British student has invented a mobile fridge that could save millions of lives across the world by keeping vaccines at the ideal temperature while in transit. BBC

Crime rates in Holland are plummeting, with total recorded crime shrinking by 25% in the last eight years. One third of the country's prison cells are now empty. Dutch News

The number of girls in school worldwide has increased by 5% in low and middle income countries in the last decade, reaching parity with boys for the first time ever. World Bank

Hellholes? Not according to US mayors, who are celebrating  years of positive gains in US cities, and clutching the stats to back them up. Politico

Renewables now account for more installed capacity than any other form of electricity in the world, including coal. Seriously. Gizmodo

More good news on climate change. 197 countries have agreed to drastically reduce their use of HFCs, the International Civil Aviation Organisation agreed to measures to combat the impact of flying, and international shipping is debating similar rules to cut its impacts.

Meet Haidar el Ali, our favourite silver-haired environmentalist you've never heard of. He’s helped restore almost 40,000 acres of mangroves in Senegal. CS Monitor

In 2012, the US and Mexico embarked on an unprecedented binational project to revive the Colorado River. In just four years, the results have astonished everyone. Audubon

The Columbian white-tailed deer population was 450 animals in 1967. Half a century later, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is taking it off the endangered list. CS Monitor

Stuff we loved

WTF is a quantum computer? We weren't sure either. Until we read this 1000 word article by the always excellent CB Insights. Come for the science, stay for the GIFs. 

A woman was just groped in VR for the first time. This is a pretty harrowing story, and shows why we need to start developing governance for the Metaverse fast. Medium

Perhaps a good place to start is better education. Here’s eight sex positive lessons parents can teach really young kids that have nothing to do with sex. Romper

Fun new cognitive bias: The Backfire Effect - when your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger. You Are Not So Smart

Elon Musk’s finances are as jaw-dropping, inventive and combustible as his rockets. Or “how to change the world by creating insane amounts of financial risk.” The Economist

Great piece here on self driving cars and the American Myth. Any journalist who starts an article with a J.G. Ballard quote is definitely doing it right. NY Mag

A collection of anarchists, hackers, libertarians and Web geeks could be on the cusp of winning Iceland’s national elections this Saturday. Washington Post

Our secret feminist crush Laurie Penny with a typically furious, entertaining bollocking for men who’ve got a problem imagining a society beyond patriarchy. Ouch. The Baffler

And finally, speaking of discarding old beliefs - like many other technology enthusiasts, we’ve been excited by the prospect of basic income for a while. That was, until we came across this article by Nicolas Colin, which has forced to rethink a lot of our previous convictions. It's a long one, so we recommend printing this out and taking it home on the train with you.

Enough With This Basic Income Bullshit

(required reading for all our economics and politics junkies)

That's it for this edition, hope you enjoyed it! 

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Much love, 

Gus, Tane and Tanushree