On the one hand, attention and effort are required, but on the other hand, the best ideas seem to sneak up from the sides when I’m not directly focussing on the issue, but playing around with unrelated topics, metaphors, or just thinking about something else. I love the idea of ‘de-focussed attention’, for me it perfectly captures the weirdly paradoxical nature of ideas generation.
At the same time, “the medial prefrontal cortex, which is responsible to learn association, context, events and emotional responses was extremely active”. They found that improvisation shows lower activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which controls ‘executive functions’, “allow more natural de-focussed attention and uncensored processes to occur ”. He quotes a study by Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu, who tracked the brain activity of rappers free-styling. Leo Widrich’s blogpost, Why We Have Our Best Ideas in the Shower: The Science of Creativity, offers a handy summary of some of the more recent thinking on the subject. Scientific research has made some interesting progress in understanding the neurological processes involved in ideas generation. To quote the late, great Leonard Cohen, “if I knew where the good songs came from, I’d go there more often”. “Known unknowns” comes to mind whenever I think about where ideas come from – I know they come from somewhere (and I’m pretty sure it isn’t an isolated cave in a forgotten corner of Iraq) but exactly where remains a mystery. Of experience.As a rule of thumb, I tend to steer clear of quoting US Republican warmongers, but I’ll make an exception for Donald Rumsfeld’s wonderful “known unknowns”, a slippery phrase introduced to the world during a news briefing back in 2002 when the then Secretary of Defence attempted to explain the lack of public evidence linking Baghdad with terrorist networks. The can-no-longer-remembers, the slow impeachment The irregularities of memory, the unknown knowns, She dreamsĪ language which cannot trouble her, a vocabulary The stars madden, and satellites hum silently This from "In Sleep", in William Logan's Sad-faced Men (1982).
We all "know" a lot more about the principles governing correct usage of our mother tongue than we're conciously aware of. But I suggest that we have a particularly good example close to home here at EL&U. You don't often hear the combination he didn't say – unknown knowns – because we find that one hardest to conceptualise. To avoid misunderstandings about any of the three combinations he actually used, Rumsfeld defined each one very succinctly immediately after saying it. Some people were keen to mock Rumsfeld's words, but they really are simple and easy to grasp.
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