How to argue with yourself and win
The process of discovery has a mystical status in our culture. Ideas appear to come from nowhere.
Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla both had inventive minds (although it is now well understood that some of Edison’s inventions came from people working for him at Menlo Park). When he had a seemingly insurmountable problem, Edison is said to have taken to holding a metal ball in his hand and drifted off to sleep. As he falls asleep, the ball drops to the floor, waking him with the solution to his problem appears in his mind. Although this story may be apocryphal, it now has scientific backing. Ramanujan claims to have received complex equations in his dreams from his family goddess.
Famous mathematician Poincaré famously had the solution to a difficult mathematical problem come to him unbidden while stepping onto a bus.
I myself have found that the solution to difficult problems often comes to me while I’m explaining it to other people.
Another technique I use, however, is to visualize a person working at a blackboard with me on a problem. When tackling problems in general relativity, I often imaging myself along side Albert Einstein, one of the greatest imaginative minds of modern physics.
In fact, I have a rather detailed place in my mind, a classroom in the old, 1920s style, creaky wood flooring, large crosshatched windows looking over a green quad, wooden framed blackboard on wheels, empty desks behind me.
The dark color of the wood, the scratches on it from years of use, the smell of the chalk, everything contributes to the sensation of cognitive creation. The great man, in his elder years, searching for a unified theory, in gray slacks and a wrinkled button shirt, stands next to me, ready to gently pry the chalk out of my hand when I go off on a foolish tangent.
How does all this contribute to creation? Why is it that human beings need to resort to tricks like imagining elaborate scenes, dreams, and falling asleep to solve problems? Why is it that when we are deep in analysis and thought solutions fail to appear?
I believe that part of the reason is because, when we try to solve problems, we erect barriers to try to box the problem in. The box, however, isn’t an iron box of logic but a thin veil of human weakness.
Our feelings, wants, likes, dislikes, and other extraneous concerns get in the way. We worry about what others will think of our idea. If you are an academic, you may worry about whether it can be published. We include ideas that we are partial to or exclude ideas for illogical reasons, like because someone we respected criticized it. In other words, our emotions get involved and distort our reason.
This is why “thinking-outside-the-box” is hard. What is that box made of? It is made of expectations of others, tradition, feelings, past experience, and worries, anything but reason. Yet, if the problem is an ordinary kind, for which ordinary methods exist to solve it, then that box saves us a lot of trouble. The box isn’t a hindrance but a shortcut, taking us down well worn paths.
We are often not aware of our emotions distorting our thinking. We feel like we are being rational when we are only rationalizing. We are stuck on a particular blind alley, driven there by emotional attachments and aversions.
Hindus and Buddhists understood this reality thousands of years ago when they offered meditation as a means of controlling the mind and taming the emotions. Our minds have weather with sunny days, storms, cloudy overcast days, and so on. We solve problems best on sunny days where the only clouds are those related to our problem, like a cloud that provides shade on a hot day. Our minds, however, rarely have that level of clarity.
To push back the veil, we have to put our minds in alternate states of consciousness where the irrelevant clouds, the storms, and the rain clear away. But that cannot be done consciously any more than we can control the weather in real life. All we can do is create the conditions for our minds to bring that about unconsciously.
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