On Expression
It is very hard to express what you’re thinking. Your brain wakes up, a few neurons fire, a pattern emerges trying to penetrate your subconscious, fighting a million other synapse connections to break through to your subconscious. Then, something that feels like a thought - bubbles up into your subconscious trying to attract the attention of your conscious brain and if a few factors combine and you spend some brain cycles, a final coherent thought is formed.
If you’re to believe Jeff Hawkins, the brain functions by running a massive prediction engine based on matching patterns that it has seen before. So, for example, you know how to open a door because your brain sees a doorknob and matches it to a previous occurrence of seeing a door knob and watching a door open by turning the knob, so it predicts that the same thing will happen (the door will open) if you turned this door knob. This is obviously a very radical way of thinking about the brain and the way it functions.
If I was to extend this theory to how the brain expresses new thoughts or how you create new thoughts, you get the model where your brain has actually had a thought before and when you think about something similar a pattern emerges. But, the pattern is incomplete, you’re not thinking about the same thing you thought about before but you’re trying to map this new thought to a thought that you’ve had before. So to create this new pattern the brain fuses the older but similar pattern with this new pattern that you’re experiencing and forms a new (as yet) untested pattern. Once you test this pattern multiple times, your brain ‘remembers’ the new pattern and uses it to repeat the process. An example of this would be to extend the ‘doorknob’ experiment above with a new ‘doorknob’ that looks different or is placed in a different part of the door, or to make it even more complicated we could replace ‘doorknob’ with a completely different ‘door-opening-mechanism’. This is all pure conjecture on my part, of course, but something to think about as I ponder creativity more.
Going back to writing about expression, we have the fact that once you have a blob of neuron connections, and it goes through a few layers of brain tissue and emerges as a coherent thought it looks very different from the real blob that you started thinking about. This depends on how much experience you’ve had in expressing a similar thought, or to put it in Jeff’s terms how many stored patterns you have that approximate this new thought you’re having now to articulate it in the best way possible.
So, then the most articulate people should be those that have expressed as much as possible. But that’s not true, because mere expression doesn’t tell you if what you’re saying is what someone else is understanding, that’s where communication and the feedback loop come in.
So, in essence, the most articulate people are those people that have expressed as much as they can but also received as much feedback as they can to understand if they’re getting through to the rest of humanity, thus improving their pattern matching algorithm to express every single thought as clearly as possible.
I think that’s why most people write, to get their thoughts out there, but to also affect the thinking of everyone that understands their thoughts.
Food for thought, yes?
[This is a new series of posts on thinking about creativity to better understand it, next up will be On Mediums of Expression]
Video of Jeff Hawkins’ talk at TED:
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Tags: creativity, thinking, the brain, expression, changing_the_world