Ideas Take Flight Through Other People, Not Solitary Thought

There is more than one way to approach planning. Here I’ll just write about my own personal stance.

First, accumulating knowledge is essential for anything. This is the “quietly alone” part.

Ideas are, in the end, just an association game. Most ideas are nothing more than applications of analogy (similarity). The image of a sprout popping up out of nowhere is simply wrong. The seeds have to be planted properly beforehand. This work is plodding, and you never know when the sprout will appear. But it’s the base for everything. If you’re someone who says “even when I’m told to come up with ideas, nothing comes to mind at all,” this phase probably isn’t sufficient for you yet. Take proper time and study first.

Once this phase has been cleared to some extent, when it comes to actually letting your thinking leap and take flight, I overwhelmingly recommend engaging with other people.

We are not Buddha, so we can’t expect some ultra-mystical enlightenment to strike us suddenly through long periods of meditation. What you normally need is to connect the synapses between the knowledge nodes mentioned earlier, and what helps with that is other people’s “something.” That “something” can be a remark, an action, a failure. All kinds of things fit here. This doesn’t mean “a team brainstorm is the way to go.” Casual chats while standing around, drinking parties, exchanges on LINE — anything works. What a single person experiences alone is limited at best.

Neuroscience has already clarified the brain action called “intuition.” Intuition is said to develop more readily in women’s brains, and the reason given is that “there is a large difference between men and women in the brain’s reaction when listening to other people’s experiences.” Men listen to other people’s stories as linguistically organized “facts,” while women listen to other people’s experiences as if they were their own experiences. As a result, “intuition” — a “synaptic circuit based on experience” — gets sufficiently trained. In other words, intuition is a well-trained neural circuit, clearly different from a haphazard hunch.

For example, when you hear about developing AI for something like image recognition, you probably picture rows and rows of supercomputers or cloud systems filling a wide floor. But the actual image recognition function itself runs on a smartphone, or these days even inside a tiny piece of silicon (an IC). That’s because while the pattern-learning process requires large resources (like the supercomputers just mentioned), once the learning is sufficiently done and the result is abstracted and implemented at a practical level, the processing turns out not to be a big deal in terms of size — it fits into an IC. Intuition is an extremely rational act: conserving brain resources for responding to fixed patterns. And what feeds it are other people’s experiences and things that happen around you. Actively taking those in, training an honest and excellent intuitive ability, and looking forward to the moment when your original knowledge gets reintegrated — that is the basic stance for planning. Nothing comes out of just clinging to your desk and surfing the net.

If anything, if you have that kind of spare time, call up a friend you haven’t seen in a while and go out for a meal instead. You’ll gain a new synaptic connection.

Originally published in Japanese at https://clazytech.com/2021/08/476/. Translated with LLM assistance and reviewed before publication.