Lateral Thinking

I find my lateral thinking rather paradoxical very often.

On one hand, I can find myself stuck in a rut of behaviour that I'd like to change sometimes, waste an inordinate amount of time procrastinating about it and devising all sorts of hypothetical scenarios, yet not see the ridiculously simple answer that's staring me in the face. I frequently have face-palming "d'oh" moments when people point out the blindingly obvious to me after hours of pacing in circles, stimming, and mumbling away to myself, all the time working  up huge levels of anxiety.

On the other hand, I am great at using whatever is to hand to bodge a solution to a practical problem, improvising tools and finding unintended uses for objects, devising ad hoc experiments to test ideas, and seeing refactoring* opportunities in my computer code.

It seems there are two extremes. When there are immediate, concrete results that can tell me I'm on the right track, lateral thinking helps me immensely to find the answer. When trying to solve something for which the consequences are not entirely predictable and which may affect things for an unknown amount of time, my lateral thinking only ever gets me further and further from reaching an answer; any answer, never mind a good one.

I'm reminded of one of my favourite quotes by surrealist artist Francis Picabia: "Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction". I think my thoughts are fitted with wonky castors from broken shopping trolleys!

* programmer jargon: refactoring = rewriting a computer program so that it does exactly the same thing but in a different way that's more efficient or stable.

I often find ways of improving an already know procedure or way of doing something, using geometry and experience , for instance, if I tell someone to use a lever to lift something on site they always push the bar under and lift the bar quite often so far under they lose any effect, so I then show them the principles of true leverage, creating a fulcrum or point of leverage, not to high or low, to high and you effectively are pushing against not lifting, too low and any ability to lift high and efficiently is lost, when the correct fulcrum is used and placed correctly massive forces can be achieved by simply using your wieght plus gravity, no grunting or bad backs involved.

 So a prime example of  my brain looking for the seemingly complex solution to an issue that most just grunt at and often manage to complete the task in hand, I just shake my head and walk off mumbling.

 I only settle for perfect, at school my practical ability was way beyond other kids, everything so perfect, but! It often took me so long I struggled to complete things, often building anxiety as everyone else would be finished, but mine even if incomplete was perfect in every way.

I often laugh when watching tv programmes showing how the academics think stone henge was constructed or the pyramids, they know maths and geometry, but they lack experience and tried and tested methodology, 

As I am rambling a lot,,, another example, when trying to move a very heavy block of stone for instance!

Yes  you can work out it’s mass, how many men it takes to pull it, how thick a rope and how many ropes, but it won’t move? Basically you need to first create momentum, so a sudden jolt or impact breaks the friction and as it moves it becomes easier to keep moving, they surmise it needs to be on grease first or rollers, no one has ever considered snow as a means of moving such a mass, snow when compacted by say a very large block of stone will become ice, although liquid is created between the stone and ice, it then moves very easily. So wait until winter to move the stones!

My brain never stops, it exhausts me, I often think things work well but could work better if a little more thought was added,

I often over think what I write as well, going into minute detail! Lol. The above is a shortened version of leverage and principles of mechanical energy he he, 

And yet academically I fall short, dyslexia effects my working memory, basically forget things to quickly, my hand eye coordination when writing is slow as my hand cannot move fast enough to keep up with what I want to write, I struggle as writing left to right seems backwards? I can only write using capitals as they never vary, small joined up letters vary depending on which letter they have to be before or after, each letter in my head is a single picture, 

I hope if you have read this far it has helped you to gently fall asleep,,,I often have that effect on people, night night sleep well. ()

) ( said:

I often over think what I write as well, going into minute detail! Lol. The above is a shortened version

Oh yes, that rings a lot of bells. When I'm responding to a post here, it often takes me five or ten minutes to write a post...

...then another 20 or 30 minutes to edit it down to quarter of its size (which still seems a bit too long), twiddle with sub-clauses to try to make things clearer (which I then decide it doesn't), piddling about with a thesaurus because I committed the capital crime of using the same adjective more than once, and much other pathological pedantry. Then I proof-read and repeat several times over until I can't quite tell whether its genius or gibberish. Then I might just scrap the whole thing and decide not to reply because I can't tell if I got the tone that I intended, or whether the tone that I intended would have been the right one anyway. If I get that far, the forum then usually tells me that someone has added another post while I've been farting about, the reading of which completely changes what I was originally wanting to say, and "wheee", off I go again...

If I do manage to actually post the end results,  I then notice the couple of incredibly stupid typos that completely change the meaning of what I said within a split second of pressing "reply"; always something introduced at some point during the editing frenzy and which I've proof-read a dozen times already without noticing a thing. More -> Edit -> Wheee!.........

This is so funny! 

Thanks for this I'm generally using an iPad - which probably explains it! 

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