Feed the White Wolf

When I first started reading and thinking about how to actively, meaningfully, and systematically foster the frequency and pace of discovery in my own work I was of two minds.

In psychology there is a line of thought which compares a child with a scientist, albeit with different degrees of content knowledge.  In this picture, the scientist’s capacity for discovery is taken to be part of an innate skill set, evidenced by the learning and daily discovery capacity of children, necessary for human development.  At the same time, sociology studies talk about institutional and field norms inhibiting discovery.  Using this mindset, I rationalized that achieving discovery more often might be about eliminating inhibitors to discovery. It’s as if we start out with the necessary tools, but access to the toolbox gets restricted over time and the tools get rusty.  Here the goal would be to identify these discovery inhibiting factors and strive to experience less of them, less often.

But upon reading the philosophy and cognitive psychology literature I generated an alternative mindset: here the emphasis is often on the individual and on mental strategies acquired by the individual over time that make discovery more likely.  Particularly fascinating, and resonant for a physicist, were the computational psychology studies reproducing famous discoveries.  Out of these investigations, into human discovery processes and computer artificial intelligence, grew techniques and algorithms much beloved by physicists today: machine learning approaches.  Using this mindset, I rationalized that achieving discovery more often might be about cultivating enablers to discovery. It’s as if we start out with a small set of tools and then add-on a toolbox and new tools over time, keeping them in pristine condition through care and attention.  Here the goal would be to identify these discovery fostering factors and strive to experience more of them, more often.

Of course, this is actually a continuum, between doing more discovery cultivating and doing less discovery inhibiting.  But which way to move toward first?  Especially in tough times, i.e., in a “limited resources scenario” where your time, your money, your patience, your motivation, and even the data available might be limited to the bare minimum.  What’s a discoverer to do then?

I found one possible answer to this question in something I read a few months earlier.  I was reading a book on evidence-based approaches to mindful meditation for pain management, by a pair of British practitioners and academics, when I came across a fictionalization they devised regarding the pull between positive and negative tendencies.  I think it stuck in my memory since, being an American from the East Coast, I used to visit the Blue Ridge mountains, connected to the Great Smoky Mountains in the story’s opener:

“It was a crisp autumn day in the Great Smoky Mountains.  A group of Cherokee children had gathered around their grandfather and they were filled with intense curiosity and excitement.  A few hours earlier, a fight had broken out between men and the village elder was called upon to settle the dispute.  The children were keen to know what the elder had to say about it.

‘Why do people fight?’ asked the youngest child.

‘Well,’ the elder replied.  ‘We all have two wolves inside us and they constantly do battle with each other.’

‘Inside us too?’ asked another child.

‘Yes, inside us all,’ he replied.  ‘There is a white wolf and a grey wolf.  The grey wolf is filled with anger, fear, bitterness, envy, jealousy, greed, and arrogance.  The white wolf is filled with love, peace, hope, courage, humility, compassion, and faith.  And the two wolves fight constantly.’

‘But which wolf wins?’ asked another child.

‘The one that we feed,’ replied the elder.”

[Vidyamala Burch and Danny Penman, Mindfulness for Health, published by Piatkus (2013), p.177-178.]

It came back to me in the context of scientific discovery because it feels like it sums up the issue in another way.  To me the wolf metaphor says, if you only have two bones, give one to yourself and one to the white wolf.  In other words, we could spend a lot of time trying to remove all the obstacles to discovery (i.e., chasing away the grey wolf).  But even if we are wildly successful, if we haven’t cultivated what fosters discovery, then all we’ll have is the most lovely, discovery-friendly environment in the world where precisely nothing happens because we didn’t actually build the capacity to discover anything yet (i.e., feed the white wolf).

So focusing on fostering seems like one promising approach.  Some old narratives of scientific discovery and high achievement  tended to liken discovery to a battle between two competing forces, a kind of assault of the intellect on the hidden aspects of Nature embodied in “ignorance”.  But, perhaps, the war is part of the problem, part of what occasionally misdirects our discovery aspirations and saps our limited resources.

Perhaps another discovery paradigm might be more effective.  Just feed the white wolf of scientific discovery and discovery may become your companion more often than you think.