Member-only story
The other day I was having a conversation with a friend and somehow we got on a topic which made me recall Frida Kahlo.
He hadn’t heard of her, so I gave him some context. And he said, “why do you fill your head with all this trivial, useless crap?”
That got me up on my soapbox, and now you, dear reader, are subject to this “treatise”.
Besides being interesting at cocktail parties, and it’s always a skill one should cultivate, it’s really far more important than I think most people imagine.
You ask why?
Let me paint a picture, it’s very likely if you’re reading this, that you work in a culture of information and ideas. So many of us do.
And in this culture there is premium on creativity, creative problem solving and crystalizing insight from observed behaviors and patterns.
Agreed?
Ok, so with that, I want to take a small step back and consider how the adult human mind works. By the time we all reach adulthood our brains have laid down patterns. We’ve experienced stuff, we’ve dealt with and responded to things, we’ve gained some successful outcome at times too. So we lock down those patterns (especially of the successful results). Here’s a simplistic diagram of how this pattern “looks”.
We have a lot of these patterns locked in our heads, and the thing is, this is a really useful evolved feature of the human brain. The human brain has the greatest search engine for pattern recognition ever and it works almost instantly. It allows us to perform lots of things at once, like driving while listening to the radio and thinking about your latest work deadline.
You’ve experienced this, one day you hop into the car and head off to work, start pondering some work stuff while kind of paying attention to NPR, and you arrive at work. And you catch yourself realizing that you were so deep in thought you’ve really no idea how the drive went.
That’s awesome power.
But this amazing pattern engine has a down side, it can work to hide creative, innovative ideas from…
