Out of the corner of my eye

Inspiration

Inspiration is when a spontaneous connection between two disparate facts or thoughts occurs.

After starting to read Koji Suzuki’s thought-provoking “The Loop” last night, then talking to J. about her dreams, I came up with a theory concerning inspiration.

Our minds, probably due to the n-connected nature of neural networks, are immensely capable of metaphorical, lexical and semantic association. We can look at an object and connect it quite logically (to us!) with a myriad of other things, whether they be concrete or abstract. This potential gives us a great capacity for expression through natural language and the arts. We need this very general connection-building potential to form relationships between different forms of sensory data; so that if somebody says a word, we can immediately connect it to something we have read, or even smelled. It is an important component of memory recall, and therefore the way we store memory (in computer science, we’d say we’re using lookup tables and metadata to help store the semantic structure of information).

How about sleep? Studies into sleep have found it has a role in memory processing, suggesting REM sleep is important for the consolidation of procedural and spacial memory, while slow-wave sleep is important for declarative memory. Although there is no direct evidence, Jie Zhang proposes that the function of sleep is to process, encode and transfer the data from temporary memory to long-term. This stream of data is consciously observed and interpreted, causing the cinema-show of dreams to flash past in microseconds.

My theory is that as this potentially massive stream of data is passed through our cognitive centre, we form new connections between the items of information. As the stream of data is not necessarily in order of relation (think of the random nature of dreams whereby seemingly unrelated events and people are joined together), these connections can form between concepts and events that would never normally be associated.

Daydreaming

The role of daydreaming in inspiration then becomes clear. When we daydream, we allow our minds to idle. A computer may store much of a program’s temporary data in a cache, held in its memory. There comes a time, however, when that data needs to be written to disk. Computers typically do not attempt to write back cache data to the disk while their human operators are attempting to perform some work; instead, they wait for idle periods.

When our minds idle, we once again give our minds time to perform some form of processing on our memories - to do some sorting and tidying. Occasionally, a connection is made between two disparate concepts that would never be made by logic alone. A flash of inspiration. My theory is not that this is the only source of inspiration, but that it is one possible source.