Quote:
Originally Posted by slayda
Steve, you're both right. The human brain does make leaps but it has to have something to leap from. Two people may have exactly the same inputs today with only one making such a leap but that one has had other inputs all his life which play in the leap.
As a writer you might look at a general situation in society and create a book. As an engineer, I may develop a method to solve a societal problem that I saw in the same situation. Two different leaps based apparently on exactly the same input but that input is colored and flavored by all our previous individual inputs & training.
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Read "Genius" by James Gleick. It's a biography of Richard Feynman. Even fellow scientists found him a bit daunting. I don't have my copy at hand, so I will very badly paraphrase how one of his colleagues described the situation. He said with "ordinary smart people", you could understand how they reasoned. You knew that you could go through the exact same mental steps, if only you were just a bit smarter. With Feynman, though, you couldn't fathom the process. He himself couldn't explain it. Things just came to him. All you had to do was give Feynman the general outline of the problem (he emphatically didn't want the details) and he'd drum his fingers for awhile, and then tell you the answer.
I might be wrong on this, but I think an aircraft or military company paid him a retainer for "anything he thought up while in the shower".