Humans have seen an amazing progression of ideas from basic survival skills to getting a handle on how the universe began and might end and a great richness in between. We do this with a brain that hasn't changed much in the past fifty thousand years. How do we do it?
Here's a quick summary of some work at Carnegie Mellon University that used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging as a probe to see how physicists organized conceptual properties. fMRI is a rather blunt tool, but it was able to show how the brain organized the measurable and immeasurable.
Another striking finding was the large degree of commonality across physicists in how their brains represented the concepts. Even though the physicists were trained in different universities, languages and cultures, there was a similarity in brain representations. This commonality in conceptual representations arises because the brain system that automatically comes into play for processing a given type of information is the one that is inherently best suited to that processing. As an analogy, consider that the parts of one's body that come into play to perform a given task are the best suited ones: to catch a tennis ball, a closing hand automatically comes into play, rather than a pair or knees or a mouth or an armpit. Similarly, when physicists are processing information about oscillation, the brain system that comes into play is the one that would normally process rhythmic events, such as dance movements or ripples in a pond. And that is the source of the commonality across people. It is the same brain regions in everyone that are recruited to process a given concept.
There are a much broader range of deep concepts in physics that may well have separate organizations, but the technique here is very coarse. They undoubtedly exist in many other occupations and one has to wonder how the mind of someone with a wide range of interests can dance around and play with different structures.
Creative organizations need have internal access to a range of thinking modes and backgrounds. Like many others I have imposter syndrome when I'm listening to someone with deep experience in a different area. Their mind has a great fluidity that you don't have became you lack the background and neural organization. Breaking through this requires communicating at the appropriate level. It's difficult if you don't know the other people. One usually thinks of conventional academic subjects, but it's probably more general. I find it amazing that some soccer or beach volleyball players create a mental map of the position, velocity, and acceleration of the other players including those they can't see and can bounce this off other information and communicate it to their teammate(s). But great players run into the same problem as academic experts. Finding the right level is difficult. Great players rarely make great coaches.
Some organizations have worked out how to do this, but others tend towards narrow depth. If they appear to cover a broad range from the outside, inside they often are an array of poorly networked silos of local expertise. Fortunately there seems to be a growing resistance to siloing. And that brings me to a special kind of person.
Every now and again you come across a human impedance matches. An impedance match is a bit of circuitry that allows as much of the signal as possible to go from sender to receiver (an over-simplification, but ...) These people can sit between people with very different backgrounds or thought processes, often more than two, and make sure the signal gets through. It astonishes me to see these people in action.
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Posted by: Jean | 10/13/2021 at 05:02 PM