Holy Crap. It
is hard to write a list of highlights from a day that contained hardly
any medium-lights and certainly no low lights. Again, I don’t know
where to start. If yesterday was awesome then today just went off the
charts. So, some things that definitely stuck in the mind and I think everyone would be interested to hear about.:

Started off
with an amazing and truly humbling talk from Oliver Sacks (author of:
“The man who mistook his wife for a hat”). One of the world's leading
neurological guys.

He was talking about the little known and even less well understood Charles Bonnet Syndrome whereby when
virtually blind people to see amazingly vivid and sometimes pretty
scary visual hallucinations, the things people see can take all kinds
of forms from simple patterns of straight lines to detailed pictures of
people or buildings. One woman was semi-permanently accompanied by
Kermit the Frog!

Then Joann
Kuchera-Mohin from Stanford showed is a glimpse of something that I
truly wouldn’t have believed had I not seen it with my own eyes. The
Allosphere.

Go check it out here.

A 3D
spherical, immersive, chamber-y thing – impossible (as I just
illustrated) to describe what it is. Implications for science and
creativity are pretty limitless with it.

Then Ed Ulbrich took us through how the guys at Digital Domain 
– 155 people over 2 years – created the technology that made Brad Pitt's
character in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”. Just how many
people know that Pitt’s character’s face for the first hour of that
film is entirely, 100% computer generated? Truly amazing technology.

Golan Levin then showed us some pretty freaky but utterly fascinating ways that we can visualise sound.

And negative space.

And you just have to go look at the Snout project

Elizabeth Gilbert then gave the highlight (for me) talk of the first two days.

She was
talking about the concept of genius and creativity – and how before the
renaissance the concept of the daemon (greek) or genius (roman) was
believed to accompany all creativity.

Fascinating and thought-provoking talk and delivered with amazing charisma.

Check out her book “Eat. Pray. Love”.

Margaret
Wertheim then freaked out, fascinated and hypnotised the entire
audience by her journey through unlocking the mysteries and conundrums
of mathematics and geometry through the medium of……….crochet! She calls
herself a Scientific Weaver. She
was truly amazing. Hyperbolic Geomotry explained through a
demonstration of knitting. I know, I know. Sounds like it makes no
sense. It kind of doesn’t, but it does. She and her sister have collaborated with each other to crochet an entire coral reef.

Check it out here on flickr.

And she has a
brilliant idea about how to unlock creativity in business by replacing
think tanks with Play Tanks. Whereby we all start to build things and
create things out of physical shapes to unlock our minds. She was so
cool.

Far too many brilliant others to go into, but just quickly:

– Daniel Libeskind (architect, Ground Zero guy) talked us through the 10 rules of architecture. Pretty inspiring stuff.

– Catherine Mohr has some amazing stuff to talk about on the future of robotics in surgery. 

Just amazing, brain too full to cope.

Had a cool talk over lunch with the author of “The Substance of Style”, Virginia Postrel.

And Dancing
Matt Harding told me he’d love to come to W+K and talk to us about the
whole “wherethehellismatt” thing. Next time he’s in London, I’ll hold
him to it.

Special
mention to W+K’s own Renny “Randy” Gleeson who spoke for three
brilliant minutes and everyone I spoke to said was brilliant. And he
was.

Quote of the
day was from the first speaker, Oliver Sacks, who said he was
interested in how “the theatre of the mind is generated by the machine
of the brain”. Er, wow.

Kev