I was thinking about thinking today, a dangerous never ending loop of thought if ever there was one. I was thinking of the vagaries and fortune that often assisted people with new theories, the holistic knowledge needed to create and then develop theories and ideas.
Knowledge in the human species is a cumulative knowledge, most and probably all the new thinking today is built upon the foundations of our ancestor’s knowledge. So you could say we our better informed thanks to the thoughts, ideas and studies of the previous generations. I would say the current ideas have evolved in a Darwinian manner; leading ideas are improved and developed whilst other disproved or unpopular ideas are left to whither and die.
Even with the cumulative knowledge we still need flashes of insight because although in the long term knowledge on different topics is a smooth progression; a close look at the graph will show sudden explosions of knowledge followed by some rapid growth and then a tailing off to only small increases until we have another spike. The spike and sudden leap in the graph or in knowledge of a subject is caused by someone thinking about the topic or problem in a different way than the previous thoughts on the subject.
The spikes often seemed to be arrived at by people bringing in ideas and knowledge from different areas such as music, experiences and more often or not luck.
Let’s first think about penicillin, this discovery came about because a Petri dish had been left out because Alexander Fleming was a messy lab technician, which makes me feel better whilst I type this at my messy desk, it his described in more detail by
wikipedia"When I woke up just after dawn on September 28, 1928, I certainly didn't plan to revolutionize all medicine by discovering the world's first antibiotic, or bacteria killer," Fleming would later say, "But I guess that was exactly what I did."
By 1928, Fleming was investigating the properties of staphylococci. He was already well-known from his earlier work, and had developed a reputation as a brilliant researcher, but quite a careless lab technician; he often forgot cultures that he worked on, and his lab in general was usually in chaos. After returning from a long holiday, Fleming noticed that many of his culture dishes were contaminated with a fungus, and he threw the dishes in disinfectant. But subsequently, he had to show a visitor what he had been researching, and so he retrieved some of the unsubmerged dishes that he would have otherwise discarded. He then noticed a zone around an invading fungus where the bacteria could not seem to grow. Fleming proceeded to isolate an extract from the mould, correctly identified it as being from the Penicillium genus, and therefore named the agent penicillin.”
There is also Isaac Newton who was inspired by being struck by an apple and then suddenly coming up with the idea for the Universal Law of Gravitation. I’m not sure whether it’s bad luck which has prevented a similar apple from hitting me on the head or perhaps a similar apple or another sort of fruit or object has struck me on the head but I didn’t have the other knowledge for it to cultivate a world changing theory.
My favourite story is Archimedes who whilst thinking about how to measure the weight of the kings gold ring whilst in the bath realised an object plunged into liquid, in this case his dirty body becomes lighter by an amount equal to the weight of liquid it displaces, according to folklore Archimedes then leapt out of the bath naked and ran around the streets shouting “Eureka!”.
We have all taken baths and I am sure many of us have had inspiration to solve problems but Archimedes found the solution to his problem of finding the weight and quality of the kings gold rings by bringing in knowledge or thoughts from everyday life and his personal hygiene to help him solve a problem he was having. Would Archimedes come to this solution without thinking about it in the bath, who knows but it was a mixture of fortune and intelligence which lead him to the solution. The inspiration for his new thought came from mixing his knowledge of two different areas, well not knowledge but usage of the bath in this case.
I remember reading about a discovery but have forgotten what it was and who it was but the person was trying to understand a pattern he could see in there results. This person was also a musician and he realised the pattern he saw was the same as the music scale he was practising whilst learning to play the piano. His musical knowledge helped him find the pattern and come up with a new analysis of his results, although I can’t remember it and this last paragraph seem a bit useless, what I am trying to emphasis is it’s often the patterns and knowledge of other areas that help us organise and understand items in other unrelated areas.
Knowing musical scales, mathematical theories, the double helix structure, business selling strategies, having a bath or being hit on the head by some fruit, it’s often having the unrelated knowledge which prompts some people to view problems in a different way to someone who doesn't have that knowledge. The problem occurs that you might the unrelated knowledge without using it on a problem where that knowledge would be insightful.
It is with this idea in mind that I think we should have a national thought day, where many people turn their thoughts to a problem or theory and write down their ideas on the subject. This in many ways is what happens today but the different thoughts come through people writing essays, books, TV and radio shows and then the people who read these ideas have ideas of their own but based on the new knowledge and their own individual thoughts based and influenced on the holistic knowledge of their brain.
Writing books, publishing essays and presenting ideas in other formats can take a long time because people spend extra time on the presentation of such ideas rather than the content. New ideas are often worth a lot of money, especially if you are trying to sell a book with your new idea in. Sometimes people don't want to collaborate with someone because it would dilute the monetary value of the idea.
Forgetting about the money or the prestige of having an idea first, in terms of creating new ideas or views on subjects then I think we should have a national thought day, what if we told the whole of the UK for today think about solutions for Global warming. Or is the mind linked to consciousness, how can improve education in England,
In general the usefulness of people’s ideas will be influenced by the depth of the knowledge they have on the subject, more informed people on a topic will be able to give a more in-depth thoughts and ideas. Yet it could be the people with different backgrounds and mixture of experience and knowledge that come up with the spike idea, the new thought on the subject which leads to the graph of knowledge spiking up.
It might need someone with a knowledge of the optimal soil configuration for mushroom growth to shed light on how to increase learning capacity of the brain or a guitar playing marine biologist studying sea horses (if they study sea horses) who comes up with the idea of how to cure aids.
I say put up the problems and let everyone put a thought towards it because I think somewhere there will be someone who has an individual collection of experiences and knowledge which will lead that person to come up with an idea the rest of us wouldn’t.
I also have a comedy podcast which needs listening to -
Hosks Half Hour
