Where Do Ideas Come From?

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

I know where ideas come from. They come from coffee. While living in Italy, I drank five espresso coffees a day and had lots of ideas. One of those ideas was this: Sleep is a symptom of caffeine deprivation. Unless I wanted to become a professional insomniac I needed an alternative. Switching to green tea has worked but the lower caffeine content results in just 62.5 words per cup. Large vats of it must be brewed by the kitchen staff even to write this blog.

Getting enough caffeine in me to feel the neurons charging is only part of the story. The ideas have to come from somewhere – but where? The first theory involves sweat.

Albert Einstein said, “It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”

Hard work isn’t always the answer, but changing perspectives might be, like stepping into the car or into a shower. After stepping into his bath, Archimedes figured out how water displacement could be used to calculate density. Could be the water, but closing your eyes also works. Researchers call this “gating” of visual input, and it might cause solution-related brain activity to burst into consciousness. The ah-ha moment! Dreams are a great resource, too. I’ve had some very big ideas in dreams, and after I wake up I write them down. They usually go like this: “Mungle bubble car mouse tree bliff.” If anyone can make sense of that, drop me a line.

It gets interesting when big ideas visit several people at once. Newton and Leibniz discovered calculus at the same time. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions simultaneously. Does that mean that scientific discoveries are just “in the air” — waiting to be grabbed up by a receptive mind? Can ideas be the product of a collective super-consciousness? That would mean that ideas don’t only come from inside. Instead of a theory of sweat, this is a theory of spirit.

According to Elizabeth Gilbert, author of “Eat, Pray Love,” the Greeks believed that the “genius” was a magical, divine entity living in the walls of the artist’s studio. When the artist was working, the genius would come out to help. As Gilbert put it, this was a psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. Your ideas were not yours – they were on loan from higher sources. If your work bombed, it was not entirely your fault. You just had a faulty genius. (Can you give your genius a cup of coffee?) This changed in the Renaissance, when human creativity was put at the center of the universe. Brilliance was being a genius, not having a genius.

Whether I have a genius living in the wall of my office or not, I believe that ideas come from having a prepared mind, and yet there is that undefined something that makes me wonder if a larger consciousness comes into play.

Television, for example, was invented by several people at once, including a Mormon farmer who was mowing hay in rows and realized that an electron beam could scan a picture in horizontal lines. Then he went in to take a shower. Where do your ideas come from?

Stay curious and see you next Thursday.

Darwin and Chopra’s Pick Up Basketball Game

Written by Lee Schneider, founder of DocuCinema.

Comments on last week’s 500 Words ran the spectrum from “you freaked out Dad,” to “I’m concerned about your mental state.” It got me thinking about which side I was on in the science-spirit game.

Say you’re on West 4th Street in NY. You’re choosing sides for a pickup ball game between the New York Logics and the California Intuitives. The guy leaning on the fence has a great jump shot and is obsessed with hard data. He goes to the Logics. The guy in three point land always makes the right move without thinking about it. He’ll play for the Intuitives. Easy choices? Before I push the basketball metaphor and tear a ligament, consider a crossroads I found myself in a few years ago.

I was making a documentary for the History Channel about the Shroud of Turin, interviewing investigators who wanted proof that the Shroud was the true burial cloth of Jesus. One reputable researcher told me, “if you do the experiment that way, you don’t get the result you want.” The result you want? I realized the guy was no longer a scientist even though he called himself one. He wasn’t playing for the Logics. He’d been traded to the Believers. Thing is, however, other Believers have been pretty good scientists. Francis Bacon, originator of the scientific method, was a Believer. Isaac Newton worked on biblical numerology when he wasn’t working with calculus. This is where the dividing line gets fuzzy.

Charles Darwin was cozy with the Church. According to a piece in Seed Magazine Darwin was close friends with his local pastor, John Brodie Innes. They served on various committees and church-funded groups, including the Sunday School. “We often differed,” Darwin wrote to Innes, “but you are one of those rare mortals, from whom one can differ & yet feel no shade of animosity.”

Innes wrote of Darwin: “He is a most accurate observer, and never states anything as a fact which he has not most thoroughly investigated … He follows his own course as a Naturalist and leaves Moses to take care of himself.” Walking in this crossroads of science and spirit you might encounter Deepak Chopra, who seems a little pissed off at science lately. Dr. Chopra recently wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle, an article reprinted on intent.com, about what he calls science’s “diabolical creativity.” The atom bomb, Thalidomide, DDT and hormone-injected meat are all on Dr. Chopra’s “Bad Science” list. He says scientists shouldn’t act like they are above morality.

That’s a tough one. You place limits on research and the free flow of ideas isn’t so free any more. This sort of action produces not Bad Science but Bad Religion: Believers vs. Infidels, Crusades, Holy Wars, regimes that suppress the rights of women. Moral absolutes might feel good to some but do they help investigators get at the truth?

Maybe, in truth, the truth is blurry. Creationists hate Darwin, but in truth he was involved in Church affairs because he knew it was good for the community. Truth is Chopra thinks from the heart, but he has years of medical training and has a scientific mind.

What team do you play for? Or do we need to choose up sides at all?

Stay curious and see you next Thursday.