Health, Innovation and Modernity

Pilot projects in healthcare are not enough!

How often do we hear of one hospital or clinic doing something ingenious while other communities continue to do things the same old (less successful) way? Health care is bedevilled by the difficulty of spreading new knowledge from one place to another. The NHS hasn’t solved this problem entirely, but Britain has established a well-funded institute whose sole purpose is to promote the rapid spread of practices and ideas that work.

THE IRONY OF CREATIVITY

The irony of creativity is this: people want to be creative without change. They want innovation with no risk. They want a new result with the same exact behavior. They can talk for hours about how passionate they are about creativity, but when it comes to actually changing anything, they’ll find a way to repeat the same thing again and again. That’s why books, seminars, courses and lectures on creativity rarely translate into much actual creation. No one can make change happen except the person who must accept the fears, and consequences, of change.

ON CONSCIOUSNESS, DARWIN AND GOD

Consciousness emerges in the development of an embryo. We have a fertilized egg and there’s no consciousness there, and it’s not that consciousness is present but is really small, it just isn’t there. And then, some months later, a baby is born, and child psychologists debate about exactly when self-awareness occurs, but at some point before the age of 3, you’ve got a conscious human being. Now, God doesn’t have to step in to make consciousness occur, but something that we don’t understand at all is occurring. I don’t think it’s supernatural. I think that someday we may understand this. There’s something going on that when the neuronal networks reach a certain level of complexity, something appears that maybe is brand-new and that is consciousness. But that’s just a guess about how we’ll eventually be talking about that phenomenon