Aditya Chadha

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

Yep, that’s right. I quit my job, and lived to talk about it.

A couple of months ago, I was just like a large majority of people on the planet. Working at a very large company. Thinking that I was making a difference helping other large companies cut costs, or increase efficiency or something equally responsible. Being underrated because I wasn’t kissing ass. Living from paycheck to paycheck, working hard at something that I didn’t quite enjoy but did anyway, because it paid the bills and let me enjoy a certain lifestyle. Falling asleep in the toliet at work, you know.

And then, it hit me.

No, not the life is short cliche (although, that is a great speech and I am an apple fanboy!) - no, it hit me that happiness is not hard to achieve. Everyone tells you to do what you love, so when you’re doing something you don’t quite love, you quit. So, that’s what I did. I quit.

But, it’s not quite that easy. How do you find out what you love doing? Well, to be honest, you don’t. (ding! ding! ding!). Like most people I had no idea what I should do with my life (Po Bronson - 2002) - but I had been reading a lot of smart entrepreneurs and their views on interactive marketing and the new collaborative web (note: yes, the so called web2.0 but that’s another cliche I’m hoping to avoid) and then I read iWoz and that was really it.

I realized that I had been most satisfied when I was building things (software), the creative thrill of starting from scratch and ending with a finished piece of code that did what it was expected to do in a fast and efficient way had been sheer joy. And, in working for a big faceless corporation, I’d lost all of that, and I realized that I missed it. I wanted to be an engineer all over again. Badly.

Leaving isn’t that easy though. You need to have some sort of a plan.

subLucid, was my plan.

[To be continued…]

technorati tags:entrepreneurship, innovation, technology

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Neat way to turn your images into ‘A Scanner Darkly’ funky 2d animation. Need to try this out, and share results!

via Photojojo

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Yesterday, I quit my job. But that’s for a later story.

This story, being the obligatory introductory post that it is, is an indication of the things to come!

First, some background… I’m a 26 year old wannabe entrepreneur interested in technology and design culture and that is what I’ll be talking about on the blog. But more than that, this blog is going to be about self-expression and creativity. In the next few months, I will try and answer the one question that is driving to me to completely turn my life around.

“Am I creative? And if I am, why am I not out there? Building brilliant new things? Changing the world?”

So, there you have it! And, to begin, some brilliant reading material:

How to Be Creative - by Hugh MacLeod

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