Heat Lightning Thoughts

Sometimes a thought flashes across my brain like heat lightning, permanently searing a new path through the synaptic fibers that connect thought patterns to habits. It creates a short circuit that opens up my mind to new avenues of understanding. I had one of those the other night while reading a book about genetics; more specifically the history of our understanding of genetics.

The author made a rather off handed comment about one of the scientific researchers who helped us understand how DNA controls heredity. The comment was extraneous to the story but it instantly forged a new connection in my mind. The comment concerned the fact that most new discoveries are made by scientists and researchers when they are young. He gave examples of Einstein and most of the Nobel Prize winners in genetics. Most of the truly monumental connections are made by scientists/researchers when they are very young; before they are thirty.

It immediately seemed counterintuitive to me. Why should this be so? I can see why athletes peak in their twenties as their reflexes, strength, agility, and recovery from physical injury are all at peak performance. Even then, a lot of key positions in sports that require the most mental concentration tend to shift that peak towards 30. This seems perfectly logical to me in that it is simply experience converging into higher skill levels. As experience increases things seem to slow down in time as you will often hear top athletes talking about the pace of the game becoming more manageable. I tend to think that is simply the brain becoming more efficient at making the necessary decisive connections when presented with repeatable patterns but in any case it does seem that experience in certain positions in sports increases performance levels.

The thought puzzled me for a moment or two but then I went back to my reading and relegated it to my subconscious, making a mental note to come back to it later. The next morning when I got up it had been churning around in my subconscious all night and I had a theory as to why such a seemingly counterintuitive thing might be true. My answer wasn’t fully formed yet but it was quite a different way of viewing the issue.

It would seem at first glance that scientific research would be one of the professions where success would increase with experience. After all, the more you know the more easily your mind makes connections between cause and effect. In my own field of work I know that my experience has served to increase my understanding of complex issues. The more I learn about different kinds of systems the more easily I can spot problems with combined systems. I think the same can be said for many people who do diagnostics type work. If a person is basically curious and takes the time to understand how each component in a system works they will be able to mental diagnostics and narrow the possibilities of any one component failure down very quickly. This is done by running mental scenarios for component failures, recognizing cause and effect correlations or lack thereof without actually doing physical testing. By the time you have exhausted all the possibilities in this manner you have narrowed the possibilities considerably, often to the point of one or two components. This process becomes second nature with experience and the wider the experience the quicker the diagnostics in almost all situations.

What had somehow come to my subconscious during the night was that leaps of intuition require a freedom from ingrained thought processes of any kind. Krishnamurti called it “freedom from the known” in one of his books that is still in print. He was referring to the ability to free yourself from the past in order to fully experience the now. I had read this book many years ago and it made quite an impression on me at the time as far as how to live a good life. Yet here it was again, reasserting itself into a highly technical question. Why are scientist/researchers more successful when they are young? The author of the book I was reading suggested that scientific research is so slow and painstakingly detailed that it may tend to burn people out. I suppose this could be true but in general people who like doing such painstaking, slow work continue to like doing it throughout their life. You either like doing this kind of work or you don’t and I suspect it has little to do with age.

I think it is quite simply freedom from the known that allows such great intuitive leaps in science. When we are young we are more open to such free association moments, perhaps a great deal more open than when we get older. As a matter of fact, the more we know about any one subject the less our tendency to connect that subject to others in general. We begin focusing on the tree and become less aware of the forest. Perhaps it takes someone free from existing knowledge to make these connections in their mind. I have long thought that the first step to learning anything is to first admit that you don’t know it. Perhaps what we do know begins to block our ability to make seemingly unlikely connections in our thought processes. In other words perhaps we lose our ability to make intuitive connections in favor of pattern recognition that comes with more experience.

You Can't Make this Stuff Up.....

This is an actual transcript from President Trump's speech on Black History Month..... No one could make this stuff up.

Well this is Black History Month, so this is our little breakfast, our little get-together. Hi Lynn, how are you? Just a few notes.

During this month, we honor the tremendous history of African-Americans throughout our country. Throughout the world, if you really think about it, right? And their story is one of unimaginable sacrifice, hard work, and faith in America. I’ve gotten a real glimpse—during the campaign, I’d go around with Ben to a lot of different places I wasn’t so familiar with. They’re incredible people.

And I want to thank Ben Carson, who’s gonna be heading up HUD. That’s a big job. That’s a job that’s not only housing, but it’s mind and spirit. Right, Ben?

And you understand, nobody’s gonna be better than Ben.

Last month, we celebrated the life of Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., whose incredible example is unique in American history. You read all about Dr. Martin Luther King a week ago when somebody said I took the statue out of my office. It turned out that that was fake news. Fake news. The statue is cherished, it’s one of the favorite things in the—and we have some good ones. We have Lincoln, and we have Jefferson, and we have Dr. Martin Luther King. But they said the statue, the bust of Martin Luther King, was taken out of the office. And it was never even touched. So I think it was a disgrace, but that’s the way the press is.

Very unfortunate.I am very proud now that we have a museum on the National Mall where people can learn about Reverend King, so many other things. Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I noticed. Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, and millions more black Americans who made America what it is today. Big impact.I’m proud to honor this heritage and will be honoring it more and more.

The folks at the table in almost all cases have been great friends and supporters.

Darrell—I met Darrell when he was defending me on television. And the people that were on the other side of the argument didn’t have a chance, right? And Paris has done an amazing job in a very hostile CNN community. He’s all by himself. You’ll have seven people, and Paris. And I’ll take Paris over the seven. But I don’t watch CNN, so I don’t get to see you as much as I used to. I don’t like watching fake news. But Fox has treated me very nice. Wherever Fox is, thank you.

We’re gonna need better schools and we need them soon. We need more jobs, we need better wages, a lot better wages. We’re gonna work very hard on the inner city. Ben is gonna be doing that, big league. That’s one of the big things that you’re gonna be looking at. We need safer communities and we’re going to do that with law enforcement. We’re gonna make it safe. We’re gonna make it much better than it is right now. Right now it’s terrible, and I saw you talking about it the other night, Paris, on something else that was really—you did a fantastic job the other night on a very unrelated show.I’m ready to do my part, and I will say this: We’re gonna work together. This is a great group, this is a group that’s been so special to me. You really helped me a lot.

If you remember I wasn’t going to do well with the African-American community, and after they heard me speaking and talking about the inner city and lots of other things, we ended up getting—and I won’t go into details—but we ended up getting substantially more than other candidates who had run in the past years. And now we’re gonna take that to new levels. I want to thank my television star over here—Omarosa’s actually a very nice person, nobody knows that. I don’t want to destroy her reputation but she’s a very good person, and she’s been helpful right from the beginning of the campaign, and I appreciate it. I really do. Very special.


The knock on Bush II used to be that he wasn't very bright. He was Einstein reborn compared to this narcissistic moron. Someone please give him a teleprompter, a speechwriter, and the common sense to use them. "Frederick Douglass did an amazing job and is being recognized more and more"... One paragraph non specifically describing great African Americans and the rest of the speech is self congratulatory crap and more attacks against anyone who dares point out his continual nonsensical boasting and basic lack of understanding on virtually every subject that comes up.

If a teacher in any fifth grade social studies class in America assigned Black History Month to the class and asked the students to come up with a short speech this would be a failing grade. The depths of this man's ignorance are breathtaking. The fact that he is now our president is as astounding as it is disgusting.