Advanced Research Concepts
A Personal
Perspective...
What is
Eureka
all about?
By Roy D. Follendore III
Copyright (c) 1999 RDFollendoreIII
All Rights Reserved
Research does not start with application but with a human and an
observation. You first sense something different or perhaps something that
is seemingly the same but perceives it in a slightly different way. It
catches the imagination and through shear attractive reason starts to embed
itself to find the foundation of the mind. I have found that more often
than not, the initial process which starts everything is blocked and the subconscious
mind grinds and cranks for weeks, months and years to find the right
connections. The urge to go find more information on the subject is there
and so you do. This is definitely not the moment of Eureka. It feels
more like a low threshold pressure that is difficult to
describe but is relentlessly there during conscious thought.
This constant mental effort is not completely controllable and at times it
even interferes with conscious interaction, particularly dialogue and
conversation with others. You appear to others as rather stupid or absent
minded. You are preoccupied but it is not necessarily a conscious
preoccupation. It is as though time is being taken from the central
processor of a computer, which in a biological way it has. I have been
fortunate to have experienced this on more than one occasion and have found that
the breakthrough moment can be a spectacular feeling.
The moment usually happens for me when I am in a consciously reflective mode
of thinking. It happens when I am at ease, relaxed in a natural
environment. It seems to happen when I am simply observing and thinking
about the natural communication that nature brings to us. As I have said,
that moment is quite electrical and it begins to ripple through the brain making
connections that seem to have been just waiting to be connected, until the
pressure is relieved, then quite suddenly an electrical surge like a
euphoric lightening strike travels down the spine. This is the moment of
Eureka. What is left is a calm
and complete understanding of the taxonomy and how to implement an
application.
It is at this moment that fear ensues. It is a fear that the mind will
somehow lose this profound knowledge before it is captured in writing but the
problem is that there is far too much to capture on paper. I have found
that the best solution is to use diagrams and audio recordings for this.
The interesting part of documenting this knowledge seems to be that by capturing
the knowledge, it often does not seem necessary to have captured it at
all. The fear that the knowledge would be lost is resolved by an
understanding that the moment was real and that real and permanent connections
were made that has permanently changed the mind.
I have obviously considered that the description I have described has many similarities
to the act of sex. Although I will categorically state that they are not
the same emotions and the normal physical sexual response is definitely not involved, the
implications of similarity that are there. Like sex, this is a fundamentally creative process
of mind and body. Like sex, it allows the perpetuation and survival of the
species. Like sex it implies an immortal aspect of consciousness. It
is even in many ways an involuntary process, an at least from my perspective, a
process which I have learned to trust as part of who I am. But just as
with sex, when I was young I did not understand what was happening and the
creation of new ideas and theories felt like an impulsive act which although I
enjoyed, I also tried to suppress because I felt it made me different.
What I have found out over years of introspection is that I can no more
strangle the theoretical concepts that emerge from the creative urges of my mind
than I could strangle my biological urges to propagate my species. It is
who I am and the world will have to accept that because I have to accept
that. It is not always wonderful but it can be
wonderful.
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