Point of Origin
On the influence of tracking the evolution of your ideas on the pace of discovery.
Have you ever moved, or had a big change in your situation, and when you started sorting through everything you wondered why you kept it all?
I have been looking through all the handwritten paper notes I scanned just before I left England (…more than 1,476 sheets of notes!…).
They are red, purple, and green block notes. Mysterious half-sentences jotted down in equally bright felt tip pen.
They are small Moleskine pages stained with decaf coconut flat whites. Coffees bought at the chain Pret a Manger for my morning tram ride to work in England.
And they are neatly laid out calculations on blank pages. Carefully crafted while sitting at my temporary desk. Each time anxiously listening for the buzz of wasps through the open window in high summer in a building with no air conditioning.
Why did I keep them all?
Because I believe in the value of tracking the evolution of your ideas.
I think it can emphasize when you are harping on the same old theme. It can point out when you have failed to try something different. And it can highlight when you have made progress over the course of time.
All of this evidence can speed up the pace at which you gain new insights, and hence the pace of discovery.
Tracking ideas can also remind you of the reality of how you actually arrived at some inflection point in your progress.
And it can pinpoint when you suddenly veered into promising territory. (In the lean innovation and startup world, this same concept is called a pivot point in product development.)
In principle, tracking the evolution of your ideas speeds up discovery because we have bad memories
We have very selective memories.
I won’t quote a bunch of psychology literature here since most of us will recognize from experience the existence of the following ideas.
How many times have you argued with a family member or colleague about something they say they don’t remember happening?
Psychologically we do have selective memories, a result of “selective attention”. We only retain some things as important enough to remember and other things we ignore.
Have you ever debated with a family member or colleague and they loop back to the same argument?
Sometimes, no matter how many times you state your case from a different angle, they keep coming back to the same point. A point you think you’ve already rationally and calmly explained to them is no good.
Our brains do literally have a thinking pattern, called “einstellung”, in which they get stuck on a particular loop that is more accessible in our memory. Our brain can’t get past that idea to try other solutions or take other lines of thought.
Another trick our mind plays on us is to engage in something called “sunk cost bias”.
This is the belief that items we have invested our personal time and money in are more valuable than they actually are.
So once you’ve latched on to a particular train of thought (or your colleague with the “crazy theory” has) the more time you spend on it, the more convinced you’ll be that it’s valuable.
(Unfortunately, we also have a mental predisposition to believe that more complex theories are more likely to be true than simpler ones).
The point is, our minds are not perfect repositories and mirrors.
Our memories don’t capture in exact detail everything that happens to us.
And our minds can’t reflect back to us precisely what need, when we try to recall a set of events or information.
But science is full of discoveries that were driven by personal events and private internal themes.
These themes kept driving the discoverer to make certain idiosyncratic and, it turns out, progressive choices at different points along their path. (To see an example of this at work in someone other than our beloved Albert Einstein, see the link on the discovery of high-temperature superconductivity in American Scientist below).
In some cases, these discoverers were aware of these themes in their choices, but at other times they were not.
So imagine how powerful it would be if you could see these themes, as they play out.
Powerful why?
Because being able to see the evolution of your ideas and themes would give you the ability to change themes at will. It would also allow you to recognize nontraditional inputs, linked to the theme, that might also push you toward discovery.
Hoping to recognize your evolution and thematic drivers by chance is bound to be slower, a sort of random walk. In contrast, doing so with intent is an efficiency-driven algorithm.
Being holistic, tracking the evolution of ideas mobilizes and harmonizes environmental forces to speed up discovery
Not only would knowing your own intellectual history and ancestry help you make discoveries faster, but a realistic picture of how discoveries are made would enable powerful social forces to come into play.
At the level of policy, having a clear awareness of what it takes to make a discovery would allow more supportive policy making decisions. This means knowing how long, by what actual means, with exposure to what themes and ideas, and according to what personal choices a discovery was made.
At the group or organizational level, having an honest and holistic understanding of the scientific discovery process allows a group to better synchronize with discovery goals. It may highlight when bringing in a new person, a new department, or a new topical theme is useful. Or it can elucidate when new resources or more time are best given to the team already present to incubate discovery.
In practice, tracking the evolution of your ideas can be achieved through two activities
On a practical level, tracking the evolution of your thoughts requires two different mindsets to be at play (though not at the same time) as you move through your investigation process.
Let’s call them the “logging mind” and the “reflecting mind”.
(In the study of learning, related concepts are the “focused mind” and the “diffuse mode mind”, respectively).
These two mindsets naturally lead to two sets of activities to engage in during the investigation process, when you’re trying to track your intellectual heritage.
The first activity uses the logging mind and is where you record your exposure to various ideas, themes, individuals, sources, and activities.
I have alternately logged these things on sticky notes, in notetaking apps on my phone, in spiral notebooks, and on block notes, over the years.
In the last two years I have started to record, along with a one-sentence reference to each item, one of two additional tags added to the item.
Take for example the cryptic block note, “Network Analysis”.
The first tag might be a place, such as “Chicago conference on CEvNS”. (Or tags might be simpler like “Nashville, TN” or “Schipol Airport”).
The second tag might be a date such as “F.11.22.2018”. (The “F” stands for Friday. I use M, T, W, R, F, S, and U for the days of the week).
I find the combination of these two tags and a note allow me to bring up in my memory, by association, what I was doing, how I came in contact with the item, and why it struck me as important.
(Sometimes I can rely on just the date tag, if it’s memorable enough. For example, around the date I moved U.S. states or countries, birthdays, holidays, and very sad family events stick with me.)
This associative thinking mode is actually much more reliable than a chronological one.
Research has shown that our minds are especially good at recalling visual-spatial information—such as places. (This is famously used in the “memory palace” or “method of loci” technique by world champion memory athletes).
So for the conference tag example above, upon seeing the item, I might even be able to remember:
- where I was sitting (the lobby of the University of Chicago Physics Department building eating a Starbucks snack),
- what I was wearing (a much loved fuchsia and burgundy flannel shirt with a favorite pair of Italian Murano glass earrings),
- the internal conversation I was having (about using network analysis of publications on a scientific topic to inform community white papers and roadmap documents), and
- what had just happened that made me jot down the note (interviewed researcher Andrey Rzhetsky about an article he co-authored using network analysis to track the efficiency of group discovery in science).
The second activity uses the reflecting mind and is where you record your reactions and responses to the investigation process and the items recorded in the logging mind activity.
For example, keeping a research journal and “freewriting” about what you are thinking at regular intervals can work. Just be sure to include personal details, such as what is going on in your life and environment. And note your personal reactions towards events and evidence (a “reflecting mind” activity).
You’ve also seen how piecing together a train of thought, which is what you do with the “reflecting mind”, can lead you to an awareness of what is affecting your work and what themes are driving your process.
For example, I shared with you the Netflix-driven incidents that honed my working definition of scientific discovery in another post (“Don’t Curate the Data”, see link below).
That train of thought came to me after reading a bunch of philosophy literature.
Feeling dissatisfied with what I had read, I found myself unable to purge the language and ideas others had used and move in a different direction.
To get past this kind of einstellung, I made a lateral move. Instead of reading more I watched TV.
I browsed according to what themes called to me—craftsmanship, a sense of honor, nobility, care, handcraft, and diligence—and which I felt defined the spirit of scientific discovery.
These new spark points were not enough for an operational definition testable in the lab, but they were enough to guide me toward different themes.
I was very diligent about capturing my thoughts on block notes at the time. So, I was able to recognize the old themes that were causing me dissatisfaction—categorization, thought, chronology—and consciously turn toward new themes that I wanted to include—quantitative, applied, craftsmanship.
Then I actively based my new efforts on that mental shift.
Within two weeks I had generated my own new definition of scientific discovery that I have not come across elsewhere in the literature, after six months of trying to come up with something new. (And I am working on putting together historical case studies that illustrate the merits and shortcomings of this definition, for publication in a peer-reviewed journal).
But without being able to look at my point of origin, even if only at one turn in my path, I would not have been able to consciously make this mental shift.
This kind of clear-sighted awareness and finesse is what more discoverers need to help them make smart choices and shift their thinking when the situation calls for it.
By analogy, tracking the evolution of your ideas is making visible an invisible maze
I have seen many versions of how to track the evolution of your ideas.
I’m still working on finding my own best way, which supports my intention of becoming a Maestra of scientific discovery and the scientific discovery process.
Sometimes trying to find our way toward a discovery feels like an invisible maze where we encounter many dead ends, or end up right back where we started.
By keeping a record of our thoughts and influences we make the maze visible.
And we give ourselves an aerial view of our point of origin and the paths we have traced out in our minds and with our actions.
Knowing your point of origin and where your thoughts have wandered can help speed you toward undiscovered territory, by showing you the paths less travelled.
Interesting Stuff Related to This Post
- Gerald Holton, Hasok Chang, and Edward Jurkowitz, “How a Scientific Discovery Is Made: A Case History”, American Scientist, volume 84, July to August, pages 364-375 (1996), freely available on Researchgate from one of the co-authors at https://www.researchgate.net/publication/252275778_How_a_Scientific_Discovery_Is_Made_A_Case_History.
- Daphne Gray-Grant, “Why you should consider keeping a research diary”, Publication Coach, October 23 (2018), https://www.publicationcoach.com/research-diary/.
- Memory palace technique at the Memory Techniques Wiki, “How to Build a Memory Palace”, https://artofmemory.com/wiki/How_to_Build_a_Memory_Palace.
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How to cite this post in a reference list:
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Point of Origin: On the influence of tracking your ideas on the pace of discovery”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, November 29, 2019, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2019/point-of-origin.
[Page feature photo: An aerial view of the maze at Glendurgan gardens, built in 1833, in Cornwall, United Kingdom. Photo by Benjamin Elliott on Unsplash.]