Subj: Rememberances of The Mother of Invention

Date: 05/27/95

To: Douganews

CC: MrPool

DBurch1108

TNSims

CC: lukerwa@po1.dal.bls.gov

GaryBorde

CC: kboss-new@seatimes.com

Saturday 27 May 1995 6:56 am

I got your "Swing.Gif" file, it transferred beautifully and was suitably weird. Count one major personal techno-triumph: You downloaded a graphics file from a giant mainframe computer that almost certainly runs on Unix or some more exotic operating system, into a Mac, which uses who knows what sort of basic operating system, back through the network on the big mainframe and eventually down into my DOS-based computer. Its the sort of thing that -- if you think about it too much -- can make you feel powerful and competent.

Of course, this is the beauty of any form of technology: It allows you to do things you don't know how to do, or at least that you don't have to think about when you are doing it. Any employment of technology, whether it is the simple (!) use of the written word or docking the space shuttle to a Russian orbiting station 200 miles up, is an amplification of your own personal power through someone else's shared thought process. Some people -- over a period of years

and years and in many different places -- sat down and figured out every little piece of your microwave oven and how to build it. But none of that is in your mind when you nuke a bagel. To me, this is magic.

Speaking of magic ... I had a very strange experience this morning. Actually, it may not be that strange, but I don't think we usually notice when it happens.

It was very early morning. I was shaving, listening to some baroque chamber music on the little stereo I have set up in the bathroom. On weekday mornings I listen to Morning Edition as I shave, my mind more or less absorbed by whatever is on the program. But this morning, being Saturday, the news wasn't on yet, so I was listening to music on the PBS station to which that radio is always tuned.

As I methodically scraped the hair from my chin, I was suddenly aware of a mental image. It was the very vivid picture of a row of condo-style houses. In an instant I recalled exactly where I had seen this image. I was driving with a group of people northward through Colorado, back to Boulder after a day-long white water rafting trip. This little expedition had been a break from the two-and-a-half-week litigation training course I was taking from the National Institute of Trial Advocacy. The four young associates from our firm who were attending the Institute and about a dozen others from our class had spent the day going through the Royal Gorge. On the way back

to Boulder, we pulled off the road just at sunset, somewhere south of Denver. The scene that had come to me was a view out of the windshield of the van (I was driving) as I steered around the off-ramp from the Interstate, heading toward a convenience store for a bathroom and soda run.

THIS HAPPENED ALMOST SIX YEARS AGO.

Concentrating on the image of this row of condos, a whole flood of memories -- places, sounds, faces -- came rushing back into my mind. The whole day we spent rafting was suddenly available to me, fresh and bright. I set my razor down, afraid that I would cut myself. For I was simply amazed at this occurrence. I was amazed not that I recalled the day, but HOW I had recalled it. The image of the row of condos was certainly the least impressive memory of the day. As I thought about it, I was certain that I recalled thinking, as I had looked at those buildings the first time -- six years ago -- that these were among the least attractive houses I had ever seen. Even as I sit here, hours later, I can conjure up the picture of those condos in the low-angled light of the sunset and can recall the feeling of consternation I had had that such wonderful light was wasted on the architectural banality of those houses. But that had been the most fleeting of thoughts, passing through my mind in the merest instant as the view out of the front of the van had flowed past my eyes with the curving of the off-ramp. I remember that I had been concentrating pretty hard. We had all had more than a little beer when we had gotten out of the water at the end of our adventure, so I had volunteered to drive in self-defense, considering myself the soberest of our crowd. I had also been working quite hard at entertaining the boisterous crowd, spritzing on some absurd legal humor for quite some time while we had driven north on the highway. The sight of the condos and the thoughts that that sight had triggered had literally passed in the blink of an eye in the midst of all of this activity.

As I wondered at this strange manner of recalling that day, I struggled to reconstruct the precise context in which this memory had come back to my mind. I knew that I had been in a near-trance state, lulled into a mental quiet by the familiar ritual of shaving and the calming music that had been on the radio. This made all the more difficult the task of retrieving the much more recent memory -- only moments before -- of how I had come to think of that instant six years ago. Finally, try as I might, I couldn't remember any specific thought that had immediately preceded the blossoming of that image in my mind. I simply cannot think of anything that happened or that I experienced or that I thought that might have triggered that memory, either in the moments before I thought of it, or in the recent past.

What is this? What mechanism of the mind brings such a randomly unconnected thought -- and such an insignificant one -- to the forefront of consciousness? I have a theory (did you imagine that I wouldn't come up with SOMETHING?).

I think there is some subsystem of the brain that evokes memories from the vast storehouse of past experiences. I think this system "selects" memories on an essentially random, or perhaps chaotic, basis, tossing them up from the jumbled pile of one's past. Perhaps this system is at work all the time, but our "focus", our conscious mind, is unaware of the process because it is occupied with the work of more structured thinking. Only when that focus dissolves can the faint signals offered by this "memory rooter" be noticed. Or perhaps this process is only at work when we aren't consciously focusing on some "connected" series of thoughts or tasks or sensory "input".

Since the mind/brain is a naturally evolved mechanism, one must ask what purpose is served by the "memory rooter". What survival value does this strange little mental engine have? Again, I offer a theory: Perhaps the "memory rooter" is an element of creativity.

An essential element of comprehension is the grasping or conceiving of the relation of one idea or image to another. Creativity is the perception of new relationships between things. Maybe we have evolved a mechanism for generating truly new ideas by randomly presenting the mind with images. Most of the time we don't notice this mechanism at work and when we do, most of the time the memories of things or ideas presented by the "memory rooter" don't lead to anything new or useful or interesting. But every once in a great while -- AHA! Juxtaposing two unrelated ideas may be the seed from which a wholly new idea develops. The value of this to an animal that has culturally "stored" and transmitted knowledge as its chief mechanism for interacting with its environment would be considerable.

This little random memory retriever couldn't be too active or obtrusive, because an animal constantly bombarded by random images from its past would be pretty darned inefficient. If Og was constantly woolgathering over random memories from his past he would get awfully hungry or end up as sabertooth tiger food before long. Likewise, not everyone in a given social group would need to have a "memory rooter". It would be enough if only some had it, and only some of the time. This may account for the great disparity in creativity we see among human populations in the present day. Also, the sudden development or enhancement of this mental facility might account for the discontinuous and recent technological explosion among Cro Magnon around 50,000 years ago.

At any rate, the "memory rooter" may also account for one of the mysteries of creativity that one can see described by "geniuses" form every facet of human endeavor, from novelists to physicists. I have seen many musings by creative people about the essentially mysterious nature of creativity, the puzzling inability to go back and precisely trace the chain of thought that lead to the great idea or the wonderful invention. Maybe this is because the "seed" of the idea had ITS birth in randomness, the simple background "static" of a little mental weasel, tunneling through the pile of rubble left in the mind from a lifetime of experience.

Oh well, I think I'll stick a bagel in the microwave and have some breakfast.

You'll note a bunch of other stuff -- I'm copying you on responses I'm making today to some folks who responded to a general request for information I made on a nanotechnology bulletin board in Usenet.

Gotta go.

GB