In last week’s session we thought about ideas.
Where do my ideas come from?
From my lived experience; my past, my present, my interactions with the world and the people in it, a moment in time, what I read, hear, see, feel, smell and taste.
What do they look like?
A network or web where they interconnect, or wait to be connected.
What kind of a web is it?
A spider’s web. Some ideas are fleeting and wispy and drift away, whilst others are more robust and have some form.
Other’s ideas are like seeds which grow over time (akin to Bateson’s ecology of the mind in which, like organisms, ideas grow and flourish whilst others become extinct) which need to be cared for and nurtured, or a breeze or mist, pre-existing ideas waiting to be received.
Maybe the source of the idea depends on what interests you at any point in time. I’m interested in my experience of living in the world, and so I don’t think that my ideas pre-exist because they are bespoke to my unique lived experience. Often they are triggered by something, a reaction to something, and so they don’t often come to me out of the blue. They are a combination of everything and anything, but at their very basic I believe that they are a matter of neuroscience; the complex neural interactions between knowledge, memory, emotions, and experience, all being broken down and continuously recombined in infinitesimal permutations, consciously and subconsciously in dreams, flow states, and acts of automatism.
Just because they are bespoke to me doesn’t necessarily mean that they are original. Gompertz doesn’t think that originality in a completely pure form actually exists and that all ideas are additional links in an existing chain (Part One: Think Like An Artist). There are numerous quotes from creatives who have built on the ideas of others: Newton and the shoulders of giants; Jobs and stealing great ideas; Twain who said that all ideas are secondhand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources.
We then considered Brian Eno’s concept of the ‘scenius’ (a creative co-operative of intelligence) and the articulation of the ideas of the scenius by an individual who is then held up by society as being a genius. On reflection, I think that he is right to the extent that the genius is just the tip of the scenius iceberg, but that both should be equally celebrated, and the attribution of the idea should be shared. It’s not enough to have an idea – it needs to be acted upon and often this involves elements of risk, courage and persistence.
Undoubtedly, collective recognition encourages greater sharing of ideas and increased creativity. In this respect, the existence of a scientific scenius goes some way to explaining why two different people can come up with same idea at the same time eg Bell and Gray, who both came up with same idea of the telephone. But, the idea didn’t come from nowhere – the circumstances at the time were demanding a solution to an existing problem, and the latest scientific developments and knowledge in the field, which were needed to devise the solution, were already widely known and shared amongst the scientific community, to the extent that Gray and Bell had detailed knowledge of each other’s work. So really, it was just a matter of time before someone came up with it. Maybe to that extent, it could be said that the idea was in the ether waiting to be received by someone who was attuned and had the requisite knowledge to implement it.
Kate McCalmont-Woods 