Cargo Interactive

Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about convergence. I see it as one of the main ingredients in creativity, and we see it everywhere when we look for it.

By convergence, I mean, whenever you take two concepts and put them together to create one concept. Joseph Campbell, for example, has referred to the dragon as a serpent and an eagle. It’s a very comon property of mythical creatures: a mermaid is both a human and a fish, a centaur is both a man and a horse, pegasus is both a horse and a bird. These creatures are not a patchy mish-mash of concepts. They take the best of each half to produce a meaningful whole. Birds are associated with flying, so a creature that inherits the characteristics of the bird should fly, it shouldn’t inherit a birds legs, for example.

Sometimes meaningless hybrids are produced for the sake of confusion and horror. The Chimera is the classic example, a creature which usually is comprised of snake, lion, and goat parts. What makes the Chimera interesting is how strange the combination is executed - often starting the the prototype of a lion, then swapping out the tail for a serpent, and then having a goat’s head jutting out of the lion’s back. This certainly offends our sensibilities, and it’s meant to. So it’s clear that the choice of, let’s say, ‘ingredients’ changes the taste of a mixture.

I recently watched a number of 80s cartoon intros on youtube, for nostalgia’s sake, and I was struck by how often this method of combining ingredients is employed.

These talks, found on the marvelous ted.com, discuss how choice can affect our happiness. While Gladwell shows how a variety of options can allow people to be most satisfied by their choice, Barry Schwartz proposes that this variety has in fact left us paralyzed, and ultimately unsatisfied.

It is interesting how we develop our tastes, and sometimes variety allows us to fine tune our preferences, yet the same overwhelming variety may confuse us, and make choice difficult. It’s been observed that people will often forgo the choice altogether, especially when making frivolous purchases. It’s tough to find that balance, and I’m sure that certain products lend better to variety than others. I do believe that a small set of very specialized, distinct choices, can be very satisfying. People will often find what they like most if they have the opportunity to try everything.

This is one of the tenets of behavoural psychology. If you ignore all elements of cognition, and only look to the relationships between stimulus and response, you can avoid trying to explain all the complex stuff that goes on in your head. And for a long time this was extremely successful. We were able to gleam a whole field of information about how animals might learn to respond to certain situations. But when you start to get into murky concepts like categorization, or identifying attributes, this get’s really hard.

Take, for example, salty and sweet. Two tastes you would assume are quite easy to discriminate. It’s actually quite hard, and I struggled for a long time with one boy trying to get him to tell the difference. You can’t say things like, “You have sweet things for desert,” because sometimes you might have potato chips after dinner. Is this really desert? Or would you consider it an after dinner snack? Well, even that discrimination could be a nightmare to teach to someone who can’t easily tell the difference to begin with.

So I stopped, and I decided to start with two given axioms. Crackers are salty. Chocolate is sweet. I told him, “Don’t worry about why this is true, just assume it and memorize it.” Then I asked him, is chocolate cake like chocolate, or like crackers? It’s like chocolate, and chocolate is sweet, so chocolate cake is sweet. How about potato chips, are they like chocolate or crackers? Well, potato chips are like crackers, so potato chips are salty. Now he had some conjectures to work with.  French fries are like potato chips, it’s salty. Ice cream goes with cake, it’s sweet.

Suddenly I took the guess work out of it. The boy didn’t have to memorize large sets of information, and he went from getting 50% of the answers right to about 90%, in a matter of minutes. It’s not perfect, you can always get some strange associations. Sometimes, pretzels are covered in chocolate. But for those special cases, if that’s all you have to worry about, you can memorize it brute force. If you have to learn a lot of discrete information at once, you’re going to start mixing up what goes where. Anyone who’s tried to cram for a test has encountered this. But if you can use an analogy or a metaphor which accounts for the majority of cases, you can take out the guess work. Of course, the hardest part is finding that analogy to begin with.