A nascent idea – a recent Ah ha! – is an ephemeral thing.  It exists only as fluttering pulses of energy flying around the 100 billion neurons in a human brain.  (Tip: an easy way to remember this figure is to think of the number of stars in our galaxy, which also happens to be about 100 billion.  How you remember there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy is up to you.  I find that writing down things I want to remember, and then looking at what I’ve written, helps).  You may also find it interesting that the number of potential interconnections between those neurons is greater than the number of fundamental particles in the entire universe.  That’s a big number no matter how you look it at, but I digress.

Turning those electrical pulses into something happening in the real world is what particularly interests me.  The easiest way to do so is to tell someone about it, so that it starts fluttering amongst their 100 billion neurons as well.  When you tell someone about an idea, something changes in the universe and it’s when ideas spread amongst many people that the real magic can happen.

Or not.  As we all know, our natural predisposition when it comes to new ideas is to say ‘that’ll never work’.  There are many good reasons for this.   We didn’t get to be here because our ancestors – and not just the human ones – took unnecessary risks.  Unlike the vast majority of individuals who have resulted from the fusion of two gametes, they at least made it to the point where they could produce their own fusible gametes. Evolution, it could be argued, has programmed us to be cautious: to stick with what we know works. This gives us a natural tendency to dismiss new ideas straight away so that we can get on with the tricky business of staying alive.  I call this tendency to evaluate ideas ‘premature evaluation’.  This sometimes makes people giggle but I can’t imagine why.

The word ‘premature’ is important here – when ideas first flicker into life we usually have no idea where they might end up.  Negatively evaluating an idea too soon – before it’s had a chance to grow and stretch its limbs a little – is a sure to way to kill it.  We all know that. If you’ve ever been involved in an organised brainstorming session (as some people think we shouldn’t call it – I’m with the Campaign for Plain English on this one) you’ll know that ‘no evaluation’ is the main rule even though many people find it one that’s virtually impossible to apply.

Obviously it’s necessary to avoid premature evaluation if ideas are to make the difficult transition from inside our brains to out there, making the world better in some way. The poet T S Eliot used rather more elegant language than me when he described what often happens to ideas.  In his poem ‘The Hollow Men‘ he wrote (just in case you’re too busy attempting to survive in this cruel world, it starts on line 78 of the excellent hypertext version to which that last link points):

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow.

Nice one TS, even though you probably didn’t have people in suits brainstorming around a whiteboard in mind when you wrote it.

So, what’s needed if the aforementioned idea is ever to hit the streets in anything like the form I have in mind, is some shadow avoidance.  Or perhaps, shadow illumination.  In management-speak a risk analysis might help.  As the idea in question involves a large, nuclear equipped foreign country I suggested to one of the victims of my email storm that the worst that could happen (that’s pretty much what risk analysis is – imagining the worst that could happen) in this case is that it causes a minor diplomatic incident which escalates out of hand leading to all-out nuclear war and the destruction of life as we know it.  Well, it could happen.

Incidentally, I might have given the impression above that all ideas make the world a better place. This is, of course, wrong.  The world would certainly be a much better place if some ideas had been prematurely evaluated at birth. Take selling popcorn in cinemas, for example. Who on earth thought that selling the noisest possible edible food in a place where SOME PEOPLE (ie me) would rather listen to what the people on screen are actually saying, rather than the row of people sitting behind them grazing like a heard of very noisy cows on overpriced, sugar-laden thermally expanded maize should be shot.  And popcorn isn’t the only example of a really bad idea, obviously. The tricky part, of course, is distinguishing between the bad ideas and the good ones.

I’ve been siezed by an idea.  Almost literally.  It occured to Jacquie (Mrs Mindworks) and me a couple of weeks ago while we were taking a walk along one of my favourite places on the planet, close to where we live.  Since then it has been waking me up at 5.00am, kicking me out of bed and insisting that I pay attention to it.  I’ve written a good few thousand words about the idea, developed a couple of Powerpoint presentations, spoken to lots of people about it and subjected a few poor souls to an Email Storm as I attempt to get the idea out of my head and into the real world.  Yesterday and early this morning I spent some time mocking up a website home page which is relevant to the thing I have in mind. More on the actual idea later, I hope.

In the meantime, the idea was partly inspired by this rather excellent book.  I don’t often say this, but buy it – right now – then read it.  As you’ll see the subtitle is ‘the power of organizing without organizations’, from which you can guess that it was written by an American.  This one, in fact:

(I really liked his response to the TV executive!)

The other source of inspiration was an event that Jacquie, I and various others helped to organise with the school whose Parents’ Association I currently chair.  See the item on the ‘Music, Dance, Art and Drama’ event here.

I’m intending to post a few reflections on how my mind works (did you see what I did there?) at times like this.  Ages ago I came across a model of the creative process developed by a psychologist called Getzels. Getzels completed a longitudinal study of many people involved in creative design and problem solving of various kinds – engineers, artists, novelists and so on – and then drew some conclusions about the process they went through.  His model – which was simplified into question/saturation/incubation/ah ha!/verification/implementation by Betty Edwards in this book – seemed very familiar to me and, I’m sure, to many other people.  Particularly the incubation/ah ha! part, during which ideas bubble up out of nowhere.  (Andrew Motion talks about ideas bubbling up from the primeval swamp and as he’s the Poet Laureat who are we to think of a better metaphor?)

Incidentally, Betty Edwards popularised the use of the terms left and right brain thinking in her earlier book, Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.  I think contrasting left and right brain modes of thinking is quite useful, but whatever you do don’t mention those terms if eminent Harvard psychologist, Stephen Pinker, is around.  In his book How the Mind Works (did you see what he did there?) he gets very cross indeed with people like me who dare to over simplify the barely understood workings of the most complex objects in the known universe which sit inside our heads.

Yes Stephen, I know, it’s all terribly complex but I just find it useful to think in terms of the kind of creative/visual/connected/divergent thinking I’m doing now as ‘right brain’ and the kind I’m about to start doing, involving evaluation/numbers/dates/project plans/detail as left brain, OK?  Calm down, man.

To conclude this already over-long post, that email storm I mentioned.  I find that writing about things helps me to develop them, as ideas.  Writing is, to my mind, a very visual process.  You get a picture in your head of something you’re trying to do or understand, and then start describing that picture.  As someone once said, reversing the more common version of the phrase, a word can be worth a thousand pictures.

This is particualrly so if you think visually.  For example, when Andrew Motion talks about the unconscious mind being like a ‘primeval swamp’ I can see the actual swamp: bubbling, churning, green and slimy, full of potential life which may or may not make it into actual living and breathing species.  It’s a very powerful image and, for me, captures an important aspect of how we think: much of it is mysterious and (at present) un-knowable but clearly vital to our mental life.

So I like to write things down, but it helps if I think that I’m actually talking to someone other than myself.  I try to remember to explain this to the victims of my emails and say something like ‘you don’t actually have to read the wittering below, just set up an auto-respond which says ‘good thought Andrew’ and get on with the rest of your life’.  I’m going to use this blog in a similar way, particularly now that we’re reaching the point when it may be possible to release ‘the idea’ onto an unsuspecting world.

I will attempt to shorten these posts as things (hopefully) move on – WordPress is telling me that there are currently 780 words in this post alone, which is about half an essay: way, way to long for a blog post.

I have neglected this blog a little, but only in the interests of saving civilisation as we know it.

I’d better explain that point.  In The Hitch Hicker’s Guide To The Galaxy, Douglas Adams mentions the Shoe Event Horizon.  As this wikipedia article explains, this is a particuarly vicious cycle, based around shoe production and, er, consumption, which ends in the complete collapse of a civilisation due to the inability of economy on the planet in question to cope with the massive demand for shoes.

I stopped posting to this blog because I feared that the blogosphere was in danger of leading to a Blog Event Horizon here on planet Earth.  It would, in my worst case scenario, have occurred at the point at which everyone on the planet spent all their time either posting to their own blogs or reading other people’s.  I think we can all identify with that particular thought.

It seems that others have also restrained themselves. My worst fears weren’t realised and now, I feel, it’s safe to proceed.  Anyway, even if the Blog Event Horizon is a threat, rapidly escalating oil prices will almost certainly finish us off first.