The Science of Ideas

Ironically I struggled to come up with any ideas about this post. How do ideas arise? What can we do to improve them? Should we even try?

The science of ideas actually has a name, dreamt up with language and letters – two lovely ideas in themselves – and is called Ideonomy. Ideas are crucial to life, to us humans and the advancement of science – not just writing. You have to dream up a hypothesis before you can prove it. Luckily for us most of the important ideas (you would have thought) have already been thought of. Science is knowledge and knowledge needs ideas. How have we thought of these ideas – with our brains? Yes. That seems to be the general consensus.

I am sure people could go into MRI machines and try and come up with ideas, or work out how it all works and how to do it better - but people must do it individually, differently and especially under scrutiny. I think the harder you try the less likely the possibility is that you will come up with an idea. Hence the ‘staring at the screen’ conundrum that writers have when trying to come up with ideas for their books.

Can you use technology to improve numbers and qualities of ideas? There are many drugs around and probably the most useful in this field are the illegal ones – ones that the Beatles and other artists/musicians/writers have used to some success.

Dopamine is a chemical messenger that carries signals between brain cells. If this is elevated, you become more relaxed and as a result you are more likely to think of an idea; and as this comes from the creative right hand side of the brain those who can free up their left hand (right-handed people being of advantage here) can help your creative right side of the brain. So if you had a more developed right side of the brain would this be good for writing? Maybe not completely – the left is good at putting things in words - so basically you need the whole of your brain to write. Don’t therefore go out and chop get a half-brain transplant.

To better come up with ideas you are supposed to read about other people coming up with ideas therefore coming up with the same or similar ideas. This is not the ideal way of doing things for creative aspects (!), but apparently there is no thing nowadays as an original idea, for there have been so many things already thought of.

Practice is probably a good idea, because practice makes perfect. This is of course not true, because no-one is absolutely perfect in the things they practice in. In fact the person who came up with the idea of perfection, was probably a little too much of an optimist. It’s a nice word though.

Will computers ever do this job for us as well as everything else – and make us all redundant creatures, sipping pina coladas? An artificial intelligence, a science used to invest machines with mind and reason could automate idea formation. Will robots eventually write books? (Apparently even monkeys can.) And will they be better than Harry Potter?