Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (73 page)

Obsession thus tries to exploit every cue coming from the environment. Otherwise put, the source of an obsession will give rise to a cornucopia of analogies applying to situations of every possible sort, and at the same time it will tend to drown out all competing analogies. The dark thoughts of the previous paragraph, for instance, all come from analogies to death, and each one is perfectly justifiable. But they clearly are just a few among a myriad possible ways of perceiving the situations described. Although such driven analogies make a certain degree of sense, nonetheless, when one stands back, they sometimes seem quite forced — so much so that they aren’t really convincing. And yet, the boldness and intensity with which an obsession invariably scans the world in search of fresh instances can occasionally give rise to new and insightful thoughts, even if this is the exception rather than the rule. Indeed, an avid quest for analogues of a given phenomenon increases one’s chances of coming across important new perspectives that, without the obsession’s driving force, would never see the light of day. If you try the same key in a thousand different locks, perhaps one time it will work.

It’s almost impossible to imagine someone coming up with a revolutionary new insight without being steeped in the domain in an obsessive or near-obsessive manner. But since we are encroaching on
Chapter 8
’s discussion of scientific discovery, suffice it to say for the moment that great physicists, great mathematicians, and great scientists of any stripe are invariably involved with great passion in their discipline. Louis Pasteur once famously observed that “Chance favors the prepared mind”, and obsessed minds are nothing if not prepared! Were their owners not passionately obsessed, they would never be able to spot connections that for a long time had escaped the eyes of all their colleagues. This brings us back to the idea, considered in the previous chapter, that creativity cannot be turned on and off with a simple switch: in order to come up with creative analogies, one has to be possessed by an idea.

Let us momentarily recall Archimedes’ “Eureka” moment in his bathtub. To understand how this discovery was made, one has to take pressure into account — and here we don’t mean the pressure exerted by the liquid on all objects immersed in it, but the pressure exerted by the monarch on his faithful servant Archimedes. It’s not hard to imagine that in those days, it was not looked upon kindly if a royal request was not
met, and thus one can easily imagine poor Archimedes pacing up and down, racking his brains for any possible way to get a handle on the volume of the damned crown. He would start seeing volumes everywhere, volumes where other people see nothing of the sort. Thus starting with the idea that a
crown
has a volume, he might soon slide to the idea that a
door
has a volume, then that a
chair
has a volume, that an
animal
has a volume, that a
person
has a volume, that
I myself
have a volume, that
parts of my body
have various volumes, that
the water that I displace in my tub
has a volume… Aha! That’s it!

Obsessions bring out curious connections that no one would dream of otherwise. This is reminiscent of a maxim originated by the psychologist Abraham Maslow: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, it is tempting to treat everything as a nail.”

Pinball machines were for J. what horses were for K., what dogs were for L., and what particles were for M. Each of their domains provided a rich wellspring of analogies, and each individual grounded their personal model of humanity in these analogies. All of these individuals were obsessed, and each one benefited, in some fashion, from their obsession. And just as we can move from one city to another, so we can move from one obsession to another, as the case of N. shows.

For outsiders who hear about such extensive, systematic, and long-term families of analogies for the first time, they may sound unnatural and somewhat weird. How can human beings, in all their richness, be understood by invoking images of mysterious invisible particles, balls in pinball machines, or horses or dog breeds? It sounds like imagination given free rein and running wild. It even suggests that an analogy can be drawn between virtually anything and anything else, provided that some kind of obsession lurks behind it all, acting as the driving force.

And indeed, there are resemblances to be exploited wherever one’s gaze falls. As the logician and philosopher Nelson Goodman observed, any two situations have an arbitrarily large number of properties in common. For instance, a crown and a human body have in common the characteristic of not being located exactly one mile away from the center of the sun, nor at 1.1 miles, nor at 1.2 miles, and so forth. Although this remark undoubtedly has philosophical relevance, its psychological relevance is minimal, since it’s obvious that humans do not look at all possible properties of all things that they look at — just a tiny fraction of them. For example, no one cares about the fact that Queen Elizabeth’s crown is not located at exactly
π
miles from the center of the sun.

Nonetheless, the incredible fluidity of the notion of
similarity
allows people to come up with connections between entities that
a priori
would seem utterly unrelated, simply because obsession-driven hunts for resemblance always wind up finding results. The fruits of such avid searches, however, are not random or arbitrary. A passion for horses or dogs does not instantly turn these animals into sources for analogies that yield insights into triangle geometry, quilt design, fly-fishing, or who knows what else. On the other hand, a
double
obsession could surely give rise to such analogies. That is, a simultaneous fanatic for, say, Euclidean geometry
and
for fly-fishing would doubtless find plenty of phenomena in these two domains on which to found analogies, for in this case the search would be intense on both sides.

Whenever someone’s passion for something increases, their personal likelihood of analogy-making (or analogy-finding) goes up. The following story shows how a young man immersed himself to excess in the world of a particular video game. From this intense experience he drew a significant harvest of analogies, showing how far a profound obsession can carry someone.

T. bet a friend that he would be able to beat him in Pac-Man, the famous video game of the 1980s, in which the player is represented on the screen by a yellow circle with a wide-open mouth. This quaint old icon seduced T. and several of his friends, and as they grew increasingly sucked into the Pac-Man world, they spent ever vaster amounts of their time playing. For hours every day and even more hours every night, T. would sit at his computer and play and play at this game.

To do well in Pac-Man, one has to avoid getting eaten by four enemies called “ghosts”, and of course the goal is to acquire as many points as possible. There are two types of pill that the player can swallow, and one of them makes ghosts edible for a short time. If possible, one wants to eat all four ghosts, since the second ghost is worth twice as much as the first one, the third one four times as much, and the fourth one ten times as much. Sometimes a fruit icon will appear at random on the screen, and swallowing it will confer special advantages such as extra points, higher speed, a temporary invulnerability, or the doubling of all one’s points until the next stage starts.

T.’s days and nights were so steeped in Pac-Mania that he came to see all of life through the filter of this game. It may seem odd, but he formulated what amounted to a whole philosophy of life thanks to a long series of analogies he made while playing. Herewith follow fifteen of T.’s Pac-Man–based maxims: