Remember Pavlov’s Dog?
Old Ivan rang a bell, the dog drooled, and a scientific legend was born. Well, guess what? You’re the dog. Responding to your base emotions and urges, both good and bad.
What am I blithering on about I hear you ask? Well, your brain is a bit of a “The Odd Couple”. On the left, you’ve got a guy in a crisp suit holding a clipboard, a stopwatch or a calculator, ticking boxes and following a standard script. But on the right side? That’s where the fun is. The right brain is a critical thinker riding a unicorn through a thunderstorm of ideas, throwing glitter at everything it sees.
While the left brain is busy asking, “Is this cost-effective?” the right brain is screaming, “What if we made this better…MORE GLITTER!“
Enter HAL the accountant number cruncher that is Artificial Intelligence. AI is like that annoying kid in school who got 100% on every single math test but had to ask for permission to use a coloured pencil. It’s without a doubt a process-thinking powerhouse. It can crunch a billion bits of data before you’ve finished your morning scratch, but it has the creative soul of a microwave.
Everyone is still marvelling over this new tech that’s just sitting and listening in everyones phones. Yes it is truly amazing at processing that kind of data on a simple hand held device but look closer and all I see is the little kid in the crowd shouting “But the King isn’t wearing any clothes?”. AI doesn’t “create” art; it just rearranges the furniture. It can’t feel a “vibe.” It’s never had its heart broken and had to console itself with creating an 80’s power ballad mix tape in its bedroom, and it certainly doesn’t understand why a picture of a cat in a tiny hat is arguably the funniest thing on the internet. It lacks the “human error function”—that unique, messy, emotional spark that turns a simple drawing or that memorable single chord into a masterpiece.
Our right brains are wired for emotional connections. We are walking bundles of Pavlovian triggers so think if this when you need to market your business to the right customer. Everyday examples can be seen in:
Marketing: You see a specific shade of red and suddenly crave a fizzy drink that’s the real thing.
Sports: You hear a rugby chant and your heart rate hits 120 bpm because your team (a group of strangers in matching shirts) just needed your support at that crucial moment of the game.
Music: A three-second chord starts, and suddenly you’re shouting the title and the phrase “Tuuuuune!” at the radio and your kids think you’re a real wierdo.
Marketing isn’t about logic. You wouldn’t ask Spoc to choose a pantone colour or font family, it’s about the right brain having a good dig into your bellybutton making you laugh and cry at the same time.
We are living in the future, folks.
Don’t get me wrong folks, I love ai and all the crap I can get it to do for me while I am creating something special. We have robots to do the boring stuff, yet we’re still trying to make them write poetry? Stop it.
Try a new kind of resolution for 2026: > Use AI for the soul-crushing, mundane stuff—like organising your receipts or writing a “per my last email” response. Save the beautiful, weird, and wonderful stuff for us imperfect humans.
Let’s stop trying to teach a calculator how to fall in love or paint that masterpiece. Leave the silicon dummies to the dreary, soul-sucking spreadsheets and reports. Save the slight of hand, the glorious goofs, and the emotional gut-punches for the humans!
Fight for your right to be weird, wonderful, and wildly inefficient. After all, a computer can win at chess, but it’ll never know the joy of eating a slice of cold pizza at 2 AM on a nightbus.
Stay human, stay messy, and keep ringing that dogs bell!