Walking In Circles

When we have no focus, we tend to Walk in Circles ThinkingOutLoud.DonaldNoyes.20130402

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Given no clues, signposts, paths, points of reference, or focus point, a person is likely to be found walking in circles, crossing or arriving at a point already travelled. This has been supposed for a long time, but now someone has studied this, finding truth in it:

• http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2009-08/m-wic081809.php

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while this is true in the physical sense of traversal movement, I believe it is also true in the realm of thought and ideas.

Unless we have a mental framework or an architecture which allows for organization of thoughts and a method of storing and recovery of our progress in thinking, we can be found in a mental traversing which brings us every again over the same ground. We can be said to have been walking in mental circles.

WeNeedExamples and pegs upon which to hang our thinking. I have in a sense been using ThinkingOutLoud as a mental peg upon which to hang some of my thoughts.

Even when we have such frames of reference, we can be found revisiting these places again and again, because they seem to us to be comfortable and familiar. It is a dangerous thing to be found wandering "outside the box" of convenient, accepted and peer-reviewed logical thinking. When we wander into the unknown territory of disconnected and fractionated thought, we have trouble connecting such excursions and in integrating them into existing mental-architectures. When we find a way to do this, new "paradigms" are framed, made to be self-supported components in an overall system of thought.

While focus and focal points are important, it may be that thinking while not being surrounded by reminders and clues about following existing paths and the "losing of focus" may lead us into new realms of thought. This is why I think WalkingAndThinking? are good partners when one wants to explore new territories and think "new thoughts"

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