The UNILEVER LOGO Secret unveiled

Our new identity is an expression of vitality, which is at the heart of everything we do – our brands, our people and our values. Each icon within our logo represents an aspect of our business.The refererence is from the uniliver official site.

Unilever is a multi-national corporation, formed of British and Dutch parentage, that owns many of the world’s consumer product brands in foods, beverages, cleaning agents and personal care products. Unilever employed 174,000 people and had a worldwide revenue of €40.5 billion in 2008.

Lets know UNILEVER LTD.

Key facts

• In 2008 our worldwide turnover was €40.5 billion
• We employ 174 000 people in around 100 countries worldwide
• Every day, 160 million people choose our brands to feed their families and to clean themselves and their homes
• Our strong portfolio of foods, home and personal care brands is trusted by consumers the world over. Among them, the top 25 brands account for over 70% of our sales
• We have thirteen €1bn brands: Axe/Lynx, Knorr, Becel/ Flora, Hellmann’s, Lipton, Omo, Surf, Lux, Dove, Blue Band/Rama, Sunsilk, Rexona and our Heartbrand ice creams
• In 2008 we invested €927 million in research and development, for example in opening new Centres of Excellence for product research and development in Italy, Poland and the UK
• We are the global market leader in all the Food categories in which we operate: Savoury and Dressings, Spreads, Weight Management, Tea, and Ice Cream
• We are also global market leader in Skin and Deodorants, and have very strong positions in other Home and Personal Care categories
• In 2008 we invested €91 million on community projects worldwide
• We have 270 manufacturing sites across six continents, all of which strive for improved performance on safety, efficiency, quality and environmental impacts, working to global Unilever standards and management systems

Their Mission:

Our mission is to add Vitality to life. We meet everyday needs for nutrition, hygiene and personal care with brands that help people look good, feel good and get more out of life.

Enthused with Vitality

Vitality is at the heart of everything we do. It’s in our brands, our people and our values.

Vitality means different things to different people. Some see it as energy, others view it more broadly as a healthy state of body and mind – of feeling alive.

Whatever their personal definition, millions of people around the world use our products daily to add Vitality to their lives – whether that’s through feeling great because they’ve got shiny hair and a brilliant smile, keeping their homes fresh and clean, or by enjoying a great cup of tea, satisfying meal or healthy snack.

Ever since the 19th Century when William Hesketh Lever stated that the company’s mission was “to make cleanliness commonplace; to lessen work for women; to foster health and contribute to personal attractiveness, that life may be more enjoyable and rewarding for the people who use our products,” Vitality has been at the heart of our business.

Vitality defines what we stand for: our values, what makes us different, and how we contribute to society. It’s the common thread that links our brands and it’s central to the unique way we operate around the world.

Health & nutrition

Our Vitality mission commits us to growing our business by addressing health and nutrition issues. We focus on priorities including children and family nutrition, cardiovascular health and weight management.

Inside & out

Our culture also embodies Vitality. Adding Vitality to life requires the highest standards of behaviour towards everyone we work with, the communities we touch and the environments on which we have an impact.

The growing demand for more Vitality in life provides us with a huge opportunity for growth. The way we work and the products we develop are shaped by consumer trends, along with the need to help raise health and hygiene standards in both the developing and industrialised regions of the world.

reference: http://www.unilever.com

INTELLIGENCE and IQ

“Capacity to act purposefully,
thinking rationally and deal effectively
with the environment.” –David Wechsler

The preceding quote is the definition of  intelligence by the man who created the Wechsler
Adult Intelligence Scale. This is the closest definition I could find that I agreed with. Hence, intelligence isn’t really a measure of intellectual capacity, but a gauge of the ability to deal effectively with life.

Most IQ tests measure intellectual aptitude, i.e. the ability to handle linear, verbal, mathematical functions or sort out artificially designed spatial relationships. Educational background can be a strong determiner of these abilities. Yet history has had many geniuses who did not fare well on IQ tests, Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Richard Feynman, to name a few. Who would argue that these men were not brilliant in their chosen fields.

The original IQ tests were created by Alfred Binet in France to measure the ability of students to keep up with their peers in the educational system. David Wechsler further refined the original Binet tests. The original value of IQ testing still holds in determining relative intellectual capacity of children and adults up to the age of about 25. If you are interested in knowing your relative intellectual capacity compared to the norm of society you could take the IQ test pointed to at the bottom of this page. I chose this test because it was simple, doesn’t take longer than 15 minutes, and was very generic in its range. It also measured reasoning ability without stressing heavily learned language or mathematical abilities. Innate intelligence should not be prejudiced by educational background. Abraham Lincoln is a good example of a man without extensive formal education, but whose innate intelligence is evident in the legacy he left behind.

In keeping with the article of Emotional IQ above, motivation is a large factor in test results. Margaret Lloyd and Theresa Sylla of Drake University divided preschool children who had taken initial IQ tests into two groups. Half of the group was given special redeemable tokens if they scored high on a subsequent equally difficult test. Those who were promised tokens did considerably better than those who received nothing, regardless of their scores. Attitude and desire cannot be divorced from basic intelligence.

It is interesting to note that intelligence theorist Robert Sternberg of Yale stated in 1987 that, “In requiring only the answering of questions, IQ tests are missing a vital half of intelligence – the asking of questions.” Learning to ask the right questions is where creativity comes in.

We’ve presented several tests on this web site. One test is to get a general measure of creativity as it relates to associative thought. Another is an essential measure of emotional intelligence, as it relates to practical everyday life. The following IQ test will give you a basic idea of what your intellectual strengths were at the time of taking the test.

All of these can be useful in knowing where you are now. This information in hand, you can decide which paths to take to where you want to go. All tests should be taken in a spirit of light heartedness and with a relaxed mind. Success and failure are only flip sides of the same coin. One defines the other, but neither is the whole picture. Your successes are only as great as they relate to your next experience. Your failures are only learning curves along the same path.

Take the following IQ test with an open mind and enjoy the process. The web site presenting this test will provide you with elaborate evaluation information if you are interested.

BUILDING A BETTER BRAIN

Editor’s Note: This is an excerpt from an article in Life magazine pointing to the research being done on ways to stimulate and increase brain power into old age. This is the article that was the original impetus for creating this web site.

Evidence is accumulating that the brain works a lot like a muscle — the harder you use it, the more it grows. Although scientists had long believed the brain’s circuitry was hard-wired by adolescence and inflexible in adulthood, its newly discovered ability to change and adapt is apparently with us well into old age. Best of all, this research has opened up an exciting world of possibilities for treating strokes and head injuries — and warding off Alzheimer’s disease.

The party last year was as rowdy as it gets in a convent. Celebrating her 100th birthday, Sister Regina Mergens discarded her habit in favor of a daring red gown, downed two glasses of champagne and proclaimed her intention to live to 102. She didn’t quite make it. Now, at vespers on a March afternoon in Mankato, MN, dozens of nuns file past the open casket where Mergens, 101 lies, rosary beads in her hands.

Concealed from view is an incision in the back of Mergen’s head through which her brain has been removed. Mergens and nearly 700 elderly sisters in her order are the largest group of brain donors in the world. By examining these nuns, as well as thousands of stroke victims, amputees and people with brain injuries, researchers are living up to the promise of a presidential proclamation that the 1990’s be the Decade of the Brain. Scientists are beginning to understand that the brain has a remarkable capacity to change and grow, even into old age, and that individuals have some control over how healthy and alert their brains remain as the years go by. The Sisters of Mankato, for example, lead an intellectually challenging life, and recent research suggests that stimulating the mind with mental exercise may cause brain cells, called neurons, to branch wildly. The branching causes millions of additional connections, or synapses, between brain cells. Think of it, says Arnold Scheibel, director of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute, as a computer with a bigger memory board: “You can do more things more quickly.”

The capacity of the brain to change offers a new hope for preventing and treating brain diseases. It helps explain why some people can:

Delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease symptoms for years. Studies show that the more educated a person is, the less likely he or she is to show symptoms of the disease. The reason: Intellectual activity develops brain tissue that compensates for tissue damaged by the disease.
Make a better recovery from strokes. Research indicates that even when areas of the brain are permanently damaged by stroke, new message routes can be created to get around the roadblock or to resume the function of that area.
New knowledge about the brain may emerge from the obscure convent in Minnesota, a place where Ponce de Leon might have been tempted to test the waters. Mankato is the site of the northwest headquarters of the School Sisters of Notre Dame, where a long life is normal. In part because the nuns of this order don’t drink much, smoke or die in childbirth, they live to an average age of 85, and many live far beyond that. Of the 150 retired nuns residing in this real-life Cocoon, 25 are older than 90.

But longevity is only part of the nuns’ story. They also do not seem to suffer from dementia, Alzheimer’s and other debilitating brain diseases as early or as severely as the general population. David Snowdon of the Sander’s Brown Center on Aging at the University of Kentucky, the professor of preventative medicine who has been studying the nuns for several years, had found that those who earn college degrees, who teach, who constantly challenge their minds, live longer than less-educated nuns who clean rooms or work in the kitchen. He suspects the difference lies in how they use their heads.

Within the human brain each neuron contains at one end threadlike appendages called axons, which send signals to other nearby neurons. At the other end of the neuron are similar threadlike appendages called dendrites, which receive messages from nearby cells. Axons and dendrites tend to shrink with age, but experiments with rats have shown that intellectual exertion can spur neurons to branch like the roots of a growing tree, creating networks of new connections. Once a skill becomes automatic, the extra connections may fade, but the brain is so plastic that they can be tapped again if needed. Like the power grid of an electric company, the branching and connections provide surplus capacity in a brownout. Snowdon and some neuroscientists believe that people with such surplus who find their normal neural pathways blocked by the tangles that characterize Alzheimer’s disease can reroute messages. To be sure, every brain is limited by genetic endowment, and flexibility does decrease with age. But new thinking in brain science suggests that whether someone hits that wall at age 65 or at age 102 may be partly up the the individual.

Professor Snowdon says the nuns of Mankato demonstrate this. He expects to prove that the better-educated sisters have significantly more cortex and more synaptic branching of neurons than their less-educated counterparts, which would allow the former to cope better with Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and stroke. Brain exercising is a way of life at the nunnery, where the sisters live by the principle that an idle mind is the devil’s plaything. They write spiritual meditations in their journals and letters to their congressmen about the blockade in Haiti, and do puzzles of all sorts….One 99 year-old, Sister Mary Esther Boor, takes advantage of slow minutes while working as the complex’s receptionist to solve brainteasers — some with words in Spanish.

What can the average person do to strengthen his or her mind? The important thing is to be actively involved in areas unfamiliar to you, says Steel, head of UCLA’s Brain Research Institute. “Anything that’s intellectually challenging can probably serve as a kind of stimulus for dendritic growth, which means it adds to the computational reserve in your brain.”

So pick something that’s diverting and, more important, unfamiliar. A computer programmer might try sculpture, a ballerina might try marine navigation. Here are some other stimulating suggestions from brain researchers:

“Do puzzles, I can’t stand crosswords,” says neuroscientist Antonio Damasio of the University of Iowa, “but they’re a good idea.” Psychologist Sherry Willis of Pennsylvania State University says, “People who do jigsaw puzzles show greater spatial ability, which you use when you look at a map.”

And remember, researchers agree that it’s never too late. Says Scheibel: “All of life should be a learning experience, not just for the trivial reasons but because by continuing the learning process, we are challenging our brain and therefore building brain circuitry. Literally. This is the way the brain operates.”

This article also discusses the enigma of phantom limbs and how the brain continues to register impulses due to synaptic connectivity long after the limb itself is gone. If you are interested you can probably pick up a copy of this article at any library. The pictures are excellent and this is information that everyone should be aware of.

STUDIES IN GENIUS

“Every artist draws himself.”
M.C. Escher

One of the most brilliant artists of all time is M.C. Escher
(Maurits Cornelis Escher, 1898 – 1972, Holland). His work is a
perfect example of living creativity in pictorial form. If the picture
at the right is a form of self portrait, he has shown us what an
open mind would look like. Escher’s work is the epitome of an
open and enchanted mind.

He took his craft beyond the bounds of simply rendering in two
dimensional medium what he saw. He embellished his work with
imagination and stretched the limits of artistic expression. He
managed to capture a three dimensional quality that few artists have matched.

What also sets his work apart was his ability bring the Moorish concept of
tessellation to new heights.Tessellation involves the division of a two
dimensional surface into a periodic checkered mosaic pattern. This is used
heavily in Moorish art and architecture. Escher proceeded to invent new
rules of tessellating a plane surface. In doing so he managed to create
visions that defy reality as they interweave themselves in intricate but
believable illusions.

In the image to the left the movement of the flock of birds, which changes into
fish, utilizes a transformation of ground into figure. These transformations involve
the subtle use of brightness contrast and shading which force certain figure-and-ground
perceptions onto the viewer.

Escher also excelled in the portrayal of “impossible figures”. These
involve perceptual paradoxes that cannot be resolved in the mind,
though the eye can experience them. In the wood engraving Other
World to the right, we see that the creature appears to be sitting
on the sill of an arched opening. Behind the creature is a bleak
alien landscape. This section has a common horizontal perspective
in which the vanishing point is on the horizon of the landscape.
If you shift your eyes to the bottom of the engraving, you see the
vanishing point as the zenith; and you are looking up at the
creature, the background being an unfamiliar part of sky.

If you continue to study this picture you will see more visual
paradoxes. You can become quite fascinated at the intricacy and
plausibility of the changing visual perspectives, all accomplished
in one drawing.

We highlight Escher’s work here because he has a large portfolio
that can be studied by anyone who is interested in opening their
mind. Most public libraries have copies of his work. In fact, I have
found that just by sitting down with a book of his images, my mind begins to experience a literal feeling of expansion. He stretches the imagination to include visual patterning that is otherwise considered impossible to the mind. And yet, here it is, portrayed in a completely plausible work of art.

One way to develop your own creative gift is to study the work of those who
have expressed their genius. This cannot be overemphasized. Surround
yourself with the work and ideas of those human beings who have ventured
beyond the known of their time, bringing back their ideas for others to
experience. I guarantee you that if you spent half an hour a day looking or
listening to the works of brilliant minds, you would begin to have thoughts
of your own that reveal your own personal genius. Everyone has some
special talent waiting to unfold. All we need is the impetus and the
exposure to inspired minds to bring this hidden talent to the surface.
Once you know where your passion lies, there are no limits to how far or
wide your own journey into the unknown will be.

Perhaps that is what life was created for. To perpetually journey into the
unknown and bring back to concrete form what we have found. The drawing to
the left shows the creatures looking into the unknown. If this was another
“self-portrait” of Escher’s, then he was showing us that a 360 degree
perception on the unknown could reveal a fantastic perspective on reality. Looking in unusual places for unusual things, rendering them coherent to ourselves and others, is the very heart of creative thinking. Begin your journey today.

THE SECRETS OF CREATIVE GENIUS

True genius sees with the eyes of a child
and thinks with the brain of a genii. -Puzant Kevork Thomajan

What is the difference between an ordinary mind and one of genius? Is it something mysterious and
available only to a few special individuals? The answer lies in the response of true genius to that question.
Below are excerpts of some truly creative genius’ to the query of how their creativity was inspired.

These are scientists and artists, for creativity is not limited to the arts. Creative thought abounds in all occupations and can be practiced and cultivated in anyone. Study their techniques, experience and revelations and adapt them to your own style.

ALBERT EINSTEIN        WOLFGANG MOZART                 D.H. LAWRENCE

HENRY MOORE                FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE       HENRI POINCARE

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Einstein is responding to a query by Jacques Hadamard asking of what use is internal or mental images to mathematicians in their work:

In the following, I am trying to answer in brief your questions as well as I am able. I am not satisfied myself with those answers and I am willing to answer more questions if you believe this could be of any advantage for the very interesting and difficult work you have undertaken.

“(a) The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be “voluntarily” reproduced and combined.”

“There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play with the above mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought – before there is any connection with logical construction in words or other kinds of sign, which can be communicated to others.”

“(b) The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.”

“(c) According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain logical connections one is searching for.”

“(d) Visual and motor. In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely auditive, but they interfere only in a secondary stage as already mentioned. ”

“(e) It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case, which can never be fully accomplished. This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness.”

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

In a letter from Life of Mozart by Edward Holmes:

“When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone, and of good cheer – say traveling in a carriage, or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep; it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence and how they come, I know not; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory, and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself.”

“All this fires my soul, and provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodized and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost completed and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is I cannot tell! All this inventing, this producing takes place in a pleasing lively dream. Still the actual hearing of the toutensemble is after all the best. What has been thus produced I do not easily forget, and this is perhaps the best gift I have my Divine Maker to thank for.”

D. H. LAWRENCE

Though known for his literary works, he took up painting at the age of forty. Here are his own words about the creative process:

“I learnt to paint from copying other pictures – usually reproductions, sometimes even photographs. When I was a boy, how I concentrated over it! Copying some perfectly worthless scene reproduction in some magazine. I worked with almost dry water-color, stroke by stroke, covering half a square-inch at a time, each square-inch perfect and completed, proceeding in a kind of mosaic advance, with no idea at all of laying on a broad wash. Hours and hours of intense concentration, inch by inch progress, in a method entirely wrong – and yet those copies of mine managed, when they were finished, to have a certain something that delighted me: a certain glow of life, which was beauty to me. A picture lives with the life you put into it. If you put no life into it – no thrill, no concentration of delight or exaltation of visual discovery – then the picture is dead, like so many canvases, no matter how much thorough and scientific work is put into it. Even if you copy a purely banal reproduction of an old bridge, some sort of keen, delighted awareness of the old bridge or of its atmosphere or the image it has kindled inside you, can go over on to the paper and give a certain touch of life to a banal conception. ”

“It needs a certain purity of spirit to be an artist, of any sort. The motto which should be written over every School of Art is: “Blessed are the pure in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” But by “Pure in spirit” we mean pure in spirit. An artist may be a profligate and, from the social point of view, a scoundrel. But if he can paint a nude woman, or a couple of apples, so that they are a living image, then he was pure in spirit, and, for the time being, his was the kingdom of heaven. This is the beginning of all art, visual or literary or musical: be pure in spirit. It isn’t the same as goodness. It is much more difficult and nearer the divine. The divine isn’t only good, it is all things.”

HENRY MOORE

This is an excerpt from his Notes on Sculpture from The Painter’s Object by Myfanwy Evans.

“It is a mistake for a sculptor or a painter to speak or write very often about his job. It releases tension needed for his work. By trying to express his aims with rounded-off logical exactness, he can easily become a theorist whose actual work is only a caged-in exposition of conceptions evolved in terms of logic and words.”

“But though the non-logical, instinctive, subconscious part of the mind must play its part in his work, he also has a conscious mind which is not inactive. The artist works with a concentration of his whole personality, and the conscious part of it resolves conflicts, organizes memories, and prevents him from trying to walk in two directions at the same time.”

“As far as my experience is concerned, I sometimes begin drawing with no preconceived problem to solve, with only the desire to use pencil on paper, and make lines, tones and shapes with no conscious aim; but as my mind takes in what is so produced a point arrives where some idea becomes conscious and crystallizes, and then a control and ordering begins to take place.”

“Or sometimes I start with a set subject; or to solve, in a block of stone of known dimensions, a sculptural problem I’ve given myself, and then consciously attempt to build an ordered relationship of forms, which shall express my idea. But if the work is to be more than just a sculptural exercise, unexplainable jumps in the process of thought occur; and the imagination plays it parts.”

FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE

“Can anyone at the end of this nineteenth century possibly have any distinct notion of what poets of a more vigorous period meant by inspiration? If not, I should like to describe it. Provided one has the slightest remnant of superstition left, one can hardly reject completely the idea that one is the mere incarnation, or mouthpiece, or medium of some almighty power. The notion of revelation describes the condition quite simply; by which I mean that something profoundly convulsive and disturbing suddenly becomes visible and audible with indescribable definiteness and exactness. One hears – one does not seek; one takes – one does not ask who gives: a thought flashes out like lightning, inevitably without hesitation – I have never had any choice about it. There is an ecstasy whose terrific tension is sometimes released by a flood of tears, during which one’s progress varies from involuntary impetuosity to involuntary slowness. There is the feeling that one is utterly out of hand, with the most distinct consciousness of an infinitude of shuddering thrills that pass through one from head to foot; there is a profound happiness in which the most painful and gloomy feelings are not discordant in effect, but are required as necessary colors in this overflow of light. There is an instinct for rhythmic relations which embraces an entire world of forms (length, the need for a widely extended rhythm, is almost a measure of the force of inspiration, a sort of counterpart to its pressure and tension). Everything occurs quite without volition, as if in an eruption of freedom, independence, power and divinity. The spontaneity of the images and similes is most remarkable; one loses all perception of what is imagery and simile; everything offers itself as the most immediate, exact, and simple means of expression. If I may recall a phrase of Zarathustra’s, it actually seems as if the things themselves came to one, and offered themselves as similes. (“Here do all things come caressingly to thy discourse and flatter thee, for they would fain ride upon they back. On every simile thou ridest here to every truth. Here fly open before thee all the speech and word shrines of existence, here all existence would become speech, here all Becoming would learn of thee how to speak.”) This is my experience of inspiration. I have no doubt that I should have to go back millenniums to find another who could say to me: “It is mine also!”

HENRI POINCARE

“In fact, what is mathematical creation? It does not consist in making new combinations with mathematical entities already known. Any one could do that, but the combinations so made would be infinite in number and most of them absolutely without interest. To create consists precisely in not making useless combinations and in making those which are useful and which are only a small minority. Invention is discernment, choice. ”

“Such are the realities; now for the thoughts they force upon us. The unconscious, or, as we say, the subliminal self plays an important role in mathematical creation; this follows from what we have said. But usually the subliminal self is considered as purely automatic. Now we have seen that mathematical work is not simply mechanical, that it could not be done by a machine, however perfect. It is not merely a question of applying rules, of making the most combinations possible according to certain fixed laws. The combinations so obtained would be exceedingly numerous, useless and cumbersome. The true work of the inventor consists in choosing among these combinations so as to eliminate the useless ones or rather to avoid the trouble of making the, and the rules which must guide this choice are extremely fine and delicate. It is almost impossible to state them precise; they are felt rather than formulated. Under these conditions, how imagine a sieve capable of applying them mechanically? ”

“A first hypothesis now presents itself: the subliminal self is in no way inferior to the conscious self; it is not purely automatic; it is capable of discernment; it has tact, delicacy; it knows how to choose, to divine. What do I say? It knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed. In a word, is not the subliminal self superior to the conscious self? ”

“Several of the above quotes of creative genius were excerpted in part from the book The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. This book contains the thoughts of thirty-eight different artists, mathematicians, poets, writers, and sculptors. It is worth reading if for creative inspiration.”

In the words of William Crashaw, “When human power becomes so great and original that we can account for it only as a kind of divine imagination, we call it genius.”

As evidenced by the above creative minds in their own words, genius is a quality of mind available to all. Find the genius within yourself and cultivate it
© J.L. Read, 1997. All Rights Reserved.