I’ve been wondering where ideas come from.
That is not exactly a new question. People considerably smarter than I am have been wondering about it for a very long time, and some of them have produced answers containing words I would have to look up before I could disagree with them. I’m approaching it from the other direction. I’ve had ideas all my life, some useful, some not particularly useful, and a few that probably should have been escorted quietly from the premises. What interests me now is what was happening immediately before one of them appeared.
Suppose an idea occurs to me while I’m sitting here. One moment I don’t have it. A moment later I do. Where the hell was it in between?
I don’t think the finished idea was sitting somewhere in my head waiting for me to find it. If it had already existed in that form, finding it would seem more like remembering than inventing. But something was certainly there before the idea arrived. I have memories, experiences, things I’ve seen and heard, people I’ve known, mistakes I’ve made, things I’ve built, things I’ve broken, things I’ve read, places I’ve been, and an impressive collection of miscellaneous mental debris whose continued storage cannot always be justified.
Maybe the idea wasn’t there. Maybe the pieces were.
Memory May Be More Than Remembering
We usually talk about memory as though its principal job is to help us recover the past. Where did I put my keys? What was her name? When did we buy that house? What did the doctor tell me? Those are certainly useful services, particularly the keys, but I’m beginning to wonder whether memory has another importance that we don’t notice because we’re too busy trying to remember where we left the damned things.
Memory gives us something to think with.
When I look at something today, I don’t encounter it with an empty head. Whatever I see, hear, feel, smell, read or otherwise encounter arrives in a mind already cluttered with the accumulated remains of earlier encounters. Most of those old things aren’t consciously waiting for inspection. I couldn’t list them for you, and quite a few of them I probably couldn’t deliberately retrieve at all. Yet something happening now can suddenly bring one of them into play.
That happened in the New Mexico story I told elsewhere on this site. I woke from a doze in a car, looked across the desert at a plateau, and immediately populated the ridge with imaginary Indians from the Westerns that had filled my younger years. Nobody asked me to do that. I wasn’t solving a problem. Something I saw simply bumped into something already in my head, and for a moment the two belonged together.
That particular combination wasn’t especially useful. Civilization advanced very little as a result. But the event has become interesting to me because I wonder whether the same kind of thing happens when the result is useful.
Perhaps memories don’t contain our ideas. Perhaps they provide the pieces from which ideas can emerge.
I Think I See Mine Before I Can Say Them
There is another part of this that I don’t know how to prove, so I won’t pretend I can. I can only tell you what it seems like inside my own head.
When an idea first appears, I often seem to see something before I can explain it.
I don’t necessarily mean a photograph-like picture. It may be an arrangement, a movement, a relationship, a shape, some numbers, part of a machine, or something closer to a dream. Sometimes the whole thing seems to be there for an instant, but when I try to put it into words I discover that language is considerably slower than whatever just happened.
The damned thing can also disappear while I’m trying to describe it.
Perhaps your thoughts don’t work that way at all. That’s one of the things I’d like to find out. Maybe your ideas arrive as words. Maybe you hear them. Maybe they’re mathematical. Maybe you feel a relationship before you can see or describe it. Maybe the form changes depending on what you’re thinking about.
What fascinates me is that whatever that first internal thing is, sooner or later we face another problem if we want anybody else to know about it.
We have to get it out.
You Can’t Put Your Idea in My Head
Suppose you have an idea and want to give it to me. You can’t. At least I don’t think you can do it literally. You can speak to me, write something, draw a picture, make a model, show me some numbers, wave your hands around, or resort to whatever other means become necessary when I continue looking puzzled. But none of those things actually transfers the thing that existed inside your mind into mine.
I have to make my own.
Try a ridiculously simple example. Imagine a little red house beside a river.
You have one now, or at least I suspect you do. So do I. But is yours mine?
My little red house has already acquired characteristics I never gave you. I can see its position relative to the river. There are trees nearby. The river has a particular width. I have some notion of the house’s proportions and where I’m standing while looking at it.
You may have built an entirely different place. Your river may be muddy and broad while mine is narrow. Your house may have white trim. Mine may have a porch because apparently my internal planning department approved one without consulting me.
Yet we can have a perfectly sensible conversation about the little red house beside the river.
That strikes me as remarkable.
Somehow a few words from me encountered whatever was already in your mind, and you constructed something sufficiently similar that we can behave as though we’re discussing the same thing. We aren’t. We’re discussing two internal constructions that correspond well enough for the purpose at hand.
Now It Gets Interesting
If that’s even approximately right, communication isn’t merely the transportation of an idea from one person to another. Something potentially much more interesting is happening.
Your idea encounters my memories.
You tell me what you’re thinking. I reconstruct it using what I already possess. Because my accumulated experiences aren’t yours, something in your idea may connect with something you never had in mind. I may misunderstand part of what you meant and accidentally notice a useful relationship. Something you consider unimportant may remind me of something that happened forty years ago. I may ask a question that seems peculiar to you because you don’t possess the experience that caused me to ask it.
Then I tell you what occurred to me. Now whatever happened in my head goes back through language and encounters your inventory again.
Well, I’ll be damned.
We may not simply be exchanging ideas. We may be repeatedly putting ideas into different collections of memories and seeing what comes back out.
That begins to explain something I’ve observed throughout my life. An idea can become more interesting when another person gets hold of it. Not always, of course. Occasionally another person gets hold of an idea and improves it by killing it before considerable money is lost. That too is a valuable contribution. But sometimes the other person sees something the originator couldn’t see because the other person has something different to see with.
And Then Along Came Artificial Intelligence
This is where I have to become careful, because I’m currently doing a substantial amount of thinking and writing with artificial intelligence.
AI can produce solutions, combinations, suggestions and apparent ideas at an astonishing rate. I use it for exactly those reasons. But at this point I am not prepared to say that what happens inside an AI system is the same thing that happens when an idea occurs inside a human mind.
For these stories, I’m going to keep using the word human, because humans are the creatures whose experience I’m examining.
A human has spent a lifetime receiving the world through an extraordinary assortment of receptors. We see and hear, certainly, but we also experience pressure, temperature, balance, position, pain, bodily states and other signals, many of which we barely notice until something goes wrong. Those encounters accumulate. Repetition strengthens some of them. Consequence makes some extraordinarily important. Others apparently disappear until something unexpectedly brings them back.
AI receives inputs too, but by a very different route. Whether increasingly capable AI systems will eventually do something we should call independent ideation is a question I’m quite happy to leave open. I don’t know, and pretending otherwise would spoil a perfectly good mystery.
For now, the distinction that interests me is simpler. I have a lifetime of encounters that happened to me. AI has access to patterns produced from enormous amounts of human-created information. Those are both remarkable inventories, but they are not obviously the same kind of inventory.
I want to know what difference that makes.
Which Brings Me Back to Memory
I started with a simple thought: memories cause ideas.
I don’t think I would say it quite that way now. Cause is too strong. A warehouse full of memories doesn’t automatically manufacture innovation, any more than a garage full of tools automatically builds a chair.
What I think I’m circling is more interesting.
Memory may provide the inventory from which thought can progress. New encounters activate pieces of that inventory. Sometimes an existing pattern answers whatever the present situation requires, and that’s enough. Need satisfied. Nothing further has to happen.
But sometimes it isn’t enough. Something doesn’t fit. Something isn’t satisfactory. The familiar answer doesn’t quite do the job, so examination continues. Other memories, patterns and pieces may become available. Perhaps something from a completely different part of a life enters the examination.
And occasionally, pieces that had never belonged together before form a relationship that does.
Maybe that’s where an idea comes from.
I don’t know yet. I rather like not knowing.
What Happens in Your Head?
That’s one of the reasons I want other people involved in this website. My own memories can tell me only what seems to happen in one peculiar human mind, and I’ve been living with that fellow long enough to question the reliability of the witness.
So I’m curious about yours.
Think of an idea you’ve had—not necessarily a grand invention, just something that genuinely occurred to you. Can you remember the instant before it arrived? Did you see something? Hear something? Remember something? Did the idea appear as words, a picture, numbers, movement, a relationship, or something you still can’t describe properly?
More interestingly, can you trace any of its pieces backward? Had you encountered them somewhere else before? Did something from years earlier suddenly become relevant? Did another person say something that made you reconstruct the problem differently?
If you can see any of that happening in your own thinking, Your Ideas is where I’d like you to tell us about it. Don’t clean it up into a brilliant finished invention before you bring it over. I’m becoming increasingly interested in the messy bit that happened first.
Because the finished idea may not be the most interesting thing. I want to know where the hell it was before you thought of it.