TED Community » Tom Byrne

More About Me

I'm passionate about

Art, drawing, knowledge, awareness, education, helping other people.

An idea worth spreading

A partially wind powered car. Why is the wind the passes over the body of the car not used to generate energy, much as the brakes of the Prius are used to generate energy and charge the batteries.

Talk to me about

The brain. Drawing. Color. Information contained in color. Motion and harnessing energy from motion.

Comments

• TEDCred score: +1.20 TEDCred reflects your contribution to the TED community.

• +1

  A comment on Talk: Jane McGonigal: The game that can give you 10 extra years of life

  Jul 13 2012: I just don't believe you. Not one inch. You may give people 8 minutes plus but you just wasted 19 minutes of my time.
• +4

  A comment on Talk: Jenna McCarthy: What you don't know about marriage

  Feb 14 2012: Nice to see someone giving a low down which is accurate, funny and useful. It's more complex than this of course but worth sharing.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Nancy Duarte: The secret structure of great talks

  Feb 5 2012: Thank you.

• A comment on Talk: Eben Bayer: Are mushrooms the new plastic?

  Jan 31 2012: It also sounds like a potentially impressive building material.

• A comment on Talk: Alain de Botton: Atheism 2.0

  Jan 28 2012: Absolutely agree with him on almost every count. I'm an artist and am very much in agreement with his point of view. I'm not excluding the other view on art but completely agree with his too.
  
  I love his analysis. It makes some wonderful and refreshing sense. I would be happy to be a member of his constituency, despite being very spiritual but not religious.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Nate Garvis: Change our culture, change our world

  Jan 7 2012: I completely agree with him. Given our culture, it's a hard concept to integrate but this is used in certain kinds of education every day and it works extremely well. The montessori method (when done properly) for instance, operates under the system he describes. It is a means of sharing and learning which spontaneously erupts in the correct environment. It may be happening through cultural mediums such as facebook. An entire country could be run like this very easily because it is self supporting and self sustaining.
• +1

  A comment on Talk: Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment

  Dec 22 2011: This is really great and thank you for your action, sharing and intelligence.
  I'm completely in agreement with regards to copyright. It's important for certain things but is being abused to the point of putting a break on everything. It's fantastic that this has become an open source and community activity and I am signing up to become involved.

• A comment on Talk: Cynthia Kenyon: Experiments that hint of longer lives

  Nov 17 2011: I've heard of this before. It was discussed a couple of years ago on the Australian - ABC science show. Very interesting. Didn't really understand it :) but good to know that there is a bit of progress in this field. Perhaps if it is developed people won't mind reducing the numbers of children being born. Older and wiser might be a very good thing.

• A reply on Talk: Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain

  Oct 26 2011: Graphic designer have to use computers so much now that they have fundamentally changed their ways of thinking and seeing, in comparrison to the designers of 20 years ago.

• A comment on Talk: Iain McGilchrist: The divided brain

  Oct 26 2011: There is far too much emphasis on the left brain. We teach it to be dominant. That makes dealing with what's right in front of us harder to do. We use the right brain to put things in context and that's essential for using knowledge, not merely accumulating it.
  
  As an artist I see this every day. Especially when I'm teaching adults. They are easy to teach methods but not easy to teach creativity. It's a often a battle because they try to understand, the way that people understand how to tune a radio. Which channel, what volume, which melody.
  
  It's not like that of course. You have to use all your senses and that's what puts something into the realm of art. When the art puts a number of things into context for the viewer. Whether that is beauty, in a manner which they can relate to, information which relates to their experience, "?" which relates to their understandings and which puts things in a context, which is perhaps beautiful or poetic but which has real global meaning for them. Meaning in a context which they may not have experienced before.
  
  People could not relate to Vincent Van Gogh or the impressionists during their life times (with few exceptions) but we have evolved to understand them and now, many people see art through those specific contexts and do not relate to other forms of art. Which is very often a learned process - left brain.
  
  Independant thinking comes from more development of the right brain. Putting things in context.
  
  We are now in a perfect period for the redevelopement of the right brain as we have never had a more uniform means of sharing information. At the same time, redevelopment has never been more important as putting all that communication into a global understanding has never been harder.
  
  For children, Montessori education is quiet good at putting things into a global perspective but it doesn't teach a great deal in terms of art. Maria wasn't perfect but she was way ahead of where we as a culture are now.