I have become suspicious of the first answer.
Not because the first answer is necessarily wrong. Most of the time it is probably perfectly good. If I ask what you had for breakfast and you tell me two eggs and a piece of toast, there is no particular reason for me to suspect you are concealing a waffle. But when we are talking about ideas—where they come from, why one person sees something another person doesn’t, and how something genuinely new occasionally appears—I am beginning to think the more interesting question often comes after the obvious answer.
It is a ridiculously simple question:
What’s that make you think of?
Try it sometime and see what happens.
You are walking through a parking lot and notice that somebody has backed a pickup truck into a space instead of driving into it. What’s that make you think of? Maybe nothing. Maybe it reminds you that your father always backed into the driveway because he said you never knew when you might have to leave in a hurry. That reminds you of the fire station where the trucks always faced outward. Now you’re wondering why parking lots aren’t designed differently if backing out into moving traffic is the dangerous part.
I have no idea whether there is a useful idea hiding in there. We aren’t trying to invent a better parking lot. We’re following what happened when one perfectly ordinary thing bumped into something else already sitting in your head.
That’s where this gets interesting.
Your Mind Has More Junk in It Than You Think
At eighty-four, I have accumulated an impressive amount of mental junk. Some of it is useful. Some of it probably should have been hauled to the curb years ago. There are pieces of businesses, people I knew for twenty minutes, machines I worked on, television commercials, arguments I lost, roads I drove, mistakes I made, things my parents said, things my children said, and things I wish to hell I hadn’t said.
Most of that isn’t sitting in front of me waiting to be consulted. I couldn’t make you a useful inventory of it if you gave me a month and a legal pad.
But something can bring a piece of it back.
A smell can do it. A photograph can do it. Somebody can use an expression you haven’t heard in fifty years and suddenly you’re standing somewhere you haven’t thought about since 1963. You can see a peculiar piece of machinery and remember another machine that didn’t look anything like it but somehow feels related.
That’s why What’s that make you think of? interests me more than What is that?
Once you know what something is, the matter is often settled. You see a shopping cart and your mind says shopping cart. Fine. Identification accomplished. Proceed to the Diet Coke aisle.
But ask what the shopping cart makes you think of and the answer belongs entirely to you.
Maybe it makes you think of a baby stroller. Maybe a hospital gurney. Maybe an airport luggage cart. Maybe the little red wagon you pulled behind you when you were six. Maybe the cart at the factory where you worked forty years ago. Maybe the damned wheel that keeps going clunk, clunk, clunk reminds you of something completely different that also failed because one small part wore out before everything else.
Now we have somewhere to go.
The Wrong Answer May Be the Best One
There is another part of this that I particularly like: there isn’t necessarily a correct answer.
If I show ten people the same object and ask them what it is, I hope most of them agree. If nine say it’s a coffee pot and one says it’s a rhinoceros, we may have a problem.
Ask those same ten people what the coffee pot makes them think of, though, and I hope they don’t agree.
One remembers his grandmother. Another thinks about the break room at work. Somebody remembers camping. Somebody else wonders why coffee pots have handles shaped the way they do. Another person starts thinking about heat, which reminds her of an experiment she did in school, which reminds her of a teacher, which reminds her of something the teacher said that she hadn’t thought about in thirty years.
Which answer is right?
All of them.
More importantly, each person has taken the same encounter somewhere different because each person brought a different lifetime to it.
That may be one reason ideas can be so damned unpredictable. We tend to look at the finished idea and admire the person who had it, but we don’t get to see all the apparently irrelevant stuff that was already rattling around in that person’s head when something new arrived.
I have spent a good deal of time lately going backward through my own ideas trying to find some of that stuff. The more I look, the less magical some of my ideas become. Things that once seemed to have popped into my head from nowhere often have ancestors. Something I saw here, something I learned there, an old problem, a new encounter, and suddenly two things that had never had any reason to meet were sitting at the same table.
That doesn’t make the idea less interesting.
I think it makes it considerably more interesting.
This Is Where You Can Screw Up Our Thinking
That brings us to one of the reasons I am building this website.
If all I wanted to do was tell stories about my life, I could do that. In fact, I’ve written a book containing rather a lot of them. But my experiences have one serious limitation: they all happened to me.
You have a completely different pile of junk.
When you look at one of my stories, you may see something I didn’t see because it reminds you of something I’ve never experienced. When somebody sends us an idea, I may make one connection and you may make another. An artificial-intelligence system may find published research that neither of us knew existed. Somebody wandering through the website six months later may look at all of that and say, “You idiots missed the obvious part.”
Good.
That’s what I want.
The Your Ideas section is where you can bring us the things you’ve noticed, wondered about, invented, questioned, remembered, or simply found peculiar. They don’t have to be polished ideas. In fact, I am increasingly suspicious that asking people only for finished ideas causes us to miss the interesting part—the messy trail of things that happened before anybody knew there was an idea.
The Discoveries section is where we’ll put some of the things we find when those contributions start bumping into other stories, memories, research and observations. Some may turn out to be useful. Some may be funny. Some may produce another question instead of an answer. Occasionally we may discover that somebody figured the whole damned thing out in 1874 and we are merely late to the meeting.
That’s useful too.
Have a Look Around
So here’s an experiment you can perform without registering for anything, buying anything, downloading anything, or putting on protective clothing.
Look around wherever you happen to be.
Pick something.
Anything.
Don’t ask yourself what it is. You already know what most of the things around you are, which is exactly the problem.
Ask instead:
What’s that make me think of?
Take the first answer, then ask it again.
And what’s THAT make me think of?
Don’t try to be clever. Don’t try to invent something. Don’t reject an answer because it seems stupid, old, irrelevant, embarrassing or completely unrelated to where you started. Follow it for a little while and see where the damned thing goes.
Then have a wander through this website and do the same thing with what you find here. Read one of My Stories and see whether it reminds you of one of yours. Look through Your Ideas and see whether somebody else’s observation bumps into something you know. Poke around in Discoveries and see whether we missed something. If you find yourself wondering where the hell all of this is going, The Model explains what I currently think may be happening underneath it.
But you don’t need to understand my model to play.
You already have everything required. You’ve spent your entire life collecting it.
The interesting question is what happens when somebody gives all that accumulated junk a little nudge and asks:
What’s that make you think of?