Reading an old copy of Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, looking for ideas on how cognitive science is liberating the workforce, I liked an idea he had of how to put into practice whole brain thinking – namely the 6 links of separation game.

The premise is to challenge one’s curiosity by clicking through some web content 6 times to see where one ends up. This is the meandering journey of doom that clickbaiters have perfected in the last few years. Why wouldn’t I click (looking randomly at my Facebook timeline) See This Thing Floating In The Middle Of Seemingly Nowhere? Well, You’re In For A Big Shock.?

I tried a slightly different approach. Take a topic of interest <INSERT>, then see what people are talking about that topic, and its various tangents.

This is what I discovered today. What is your 6-links of separation learning?

Reviewing my twitter timeline, I had to start here!

Corporations Aren’t Recruiting Enough Weirdos | http://t.co/X8ehxtavQG #innovation #generalism

— Kenneth Mikkelsen (@LeadershipABC) September 18, 2014

Weirdos – check! And Weirdness with a capital W, nice distinction in the article.

Weirdness can look like a problem but, in fact, it’s quite often the solution.

Sounds about right. Thereafter, I nearly clicked “Would you pay $10 to feed your dog?” because it sometimes seems I am doing that already, but plumped for an “Englisher” link instead.

Link 2: There Are 7 Types of English Surnames — Which One Is Yours?

Turns up nothing new, probably mine is associated with patronymic, matronymic, or ancestral. Now, I am stuck in a genealogy website, but luckily…

Link 3: Did You Know Stephen Colbert Is Canadian too? What’s not to click? Turns out, blah blah, he has Canadian ancestors. I wish I could click on this idea:

“As Stephen himself admits, he has little time for facts, logic or information… He prefers to feel the truth rather than look it up in historical records.”

Don’t we all, and I am sure there is some truthy science to it too. Unfortunately, there is no link there. Hmmm, I am in a walled garden. I guess genealogists are fairly focused people, what with all that research an’ all.

OK, last ancestry.ca blog post. Link 4- It’s a Boy! Now, It’s a Girl! 8 Baby Names That Switched Genders.

Allison and Meredith. Who knew? It’s time to google a boy called alison, which leads to Link 5 – A Boy by Any Other Name. Turns out

“Your father drank himself to death at forty-seven.”

Click the link if you want to know if his name had anything to do with it. However, the blog post had no other links on it, so I am stuck again. This task is easier if I stick to linkbait sites. Likely, I would end up looking at side boob photos at some point though.

The blog post had an image of a book cover – Undiscovered Gryl. Googling that gets me to a IMDB post about a 2014 film Ask Me Anything, which seems to be the film title of the book, in which the protagonist chronicles “her adventures in an anonymous blog into which she pours her innermost secrets. Eventually, Katie’s fearless narrative begins to crack, and dark pieces of her past emerge.”

And that’s enough of that for one day. #6LinksOfSeparation.

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