Spark Point

For a long time, I’ve been drawn to the idea of a “spark.”  I know where this began.  My long-time love and fascination with the Walt Disney World character Figment, as in “a figment of your imagination”.  Only in the Disney story, a man by the name of Dreamfinder makes Figment real.  More to the point, there is a song that used to play during the original iteration of the 1983-1998 ride in Walt Disney World, which I first saw at the age of 3 years old (and still remember it being love and adoration at first sight):

“We all have sparks, imaginations

That’s how our minds create creations

Right at the start of everything that’s new

One little spark lights up for you.”

(Lyrics from “One Little Spark”, Walt Disney World Ride “Journey Into Imagination”, Composed by the Sherman Brothers, Performed by Chuck McGann and Billy Barty)

The ride and song also featured something about electron beams (I got my Ph.D. in physics), the famous writer Edgar Allan Poe (I got an M.A. degree in creative writing), and even tap dancing (I remember tap dancing to the song “The Good Ship Lollipop” at around age 4 for a brief stint in dance lessons).  So, no doubt, I’m now living the Figment dream, albeit with a little bit of Freud thrown in (I got a B.S. in Psychology too—you can never have too many sparks).

But what stuck most was the word “spark” and it resonated even louder as I was reading the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on scientific discovery about the moment of discovery conception where the authors have a “happy thought” or the “Eureka” moment.  For me it is the “spark point”, when you become aware of the presence of an idea or option which then goes on to become a bona fide discovery.  So what are these spark points?  And can discovery be cultivated by fostering these spark points?

Good questions to craft into scientific hypotheses for testing, maybe in cognitive psychology.  But strictly speaking my own current work remains hypotheses in physics.  So I will have to approach this more as a matter of trial and error, unless I can find a discovery-friendly adventuresome collaborator from another field who might want to investigate the issue, or happily find a body of research has been done that, as of this writing, I just haven’t read yet.  Until then, I will make a sort of ramshackle working hypothesis to guide my trial and error in that direction.

What then is a spark point?  The one-line phrase that pops in to my mind is “an unseen cluster in the network of the mind.”

It’s as if a discovery path were a bridge leading from the known to the unknown.  The bridge exists, always there, but the trick is to find it.  Perhaps there are in fact many roads that lead to this bridge, either directly or indirectly, but even though you may take and re-trace a route you might not happen upon the bridge.  Or upon seeing the bridge you might not recognize it as a route to somewhere new.  So here lie all these links and the route to discovery, but it goes unrecognized.  It’s a key intersection, a crossroads, hiding in plain sight.

It’s similar to the mind perhaps.  We have neural connections linking to the key point from which a discovery idea could be made.  In fact, we re-use and add on to these neural connections with new learning, associations, and experiences daily.  But we don’t see that they are forming a cluster around a key point, a spark point, which provides the neural bridge between known and unknown.  It’s as if the discovery just sits there on a quiet neural pathway that never lights up because it never gets ignited by a spark.

I think maybe discovery strategies help by uncovering these spark points or allowing us to build up connections to them by re-visioning what is known.  Discovery strategies and approaches make the search active, dynamic, explicit, and unfamiliar, causing us to pay attention to what otherwise might go unnoticed.

In my personal experience these spark points often feel like they “resonate” somehow with one’s thinking, because the connections are there, even if as yet unnoticed, in the network of the mind.  The trick would be to lay down new roads through experience or shine a new light on old roads.  A good part of a discovery process search will look for ways to illuminate these hidden clusters and learn how to cultivate them.  This is an area I will definitely have to investigate more deeply.  For indeed, where there’s spark, there’s fire.