Dream Dots
What do you see?
A cross? A sword? A face? Or did you consider…
Is there something to see?
Our brains are hard-wired into finding shapes in smoke, faces in clouds. Bunny on the moon. Faces on the wall. Pareidolia is the name for this human tendency to see patterns where none exist. The itch to connect dots. Did you take a moment to consider if the dots were just dots?
For our ancestors, there was a benefit to the inherent paranoia of seeing faces everywhere. Detecting predators and other threats at a glance was critical. And the drawbacks of a false positive (“Oops! It wasn’t a lion after all, sorry guys.”) were trifling, compared to a false negative (“Wha-”). Exception being the boy who cried wolf. Outlier.
But we have a more innate need to connect dots. Finding meaning in the dots of our life. Making out our life-story to be a sort-of linear trajectory.
Never mind the under-fitting of the data-dots.
One way or another. When real life really is…
???
Over-fitting? Over-thinking?
Our lives certainly have minds of their own. And our minds have dots of their own. Ideas. Thoughts. Connecting these dots is the essence of creativity. Our thoughts meander from dot to dot. Sometimes two such dots spark up a connection:
Human + Spider →Spiderman
The more far-away the dots are, the more eccentric the connection.
Vacuum cleaner + Happiness → Dementor!
When our minds are in a relaxed or “diffuse mode”, our thoughts meander freely. The mind dots seemingly “spread-out”, leaving more scope for new and unique connections to form. The likes of LIGO and the theory of relativity. Of course, to actually turn these into dreams to reality needs a “focussed mode”. Here the figurative mind-dots are more squeezed together, preventing the thoughts from sauntering. This gives the sort of productivity often attributed to deadline hysteria. In short, the “diffuse mode” lets your mind wander, go wild, and think out of the box. Then the “focussed mode” lets you get things done.
Salvador Dalí, the surrealist artist, was a known exploiter of these mind modes. He was known to lie down with a heavy key pressed between his fingers and held above a plate on the floor. He relaxed; his mind wandered into the lacuna between sleep and waking. This state allowed thoughts from his conscious state to float around and form into the dream-like (and borderline weird) shapes his art was known for. Examples here: Dalí’s artwork
Interesting use of sleep, which he otherwise considered a waste of time. But for these mind-boggling ideas to form, the dream-dots must first exist. The knowledge, the skill, and the passion to push these thoughts even into the unconscious state. And all the random meandering that must happen. The sleeping, and the waking. Time is the currency that buys genius.
My own mind, when it relaxes, makes all the dots vanish. In my “diffuse mode”, I like to do what our ancestors seem to have done best. Sit back and look at the stars…
My idea of dream dots. This one being - the Cygnus constellation. Do you see a swan?
See more of your compulsive face-finding tendency: Pareidolia
See and learn more of Dali, the artist: Salvador Dalí
More shapes to look for in the sky: 88 officially recognized constellations
This MOOC by Dr. Barbara Oakley teaches you how you can use the different learning modes of your brain effectively: Learning how to learn
