Watch the bird make a nest. It's fascinating. Look at the spider, spinning a web. You are charmed. You have one question:

How does it know to DO that?

The answer will tell you the difference between humans and such things as birds and spiders. Because it isn't what you think.

Birds and spiders have those patterns on their hard drives. It's a program upgrade. What they don't have is a Paint program where they design nests or webs. They aren't drawing blueprints. Drawing blueprints is what humans do. Well, smart humans, anyway.

What am I talking about? I'm talking about what makes us different. It's not language, or laughter. It's our ability to think hypothetically.

In other words, we can ignore the current reality and imagine a different one. One that has a nest in it, or a spider web. Or a 42-storey neo-gothic building.

Some men see things as they are and ask, 'Why?' I dream things that never were and ask, 'Why not?'

Robert Kennedy

You want to build a birdhouse. Or draw a picture. Or write a song. You see it 'in your head' before you start to do it. Then you pick up your tools. In fact, before you had those tools – a pencil, a ruler, a blank piece of music paper – somebody just like you had first to visualise that tool. And then make it. We are a tool-making species. But before that, we are a visualising species. We dream things that never were, and ask, 'Why not?'

They say Nicola Tesla was so good at what he did because he could build a machine in his mind, let it run for hundreds of repetitions, and see where it broke down. Then he'd fix it, before he ever put any pieces together. That's visualisation, persistence, and genius.

We tell ourselves stories as a form of thought experiment. Working out the plots and figuring out the 'morals' helps us understand the world better.

I stand at the window of a railway carriage which is travelling uniformly, and drop a stone on the embankment, without throwing it. Then, disregarding the influence of the air resistance, I see the stone descend in a straight line. A pedestrian who observes the misdeed from the footpath notices that the stone falls to earth in a parabolic curve. I now ask: Do the 'positions' traversed by the stone lie 'in reality' on a straight line or on a parabola? Moreover, what is meant here by motion 'in space'?

Albert Einstein, Relativity: The Special and the General Theory

It can even help you work out theoretical physics.

By the way, the moral of this story is that if you want to violate the Verhaltensvorschriften of the Swiss railway, you'd better be a world-famous theoretical physicist.

Visualisation is our secret weapon. We make pictures in our heads, try things out. Then, hopefully, we act on them. We think, 'How would it be if I rearranged reality this way?'

Don't do like Konrad Lorenz, though. This is a true story. At least, the professor I talked to at a wine-and-cheese reception at the University of Munich swore up and down that it was, and she knew the man personally. According to her, Lorenz was the Urtyp (very model) of the absent-minded professor.

One day, the great animal behaviourist was due to receive the Chief Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) of Munich and some other officials (hohe Tiere, or 'high animals') in his well-appointed office at the research institute, so that they could give him a medal or some such. Unfortunately, they got held up in traffic on the way out to Starnberg. This left Lorenz in his office, all dressed up for the occasion, but with nothing to do. And the devil finds work for idle ethologists. He studied his fish tank – a large, splendid setup for observing fish behaviour. He thought of improvements. What if I rearrange this, and put up a barrier here…? Of course, he'd need to get into the tank.

He remembered not to get his nice suit wet. His secretary would fuss…

Thus it was that, when the delegation arrived, they were shown directly into the great man's office…and found, to their surprise…Professor Dr Dr h.c. mult. Konrad Lorenz, stark naked, in a very large fish tank, moving rocks around.

That's the best nerd story I know.

Notice: when you read that story, you got a picture in your head. The picture's even better if you have seen his beard. That 'picture in the head' is worth a lot more than a thousand words.

Let me be clear: the 'pictures in our heads' aren't necessarily images. They could be sounds. Or sensory impressions. Or olfactory sensations. Or ideas, any way you perceive and store them. We all work our virtual magic in different ways. (I have a sense of space/time that's kind of weird.) Not everyone's a photographer, just as not everyone's a musician. But we all have some way to hypothesise virtual mental concepts. And that's a special gift. It makes everything else possible.

Dmitri Gheorgheni

21.09.20 Front Page

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