There was one particular calculus class that I remember clearly; we had finished all the preliminary work at the beginning of the semester, and were finally getting to the basic premise of the whole thing. Calculus, we were learning by degrees, is all about determining the area when the shape you’re measuring is curved. It’s actually a pretty abstract concept… you have to divide up the area you want to measure into smaller and smaller bits, until you’re essentially divining what would happen if you were to split it up into infinitely small parts and measure them all individually. Surprisingly, there’s a very accurate set of rules for doing this.
Anyway, the teacher was spending a whole class period leading us through the steps to this final realization, and I realized about ten minutes before he was done that I knew where it all was going. There was no series of logical jumps went through my mind. The Big Idea was suddenly just *there*, and I had an intensely visceral reaction to it. My face got hot, my heart sped up, and I was almost jumping out of my seat for the teacher to get to the end of his spiel already, and tell me that which I already knew was right.
I’ve learned since that this kind of reaction isn’t uncommon. It’s said that Einstein had heart palpitations for days after making the leap of intuition that lead to his understanding relativity. Not that I’m comparing him and me by any stretch, but it happens. I can only imagine what must have been going on in his head at that moment… with so many thoughts arrayed in his mind, then having them all jump together suddenly into a beautifully elegant solution, seemingly of their own volition.
Later on, I read Dianetics -- the textbook for Scientology – just to see what the big deal was, and one of the (few) worthwhile things that I took away from it was the point that, at its highest level of function, the human mind doesn’t work in language. The majority of thoughts that go through our heads are, however… we actually think the words in our heads, even though we don’t say them. But those great flashes of insight occur instantaneously, with no coherent form or structure. They just *happen*.
Studies of the brain have shown that your mind does two things when you say a word… a certain area of the brain forms the word by flashing a particular pattern of neurons, and then another part of your brain works the lungs and larynx to actually make the sound of it come out of your mouth. It turns out that when you think a particular word, that initial pattern flashes even if you don’t actually go on to say the word. Of course, this means that if we know what neural pattern matches to what word, someone could literally read your thoughts by scanning your brain activity. But I digress…
While that’s a technology for the future, all these things also got me thinking about the past, and how people’s thoughts must have been structured differently before language existed… it took a while, but we actually made some significant technological advances before we had any way of vocally expressing them to each other. Creating tools and fire and wheels, first of all. The only means at our disposal would have been showing by example. True, the advances in knowledge come faster when you can tell everyone how it works -- or even better, write it down -- but I wonder if it comes at a price. We’re now so used to hearing spoken language in our heads and before our eyes, we might be cutting ourselves off from having these language-less flashes of inspiration. Clearly, they do come, but maybe they don’t come nearly as often. Then again, what good is brilliant inspiration if you can’t articulate it to anyone else?
No comments:
Post a Comment