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.