Supersaturated solution

Garbage in, Garbage out.

What you read, what you see (and enjoy) deeply impacts how you think and the way you interpret events and people. These things are also major factors influencing what kind of ideas you generate, how you detect patterns, think of abstract concepts and make connections between disparate entities.

This is an obvious piece of wisdom, but is sometimes overlooked because it is so obvious.

In Zen and the Art of motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig describes the incident where his thinking process started coming together into one coherent mass. Although in the beautiful analogy below, his emphasis is on the suddenness of the event, in this post I'm focusing on the causes leading up to that event.

That was the moment it all started. That was the seed crystal.

A powerful fragment of memory comes back now. The laboratory. Organic Chemistry. He was working with an extremely supersaturated solution when something similar had happened. 

A supersaturated solution is one in which the saturation point, at which no more material will dissolve, has been exceeded. This can occur because the saturation point becomes higher as the temperature of the solution is increased. When you dissolve the material at a high temperature and then cool the solution, the material sometimes doesn't crystallize out because the molecules don't know how. They require something to get them started, a seed crystal, or a grain of dust, or even a sudden scratch or tap on the surrounding glass.

He walked to the water tap to cool the solution but never got there. Before his eyes, as he walked, he saw a star of crystalline material in the solution appear and then grow suddenly and radiantly until it filled the entire vessel. He saw it grow. Where before was only clear liquid there was now a mass so solid he could turn the vessel upside down and nothing would come out.

The one sentence "I hope you are teaching Quality to your students" was said to him, and within a matter of a few months, growing so fast you could almost see it grow, came an enormous, intricate, highly structured mass of thought, formed as if by magic.

Whether we get a seed crystal to consolidate our thoughts into a clear, significant mass or not, the prerequisite for forming even less well-thought out ideas remains the same - saturating our mind with information and thoughts relevant to the topic (prior to that event, Pirsig had spent years reading, exploring and thinking about Quality). It is only when we fill or over-fill our mind with thoughts about our chosen subject, obsessively, passionately focusing on it till our brain becomes supersaturated with it, that we can create something truly remarkable.

Unless we do that (passionate pursuit), Prof. Larry Smith argues, we will not have great results.

If the solution contains enough of other residues and impurities, it may not get saturated with the stuff you want. If you fill your mind with pop culture, crap movies, news, cat videos, funny ads and  social media when these are not part of your passion, you lose the opportunity to saturate your mind with the stuff that really matters to you and consequently the opportunity to generate the ideas and actions you might otherwise produce.

In that case, the ideas that have gone into your mind are going to inevitably affect what comes out of your mind. Garbage in, garbage out.

But then is it possible to altogether avoid garbage? Is all garbage bad? Perhaps the key is to keep the level of garbage you put in your mind low enough so that it doesn't affect the outcome. Learning to say No would be critical then.

I don't know the boundaries to this kind of obsession, whether there are any or where they are drawn. Would be worth it to find out.