{"id":30581,"date":"2014-01-01T19:47:21","date_gmt":"2014-01-01T19:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=30581"},"modified":"2014-01-01T19:47:21","modified_gmt":"2014-01-01T19:47:21","slug":"happy-new-creative-leap-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=30581","title":{"rendered":"Happy New “Creative Leap” Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron<\/strong> — wondering whether a von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n vortex street might be a good place to take a Paul L\u00e9vy walk one of these days — when I’m out and about, foraging for new ideas ]
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"Named after French mathematician Paul L\u00e9vy, a L\u00e9vy walk is characterized by many small moves combined with a few longer trajectories."<\/p><\/div>.<\/p>\n

M’friend Bill Benzon<\/strong> of the New Savanna<\/em> blog posted two paras<\/a> out of an NYT blog piece, Navigating Our World Like Birds and Bees<\/a>, today:<\/p>\n

What they have found is that when moving with a purpose such as foraging for food, many creatures follow a particular and shared pattern. They walk (or wing or lope) for a short time in one direction, scouring the ground for edibles, then turn and start moving in another direction for a short while, before turning and strolling or flying in another direction yet again. This is a useful strategy for finding tubers and such, but if maintained indefinitely brings creatures back to the same starting point over and over; they essentially move in circles.<\/p>\n

So most foragers and predators occasionally throw in a longer-distance walk (or flight), which researchers refer to as a \u201clong step,\u201d bringing them into new territory, where they then return to short walks and frequent turns as they explore the new place.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I can’t help but think that this may give us a closer approximation to the way minds can think than our usual terms, linear <\/em>and lateral<\/em>, or on a wider scale, disciplinary <\/em>and interdisciplinary thinking<\/em>, with the short walks<\/em> involving thoughts that require investigation but not analogy, and the long steps<\/em> being leaps by analogy into new territory — the familiar hop, skip and jumps we also call creative leaps<\/em>.<\/p>\n

From my POV, seeing both linear and leaping thoughts this way allows for the fact that what we’ve been calling linear thoughts aren’t so much linear <\/em>as local<\/em>, while analogical thoughts by their very nature take us from one thought domain to another — via parallelism or opposition — leaping conceptual distances<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Which is why I can wish you a Happy New “Creative Leap” Year! — even though 2014 isn’t divisible by 4 and there will still only be 28 days this February.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[ by Charles Cameron — wondering whether a von K\u00e1rm\u00e1n vortex street might be a good place to take a Paul L\u00e9vy walk one of these days — when I’m out and about, foraging for new ideas ] . . M’friend Bill Benzon of the New Savanna blog posted two paras out of an NYT […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,46,526,24,25,462,32,1,463],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-analogy","category-analytic","category-charles-cameron","category-cognition","category-horizontal-thinking","category-metacognition","category-science","category-uncategorized","category-vertical-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30581"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30581\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30597,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30581\/revisions\/30597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}