Holistic Thinking, Innovative Marketing

Brock University in St. Catharines Ontario has 17,000 full-time students. “Brock champions smaller class sizes and - this is key - a whole brain approach to the students ... [This] means a student's social awareness, emotional development, connection to the community - artistic development.... [The marketing firm therefore] created a bold look that explores a whole-brain examination of students, faculty and alumni. And so we meet Rohan Kothari, majoring in biological sciences but working on mastering the sax, and MSc candidate Lisa Neville, a licensed gliding instructor who lauds Brock's dual major course offering (Earth sciences and biology). Each image is bifurcated: an oil painting substitutes for half of Mr. Kothari's face; a raptor for half of Ms. Neville's.” This novel university campaign literally illustrates the primal creative relation between self-identity, language, and image. "Both sides of the brain", as the campaign tag goes, indeed.

Globe & Mail Article - Brock offers a lesson in boldness
Brock University

More On Happiness

As a T-shirt design on zazzle.com archly proclaims, "Happiness is a fragment of your imagination!" Happiness today is defined as a “a state of well being characterized by emotions ranging from contentment to intense joy" [http://wordnet.princeton.edu]. Our original understanding was more complex, nuanced, and pragmatic.


For example, ‘Hap’ in the Old English of the 1300s meant ‘fortune or chance’. This basic link between happiness and luck is found in most northern European languages of that time. Yet, happiness was also associated with two other related emotional states - beatitude and blitheness.

The first is defined as “perfect happiness and inner peace” and stems from the Latin beatus. The second term means, “having a casual and cheerful indifference to convention and rules”. Bliss is yet another related term. Over ensuing centuries, these associated meanings for happiness’ changed in keeping with the West’s overarching worldview and ethos.

For example, ‘silly’ originally meant ‘happy’. It stems from the Latin ‘solari’, meaning ‘to comfort’ and ‘salvus’ meaning ‘whole and safe’. Over the course of six hundred years its meaning devolved from: "blessed to pious,to innocent (1200), to harmless, to pitiable(c.1280), to weak (c.1300), to feeble in mind, lacking in reason, foolish (1576)" [www.etymonline.com].

It’s interesting to consider the continuum of emotional states associated with happiness. Of course, sheer good luck is a common factor. [Anthropological research indicates that the reason most of us can’t resist sweets is because of primal hardwiring. In the long millennia before civilization, our hardy nomadic ancestors rarely encountered sweets like honey. They therefore happily gorged on their good luck knowing it would be a long time until they discovered more.]

Yet our ancestors also cane to understand that the more enduring type of happiness doesn’t depend on blind luck but on an inner attitude. The ancient link between happiness, wholeness, and solace is especially resonant today given recent global events. Interestingly, contemporary happiness research bears out what past generations readily understood.