A plethora of Ideas

Humanity’s most remarkable achievements can usually be traced back to moments of epiphany by individuals throughout history.

Whether it’s Newton contemplating a fallen apple in a garden and coming up with his famous laws of motion and gravity, making inventions like Cars, Airplanes, Satellites and more possible,

Or Archimedes discovering the buoyancy principle from an activity as simple as taking a bath, making the entire field of fluid dynamics a thing today,

Or Alexander Graham Bell working in his lab to invent the telephone, without which, you wouldn’t be reading this article, and the earth would probably still be a bunch of warring tribes and nations. 🤔

With these in mind,

Where do the best ideas come from?

One common feature of these stories that the creators were alone when they had these amazing ideas.

They paint a picture of a serene environment, structured in such as way as to make it possible for Man’s idea factory to function at optimal capacity.

However, in reality, few good ideas are born that way.

Humans are social creatures, so we interact with each other a lot, and share our knowledge. From these interactions, we find ideas are born.

How do we know this?

We’re about to go Geek!

Kevin Dubar once conducted a research where he actually went around filming microbiologists in a Lab as they went about their work. They’d have meetings to discuss ideas, and attempt to come up with innovations.

In a few of these meetings, the Labs had remarkable breakthroughs because of analogies pointed out by its members, and suggestions by other members about these, opening up new discoveries in the minds of the scientists.

In one of the Labs, there were no breakthroughs while Dunbar was with them, and he discovered that in this case, no analogies were used in the meeting, and the members of the team were all from the same specialized background and had developed a shared precise technical language for communication.

What we think?

In other words, the best teams for making discoveries during brainstorming sessions are the diverse teams.

Why is that?

This is because our ideas are actually neurons firing in our brain in new, undiscovered patterns.

When the human experience becomes a routine, our brains settle into a familiar pattern and it becomes difficult to make new discoveries.

So what about the others?

How about Newton and Archimedes? How did they manage to have Eureka moments while working alone?

We believe this is as a result of something we at Repools like to call the “no-time complexity”.

The No-Time Complexity

You see, humans like to summarize their stories of innovation into simpler time frames. It’s a bit difficult to start piecing together the details of the tiny ideas that bombard our minds to later form our grand innovation ideas, so we chalk it up to, “well, I was just about take a dump when it hit me that blackholes are like toilet pipes”.

The famous Charles Darwin is a fantastic example of this.

Charles Darwin tells a story about coming up with the idea for natural selection in October of 1838, while reading Malthus on population when the idea popped into his head. It’s in his autobiography.

However, a wonderful scholar, Howard Gruber looked at Darwin’s books during this period and saw that Darwin did have the full theory of natural selection for months before he had his alleged epiphany.

It was evident that Darwin had the theory at the back of his mind, it influenced his writing, but he just didn’t realize it yet.

So Newton, may have had the idea for his laws about the motion of objects long before that apple fell, and Archimedes may have had ideas about his famous principle long before he got in that tub.

So, what does it all mean?

Brainstorming is an efficient problem-solving technique employed by individuals and organizations all over the world. An easy way to improve the efficiency of your brainstorming sessions is to add diversity.

Diversity helps to bring analogies from outside the field of study, helping to trigger ideas that would otherwise have been unattainable.

One more story,

In Chemistry, the story of Friedrich Kekule, discovering the ring-like structure for Benzene after dreaming about a Serpent biting its own tail is famous among Chemists.

Kekule had been trying to figure out the structure for Benzene for a while, before he had the dream.

The interesting part is that a snake eating its own tail is a popular symbol in Alchemy called the “Ouroboros”. Of course, alchemy is dead, but if Kekule had an Alchemist with him in his lab and had done some brain storming, he’d probably have figured out the structure sooner.

So, what should we do?

At Repools, our mission is to build unconventional communities that help people connect and live better lives.

So, armed with this new information, we’ll be shaking things up a bit!

We’ll be going out more, sharing a lot more of our thoughts with you, listening to what you have to say.

We hope we’ll discover new things together!

The End!