Your mind is a web.
A spherical web with threads in infinite directions. And each thread is a path that we may navigate. A thread for mathematics, a thread for music – a thread for each and everything we know. We spin new threads when we learn a new topic, but most times we follow an existing one, learning more and more as we travel along its path.
You have the ability to jump threads, if you wish. This is best represented by our ability to talk or think on one topic, and then completely leap to another, and another, and so on. You can jump between threads, and, sometimes, you walk along with a leg on two or more (an easy feat for someone with eight legs). We could walk on, say… a thread of philosophy, and a thread of neuroscience – neuroethics. A thread of music, and a thread of theatre – musical theatre. I’m sure you can come up with examples of your own.
Along these threads, you have nodes. The further you travel along a thread, the more nodes you acquire. These nodes are ‘save points’, or hubs for the information you have collected along the way.
Have you ever noticed when you begin learning something new, that progress is often quite fast in the beginning, but then it gradually slows done as you improve? In the early stages of learning something new you’ll have many nodes quite close together, and once you have progressed and improved, they will become few and far between.
Dependant on which threads you extend, and the amount of nodes you accrue along the way, is the amount of your entire knowledge and experience of that topic.
Creativity is your ability to quickly jump between the nodes of different threads, making connections and linking different threads of knowledge and experience to create meaning, observe similarities, or spot differences. Points of intersection which give rise to new ideas, new ways of approaching things – new-thought. Creativity is a skill that needs to be worked on and practiced, and when we get stuck in the same environments, the same situations, and the same routines, we are travelling down the same paths repeatedly leaving our creativity unexercised.
Our 9-5, consumerist system does not just stop us from thinking creatively, freely, because we’re so busy, eagerly working to consume and repeat the cycle, but because our spider is stuck, working the same threads day in and day out, rigid in its own non-physical routines.
The effects of this on our creativity over long periods of time are almost permanent – our creative muscle is becoming weaker and weaker and we don’t even realise. Perhaps we won’t even realise when it disappears entirely. Open your mind by navigating your web creatively.
Your brain is its spider.
Thoughts For Tomorrow 