Do you remember being in school and having to draw brainstorming clouds? You know what I mean, right, where you start with one idea, and then you have to draw lines to other ideas that connect to that one, and more that connect to those, and try to get a "good, solid set of ideas for this paper/ project/ presentation/ whatever" that the teacher wanted you to work on?
Yeah, that. Want to know a secret? I hated those. Passionately. Not because I couldn't come up with ideas, oh no. I hated them for a couple reasons. For one, there was never enough space. If you give me a piece of paper the size of a parking lot, I might have enough space to fit in, say, three layers of concepts, but it would
be convoluted as all heck. For two, while it's easier now, I tend to not think in linear directions. Every word and concept has a 3D cloud around it with other words and concepts, and those in turn have their own 3D clouds, sometimes in multiple languages or fragments of languages... and trying to get all that on a flat, 2-dimensional piece of paper is hard.
The biggest reason why I hated those, however, was that I was always accused of making things up (hello, isn't that the point of brainstorming?). Language and I have an odd connection, and sometimes words are linked in my head just because the shape of the letters or the movements of your mouth when producing them are similar. So, for example, "polyglot" links to "frog" because "pollywog" is so close to the shape of the first word, but isn't used often, so gets bumped out by the more common name- frog. Sadly, I know an insane amount of archaic, obscure, dialectic and just bizarre words, so this sort of link is very common for me, and happens so fast that even I have to backtrack to figure out how I got to the final word. Since teachers weren't able to read my mind, they just accused me of making things up, or not focussing.
This has gotten me into trouble a couple times outside the classroom, too. One year, for example, I decided I wanted to go mini-golfing with my friends for my birthday party, and, since we were all middle-schoolers, my mother graciously nominated my father as our chaperone/ handler. Unfortunately for him, he had been out of town the week prior to my birthday, and the plane that was supposed to bring him back the day before (so he could be well-rested before dealing with a bunch of pre-teen girls) got delayed, rerouted, cancelled, rescheduled, rerouted again, and finally delivered him to our door roughly an hour before my party, having been awake for two days straight.
So my poor zombie father poured himself into the car, drove us to the mini-golf range, and propped himself up on his club, trying not to fall over. We, of course, were oblivious to anything other than the game, and proceeded to make our way along the course. About halfway through, there was a truly wonderful waterfall that you got to putt under, and upon reaching it, one of my friends noted that it was made of cement. For some utterly inexplicable reason, the word 'cement' started a chain of connections going in my head, and presented another word to my consciousness whose definition I couldn't quite recall. Being possessed of all the tact and grace of a blind moose on roller-skates, I turned around and yelled across the park to my father...
Oh yes, I did. And naturally, in the seconds between me shouting that across the golf course and my father gathering enough functional brain cells to realize that he was being addressed, the definition of said word leapt with blinding comprehension into my mind. As I stood frozen in a cloud of bright pink embarrassment and horror, willing the last few seconds not to have happened, my father finally focussed his bleary eyes on me and said... "Huh?"
Somehow, amazingly, neither my friends nor my father had registered what I said, and I was certainly not going to tell them what I'd done. For over 15 years, I kept that debacle to myself, and only recently did I relate my side of the story to my father. He may or may not have since regaled my mother with the tale- if so, I'm not sure I want to know her reaction. Suffice to say, however, that while I cannot stop my brain from making bizarre connections, I have at least learned when to shut my mouth, and not let other people know that things aren't lined up quite right in there. Cheers!
Yeah, that. Want to know a secret? I hated those. Passionately. Not because I couldn't come up with ideas, oh no. I hated them for a couple reasons. For one, there was never enough space. If you give me a piece of paper the size of a parking lot, I might have enough space to fit in, say, three layers of concepts, but it would
be convoluted as all heck. For two, while it's easier now, I tend to not think in linear directions. Every word and concept has a 3D cloud around it with other words and concepts, and those in turn have their own 3D clouds, sometimes in multiple languages or fragments of languages... and trying to get all that on a flat, 2-dimensional piece of paper is hard.
The biggest reason why I hated those, however, was that I was always accused of making things up (hello, isn't that the point of brainstorming?). Language and I have an odd connection, and sometimes words are linked in my head just because the shape of the letters or the movements of your mouth when producing them are similar. So, for example, "polyglot" links to "frog" because "pollywog" is so close to the shape of the first word, but isn't used often, so gets bumped out by the more common name- frog. Sadly, I know an insane amount of archaic, obscure, dialectic and just bizarre words, so this sort of link is very common for me, and happens so fast that even I have to backtrack to figure out how I got to the final word. Since teachers weren't able to read my mind, they just accused me of making things up, or not focussing.
This has gotten me into trouble a couple times outside the classroom, too. One year, for example, I decided I wanted to go mini-golfing with my friends for my birthday party, and, since we were all middle-schoolers, my mother graciously nominated my father as our chaperone/ handler. Unfortunately for him, he had been out of town the week prior to my birthday, and the plane that was supposed to bring him back the day before (so he could be well-rested before dealing with a bunch of pre-teen girls) got delayed, rerouted, cancelled, rescheduled, rerouted again, and finally delivered him to our door roughly an hour before my party, having been awake for two days straight.
So my poor zombie father poured himself into the car, drove us to the mini-golf range, and propped himself up on his club, trying not to fall over. We, of course, were oblivious to anything other than the game, and proceeded to make our way along the course. About halfway through, there was a truly wonderful waterfall that you got to putt under, and upon reaching it, one of my friends noted that it was made of cement. For some utterly inexplicable reason, the word 'cement' started a chain of connections going in my head, and presented another word to my consciousness whose definition I couldn't quite recall. Being possessed of all the tact and grace of a blind moose on roller-skates, I turned around and yelled across the park to my father...
Oh yes, I did. And naturally, in the seconds between me shouting that across the golf course and my father gathering enough functional brain cells to realize that he was being addressed, the definition of said word leapt with blinding comprehension into my mind. As I stood frozen in a cloud of bright pink embarrassment and horror, willing the last few seconds not to have happened, my father finally focussed his bleary eyes on me and said... "Huh?"
Somehow, amazingly, neither my friends nor my father had registered what I said, and I was certainly not going to tell them what I'd done. For over 15 years, I kept that debacle to myself, and only recently did I relate my side of the story to my father. He may or may not have since regaled my mother with the tale- if so, I'm not sure I want to know her reaction. Suffice to say, however, that while I cannot stop my brain from making bizarre connections, I have at least learned when to shut my mouth, and not let other people know that things aren't lined up quite right in there. Cheers!
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