Where do my ideas come from?

I thought I would do an empirical study on this topic. Where did my ideas come from in my answer?

Having read the topic, I firmly hid it in the back of my mind for Little Bob to work on. Then I engaged in many and varied essential activities, such as political campaigning, answering a cry of despair, interacting with a lovely bunch of people who are advising me on where Doom Healer major character Renata Baumgartner can do her pole vaulting, doing more than usual of house work while my dear wife is all too slowly recovering from open heart surgery, and, um, playing chess and other games on my computer.

Little Bob reminded me of how memory is organised. It is not like a recording, but a network of nodes. Each node has an address, and consists of nothing but a list of the addresses of other nodes. And way back when I was a student, George Miller was famous for “the magic number 7 plus or minus 2:” our consciousness can hold a very small number of chunks of information. At the time, I bragged that I had no trouble with 12, but today I need to strain to look at a phone number then dial it from immediate memory, and that’s only 10.

So, OK, we have half a dozen entry points into this complex network of information. You get interesting results when this brings together two or more nodes not usually connected to each other. Here are a few results:

Groucho Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it is too dark to read.”

J. F. Kennedy: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” and “Let both sides unite to heed, in all corners of the earth.” (We need both of these, more than ever.)

Oscar Wilde going through customs: “I have nothing to declare but my genius.”

Ogden Nash: “Candy is dandy but liqueur is quicker.” (He would be booed for this today!)

Confucius: “Anger is burning the bridge you need to cross.”

George Bernard Shaw in conversation with a woman who propositioned him so they could “make a baby with my beauty and your brains:” “Madam, but what if the child has my beauty and your brains?”

Bob Rich: “Hydro = water, so hydrogen is ‘water maker.’ Does that mean oxygen is ox maker and nitrogen nit maker?”

So, when a bit of writing makes you think, or makes you laugh, or, as with the last one, makes you groan, it is because the connections in the author’s inner network go to places that are new to you.

Fiction or nonfiction, to be worthwhile, this is what good writing is about. Same old, same old leaves the reader cold.

That’s all you’ll get from me. If you want a sensible answer, check out what connections the nodes in my fellow blog-hoppers have come up with.
Connie Vines
Diane Bator
Anne Stenhouse
Helena Fairfax
Judith Copek
Skye Taylor